Search Results for: Love

Shitphone: A Love Story

Longreads Pick

John Herrman switches from his iPhone to a much more affordable “shitphone” and discovers how reliable mid-market gadgets can be.

Source: Matter
Published: Mar 9, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,492 words)

Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer

Longreads Pick

“Bear with me as I describe my own fandom of Kelly Link.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 28, 2015

Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer

There’s that urge in adolescence when you feel like you discovered something, maybe a song, a book, or a painting, that resonates so deeply within you, to protect it, and keep it secret and close, so that you feel like you have claim of something wondrous and all your own. And if you share the secret, or if others discover the artist, you may later state that you were listening to the music first, or reading an author first, as if your personal first spark determines the authenticity of an artist. It does not end up being an attractive trait, because we should share good art, because we shouldn’t be snobs, and because artists are responsible for their talent, not the consumers of the work. Luckily, it’s an impulse most seem to grow out of, except for in extreme cases, particularly if that person continues to fly under the radar of mainstream culture for an unexplainable amount of time. Read more…

The Boys Who Loved Birds

Longreads Pick

Can an eco-corridor inhabit the no-man’s land that once separated Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc? Kai Frobel thinks so.

Published: Feb 18, 2015
Length: 40 minutes (10,100 words)

My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

Longreads Pick

A first-person account of how mental illness reshapes a marriage.

Published: Jan 12, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,000 words)

To the Office, with Love

Longreads Pick

What do we lose when the traditional office job disappears? An examination of the forced freelance future.

Published: Jan 7, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,300 words)

10 Short Stories I Loved in 2014

Phil Klay. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year.  Read more…

For the Love of “Rent”

I had never seen anything like it. Its music was gorgeous, its spectacle captivating. But then there was the scandal of it to my 12-year-old self. I’d never heard something as horrifying as having your ex-girlfriend break the news that you both have HIV and slitting her wrists in the bathroom. I’d never heard someone say the words “dildos” or “masturbation” or “marijuana” or “erection” or “faggots lezzies dykes cross-dressers too.” I’d never seen a depiction of a romance between a gay man and a drag queen, let alone one so beautiful it made me weep. Most importantly, it depicted what to me was a fantasy as attractive as any I’d ever seen: that you could be in your twenties, living in New York City, surrounded not by the family you’d left behind but by the ones you’d made. That you could pursue above all else art and love. At its end, I leapt to my feet in applause. After, Dylan and I waited by the stage door and got autographs with every actor we could. In the photographs his mother took we are beaming.

In late middle school and early high school, on weekend mornings, I would sit at my desk in my bedroom, the blinds still drawn, and listen to the soundtrack, which hadn’t come with a lyrics sheet, and listening on my Discman try to write out the words to the songs in my journal, especially those to the epic, two-part, 12-minute number at the play’s center, a sort of manifesto to the lifestyle embodied by the play’s characters, “La Vie Boheme.” I’d have to carefully press the button down to backtrack and listen to the contours of the words I didn’t understand — “Sontag,” “Vaclav Havel,” “Pablo Neruda,” “Antonioni, Bertolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana.” I don’t recall trying to search the internet to see what these things were. They were strange and beautiful symbols of the unknown. For years to come I’d encounter them in museums and textbooks and life and they’d ping that Rent part of my brain.

But I kept my love of Rent quiet, especially as I tried to eschew some of the intense uncoolness that had so defined me. Eighteen — that was the last time I could love Rent without shame, when I was first, finally living thousands of miles away from my family, in Providence, Rhode Island. When I was having my first drunken evenings, my first heartbreaks, my first exposure to intellectual texts and to people who had been raised among art that was much better than Rent. When I was finally beginning a thing called adulthood and would therefore begin to see that, yes, Rent is kind of dumb.

– In this tender, funny and damned relatable essay for BuzzFeed News, Sandra Allen traces the intersections of her love of Rent, an interview with her favorite author and her own romances.

Read the story

Everybody Loves Walter

Longreads Pick

The story of a homeless man who became the guardian of a California beach and its birds

Author: Kit Stolz
Source: Latterly
Published: Nov 18, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,050 words)

What It Was Like to Be Basquiat’s Lover

Longreads Pick

Three scenes of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life with his longtime lover Suzanne Mallouk, as sketched by Mallouk’s friend Jennifer Clement.

Published: Dec 15, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,000 words)