Search Results for: Esquire

On Cancer: ‘Love wasn’t something I felt anymore. It was just something I did’

Photo by Tara Hunt.

Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: “It’s everywhere,” he said. “Like somebody dipped a paintbrush in cancer and flicked it around her abdomen.” I staggered down a hallway and then collapsed. I remember the tile, close to my face, and then watching it retreat as my best friend picked me up from the floor. His name is Dane Faucheux, and I remember noting, even in the midst of a mental fugue: Dane’s a lot stronger than I realized.

Matthew Teague’s wife Nicole was only 34 years old and dying of cancer. From Esquire, this is the story of how a friendship, deep, true, and strong, became prophylactic against the dizzying litany of indignities involved in a slow, painful death.

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10 Short Stories I Loved in 2014

Phil Klay. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year.  Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

“It is not for us to cool it.”

Longreads Pick

A conversation between James Baldwin and the editors of Esquire about race relations in the summer of 1968.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 4, 1971
Length: 33 minutes (8,321 words)

1964: A Sidelong View of Sports

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston.

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Fifty years ago, a champion boxer picked up his son from school, a literary critic was tackled by NFL players, and a famed NASCAR racer tended to his chicken farm. Such was the sidelong view of sports presented by Gay Talese, George Plimpton, and Tom Wolfe. Sports in the 1960s proved a rich arena for writers looking to flex their literary muscle, and Talese and Wolfe tried out unconventional sports writing while still kicking off their careers. You won’t find much reference here to the sweeping political developments that tend to dominate our narratives of 1964. Instead, you’ll get some sense for the texture of the time. Read more…

Honoring Your Forebears: Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

R.J. Vogt’s profile of an aging Medal of Honor winner draws the best of Esquire‘s voice, ruminating on age and death and masculinity and heroism.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 12, 2014

Honoring Your Forebears: Our College Pick

Regular readers of a particular magazine can usually pick up on that publication’s voice. Articles sound like Cosmo or the New Yorker or Saveur and we read them because we like articles that sound that way. We like the voice. Professional writers learn to tailor stories to a specific magazine and journalism students practice writing stories that sound like they could be published in the titles they love and admire. R.J. Vogt’s profile of an aging Medal of Honor winner draws the best of Esquire‘s voice, ruminating on age and death and masculinity and heroism. It is, like all good magazine articles, about something bigger than the initial storyline.

He Wears a Medal of Honor

R.J. Vogt | Medal of Honor Project | July 29, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,598 words)

When Our Troops Are Abandoned and Neglected at Home: 6 Stories

This October 2014 New York Times investigation by C.J. Chivers is about more than just the discovery of old chemical weapons in Iraq—it’s about how shabbily we still treat our troops when they return home. We leave our all-volunteer army with inadequate medical care, emotional trauma, and fragile families. Here are six stories on our veterans.

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Interview: Vela Magazine Founder Sarah Menkedick on Women Writers and Sustainable Publishing

Cheri Lucas Rowlands | Longreads | Oct. 2 2014 | 10 minutes (2,399 words)

 

Three years ago, Sarah Menkedick launched Vela Magazine in response to the byline gender gap in the publishing industry, and to create a space that highlights excellent nonfiction written by women. Last week, Menkedick and her team of editors launched a Kickstarter campaign to grow Vela as a sustainable publication for high-quality, long-form nonfiction, to pay their contributors a competitive rate, and to continue to ensure that women writers are as recognized and read as their male counterparts. Menkedick chatted with Longreads about her own path as a writer, the writer’s decision to work for free, building a sustainable online publication, and the importance of featuring diverse voices in women’s nonfiction.

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Let’s talk about Vela’s origins. You created Vela in 2011 as a space for women writers in response to the byline gender gap — yet it’s not a “women’s magazine.” Can you explain?

Like so many women writers, I was discouraged by the original VIDA count in 2011. I was also a bit disenchanted with a certain narrowness of voice and focus in mainstream magazine publishing, which tended to be very male, because men tend to dominate mainstream magazine publishing. Talking about the alternative to that gets really dicey, because it’s icky to talk about a “womanly” or “female” voice. I wanted to say: nonfiction and literary journalism written by women doesn’t have to sound like this sort of swaggering male writing, or like the loveable snarky-but-sweet meta writing of John Jeremiah Sullivan or David Foster Wallace. It can be like . . . and there we run short on models, because there aren’t very many women being widely published whose work falls into that middle zone between “creative nonfiction” — which tends to be more academic, more experimental, more the types of essays appearing in literary magazines — and traditional journalism.

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David Foster Wallace on the Costs of Becoming a Professional Tennis Player

It’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life – outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small.

-From David Foster Wallace’s “The String Theory,” published in Esquire in July 1996.

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Photo: jpellgen, Flickr