Search Results for: Fortune

The Corpse Rider

Yūrei from Bakemono Zukushi (Monster Scroll), artist unknown, c. 1700. Wikimedia Commons.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,729 words)

“The daimyō’s wife was dying, and knew that she was dying.” So begins Lafcadio Hearn’s uneasy and unsettling ghost story, “Ingwa-Banashi,” gathered first in his 1899 collection, In Ghostly Japan, and republished this year in a new Penguin Classics anthology edited by Paul Murray. As the daimyō explains to his wife that she is dying and preparing to leave “this burning-house of the world,” he offers her any final rites she may request. She asks him to summon one of his concubines, the nineteen year-old Yukiko, whom, she reminds him, she loves like a sister.

Yukiko arrives, and the dying woman tells her that one day she will rise in rank and be made the honored wife of the daimyō, a fortune that the low-born Yukiko cannot believe. As her last request, the daimyō’s wife asks Yukiko to carry her out to the courtyard to see a cherry tree in bloom — obligingly, Yukiko lowers her back and allows the old woman to wrap her arms around her, to carry her. Once she has grasped hold of Yukiko, though, the old woman laughs, clutches tight, and, with her dying breath tells Yukiko: “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom — but not the cherry-bloom of the garden! … I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it! — oh, what a delight!” Read more…

Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

1000 Days of Trump

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

It’s been 1000 days.

I doubt the definitive retrospective on this presidency and administration will ever exist. No one book or story, no matter how long, will be able to cover this kaleidoscopic history — let alone its fallout — in its entirety.

Three months after Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, we shared a collection of longreads from Trump’s first 100 days in office in an attempt to capture a cross-section of some of the early, often breathless stories that came out of that hectic period of adjustment (and refusals to adjust). The month after, we looked back even further, examining his war with the past.

Here are some of the longreads from Trump’s first 1000 days that Longreads editors and contributors chose as some of the best political writing of each year, as well as all the stories about the presidency and the administration that headed up our Top 5 Longreads of the Week emails since Trump’s inauguration.

1. Donald Trump: He Was Made in America (Kirsten West Savali, The Root)

The question is not “Where did Donald Trump come from?” It’s “Where have our so-called allies been?” It is not “Why is he resonating with so many people?” Rather, it’s “How could he not?”

But we already know the answer to that.

“I don’t trust any journalist in the world more that Kirsten West Savali,” Kiese Laymon wrote in 2016, when he picked this story as one of the best political analyses of that year. Written eight months before the election, Laymon singled this piece out for making it clear “to any one willing to listen what this nation was going to do on November 2” — and for anticipating so many clear answers to questions that are somehow still being asked years later.

2. The First White President (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)

“Few writers have done more to expose the racist truth of the Trump presidency than Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Longreads Founder Mark Armstrong wrote while highlighting this excerpt from We Were Eight Years in Power as some of the best political writing of 2017:

Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

While reading one of its most iconic passages, Longreads editor and writer Danielle Jackson shares how this segment from Coates’ excerpt echoes James Baldwin’s commentary in the 1964 documentary Take This Hammer, on “the creation of a class of pariahs in America.”

3. The Loneliness of Donald Trump (Rebecca Solnit, LitHub)

The opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.

Solnit’s Grimm fairy tale was one of our No. 1 story picks for 2017. For another poetic retrospective, read Brit Bennett’s essay on “Trump Time” in Vogue:

In Trump Time, the clock moves backward. The feeling that time itself is reversing might be the most unsettling aspect of a most unsettling year. What else is Make America Great Again but a promise to re-create the past? Through his campaign slogan, Trump seizes the emotional power of nostalgia, conjuring a glorious national history and offering it as an alternative to an uncertain future. He creates a fantasy for his base of white Americans but a threat for many others. After all, in what version of the past was America ever great for my family? “The good ol’ days?” my mother always says. “The good ol’ days for who?”

4. Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway (Michael Kruse, Politico)

He said he was going to bring back the steel mills.

“You’re never going to get those steel mills back,” she said.

“But he said he was going to,” I said.

“Yeah, but how’s he going to bring them back?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s what he said, last year, and people voted for him because of it.”

“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”

He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”

He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.

And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.”

“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”

Chris Smith, author of The Daily Show (The Book), contributor to Vanity Fair, and contributing editor at New York Magazine picked Kruse’s story as one of Longreads’ Best of 2017. Longreads Editor in Chief Mike Dang also selected it as an editor’s pick, alongside Adam Davidson’s New Yorker story,Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.”

5. I Walked From Selma To Montgomery (Rahawa Haile, BuzzFeed)

Rahawa Haile’s story on hiking the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail was one of our No. 1 stories for 2018:

On Feb. 9, 2017, 20 days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence as attorney general. The travesty of that sentence, the sinister potential of it more than a year later, fuels my anxiety still. It is the reason why, mere months after returning from the Appalachian Trail, I emailed my father on Feb. 22, 2017, to see if he might be interested in meeting me in Alabama for a thru-hike of sorts. I wanted to walk from Selma to Montgomery — following in the footsteps of the civil rights marchers who had come before me — to protest Jeff Sessions’ entire political career, specifically his most recent and wildly dangerous appointment as the head of the Department of Justice. […] I traveled to Selma, Alabama, because I had to, because no other walk on Earth made sense to me, or my rage, at a time when walking was the only activity for which my despair made a small hollow. And fam, let’s be clear — I did it for us.

