Search Results for: Brooklyn

A Book in the Mail is the Cure For Ferrante Fever

Magda Szabó. Photo via gabrilu, Flickr

As a regular book browser, or shelf stalker, and former employee of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I’ve recently watched several customers come in asking for recommendations of what to read next after finishing Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume saga, The Neapolitan Quartet — a masterwork concerning issues of class, status, and the remarkable complexity of female friendship, set on the fringe of an economically depressed Naples. I also had been wondering what I myself would find to read and recommend to friends to quench the Ferrante Fever. As if the book gods heard my call, I nearly simultaneously received a long letter and gift from an old friend in the mail the other day. I’d recommended she read Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. In return she sent along a beautiful recommendation of deceased Hungarian novelist, Magda Szabó’s The Door, a novel that also explores the complex and unsettling nature of friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different:

She was nowhere to be seen, either in the apartment when I awoke, or in the street when I set off for the hospital; but there was evidence of her handiwork in the section of pavement outside the front door swept clean of snow. Obviously, I told myself in the car, she was making her rounds at the other houses. I wasn’t distressed, or heartbroken. I felt that only good news awaited me at the hospital, as indeed it did. I was out until lunchtime. Arriving home, rather hungry, I was sure she’d be sitting there in the apartment, awaiting my return. I was wrong. I was faced with the disconcerting experience of walking into my own home, bearing news of life and death, and no-one to share it with. Our Neanderthal ancestor learned to weep the first time he stood in triumph over the bison he had dragged in and found no-one to tell of his adventures, or show his spoils to, or even his wounds. The apartment stood empty. I went into one room after another, looking for her, even calling out her name. I didn’t want to believe that, on this of all days, when she didn’t even know if my patient was alive or dead, she could be somewhere else. The snow had stopped falling. There could be nothing in the street requiring her attention. And yet she was nowhere to be found.

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‘Barbados was Bimshire’: Naomi Jackson’s Debut Novel

From the cover of The Star Side of Bird Hill

In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like love for her country, and she wanted at the very least to keep up with what was going on there. Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meeting of the old boys’ and old girls’ clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church basements in Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call “this man country.” In the same way that Avril had never been a good West Indian girl when she was home, she was not a good West Indian woman abroad, not given to cultivating a desire for and a connection to home that smacked of devotion. Still, she told Dionne and Phaedra that no matter what she felt about Bird hill, it was important that they spend time with their grandmother, and get to know the place without which they would still be specks in God’s eye.

—From Naomi Jackson’s debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, about two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, exiled to Brooklyn from Bird Hill, Barbados, while their mother, a former AIDS nurse, stays back home due to a severe chronic depression.

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The Nine Lives of Cat Videos

Photo: Children posing with life-size Lil Bub. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

Jillian Steinhauer | Longreads | September 2015 | 15 minutes (3,800 words)

 

The following essay is excerpted from Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong, in which 14 writers address the following question: Why can’t we stop watching cat videos?

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The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.

—Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”

The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable.

—John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

1.

One evening in the summer of 2013, I joined 11,499 other people—give or take—at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand to sit and watch cat videos. I had spent the day leading up to the Internet Cat Video Festival (or CatVidFest, as it’s nicknamed) wandering the fair in extreme heat, eating assorted fried foods on sticks, watching butter sculptors, and paying money to take off my shoes and traverse an artsy blow-up castle with “rooms” of saturated color (think Dan Flavin goes to the fair). Hours later, dehydrated and probably sunstroked, I met up with a journalist from Minnesota Public Radio for a brief interview. He wanted to talk to me because I was an art critic, and because I had served as a juror for that year’s CatVidFest. Read more…

The Lost Summer

Elissa Strauss | Longreads | August 2015 | 15 minutes (3,841 words)

 

Below is the story of a single mother and her daughter. Names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect their identities.

 

* * *

OLYMPIA

By the time Olympia picked up her 6-year-old daughter Raina from the babysitter she was tired. She works a 10-hour day satisfying the various needs of two young siblings in Brooklyn’s affluent neighborhood of Cobble Hill, shepherding them to and from various classes, camps and playdates, making sure they get food when hungry, rest when tired and are properly stimulated when bored. Read more…

New York City’s Menu Wars

In the early 1990s, food delivery services on Manhattan’s Upper West Side sparked what New York Times writer Emily M. Bernstein called “the menu wars.” Everyone from dry cleaners to nail salons followed Chinese restaurants’ lucrative lead, placing paper take-out menus inside apartment buildings’ lobbies and mail rooms and under residents’ doors. Angry tenants demanded that businesses stop. Fistfights erupted. Local government got involved. In 1996, Jane H. Lii wrote in The New York Times about the hard-working delivery men at the center of the battle. Here’s an excerpt:

”At least with this job we can make enough to survive,” said Li W. Xiao. ”You can do twice the work and make half the money in a garment factory.”

Until a year ago, Mr. Li, who was smuggled into America just four years ago, thought he was on top of the world. Inspired by the American entrepreneurial spirit, he and his brother took a gamble and borrowed $20,000 from friends and relatives to open a garment factory in Brooklyn. But they did not realize how fierce the competition would be. After they opened, orders never came in enough volume for them to pay the bills. They shut down the factory six months ago. Now, in addition to his smuggling debt, Mr. Li owes $10,000 more.

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‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel

Paula Fox. Photo by Avery Hudson

Sari Botton | Longreads | July 2015 | 5 minutes (1,250 words)

 

This year, on the 45th anniversary of its publication, W.W. Norton & Company has re-(re-)released Desperate Characters, a novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and made into a film the following year, with Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. We’re thrilled to publish an excerpt here on Longreads. Read more…

Desperate Characters

Photo via Roger W/Flickr

Paula Fox | Desperate Characters | W.W. Norton & Company | 1970 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Desperate Characters, the novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and re-(re-)released this year on the 45th anniversary of its publication. Read Sari Botton’s Longreads interview with Fox about her book.  Read more…

Desperate Characters

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Paula Fox’s 1970 novel: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.

Author: Paula Fox
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 27, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,046 words)

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

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October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

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‘A Sweatshop for Trustafarians’ Inside Vice’s Williamsburg Headquarters

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo by Iker Alonso, Flickr

Vice’s headquarters are a 30,000-square-foot amalgamation of converted warehouses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—hipster capital of the US. [Vice co-founder Shane Smith], who was not made available for an interview with CJR despite repeated requests, has called his office of 425 workers “a sweatshop for trustafarians” and the culture “like an incestuous family.”

The interior matches Vice’s style: gritty yet polished. There’s the meeting room with a stuffed bear, a memento from a video shoot. When I visited in April, the famed office bar was temporarily gone in anticipation of Vice’s upcoming move to a space double the size.

Rings with the Vice logo are worn around the office. New employees sign a non-traditional workplace agreement, acknowledging that, among other things, “sexually provocative and other explicit images, videos and audio recordings are regularly present in VICE’s offices.” And the company throws events like a charity ping pong match in March between senior editor Benjamin Shapiro and Rolling Stone’s Gus Wenner, and last December’s 20th anniversary party, where rapper Lil’ Wayne performed. The event was preceded by Smith personally handing out envelopes of $1,500 in cash to employees at the staff holiday party.

Chris Ip, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the future of Vice.