Posted inEditor's Pick

Once Upon a Time in the West

How Mark Twain turned frontier humor into literature: It wasn’t easy. The notion that literature could emerge from the frontier’s barbaric yawp encountered violent resistance from America’s literary establishment. It didn’t help that tall tales abounded in vulgarity, drunkenness, and depravity, not to mention perversions of proper English that would make a schoolteacher gasp. Proving […]

Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction

Call It Rape

Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words) The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.Subscribe to The Normal School * * * Still life with man and gun Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high […]

Posted inCollege, Nonfiction

College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but […]

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