6. How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker)

Jane Mayer has written several blockbuster stories on the Trump administration, including this year’s “Fox & Friends” and 2017’s “The Danger of President Pence.” Here was another of our No. 1 stories for 2018:

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.” […]

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

7. Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and David Barstow, The New York Times)

Last year’s ground-breaking investigation into the potentially illegal financial schemes, tax evasions, and grandiose lies employed by the Trump family was one of our No. 1 stories for 2018.

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes.

8. Hideous Men (E. Jean Carroll, The Cut)

E. Jean Carroll’s excerpt from her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal was one of this year’s No. 1 stories:

Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.

Further listening: The Daily covers this story in “Corroborating E. Jean Carroll,” which Longreads editors discuss on an episode of the Longreads Podcast, “All Things Being Unequal.”

Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler

Penguin Press

In the fall of 2011, Peter Hessler arrived in Egypt, with his family — twin toddlers, and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang. The two had met in China, where Hessler first landed as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, details his two years teaching English. Two other books, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, followed. After leaving China in 2007, the family settled in southwestern Colorado, where they are now based. A few years later, they decided to wipe the slate clean and move to Egypt. But just as they planning their move, the Egyptian Arab Spring started, sending the country down the chaotic path it has followed until today.

Hessler’s latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, chronicles both the revolution itself, and the lives of the people they met during their five years in Cairo. It’s a deep look at what is, in some ways, the oldest country in the world, and it bears the hallmarks of Hessler’s work: vivid scenes, elegant narrative arcs, and a long lens that examines the links and gaps between Egypt’s troubled present and its ancient past.

Today, Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his 2007 National Geographic story, “Instant Cities,” and in 2006, Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist. In 2011 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving Egypt, his family returned to Colorado again, before decamping this year for another stint in China, where Hessler plans to teach at Sichuan University, 20 years after he first taught at Fuling Teachers College. Frank Bures spoke to him about the value of language, learning from John McPhee, and what your garbage man can teach you.

***

Frank Bures: You built your career writing about China, but how did you start writing in the first place?

Peter Hessler: My first interest was in 10th grade. I had an English teacher in high school who thought that I had some talent at it, and encouraged me. She was the one who made me think seriously about becoming a writer. That was one of the reasons I ended up at Princeton, because they had a good creative writing program. I was encouraged there by Russell Banks, who was my teacher and a thesis advisor, and also John McPhee.

I originally was interested in fiction. I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication. Later, after I took McPhee’s class, I started doing a little freelancing. In grad school overseas I started shifting towards nonfiction, partly because I couldn’t sell short stories. It was hard to publish them, whereas I could publish my travel pieces and essays and get paid for them, and that was encouraging. But I was still unsure when I joined the Peace Corps at age 27. I’d published a lot of travel pieces, but I’d never held a job in journalism, and the kind of stuff I published wasn’t enough for me to support myself.

I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication.

FB: What kind of travel pieces had you done?

PH: The New York Times used to have these essays. The first one I wrote for them was about taking the Trans-Siberian train. Because after I finished grad school at Oxford I traveled for six months, and I consciously researched stories along the way, thinking that when I got home I would write pieces, and possibly write a travel book. I wrote the train essay, and just sent it to a name on the masthead at the Times, and by some miracle they read it and published it. After that I started doing some stuff for them as a freelancer.

FB: When did you start thinking about books?

PH: When I joined the Peace Corps, I wanted to learn Chinese and become a better writer. But I didn’t think I was going to write a book about that experience. I felt I was too young, and I really was. I didn’t have the maturity to write a book, nor did I really have the material at that point. But I did take a lot of notes. It was my way of processing what was going on. I would write about experiences I had, or encounters with people, things on campus, but just in a diary format. And I tracked a lot of my students’ writing because they were such beautiful writers, and I thought they were fascinating people.

Then with six months to go, we got Internet for the first time, and I got back in touch with people. If it had been any earlier, it probably would’ve been a distraction, but at that point it was good to start thinking about the future.

He said, ‘It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.’

I had written to John McPhee throughout my time there, and he had written back often. But now we were on email, and I remember writing to him because I was thinking about applying for journalism jobs, and applying for an internship at Newsweek in Beijing. John wrote me a long letter, telling me: “You should write a book about Fuling.” Because he’d read these letters. He said, “It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.”

That was a powerful moment, because I hadn’t thought about it. Once I got that email and started thinking, it immediately made sense. When I went back through all my notes in my diaries, I realized, “I’ve really got a lot of stuff here.” But I could also see what I needed: more detailed descriptions of the landscape, and some deeper observation of the community and of the city.

FB: Did you write the book then?

PH: No, I didn’t write the book until I left. I went back to my parents’ home in Missouri, and I decided I would take about half a year. I was 29 years old and I had never held a job. I had college debt, so I felt a lot of pressure. I was applying for journalism jobs at the same time, sending out resumes to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, pretty much anybody who had a China bureau, and I got form rejections across the board.

When I finished the book, I sent a resume to Amazon, because they had sent me a recruiting thing when I was in Fuling. I had no idea what it was. I guess my life could’ve been pretty different. I sent them a resume, but they never wrote back.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else. After a couple weeks of this sort of thinking, I finally sent the book out to agents, and a couple of agents were interested. I went to New York and met with them, and I ended up signing with a young agent named William Clark. He sold the book to HarperCollins, and it happened very quickly. It wouldn’t be considered a big advance, but it was enough to pay off all my college loans, and suddenly I realized, “I can just go back to China on my own. I don’t need a job. I’ll just go and figure it out.” And that’s where Oracle Bones starts, in that I was just showing up, and I had a part-time assistant position at The Wall Street Journal, for $500 a month, and that gave me a base.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else.

