Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story

The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.

Posted inNonfiction, Story

How One Magazine Shaped Investigative Journalism in America

The following story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. […]

Posted inFirst Chapters, Nonfiction, Story

‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s

Edwin Lefèvre | Reminiscences of a Stock Operator | 1923 Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro: Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the […]

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Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing

Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing “We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Mark Frauenfelder and his partners — Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz — didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff […]

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In the weeks after Color’s belly flop last spring, friends and colleagues were concerned that Nguyen might be humiliated, or devastated, or at least very stressed out by the $41 million of venture money invested in his failed product. But Nguyen understands the arithmetic of Silicon Valley, and anyway he isn’t one to reflect. “I […]

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