Search Results for: Love

Crazy in Love

Longreads Pick

“Loving a crazy person forces you beyond all conventional measurements of worth or meaning.”

Source: The New Inquiry
Published: Dec 4, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,084 words)

Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: ‘The Longest and Most Charming Love Letter in Literature’

Orlando has long had a towering, and very much deserved, reputation in the LGBT community; it was published the same year Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness, depicting lesbianism as a tragic curse, became a bestseller. Woolf’s creation of a figure who effortlessly changes sex casually upends any notion that biological sex is related to gender or orientation—even the notion that biological sex is fixed and stable at all.

Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson would later call Orlando “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” and whether or not it began as a private missive for Vita, it’s also clearly much, much more, and early on in its genesis it began to exceed whatever initial idea Woolf had for it. “For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered,” she wrote in March 1927. “I want to kick up my heels & be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think it will be great fun to write; & it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come next.”

Colin Dickey, in Lapham’s Quarterly, on Virginia Woolf’s time-warping novel Orlando.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Dress Your Family In Your Lover’s Shoes

Longreads Pick

Hale recalls meeting a boyfriend’s eccentric family during a trip Ireland.

Source: The Hairpin
Published: Sep 2, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,849 words)

The Lovers and Haters of the Pumpkin Spice Latte

The pumpkin spice latte has reemerged. Seattle Met’s Allecia Vermillion looks at the origin story of the popular fall beverage, which actually contains little discernible pumpkin.

Since the pumpkin spice latte’s inception 11 years ago, customers have ordered more than 200 million, each topped with whipped cream and a parting shake of spices. It arrives while the summer sun still beats down hot over most of the country, but a combination of masterful marketing and a fan base with the kind of obsession usually reserved for pop stars has transformed this drink into a national harbinger of fall.

Fans paint tiny Starbucks cups on their nails. They dress their dogs up in latte costumes for Halloween (pug-kin spice latte—get it?). They post online comments like, “Can it be fall now? I am so ready for Pumpkin Spice Latte, pants, warm sweaters & lots of cuddles.” The morning after the first presidential debate of 2012, the nation was talking in nearly equal measures about Obama’s curiously detached performance and a front-page Wall Street Journal article about a temporary shortage of pumpkin spice lattes after an early-season rush.

Plenty of others hate it. Their online comments are more in the vein of “tastes like candle wax” or “How do you make a pumpkin spice latte? Put yoga pants, Ugg boots, a hoodie, an iPhone 5, and a white girl into a blender.” But if you partake in any form of social media whatsoever, it’s nigh impossible to ignore the drink’s return each year. (The Starbucks media team tracks 3,000 tweets a day when the hot beverage reemerges from hibernation, usually around Labor Day.)

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Photo: Dave Hackbarth

‘Jared Lorenzen and I Are in Love with the Same Woman’

Longreads Pick

Tommy Tomlinson meets Jared Lorenzen, a former New York Giants quarterback whose struggles with weight gain meant an early end to his NFL career.

Source: ESPN
Published: Aug 23, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,678 words)

The Spy Who Loved Me

Longreads Pick

Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Two years after that, Bob disappeared from their lives, seemingly without a trace. In this piece for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins investigates who Bob Lambert really was: a British police officer part of a massive undercover operation, whose officers— known as “deep swimmers,”—spent years surveilling different radical groups.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Aug 25, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,783 words)

Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family

Longreads Pick

A new Longreads Exclusive from River Teeth: Debie Thomas shares her story about growing up in a conservative Indian family and reconciling the idea of arranged marriages with the Western world’s version of falling in love.

Source: River Teeth
Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,194 words)

Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Debie Thomas | River Teeth | Summer 2013 | 17 minutes (4,194 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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Love for the Library: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

“I put the hottest titles on hold. I stumble upon books I never would’ve thought to read. I can check out giant stacks without feeling any guilt. Libraries are amazing. Here are four stories looking at different aspects of the library system.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 27, 2014

Love for the Library: A Reading List

My New Year’s resolution for 2014: forgo book-buying—just for a year. I’ve made two or three exceptions (a signed first edition! A play from my friend’s small press!), but, miraculously, haven’t binged in my local bookstore, much as I want to. I own hundreds of books. I want to read what I already own. And I want to save money, like any good millennial.

But there’s still the library—my salvation. I put the hottest titles on hold. I stumble upon books I never would’ve thought to read. I can check out giant stacks without feeling any guilt. Libraries are amazing. Here are four stories looking at different aspects of the library system. Read more…