It took a while for River Town to come out, because I took a long time editing it. But there was a lot of stuff going on that year and people were starting to get interested in China. So I very quickly had a lot of work. After about a year I got a break with National Geographic and The New Yorker. I was on the ground there for just a little more than a year when I sold my first story to The New Yorker in 2000. Then a week later I sold my second story to them, and we were pretty much off and running.

FB: It was a great time to be writing about China.

PH: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was at the right place in the right time. But it did take some faith, because it was very discouraging earlier, when I was rejected for those jobs and living at my parents’ house. I didn’t grow up with any money, so I couldn’t rely on anything else. And the college debt weighed on me.

FB: Was there anything you learned from John McPhee that influenced the way you write, or think about writing?

PH: There were huge numbers of things that I learned from him. There’s technical stuff. Probably one of the best examples is a “set piece.” He’d teach us that in his course, and show us an example from his writing. It’s something, actually, that a lot of journalists don’t learn, because you only do it in long-form writing, but it makes you think differently about the structure and organization, and that was a really useful lesson to have as a young writer. The example he gave came from his Alaska book, where he’s on his trip through the Alaska back country, and they see a bear. The thing shifts to maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words about bears, and it’s no longer in his experience. It talks about the nature of bears, things they do, and their size. There’s all this, of course beautifully written, but it’s a way of getting background information in an interesting way. It also allows you to step away so the voice doesn’t get stale.

McPhee had a lot of technical lessons, but I think the most important thing was the deeper ways of thinking about writing. One of them, for me, was that you can do fascinating creative writing as a nonfiction writer. I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing. My parents didn’t get The New Yorker, so I didn’t realize there were these other ways of writing nonfiction, and that it could be just as dynamic and fascinating as fiction, and just as artistic.

FB: How did you and Leslie choose Egypt?

PH: There are a couple things. We wanted something different from China. We wanted a different kind of challenge, and something that would give us a new perspective. We wanted to study a language that would be fascinating and rich. I like the idea of a place with a long history, and especially with ancient history because I like archeology. But we also needed it to be a place that would interest The New Yorker. I couldn’t go to Portugal, right? I mean, how many stories about Portugal are you going to write for The New Yorker? I had to be able to support my family.

We thought about India, but I didn’t like the way that there wasn’t one language that unified it, and it seemed like maybe it was too close to China in some sense. So we eventually settled on the Middle East. It was going to be Damascus or Cairo, because those are good places to study Arabic. We were leaning toward Damascus for a while, but once the Arab Spring started it was clear that Cairo was the place. But we’d never been there. We showed up in Cairo with these kids, and neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


FB: Having kids myself, I can’t imagine a move like that.

PH: When I look back, it’s totally crazy. Leslie and I, maybe we’re delusional or something, but we’re also pretty calm people. It helps, too, if you’re doing this with somebody else who’s totally on board. It was definitely a hard first year. I mean, I think the whole thing was hard, because it’s hard with little kids to do something like that, and it’s hard to be in the midst of this chaotic political period. It was very intense. But it’s an engaging place. The people are likable, even though Egypt has problems on a level that we had not experienced in China. There’s serious dysfunction in many aspects of Egyptian society. But it was a phenomenal experience, and I was also fortunate in that I did get to know individuals who brought some light to what was going on, and not just in the sense of understanding. They were engaging, positive people that I liked to spend time with. Sayyid, and Manu and Rifaat, our teacher. We loved it.

FB: What’s your feeling about the importance of learning the language of a place where you’re writing about or living?

PH: To me, it was fundamental. I’m not interested in writing in-depth about a place where I’m not at least doing my best to learn the language. In Egypt I didn’t become fluent like I was in Chinese, but I was very conversant, comfortable with somebody like Sayyid. I could spend a lot of time with him and his family and understand what’s going on, and that was really important to me.

FB: With Egyptian Arabic, what did you learn about Egypt that you wouldn’t have learned without that?

PH: There’s the deep religious nature of the language, and the impact of religion on the language itself. It’s fundamental to that language. I think that that’s pretty rare in the world. There aren’t that many cultures where you have the religion so deeply embedded in the language. It’s a huge part of what you’re saying when you’re using these terms all the time.

I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing.

The language also makes you think a lot about the Pharaonic world, and the ways in which it lasted or didn’t last. There are remarkably few Pharaonic words in Egyptian Arabic. It’s quite striking. There are probably more Turkic words than there are Pharaonic words. But it’s also striking that a lot of those Pharaonic words are very foundational, like the vocabulary for agriculture has a lot of Pharaonic stuff in it, and the word for women, the word for water, the word for land, the Nile, the river. These are things that have deep roots, and those survived the adoption of Arabic.

FB: I love how in both The Buried and Oracle Bones, you’re writing about the distant past and the present, and finding connections and divergences. Do you think that was one of the reasons that you were attracted to Egypt?

PH: I definitely liked the idea of this place with an incredibly rich ancient history. I think there are always some people who say, “Well, that’s not really relevant to what’s going on today.” But I don’t believe it disappears. There are too many echoes that you can see. Also, it’s not just whether things stay the same. I’m not saying that everything is static, but more what I’m saying is that the ancient Egyptians were brilliant politicians, and a lot of what they did politically we see echoes of. For example, their use of nostalgia. Even 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they were already writing nostalgically about the past, and the perfect political world of the past. That’s an effective political strategy. It’s what Trump does now. People do this all over the world.

