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A Reading List Inspired by Seattle

“It’s really beautiful up there.” “Yeah, it’s, like, green.” “Really green.”

Ultimately, this is all I had to go on before I boarded a plane to Seattle last Saturday. Sure, my genius friend Josclin created an eight-page Google Document itinerary for our trip, I listened to a lot of Sleater-Kinney, and I’d oohed and ahhhed at Instagrammed pics of La Push, but none of that can replace actually being in a place.

Our trip took us to Tacoma, Olympia, Forks (TWILIGHT), La Push (and four beaches), Port Angeles (where we slept on a sailboat), the Hoh Rainforest (really green), and, finally, Seattle itself. I got home late Saturday night, jet lagged and eager to pore over every photo with my kind, exhausted parents, who picked me up from the airport.

Seattle was cool and sunny. The flowers were more vivid than anything I’d ever seen on the East Coast. I touched the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I slept on a goddamn sailboat. Washington, I love you. I really missed my cat and my boyfriend, but it was hard to say goodbye to the West Coast.

1. “What I Gained From Having a Miscarriage.” (Angela Garbes, The Stranger, April 2016)

Our first stop was Tacoma, and I lost it a little bit when I saw The Stranger in its newspaper box. “I’ve only read this online!!!!!” I shrieked at my friends. “It really is in print!!!!!” “My” issue featured a beautiful cover illustration of Prince and this astounding essay by Angela Garbes. I read it on the plane home. Read more…

The Defenders

Common space at the Bronx Defenders. All photos by Matthew Van Meter.

Matthew Van Meter | April 2016 | 25 minutes (6,411 words)

This story was co-published with The Awl and funded by Longreads Members.

 

On December 20, 2013, Christine Morales got up at seven to make breakfast for Kierra, her two-year-old daughter. They lived in a public housing project in Hunt’s Point in the south Bronx, where Morales worked as a security guard at a grocery store. When they were getting ready to leave, the door of the apartment exploded. Police officers burst in, carrying shields, guns drawn. One waved a search warrant; Kierra started to wail. As an officer pushed Morales to the wall and handcuffed her wrists, her mind raced: she thought through everything she had ever done wrong, trying to understand what had brought the police into her home.

Morales’s arrest instantly set in motion a chain of dispiriting events. Because Kierra was two, and the arrest was for a drug charge, the Administration of Children’s Services opened an investigation. Because Morales lived in public housing, the New York City Housing Authority began eviction proceedings. The police built a case to lock her out of her apartment under a Nuisance Abatement law. Finally, she lost her security license, so she could not go to work.

After spending the night in central booking, Morales was assigned a public defender, Seann Riley, for her arraignment at Bronx Family Court. He asked her about her case and her concerns; she said she just wanted to see her daughter again. The prosecutor read her charge aloud: possession with intent to distribute—Morales’s boyfriend had been dealing drugs out of their apartment. However, Riley pointed out that when police raided the apartment, they had been looking for her boyfriend, not her. The judge released Morales. Meanwhile, her father had taken Kierra to family court, where a lawyer from the child-protection agency insisted that she be placed in foster care for protection. Morales’s boyfriend pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, and, two weeks after her arrest, the prosecutor dropped all the charges against her.

At her family court hearing, Morales learned that Kierra would not be coming home, despite the lack of charges. The judge told her she wasn’t trustworthy, and that her boyfriend had taken the fall for her. She was allowed to see her daughter, supervised, at the child protection facility. When time came to leave, Kierra would ask why she couldn’t go home with mommy, and Morales would try to explain, trying to keep it together until she walked out the door.

Morales’s experience is common in New York, and more common still in the Bronx. Kierra was one of more than ten thousand children placed in foster care, almost all after suspicion of parental neglect—a catchall term that includes everything from excessive corporal punishment to missing doctor appointments. Morales’s poverty was her vulnerability: living in public housing subjects a resident to twenty-four-hour surveillance and automatic eviction after being charged with even low-level crimes.

When the criminal charges against her were dropped, her public defender had technically done his job. The government is required to provide a lawyer to help people through criminal court, nothing more. But Morales’s lawyer was from the Bronx Defenders, which extends representation from criminal court to family court, housing court, and immigration court. Morales was one of 30,000 Bronx Defenders clients in 2014—the only criminal defendants in the city or the country to receive these across-the-board services.

Even after her charges were dropped, Morales had a family attorney and a parent advocate to challenge the family court judge’s ruling. When the police locked her out of her apartment, a civil lawyer from her team got them to let her back in after a few hours. Her advocate, who is not a lawyer, helped her set up parenting classes, and a social worker checked in with her to see how she was dealing with life alone and to offer moral support. Kierra finally came home in June 2014, six months after the arrest. Read more…

Liar: A Memoir

Rob Roberge | Liar: A Memoir Crown | February 2016 | 23 minutes (5,688 words)

When Rob Roberge learns that he’s likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he’s terrified at the prospect of losing “every bad and beautiful moment” of his life. So he grasps for snatches of time, desperately documenting each tender, lacerating fragment. Liar is a meditation on the fragile nature of memory, mental illness, addiction, and the act of storytelling. The first chapter is excerpted below.

