Search Results for: Guernica

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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Lidia Yuknavitch on Mythologies We Adopt to Make Sense of Violence

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the acclaimed new novel The Small Backs of Children, has a haunting essay up at Guernica about “Laume,” a mythological water spirit and guardian of all children that her Lithuanian grandmother introduced her to when she was young, and about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of violence and tragedy:

I had a recurring dream for twenty years that I would have three sons.

I did not have three sons, and I’m fifty-two, so it’s not looking likely. What I did have was a daughter, who died, and one son, sun of my life. But I did have three husbands.

Maybe dreams don’t mean a goddamned thing.

Or maybe they mean everything.

They say you marry a man who is like your father. My father, the artist-turned-architect, molested and abused us. He was big. Angry. Loud-fisted. Marked us forever—three little women, making for their lives.

My first husband was gentle as a swan. A painter with long fingers and eyelashes. You can see what I was shooting for. I almost self-immolated next to his passivity.

My second husband, another painter, used harsh lashing strokes on the canvas. He was big and loud, but made softer by alcohol and art. Except when he wasn’t. The gun of him. Sig Sauer.

My third husband, father of my son, is big and loud and a filmmaker. But there is the gentleness of a cellist in his hands and eyes.

So sometimes I wonder if my dream was meant to show me not three sons, but three husbands. Take my second husband, for instance—the one who pressed the gun of him to me—he was a lot like a child. I wonder if Laume came and took my baby daughter, who died right before I met him, and replaced her with a man-child. This is kind of how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what’s happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.

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John Waters on TV, Bad Taste and Going Undercover

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:

Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.

John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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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Read more…

The Three Immutable Rules of Chicken Tenders

A true connoisseur of the chicken tender knows that there are three immutable rules.

The first is the rule of physical integrity. A tender has a proper shape: flattish, oblong, and gradually tapering from a wide front to a narrow end. Unlike nuggets, which are largely made from processed, re-formed scraps, the chicken tender takes its name from an actual piece of the chicken: the pectoralis minor, a muscle located under the breast, against the sternum. The tenderloin. It’s rare nowadays to get actual tenders when you order them (hence the rise of “fingers” and “strips,” terms of art that veil all manner of creative butchery), but integrity demands that a wedge of breast put at least some effort into mimicking the actual part of the chicken it is trying to be.

The second rule of chicken tenders is that, contra any advice your mother may have given you, what’s on the outside matters infinitely more than anything on the inside. A chicken tender lives or dies by its exterior: batters, breadings, the disappointing faux-sophistication of panko. The subtlety or intensity of its spice and salt. The crispness of the exterior is what creates the tenderness of the interior, its structural cohesion when submerged in hot oil helps the chicken inside stay juicy and good. But it can’t adhere only to itself: a good chicken tender’s breading stays connected to the chicken inside once you take a bite, not slipping off like a silk stocking or the bullshit batter on an onion ring.

The third rule of chicken tenders is that sauce is a last resort. You shouldn’t have to dip your chicken tenders in anything. If you want a vehicle for ranch dressing, order the crudités.

Helen Rosner writing in Guernica about her deep love for chicken tenders.

 

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The Transformative Power of Dressing in Drag

The excellent and underfunded nonprofit art and politics magazine Guernica has a special issue this month dedicated to exploring the boundaries of gender. In it, novelist Alexander Chee writes about the surprising realizations he had the first time he dressed in drag for a night on the town with the man he loves:

He is really spellbound, though, in a way he hasn’t been before this. I have never had this effect on a man, never transfixed him so thoroughly, and I wonder what I might be able to make him do now that I could not before. “Honey,” he says, his voice full of wonder. He walks closer, slowly, his head hung, looking up at me. I feel my smile rise from somewhere old in me, maybe older than me; I know this scene, I have seen this scene a thousand times and never thought I would be in it; this is the scene where the beautiful girl receives her man’s adoration and I am that girl.

In this moment, the confusion of my whole life has receded. No one will ask me if I am white or Asian. No one will ask me if I am a man or a woman. No one will ask me why I love men. For a moment, I want Fred to stay a man all night. There is nothing brave in this: any man and woman can walk together, in love and unharassed in this country, in this world—and for a moment, I just want to be his overly made-up girlfriend all night.

Photo by Dan Nicoletta.

Photo by Dan Nicoletta.

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Trauma and Joy: Four Stories About Adoption

The stories of adoptees are not open-and-shut case files—they are complex and messy. In these particular stories, you’ll meet a young woman who fought for her three brothers, a group of stridently anti-adoption adoptees, an eager couple waiting by the phone, and another couple coping with the myth of post-racism.

1. “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” (Nishta Mehra, Guernica, March 2015)

You can feel the urgency of Nishta Mehra’s words, like she’s crafted this essay in her head so many times and now, finally, has it in writing. Here is what happens over and over again, she says. Here is our family: a white woman, an Indian woman, a black toddler son. We are full of love. We face many questions. We have much to fear. Read more…

Literary Agent to Authors: Take the Money

Guernica: Is there ever a situation where you’d advise an author not to take a big advance that’s being offered?

Chris Parris-Lamb: No, not really. Which is not the same as saying they should always take the biggest advance that’s being offered. But I’d never advise an author to turn down an advance because it’s big. Statistically, your book is more likely to do well if you receive a big advance. There is more pressure on the publishers to make it work and get their money back if they’ve paid out a large advance. The downside of any advance is always the same—your book might not sell. That’s a risk if you get a small advance, and a risk if you get a big advance, so if there’s a big advance on the table, take it, and use the money to write your next one.

I think there’s this idea that if you receive a big advance and then the book doesn’t work, it’s a disaster, and your career is ruined. That’s just not true. If your first book doesn’t work, it’s always going to be harder to sell the second book, and that’s the case regardless of whether you were paid a big or small advance. If someone wants to make a bet on you, why not take it? If your first one doesn’t work, you might have to take a haircut on the advance for the second, but so what?

Literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb, in a Guernica interview with Jonathan Lee. Parris-Lamb has represented authors including The Art of Fielding author Chad Harbach, and he helped get a nearly $2 million advance for the forthcoming Garth Risk Hallberg novel City on Fire.

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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…

Beyond the Simply Salacious: Five Stories on Adultery

Here are five stories born of adultery. Read about technological advancements for philanderers and their cuckolds, personal perspectives from the cheater and the cheatee, a forbidden lust-fueled crime story, and a piece on how adultery became bedfellows with American popular culture and music—back in 1909.

1. “The Cuckold” (James Harms, Guernica, February 17, 2014)

“The cuckold knows betrayal as a form of revision: here is the life you thought you were living; now here is what really happened.” Read more…