FB: What’s your sense of the difference between how people in China and Egypt relate to that distant past?

PH: It was a huge difference. The Chinese are much more comfortable with it, and there are a couple reasons for this. The main one, of course, is they see their history as an unbroken line. It’s a very powerful thing to have that link. Egypt does not have that. The other huge difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself Pharaoh was somewhere in the second century BC, and from that point until 1952. there was not a single Egyptian leader.

FB: What was the biggest challenge as a writer in Egypt?

PH: It was getting enough language, and being able to do that while the revolution was going on and while I had small children. I couldn’t study all the time the way I had in Fuling. In Egypt I was having to go report on stuff, and I had kids to take care of.

FB: In Oracle Bones you say that in writing narrative nonfiction stories, you’re collecting fragments and organizing them into stories. Some of your stories have arcs that span years. How do you know when a fragment, or something that you’ve collected, is part of that story?

PH: It’s an instinct you develop over time. It took me a while to get there, but by the time I left China I had a pretty good sense of this. When I was in Colorado, for example, and I was reporting on the uranium industry in my corner of the state, and I ran into a town where everybody was telling me to talk to the pharmacist, because he knew everything. That confused me, because why would a pharmacist be somebody who knows a lot? Then I talked to him and realized, well, there’s no medic, there’s no hospital anywhere near here, so he’s basically like a doctor.

I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start.

He also mentioned the story of some loner in town who died and left him half a million dollars, and at that point my instinct kicked in and I thought, “There’s something going on here.” So I left him out of the uranium story, with the idea that I was going to pursue this. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I thought there was something there. You get those instincts over years of writing stories and books. The same thing in Egypt when the garbageman, Sayyid, kept bringing me stuff from the neighborhood and he knww so much about people.

FB: Do you typically start with an idea?

PH: It’s usually either a person or a place. It’s almost never an idea. I don’t start with themes or issues. Partly that’s my instinct, but partly it’s also deliberate because I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start. Maybe you’re fitting them into a larger narrative or idea that isn’t appropriate. So I tend to start either with a place or a person, and then the issues and the themes are secondary. They come in as I get to know the person or the place.

So I get to know Sayyid. Then I start to learn about him. Then that leads me into the informality of Cairo and the self-organization of those communities. Then it also leads me into gender relations, because I start to get to see how him and his wife interact. It leads me to issues of education, because I realize that this incredibly intelligent person is illiterate, and I get to know what his children are doing in school, and educate me in new perspectives. But it all starts with him.

FB: And now you guys are going back to China. Where are you going to be?

PH: We’re going to Chengdu. I’m going to teach for a year at Sichuan University. It’s been 20 years since I taught in Fuling.

FB: Is Chengdu near Fuling?

PH: It’s close. I wanted to teach in Fuling, but I wasn’t allowed for political reasons. I could do it in Chengdu. I’ll also be tracking down my former students and seeing what they’re up to, and revisiting Fuling.

FB: Are you going to write a sequel to River Town?

PH: I suspect some kind of follow-up book. But, I don’t know. I always wait until I’m into it before I really know what form it’s going to take. I do want to build on that experience, and I want to try to write something about how this place has changed and what it feels like on the ground, both for the people involved and for me as an observer. I’m also interested in my former students, who were a remarkable generation, because they were born around the time that Mao died, and they grew up with the changes. I’m curious to know more about their perspective on what they’ve seen and what they’ve lived through, because they’re middle-aged now.

FB: Is your plan to be there for a year?

PH: Right now, I think we’ll be there for five years. I’ll do one year of teaching, and then transition to writing full-time and reporting. Leslie is finishing her Egypt book, and then she’ll transition to writing. We also want our children to learn Chinese.

FB: How did you guys meet?

PH: I was working at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant, and she was a journalist, or a correspondent for them in China. I was the lowest guy on The Journal totem pole, and she had a real job, back in ’99. But we didn’t date then. We were in the same circle of friends, and then in 2003 we started dating.

FB: Can you say what Leslie’s Egypt book is about?

PH: It’s about women factory workers in Egypt. She reported on the factory in Alexandria. She has really good stuff, and she’s partway through it now.

FB: That will sit nicely on the shelf next to Factory Girls.

I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it.

PH: I think the two books will be interesting. My book and her book also will be interesting because we’re looking at Egypt from slightly different angles. There are some cross-themes, and it was fun to have these projects being researched at the same time. It helps, I think, both of us to have all these conversations while we’re doing research.

FB: Do you guys read each other’s work, like Joan Didion and John Dunne?

PH: Pretty late in the game. We don’t do it as we’re working. I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it. Actually, for this last book, she didn’t read it until pretty late in the process because I think she was feeling a lot of pressure for her book and trying to get it going, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to throw it on to her. She needed to focus on her thing, but I think that was a little bit of an unusual time, just part of the whole challenge of doing these projects with young children. We’re both very supportive, and it helps a lot in terms of the reporting, because each of us is learning things that help the other person.

FB: With two writers in the family, how do you balance your life and work?

PH: I guess that develops kind of naturally. It’s all we ever knew together, because both of us were writing from the time we met. The hardest thing about having two writers is probably financial, and lack of stability. Neither of us have a steady paycheck, but we had kids so late, and then both of us had the good fortune to start in China, which was a good place to get established. Though we would never write together. We have no interest in that. We are not a team of writers. It’s an individual sport, like running.