***

Read more…

Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ and the Racism of The Little Rascals

Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty. Image via PBS NewsHour

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

-Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The Sellout, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction (and now the 2016 Man Booker Prize), is a brutally funny-awful-sad-funny riff on racism in America, about an African American man who attempts to re-segregate his hometown — a fictional suburb of Los Angeles called Dickens. Beatty’s protagonist paints a border around Dickens, distributes “No whites allowed” signs to the local businesses, and gets help from a local celebrity, Hominy Jenkins, who was an understudy to Buckwheat and the last surviving cast member of the 1920s and ’30s serial “The Little Rascals.”

Through Hominy we also get a primer on the racist history of Hollywood — what was removed from public view, and what is still on display today. Beatty’s book led me back through my own childhood memories watching “The Little Rascals” in reruns during the early 1980s, unaware of the racist humor that was excised from syndication. Through The Sellout we get a tour of our ugly cultural past — Our Gang and Looney Tunes as just a start — and Beatty’s humor guides us through the injustices of the present.

Further reading:

• Interview with Paul Beatty (Scott Simon, NPR)
• New York Times Book Review (2015)
• An excerpt from The Sellout

‘My Model for Writing Fiction Is to Replicate the Feeling of a Dream’

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2016 | 20 minutes (5,074 words)

 

In 1989, Daniel Clowes started a comic-book series called Eightball. Instead of lauded superheroes following traditional plotlines, his comics often featured oddballs, meandering or dreamlike sequences, and an acerbic wit. At the time, it felt like he was writing into the abyss.

Since then, Clowes has become one of the most famous cartoonists in the world. Eightball was the original home to what became the standalone graphic novels The Death-Ray, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and Ghost World, among others. Ghost World was adapted into a feature film in 2001 (Clowes collaborated on the screenplay); his graphic novel Wilson will have the same fate. Eightball itself was republished in a slipcase edition last year. This is a wildly abridged history, and I haven’t even mentioned the awards.

Clowes’s new work is his most ambitious to date: the graphic novel Patience, a huge gorgeous slab of a book with drawings so sumptuous and vibrant I wanted to plaster them all over my walls. The book opens on Jack and his wife Patience learning they’re going to have a kid, shortly after which a wrenching turn sends Jack on a tumultuous trip back and forth in time. We spoke by phone about Patience, dreams, teen-speak, and when Clowes gets his best ideas: when he’s really bored. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Logan Cyrus, Charlotte Magazine.

1. Life Below the Poverty Line in Banktown, USA

Lisa Rab | Charlotte Magazine | Feb. 1, 2016 | 15 minutes (3,769 words)

A searing, nuanced portrait of a single mother living in poverty in Charlotte, N.C.

2. My Last JDate

Esther Schor | Tablet Magazine | Feb. 10, 2016 | 37 minutes (9,455 words)

A three-part essay on Jewishness, cancer, and finding love in your fifties. (Read Part II and Part III).

3. Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself

Caity Weaver | GQ | Feb. 11, 2016 | 21 minutes (5,338 words)

Justin Bieber is not easy to talk to. Despite that, Caity Weaver is able to write a funny and engaging celebrity profile of the pop star.

4. A Killing in the Hills

Nicholas Phillips | Riverfront Times | Feb. 10, 2016 | 23 minutes (5,882 words)

Looking for answers in a decades-old murder case set deep in the Missouri Ozarks.

5. The Wow Factor

Don Van Natta Jr., Seth Wickersham | ESPN | Feb. 11, 2016 | 24 minutes (6,044 words)

The story behind the complicated and bitter fight between owners in the NFL over which teams would have the right to move to Los Angeles and build a stadium.

Danny Thompson Drives Like a Bat Out of Hell

Photo: Danny Thompson Archive/Holly Martin Photography

Matt McCue | Longreads | January 2016 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

The Crazy Quest

Almost every day, for the past five years, Danny Thompson has pretzeled his creaky, five-foot-seven frame into his Challenger II car’s cockpit to eat lunch in a space so tight it could double as an isolation chamber. Thompson settles into a custom seat he built by pouring liquid foam into a trash bag and nesting in the plastic for two hours until the foam molded perfectly to his body. The 32-foot-long, cigar-shaped vehicle—the missing link between car and space ship—rests on blocks in the middle of a cavernous warehouse building three miles from the Huntington Beach surf. It often is stripped of its wheels. That hardly matters to Thompson. He sits in the Challenger II to become one with the car, he says.

A Southern California native, Thompson has a sun-bleached face, rusty-blond surfer hair and likes to describe things as “bitchin.” His hands are stained by tar-black oil and electric-blue paint, or whatever he’s tinkering with that day. Despite scrubbing his paws raw with a Scotch-Brite brush, he can’t completely remove the layers of grease and grime that have built up from 50 years as a gearhead. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

American Gun Culture Is Literally Killing Us: A Reading List

“You look like you’re saving the world. Are you saving the world?”

I looked up from my notebook into the face of a tipsy, friendly woman, glammed up for her night out. We were in the narrow aisle of our local pizza joint. She’d shared a quick snack with her friend, and my sandwich and soda were half-finished. Writing here has become a Friday night tradition: When I wrap up my shift at the bookstore, I head here to eat, read and sketch out last-minute ideas for my reading lists.

If she knew what I was reading, she wouldn’t ask me that. “No!” I laughed. “I wish.”

“Well, good luck with it, whatever you’re doing,” she said. I thanked her. She left with her friend.

I was reading—am reading—about guns. About their magnetism, their effect, their handlers. About the people caught in the literal crossfire, the innocent and the marginalized. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…