This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path. The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden and Kennedy in […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads Member Exclusive: Graveyards, by Scott McClanahan
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Graveyards,” a short story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery. The piece was published last year in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories collection, and it will appear in McClanahan’s forthcoming book Crapalachia, a portrait of growing up in rural West Virginia, published by Two Dollar Radio. Support Longreads—and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads Member Exclusive: Contest of Words, by Ben Lerner
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path. The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Feel Of Nothing: A Life In America’s Batting Cages
Steve Salerno | Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words) Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and […]
Posted inUncategorized
“Monopoly Is Theft.” — Christopher Ketcham, Harper’s Magazine More by Ketcham
Posted inUncategorized
Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring stories from Orion Magazine, Harper’s, Atlanta Magazine, Fortune Magazine and The Rumpus, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick from N.V. Binder.
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Member Pick: Graveyards, by Scott McClanahan
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Graveyards,” a short story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery. The piece was published last year in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories collection, and it will appear in McClanahan’s forthcoming book Crapalachia, a portrait of growing up in rural West Virginia, published by Two Dollar Radio. Read an […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
The Eat, Pray, Love author talks to the Lucky Peach editor about how she became a writer, and the key to creativity: “I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive
Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level: “By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Philip Levine, The Art of Poetry No. 39
When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down […]