***

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology. He writes about travel, culture, language, science, outdoors, narrative, and belief for publications such as Harper’sAeonLapham’s QuarterlyThe Washington Post MagazineOutside, and the Best American Travel Writing

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Under the Knife

Margot Harris | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (3,346 words)

I was scrolling through my usual Instagram cache of impeccably staged dessert photos when I saw the cupcakes. Vulva cupcakes, decorated to celebrate a wide range of yonic beauty. With frosting. Buttercream, chocolate ganache, fondant, and raspberry-flavored labia of varying sizes, fresh from the oven. Edible pearl clitorises perched neatly at the apex. The self-proclaimed body-positive account featured whimsical tableaus: oranges, apples, cherries, and bananas were arranged in pairs to celebrate diversity in breast size and shape. Sliced papaya, honeydew melon, and grapefruit rivaled the blatancy of Georgia O’Keefe. And yet, as I searched the grid of suggestive snacks, I couldn’t find a fruit or baked good to match my own anatomy. Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top? Was that shape so far from the norm that it couldn’t be included in a shrine to body diversity? I bit my tongue until I tasted salt. 

***

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

“It’s a cupcake,” my friend Chloe* hissed at me over room temperature white wine, “get a grip.” She was right, of course. Women across the country were reeling from the appointment of an all-but-certain rapist to the Supreme Court, hence our meeting at a dingy bar on a Thursday afternoon, and I was busy vocalizing my fears that my labia didn’t match ones made of buttercream. Vanity at this particular moment felt inappropriate, a glaring indication of my privilege, but days of tense political bickering and nights without sleep had eroded my filter. I was tired, tired of everything, so why not slur my wine-soaked truth to a college friend? Especially one I could always count on to redirect my priorities. But the theoretically inclusive vulva cakes, however stupid, were just another image to taunt me and shape that incessant internal monologue; I will never look normal. I gulped the rest of my wine so I could tell Chloe before the embarrassment took over. I was considering aesthetic surgery. Labiaplasty. Definition: plastic surgery performed to alter the appearance of the labia minora, usually in the form of trimming. Yes, there would be a scalpel involved. No, it wouldn’t be covered by health insurance. No, there would be no general anesthesia for the procedure. Yes, there would be sutures down there. I gripped the stem of my wine glass to steady my hands, leaving sweaty fingerprints at the base. Chloe’s eyes widened at the mention of scalpels and she almost looked sympathetic for a minute. But her eyes darted to the TV behind my head, and she finished her wine. “Well,” she said, examining her empty glass, “at least no one can accuse you of being a crazy feminist anymore.” 

***

Growing up, I was educated by the standard syllabus. Venus shaving ads, glowing from the pages of Teen Vogue, informed me that my legs were worthless unless smooth to the touch — even at the hard-to-reach spots on the knees and ankles. Laguna Beach and MTV reality shows taught me that real self-improvement took the form of spray tans and weekly pedicures. America’s Next Top Model preached the value of high cheekbones, clear skin, and expressive eyes (I couldn’t make mine smile like Tyra said, despite concerted efforts in the bathroom mirror). Romantic comedies and horror movies alike demonstrated how my breasts should be perfectly round and bounce in slow motion when running, either in soccer practice or away from serial-rapist-murderers. I took notes dutifully, rubbing tanning lotion on my raw shins and sneaking away to Victoria’s Secret with friends to buy padded bras. The ones with gel inserts for natural bounce factor. Clear skin was simply out of the question, thanks to genetics, but I owed the world my best efforts: at the recommendation of a dermatologist, I singed every oil gland on my face with UV radiation once a month. 

Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top?

High school arrived with an even more specific mold that didn’t fit my body. Standards of beauty didn’t just apply to your legs, I deduced, but what was between them. The real truth, the one free of classroom and parental naiveté, could be found on the Internet. Meme culture arose with a vengeance, and it quickly became an easy platform to dictate the genital gold standard. The knots in my stomach turned to lead when I saw a photo of sandwich meat spilling out of a deli sub — an unnervingly familiar visual — with the caption “when she takes off her panties and you know you’ve made a huge mistake.” Porn, the primary educator of insecure and under-informed teens, confirmed my fears. I hid under a tent of blankets, an overheating laptop burning the tops of my thighs, and I researched. Sasha Grey and her PornHub contemporaries had something in common beyond their stamina, nonexistent gag reflexes, and incomprehensible enthusiasm: camera-worthy labia. Small, pink, smooth, and completely unrecognizable to me. Had those vulvas been honored in dessert-themed Instagram accounts, they could be represented with half a pink macaron. 

Once aware of my deviant labia, I took precautions. While my friends shimmied carelessly into tiny bikinis in open locker rooms, I fumbled into oversize one-pieces from the bathroom stall, carefully arranging myself so everything would stay in place. When my boyfriend tugged at the waistband of my jeans during our make-out sessions on the L-shaped couch in his basement, I immediately shut off the overhead light exposing us. He bit my lower lip and moaned into my neck, grinding into my hip bones until he came. I watched the ceiling fan circle relentlessly, feeling nothing but overexposed and dry, praying he wouldn’t reach for the light. At least I could be small and pink — worthy of his sexual enthusiasm — in the dark. 

***

In college, I began a long pattern of using my academic work to sort through my issues with inadequacy. I sat doe-eyed in freshman year sociology classes, devouring professors’ condemnation of social constructs and snapping along with my classmates at the mention of toxic masculinity. I pored gleefully over the textbook chapter defining the sexual double standard. I gasped along with my Introduction to Gender Studies class when we learned of a radical feminist theory that heterosexual sex could not truly be consensual under the current patriarchal structure of society. I felt vindicated by my selective interpretation of the texts before me — determining that my physical shortcomings weren’t my fault, but a reflection of a deeply flawed system. Most importantly, I felt, academia promised me that we could unlearn carefully cultivated notions of beauty. 

