The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)
Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words)
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.
Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.
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He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his. Read more…

Janet Fitch | White Oleander, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 19 minutes (4,640 words)
Our latest first chapter comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com. Read more…

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.
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Have you heard? Science fiction is “in”—nerds at the movies, nerds everywhere. This is thrilling if you are familiar with the genre, but what if you never got into sci-fi in the first place? Where would you start?
Since its inception (ha), speculative fiction has worked as social commentary, satire, and a creative answer to the question “What if?” Here are my personal picks to get you started.
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No sci-fi list is complete without Asimov, and not only due to his creation of the Laws of Robotics. If you like this story, I would suggest moving straight on to his “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin stories.
Bradbury, of Martian Chronicles fame and beyond, writes here about the danger of integrating technology too far into human developmental psychology.
A look at the symbiotic relationship between aliens and humans. If you’ve seen any horror movie featuring extraterrestrials, you’ve pretty much seen them all, but sci-fi stories like this one explore more “alien” ideas than the simple “monster from space” trope.
Robots! Here’s a short and wicked story from Bell, a contemporary sci-fi writer who touches on slavery, mortality, and the horror of a slow decline in life.
Wells (War of the Worlds, Time Machine) is the oldest pick on my list, and this story imagines just what its title implies.
Chiang addresses PTSD, advancements in medical science, and the horror of not trusting your own mind. This story is probably one of the best “straight” sci-fi examples on this list—the clear “What if?” develops steadily, and pushes the reader along to its surprising conclusion. Entire novels have been written in this style—Max Barry’s Machine Man is my personal favorite.
I also recommend this list for more great reading material, and if you want to start with something cyberpunky, look out for Neal Stephenson or William Gibson—they’re mostly novelists, and definitely worth your time.
(cover via umbc.edu)
A look behind the introverted life of James E. Holmes, a graduate student in the neuroscience department at the University of Colorado, Denver, before the shooting in Aurora:
In the days after the shooting, faculty members and graduate students, in shock, compared notes on what they knew about Mr. Holmes, what they might have missed, what they could have done. Some said they wished they had tried harder to break through his loneliness, a student recalled. Others wondered if living somewhere besides the dingy apartment on Paris Street might have mitigated his isolation.
At a meeting held at Dr. Ribera’s house, a student said, Barry Shur, the dean of the graduate school, said Mr. Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist. When the authorities told him the identity of the shooting suspect, Dr. Shur said, his reaction was “I’ve heard his name before.”
But all that came later.
No one saw Mr. Holmes much after he left school in June.
The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves:
I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and is 4-foot-2, was picked up and thrown by an unknown assailant in Somerset, England. He suffered partial paralysis and now requires a walker. The night of the Globes, after Dinklage’s mention, Henderson’s name was a trending topic on Twitter. Dinklage later turned down offers to discuss the case with Anderson Cooper and other news hosts.
‘People are all, like, I dedicated it to him,’ he said. ‘They’ve made it more romantic than it actually was. I just wanted to go, “This is screwed up.” Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice. Not just by people who’ve had too much to drink in England and want to throw a person. But by media, everything.’ He sipped his coffee and pointed out that media portrayal is, in part, the fault of actors who are dwarves. ‘You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.’
“Peter Dinklage Was Smart to Say No.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine
See also: “The Secret Drew Barrymore.” — Todd Gold, People Magazine, Jan. 16, 1989
How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison:
Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him in prison—many details of which have not been previously reported—stemmed from his apparently insatiable appetite for flashy cars, some of which he obtained using falsified financial documents. “He had to have all of these trappings to prove to himself he was as good as he thought he was,” L.A. County Deputy DA Alex Karkanen told SI after Monday’s sentencing.
In the unreleased documentary, filmed after his bankruptcy filing, the former Met and Phillie explains the importance of a private plane to his contentedness. “I said, O.K., I know I’ll be happy when I buy my own Gulfstream,” says Dykstra, reflecting on the plane he purchased in 2007. “But I got down to the end of the nose, I looked back and I said, O.K., happy, come on, come on. So it’s not about the Gulfstream. But it is about the Gulfstream. Meaning it just wasn’t as good a Gulfstream as I wanted.”
“How Lenny Dykstra Got Nailed.” — David Epstein, Sports Illustrated
See also: “Going…Going…Gone.” — Gabriel Sherman, GQ, April 1, 2009
Before Wonder Woman there was Miss Fury, the first female superhero, introduced in 1941:
Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well as for superhero comic readership, would have depended more on the influence and perspective of actual women.
“Heroine Chic.” — Evie Nagy, Los Angeles Review of Books
See also: “Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself.” — Dan Kois, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 27, 2011
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling.
Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross pollination in the picks below. You’ll also see some good stuff that hasn’t shown up on the Top 5 lists so far. That’s on purpose. Hope you enjoy, and please know you’re welcome to come join us for last call over at gangrey.com. Drinks are on Wright.
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Wright Thompson
Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and he lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine
“The View From Within,” Seth Wickersham, ESPN The Magazine
“Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?” Tom Junod, Esquire
“The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,” David Von Drehle, Time
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Justin Heckert
Heckert is a writer living in Atlanta.
“The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
”The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
“Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home”, by Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“Staying the Course”, Wright Thompson, ESPN
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Thomas Lake
Lake is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated living in Atlanta.
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“True Grits,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker (sub. required)
“Diving Headlong Into A Sunny Paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
“Could This Be Happening? A Man’s Nightmare Made Real,” Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times
“When A Diver Goes Missing, A Deep Cave Is Scene Of A Deeper Mystery,” Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times
“The Beards Are A Joke,” Justin Heckert, Atlanta Magazine, April 2011
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Mark Johnson
Johnson is a 2010 Pulitzer winner who covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and once played guitar for a Rockford, Ill., grunge band called The Bloody Stumps.
“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine
“Punched Out,” John Branch, New York Times
“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” Rich Schapiro, Wired
“Imminent Danger,” Meg Kissinger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Diving headlong into a sunny paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
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Michael Kruse
Kruse, a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and contributing writer to ESPN’s Grantland, won this year’s ASNE award for distinguished non-deadline writing.
“The Lost Boys” Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly
The easiest-to-read hardest thing I read this year.
“The Lazarus File,” Matthew McGough, The Atlantic
Simple: suspense and surprise.
“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine
My first reaction when I read this? Jealousy and awe. And when I read it a second time? And a third? Same.
“A man’s nightmare made real,” Chris Goffard, the Los Angeles Times
Riveting. The work of a master.
“God’s Away on Business,” Spencer Hall, Every Day Should Be Saturday
George Teague, college football and big thoughts.
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Ben Montgomery
Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, and he lives in Tampa.
“If I Die Young,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
“The Guiltless Pleasure,” Rick Bragg, Gourmet
“A Lot To Lose,” Tony Rehagen, Indianapolis Monthly
“The Shepard’s Lamb,” Danielle Paquette, Indiana University Daily Student
“Voice of America,” by Coozledad, rurritable
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