Murder Music In no arena is dancehall—and Jamaican society overall—more troubled than in grappling with sexual orientation. Blaring on most street corners and from car radios, dancehall’s virulent homophobia, a curdled hatred for homosexuals explicitly and pervasively articulated in the music’s lyrics and deeply entrenched in dancehall culture, foments a quotidian reign of terror against […]
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Detroitism: What Does 'Ruin Porn' Tell Us About the Motor City?
Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City? The third major subgenre of the popular Detroit narrative is a backlash against the pornographic excesses of the Lament and is, at best, an attempt to find a new definition of urban vitality. The Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they […]
Featured Longreader: Doug Coulson, lawyer, and English Ph.D. candidate at UT-Austin. See his story picks from the Pen American Center, Guernica Magazine, and more on his #longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Political and economic analyst Sujatha Santhanakrishnan. See her story picks from The Caravan, Guernica, New York magazine and more on her #longreads page.
Writer Elliott Holt: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.) *** I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction. It’s no secret that the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, One Story and Tin House […]
Alexander Chee's Top 5 Longreads of 2011: #Fiction and #Nonfiction
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.) *** My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011: • Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried […]
[Fiction] An adolescent girl’s discoveries about her beautiful, elusive mother: “At the time, what I saw struck me as a strange dream, one that I managed to forget for many years. I was so angry with my mother for so long. Now I’m old enough to recognize the disillusion I saw dawning on her face […]
[Fiction] Pepa’s not afraid of anything: For two weeks, her parents were gone, and during this time Pepa took care of her brother as she did when they were not in the jungle. She prepared meals. She went to the market and mopped the floors and fed the chickens, of course. She made sure that […]
Featured: Rahel Aima, writer/editor at The State. See her story picks from The Millions, Guernica, New York magazine, plus more on her #longreads page.
On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles: The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment […]