But the warped photocopies of Andrea Dworkin essays and peer-reviewed studies about the role of attractiveness in the economy hardly mattered when I looked into the lighted magnification mirror that taunted me from my dresser. There were the craters marring my forehead from years of pimple-popping. Then those deepening stretch marks creeping up my hips from 2 AM stress pizza (I never dabbed the oil off with a napkin like my roommate from the softball team). And there was the constant, lurking anxiety of knowing I wasn’t “normal.” In fact, I was grotesque — grotesque enough for a sexual partner to view fucking me as a mistake. Academia — or, more accurately, the projection of my insecurities onto my assigned readings — assured me that these features were not inherently unattractive. Distaste for them was the product of a larger system with a social, political, and economic agenda in mind. But I lay awake on my twin extra-long mattress wondering when knowing this might translate to hating my body less. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


In an effort to avoid the disconnect, I dragged my male friends to gender studies seminars until they acknowledged the brilliance of Catharine MacKinnon. I encouraged unsuspecting students tanning on the Green to take part in the university’s nude yoga class — all about body positivity! — and huddled in the back of the studio taking attendance while a sea of sweaty, body-glittered legs spread and intertwined in front of me. I hoped they couldn’t see my fraudulence from my hideout in the corner. I wore my “feminist killjoy” tank top well into the winter months. Despite the desperation to live in perfect coherence with my newfound values, my reverence for the bodies of others never coincided with forgiveness for my own. I tutored friends in introductory gender studies and used my earnings to laser the hair off my underarms.

***

The performative feminism as a deflection from my confusion continued after college. I donned sloppily-made pussy hats to march on Washington and passively tweeted my outrage. I donated a small percentage of my paycheck every month to Planned Parenthood. I bickered valiantly with my parents over Thanksgiving dinner about body shaming. And I believed what I said. But I demanded empowerment and resistance from everyone but myself. I researched aesthetic surgeons every night before falling asleep. 

It took two years of investigating genital surgery before I made the decision. I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia. According to the photographic evidence, labia that looked like mine — protruding, asymmetrical, and discolored — could be rejuvenated to more closely resemble the fruit and candy interpretations on Instagram than the heinous deli meat memes. I imagined the sex. Wet and sticky, completely exposed with the lights on. I pictured my legs splayed apart — shamelessly, carelessly — while a nondescript face with a square jaw kissed my inner thighs and moved upward to a silky pink crevice, recognizable from any porn industry fantasy. I pictured orgasms, intense as the ones I gave myself in my empty bedroom, when I felt my heartbeat between my legs and kicked the fitted sheet off the corner of the mattress. Isn’t that what my feminist predecessors would have wanted? Well, at least the ones who believed consensual sex could exist at all. 

***

Ben and I didn’t make eye contact when I told him. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the red couch in his living room, staring at the cookie tin my grandmother gave him that he’d converted to a coffee table ashtray. We’d been dating for five months, but we didn’t trust each other. I combed through his text messages while he slept, wondering who Sarah was and if she had a flat stomach and high cheekbones. She probably liked his favorite brand of sour beer that tasted like dead Sour Patch Kids. Maybe she was someone he used to, or still did, sleep with. I wondered if he devoured every inch of her body, leaving no patch of skin unbitten, no crevice unattended to. Was he astounded by how symmetrical her breasts were or how she always looked powerful and elegant, even bent over his bed, sweat dripping down her neck? Maybe, when they were finished, he even grinned at her and told her how perfect her body was. He never said anything about mine. After sex, he’d roll over and peruse the fantasy baseball app on his phone, grinding his teeth in frustration over batting averages and shoulder injuries. I stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the paint so I wouldn’t slip up and ask if he’d enjoyed himself. If there was something wrong with me. 

 The tips of his ears glowed red at the word “labia” and his jaw clenched when I added the part about the surgery’s six-week recovery time, which meant no sex. I sensed him adding another tally to my invisible scoresheet, marking me down for another deviation from the confident, low-maintenance girlfriend image I’d so carefully curated on the Bumble profile he swiped. The girl in the photos had subtle purple streaks in her hair, boasted a nipple piercing, and never got jealous. She liked sex and spontaneity and wouldn’t ask how she was in bed. That’s what he was promised. How many more tallies before that girl was gone — and Ben with her? 

“Do you want to say anything?” I asked after a few minutes of icy silence.

“You should spend that money on therapy instead,” he said. 

***

The Internet offered me little validation. Reddit revealed a disappointing alliance between Incels and intersectional feminists. Granted, the two groups had markedly different concerns. Incels feared my deceiving ways — my stealthy attempt to revive the ravaged remnants of promiscuity. The self-proclaimed feminists decreed the procedure of “designer vaginas” a response to brainwashing and deeply internalized misogyny. I remembered the photocopies collecting dust in my old college folders and pictured Andrea Dworkin seizing in her grave. 

I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia.

More disturbing than the ranting of vulva purists were the articles from the experts. Gynecologists referred to labiaplasty — the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic surgery, according to one devastating headline — as a deeply disturbing trend, with procedures up 45% in 2016 alone. Some made the case that long-term effects of labia reduction surgery are “criminally under-researched” and the procedure’s existence is nothing more than a lack of consideration for the vulva as anything beyond a visual stimulant to men. One pediatrician described being “heartbroken” by the puberty-aged girls showing up to her door wanting to sever their labia. I could rationalize away misogynistic Reddit criticisms of my deception, but I didn’t enjoy the weight of responsibility for underage girls wanting to remove their organs. 

