Search Results for: Guernica

Featured: Irwin Chen, information architect, interaction designer, and part-time teacher. See his story picks from Findings, Felix Salmon, Guernica, plus more on his #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, n+1, Guernica, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Marcus Sortijas.

Photo: Wikipedia

A family, convinced that homeownership was a requisite part of the American dream, ends up with a foreclosure:

We tried to short sale. A realtor named Sharon came by the condo to see the property and talk about our options. Normally a friendly and exuberant child, our two-year-old daughter Amelie was immediately suspicious of Sharon, who was actually quite kind and warm, and so naively optimistic about our short sale chances that we should have realized it wouldn’t work. When Sharon tried to sit on our sofa, Amelie pointed out that it was her sofa. Our daughter had never before looked at anyone with such contempt. We asked Amelie to be nice to our guest. Matt suggested that he and Amelie take a walk to leave me time alone to talk to Sharon and show her the condo. Instead, our daughter glared at Sharon, gripped her tiny hands on the sofa, and declared to all three of us: “This is MY HOME.”

“Housed.” — Aimee Phan, Guernica

See also: “Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners.” — Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, Nov. 10, 2010

An interview with Cuban director Fernando Pérez on life, art and making movies in Cuba:

Fernando Pérez: I have one place in the world that I live in, where I was born, and that’s Havana. If you ask me why, I wouldn’t know, but then, that’s why I make films. In Cuba and specifically in Havana there’s a sort of energy that turns every situation into something unexpected. We lived through the Special Period in the 1990s in which the economic crisis that happened as a result of the fall of the USSR became, for many people of my generation and for a slightly younger generation like that of my children, a material and social crisis, it’s true, but for me, also a spiritual crisis. I went to visit my parents every Sunday, in Guanabacoa, a nearby village. I remember that had go through the tunnel under the bay of Havana to get there, and since there was no transportation I would do it by bike. And in 1993, when things got much worse—there was no food, they would cut the electricity for long periods of time—as I left the tunnel, I thought, this image that I’m living, it’s like a metaphor for the Cuban reality. It’s like one is crossing the tunnel, and we don’t see the end, but it has to be there; it struck me as very impressionistic, and that’s when the idea for the movie came.

“Cinefilia en Habana.” Julia Cooke, Guernica

See more interviews on @Weegee’s #longreads page

Featured Longreader: Jan de la Rosa, YAlit enthusiast. See her story picks from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Guernica, plus more on her #longreads page.

[Fiction] A favor from an ex, with a catch:

DENNIS

Let me guess. Is this about money? Now that I have it? Or do you suddenly need me on some emotional level heretofore unrealized?

Pause.

JOSH

Yes. I need money.

Silence.

“Turnabout.” — Daniel Reitz, Guernica

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A brief history of “library porn”:

Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known.

“Checking Out.” — Avi Steinberg, The Paris Review

See also: “The Story of the ‘Story of O’.” — Carmela Ciuraru, Guernica, June 16, 2011

[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 Kurt took a bath every day and helped him with his lessons. When her parents returned from the jungle, their clothes caked in red mud, their breaths smelling of hunger, Pepa washed their clothes, stomping and rinsing them over and over again, the water flowing red like blood. Then she made them a twelve-egg omelet, for the protein, and fed them mounds of rice and fried bananas. After the meal, which they ate dutifully and in silence, they slept for twenty-four hours straight.

“The Doctor’s Daughter.” — Anne Raeff, Guernica Magazine

See more #fiction #longreads

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Sports Illustrated, GQ, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, plus a guest pick from Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg.

[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 that night. Happiness is elusive. I’ve learned you can become the kind of person you swore you’d never be. Your sense of self can slip out from under you. You can fall so far. She must have known it couldn’t last. Her eyes were closed against the future.”

“The Norwegians.” — Elliott Holt, Guernica magazine

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Photo: Froskeland/Flickr