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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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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— Jenny Diski in The London Review of Books on discovering that she has inoperable cancer and publicly writing about it.
Photo: Suki Dhanda

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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Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. Read more…

We are expats and nomads. We are products of multiple countries. We run away from places that don’t feel quite right, only to never find where we belong. These stories celebrate the journey of returning to (or discovering) our roots, and the elusive, ever-evolving concept of home. Read more…
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Pacific Standard, Esquire, London Review of Books, and Bitch Magazine.

This week is all about ghosts: ghosts that haunt houses, girl ghosts in movies, ghostwriters and Ghostbusters.
Katie Heaney writes about the supernatural for Pacific Standard — everything from Bigfoot sightings to seances. In this installment, she visits the oldest home in New York in search of its rumored ghostly matriarch.
“You never expect that big a hit. But there was a great sense that we were doing something special right from the beginning.”
A sprawling, spectacular account of O’Hagan’s attempt to help the founder of Wikileaks write his memoir, and the total chaos that ensued.
A shorter piece about the role of malevolent women ghosts in cinema. (Hint: It’s their righteous fury that makes them so angry.)
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Photo: spectrefloat

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill 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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In the London Review of Books, Richard Lloyd Parry looks at Japan’s cult of ancestors and the phenomena of the appearance of ghosts after the country was devastated by the 2011 tsunami. See more stories about the tsunami.
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Photo: Pieterjan Vandaele
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Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, recounts the disastrous experience of trying to ghostwrite the autobiography of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (The publisher later released an unauthorized early draft of the book):
I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it could become a modernist autobiography. But the jokes wouldn’t hold and Julian, despite promising his publishers and me that he’d produce pages, paragraphs, even notes towards his book, produced nothing in all the months I was there. Not a single written sentence came from him in all that time. But at the end, from all those exhausting late night interviews, we assembled a rough draft of 70,000 words. It wasn’t by any means great, but it had a voice, a reasonable, even-tempered, slightly amused but moral voice, which was as invented as anything I’d ever produced in fiction. Yet it hadn’t felt like creating a character in a novel, so much as writing a voiceover for a real person who isn’t quite real. His vanity and the organisation’s need for money couldn’t resist the project, but he never really considered the outcome, that I’d be there, making marks on a page that would in some way represent this process. The issue of control never became real to Julian. He should have felt worried about what he was supplying, but he never did – he had in this, as in everything, a broad illusion of control. Only once did he turn to me and show a glint of understanding. ‘People think you’re helping me write my book,’ he said, ‘but actually I’m helping you write your novel.’
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