More specific googling yielded women’s magazines reminding plastic surgery skeptics that feminism is all about making your own choices now! But I perused them half-heartedly, focusing on their typos and unforgivable use of the passive voice. Hardly credible sources, I determined. I returned to my critics’ articles constantly, keeping their searing headlines open in separate tabs on my computer. Despite stumbling on an occasional article to the contrary, I deduced a general consensus among the medical and progressive communities: getting this surgery wasn’t really okay. But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex. Or to sit through a class or meeting without constantly visualizing the Internet-condemned roast beef spilling out between their legs. 

***

The day of my procedure, I repeated my rationale to the mirror in the bathroom of the plastic surgeon’s office. First, the half-true elevator pitch, given to the surgeon: I get uncomfortable riding a bike! I don’t want to live in physical discomfort anymore. Second, the defense: Who cares if it’s aesthetic surgery, anyway? No one else gets to have an opinion. I am in control of my body. This is what agency looks like. Third, the half-hearted reassurance: This procedure will turn out well—I picked the best surgeon in the country! No one will have to know I did it, anyway. Unless I tell them. 

The last question on the intake forms asked for an emergency contact. I left it blank. “If I die on the table, just don’t tell anyone,” I begged the nurse who returned the incomplete paperwork. 

“Make me pretty,” I slurred to Dr. Hunter as the painkillers took hold and I fumbled with the tie on my hospital gown. In my Percocet-induced clarity, I knew: I wanted to be pretty. Neat. Dainty. Worthy. Yes, I chose one side of the conflicting messages I’d been bombarded with — taunted by — my entire life. What did I have to defend? But lying on the icy, sanitized operating table, the Ativan slowing my pulse and loosening my jaw, I heard myself whisper, “Sorry.” Thanks to a shot of local anesthetic, I felt nothing during the procedure but an eerie pressure somewhere between my legs. 

The contours of the pain became much clearer on the fifty-block cab ride home, the numbing medications wearing off with each excruciating jolt of a speed bump or crunch of gravel under the tires. I tried to remember the terms I’d heard doctors use to categorize pain: burning, radiating, sharp. What words did they use for the pain of being gutted by a butcher knife, genitals first? “If you’re going to throw up, get out,” the driver warned. 

But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex.

Against the doctor’s advice, I peeked under the carefully-arranged bandage as soon as I arrived home. I winced at the sight of the dried blood collecting on the stitching, but amidst the carnage and swelling, I could see it. A glimpse of worthiness. 

***

I decided my penance for the surgery would have to go beyond the three-month payment plan and the tearful weekend in bed with a bag of frozen peas clamped between my thighs and a bottle of Percocet adhered to my palm. The price for my fraudulent labia, my rejection of ideology and general medical advice in pursuit of twisted perfection, would be my humiliation. I told everyone. I mentioned it offhand to classmates over Chinese food. To the pharmacist prescribing painkillers. To a Tinder date who looked like he wanted to disappear into his untouched wine. 

 “You know, you’re not required to tell everybody,” one friend told me between stale beers at his apartment when I blurted it out. “They probably don’t want to know, anyway.” But I relished the pounding in my chest, the flush in their cheeks, the darting glances to anywhere but my eyes. The palpable discomfort. This was my punishment: the distress of sitting with public culpability. 

“I didn’t know that was something you could do,” my mom said, her tone only tinged with disapproval — no more so than when I told her I would be graduating a semester late. But her mouth pinched shut the way it did when she was afraid she might blurt out an honest opinion, wrinkles collecting on her upper lip. I knew how she felt about image-conscious women. Beauty is skin deep, she’d clucked at me since the first time she caught me hovering by the flavored lip gloss in Sullivan’s Toy Store. What a waste of money and brain cells, we’d muttered with eye rolls in response to the mothers of my high school classmates who often appeared at school events with tighter faces and unassuming noses. Watching her silence, I felt it. The rush of humiliation; the heat in my face, the numbness in my toes, the quickening of my pulse. Embarrassment for talking about my vulva. Shame for being one of those women who wasn’t serious. Wasting money and brain cells. This was the shame I deserved. 

I even showed Chloe the eight sutures before they dissolved into discrete oblivion. My repentance could only be completed with total exposure. “That’s crazy,” she whispered, inspecting the stitching.

Throughout my six-week healing period, as the sutures dissolved and my own silky pink macaron anatomy took shape, I brought up the surgery constantly. Compulsively. Paying close attention to my own retelling of the story — searching for clues, but still unable to identify what embarrassed me most: that I’d been so ‘unattractive’ in the first place, that I’d gone through with the surgery, or that I was pleased with the results.

***

I had plans for the grand unveiling of my downstairs renovations. Ben was gone — after ten months of staring at our phones instead of each other, we returned college sweatshirts and shared a final beer sitting cross-legged on the floor of my apartment. I was excited for sex with someone who might approve of, or even be excited by, me. And if anyone had something to say about my body, I had a rehearsed response at my disposal: “Yeah, it’s new.” Perhaps it was the final acceptance of what I’d done, one last embarrassing step toward ownership. Toward something. And when it happened — a vague, crude observation from a graduate student who tasted like popcorn and didn’t own a bedframe — my mouth felt dry. No defiant joke or witty response. So, like many times before, I said nothing and stared at the bone-white ceiling, counting backward from one hundred.

