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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.)

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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 his child will grow up to be a killer. Gaitskill at her best.

• Justin Torres, “Reverting to a Wild State”, The New Yorker, August 1, 2011: What better could you hope for than a story that begins with a beautiful man in a diaper? And for money? 

• Lauren Groff’s “Above and Below”, The New Yorker (subscription required), June 13, 2011: A young woman who slides right out of the educated class into homelessness. 

• Deborah Eisenberg’s “Recalculating”, July 14, 2011, The New York Review of Books: If you hear people tell you about short stories that do what novels do, and you don’t believe it, read Eisenberg. This is one of those stories.

• Yang Sok-Il’s “In Shinjuku” at Granta Online, April 14, 2011: A rare glimpse of the life of a Japanese Korean from a writer who is largely unknown to us in the West for being under-translated.

My Top Nonfiction Longreads for 2011

• Porochista Khakpour’s “Camel Ride” at Guernica, Feb. 15, 2011: “I learned English through watching the Twilight Zone.” Porochista is a friend and also a favorite writer, and this, I think, is one of her best of the memoirs she is publishing.

• John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mr. Lytle” at the Paris Review is the record of an extraordinary apprenticeship. 

• Paul Ford’s “Facebook and the Epiphinator” at New York Magazine was a revelatory essay on Facebook’s impact on our lives but also our narratives. A lot of people try to write about “what Facebook means” but Paul really did it.

• Eileen Myles’ “Being Female”, at The Awl: ”When I think about being female I think about being loved.” Amazing. The sentences just blow everything up.

• Nell Boeschenstein’s “Now That Books Mean Nothing”, at The Morning NewsShe is a new favorite of mine, and this is a powerful essay about the author’s discovery that books have lost their ability to console her in difficult times.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

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.)

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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 publish great fiction, but there are also a lot of excellent online literary magazines, so I wanted to include work from a couple of them here. I had to include one story from The New Yorker, though, because Alice Munro is one of my favorite writers.

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Reese Okyong Kwon, “Stations of the Sun” in Kenyon Review 

Alice Munro, “Gravel” in The New Yorker

Nahid Rachlin, “Bijan” in Guernica

Laura van den Berg, “Mansion” in Guernica

Colson Whitehead, “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” in Grantland

Photo credit: Rebecca Zeller

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.

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: The prolific Matthias Rascher. See his story picks from History Today, Guernica and more on his #longreads page.

Picasso’s Erotic Code

Longreads Pick

A major new exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery tracks the affair between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became his mistress at 17, bore him a child, and committed suicide after his death, 50 years after they met. John Richardson tells the love story behind Walter’s encoded appearances in some of the 20th century’s most important artworks, including Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Apr 14, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,070 words)

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