***

Margot Harris is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Dispatch from Puerto Nowhere

Merve Karahan / Getty, Photo Collage by Homestead Studio

Robert Lopez | Longreads | October 2019 | 25 minutes (6,239 words)

For years I’ve been misquoting the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz without knowing that Milosz is the one I’ve been misquoting. I’ve done this, I’m sure, because I heard someone else misquote Milosz. I’m pretty sure this person did so without attribution, as well.

How far back it goes is unknowable, of course, but it’s akin to a literary game of telephone that is entirely without consequence or the least bit interesting.

What I’ve been saying is this: When a writer is born into a family, it’s the end of the family.

I preface this statement with the safe and inarguable, “A writer once said …”

I used to think Flannery O’Connor said this about writers and families, as it sounds like something she would’ve said.

It isn’t very scholarly or academic to say, “A writer once said,” but it gets the point across to students. I trot this misquote out whenever I’m trying to get my students to risk more on the page, whenever I see them pussyfoot around potentially interesting and dangerous material. I use the Milosz quote to give them license to let it fly, to destroy themselves and their families.

I employ any number of quotes and misquotes when I teach fiction and nonfiction writing to students. Babel, Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, Didion, Pritchett, Hannah, Shakespeare, O’Connor, Borges, Stengel, Berra, Ray Charles, A writer, etc.

The actual quote from Milosz is: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

I like the misquote better.

There’s a finality to the misquote that feels apocalyptic, whereas the actual quote sounds softer. One can finish a coffee table or a deck. One lover can ask another, “Did you finish?” and it would be considerate, thoughtful. A diamond is finished as are countless other precious gemstones and earthly items.

A family finished can mean they’ve attained the pinnacle of human achievement. No reason to go any further, to go forth and continue with this mindless multiplying, for we have birthed a writer.

Of course, it could be an issue with translation, too, and there’s no accounting for that. And I don’t know where the quote comes from, if it was in a poem or essay or lecture or what. A google search doesn’t provide this information, and I will have to dig deeper.
Read more…

When the Dishes Are Done, I Wonder About Progress

Lady Godiva rides through the streets of Coventry. July 1, 1962. (John Franks/Keystone/Getty Images)

Sarah Haas | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,825 words)

In the days after reading Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s newest book and first collection of essays, I knew I’d been affected — deeply — but struggled to understand how. A binding together of pieces published between 2006 and 2019, it’s not clear whether Coventry was written with its final product in mind. Sure, the architecture seems intentional — as in it makes sense to read the collection from left to right — but without a central nor obvious thesis at its core, interpretation of the whole seemed to require an unfounded creativity. To make sense of Coventry I’d created a narrative that positioned the book against Cusk’s own storied life, imagining the collection as an allegory for the author’s experience of having been pummeled by so many critics. Reviewers of her other nonfiction works have called Cusk “condescending,” “terrible,” and cruel — an adjective that still sticks to her persona today. Wanting for narrative, I imbued Coventry with the arc, protagonists, and villains I’d imagined part of her life story. But then I heard Cusk’s voice like a whisper, proclaiming the death of exposition and character, as she did in a 2017 interview with The New Yorker. Cusk has been careful to ensure the absence of both in her work but, habituated to expect it, I’d struggled to yield. Just past the edge of my attention, my mind filled in the void by assigning Cusk the burden of the narrative’s enactment. It was the first time as a reader that I felt the success of a book depended not on the author’s ability, but on mine. Read more…

The Story of Country Music’s Great Songwriting Duo

Jared Brainerd, Faber & Faber Social

Dylan Jones | Wichita Lineman | Faber & Faber | September 2019 | 26 minutes (5,155 words)

 

In 1961, like most fourteen-year-old boys Jimmy Webb was obsessed with three things: music, cars, and girls. In an effort to curb these distractions, his Baptist minister father got his son a part-time job ploughing wheat fields near Laverne, Oklahoma. One day, while listening to music on the green plastic transistor radio that hung from the tractor’s wing mirror, the young Jimmy Webb heard a song called “Turn Around, Look at Me,” sung by a new artist called Glen Campbell.

Webb loved that record, not just because of the tune, but mainly for the voice, which he thought was sweet and true.

Read more…

The Little Book That Lost Its Author

Oliver Killig/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Amber Caron | Boulevard | Spring 2019 | 16 minutes (3,262 words)

 

In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” Adolph Knipe, the story’s protagonist, invents a computer that can provide the answer to a math problem in five seconds. His invention is a technical masterpiece, and his boss sends him on a weeklong vacation to celebrate his good work. Knipe, however, doesn’t travel and doesn’t even celebrate. Instead, he takes a bus back to his two-room apartment, pours himself a glass of whiskey, and sits down in front of his typewriter to reread the beginning of his most recent short story: “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs.” It’s not a promising beginning, and Knipe knows it. He feels defeated, nothing more than a failed writer, when he’s suddenly “struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!” His fate isn’t to write stories, he realizes, but to build a machine that can write stories for him. Read more…

In the Straits: The Story of the Inmate Turned Millionaire Turned Lone Survivor

Longreads Pick

“He was a convicted felon who found a niche in Seattle’s construction boom. As the region’s fortunes rose and fell—and rose again—so did his. Then a fatal boating accident came for Michael Powers’s fairy-tale ending.”

Source: Seattle Met
Published: Aug 19, 2019
Length: 27 minutes (6,840 words)