Longreads Pick
[Fiction] Two brothers begin to drift apart in India during the late ’60s after one decides to study in the U.S. and the other becomes a Naxalite:
“Richard asked Subhash about India, about its caste system, its poverty. Who was to blame?
“I don’t know. These days everyone just blames everyone else.
“But is there a solution? Where does the government stand?
“Subhash didn’t know how to describe India’s fractious politics, its complicated society, to an American. He said it was an ancient place that was also young, still struggling to know itself. You should be talking to my brother, he said.”
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Published: Jun 3, 2013
Length: 56 minutes (14,192 words)
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Longreads Pick
The writer visits a taxidermy shop to purchase a Valentines’s Day gift. This essay will be included in David Sedaris’s new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:
“The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.
“‘Me?’ For some reason I looked at my hands. ‘Oh, goodness no.’
“‘Then your interest in those skulls is non-professional?’
“‘Exactly.’
“The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. ‘Who do you think this was?’ he asked.
“Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height – between four and a half and five feet tall. ‘Is it an adolescent?'”
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Published: Apr 13, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,265 words)
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dietcoker:
- An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop in Toronto specializes in the strangest, most wonderful books.
- Katherine Arcement writes about her adolescent love of fan fiction.
- Monica Torres writes about majoring in English while not being white.
- Dating While Feminist and Christian
Emily Perper’s always excellent reading list.
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Longreads Pick
A writer looks back on her costly mistakes—blowing a generous book advance while pursuing a relationship with a married man:
“I was 27 the year my first novel sold for half a million dollars. During the three years I spent writing the book, I’d gotten by on next to nothing, eating ramen noodles for dinner and living in a rented apartment in Colorado over what may or may not have been a meth lab. I had $10,000 in credit card debt and $30,000 in student loans, and the most I’d ever earned in a single year was $15,000. Half a million dollars, I remember thinking, was more money than I could spend in a lifetime.
“I’d never had money before, and now that I did, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I met with bankers and accountants, strangers in suits who helped me divvy my new money into the kinds of accounts I hadn’t known existed, for purposes I hadn’t ever thought about: a CD for the significant chunk I would owe in taxes; a health savings account (HSA) to cover the deductible on the medical-insurance policy I could finally afford; an IRA to protect a portion of the money for the unimaginable day when I would need it to live on. Afterward, they would shake my hand and congratulate me on my success: I was making such good choices with my money!”
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Published: Mar 12, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,790 words)
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Longreads Pick
On the life and career of writer Nelson Algren, one of the most prolific—yet underappreciated—writers of the last century:
“For my money, no book more elegantly describes the world of men and women whom the boom years were designed to pass by. In the decades after Golden Arm, the country obsessed over the behaviors and fates of women and men like Algren’s characters—and dedicated millions to altering them through wars on poverty and drugs—but in 1949 Algren was nearly alone in reminding the country that having an upper class requires having a lower class. For the skill and elegance of its prose, its compassion, and its prescience, I’d rank Golden Arm among the very best books written in the twentieth century. Before Algren’s fall from favor and the onset of his obscurity, many people agreed with that assessment. The book received glowing reviews from Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, even the New Yorker. Doubleday nominated it for the Pulitzer, and Hemingway, who had declared Algren the second-best American writer (after Faulkner) when Never Come Morning was published, wrote a promotional quote that went too far for Doubleday’s taste but pleased Algren so much he taped it to his fridge:
“Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow every day, Algren comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer… Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful… Mr. Algren, boy, are you good.“
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Published: Jan 1, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,997 words)
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Longreads Pick
A journalist takes his son, who has Asperger’s, to meet Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and learns to be a better father after the meetings:
“Bush had connected. With an impish smile, he told Tyler about the time that rocker/humanitarian Bono was scheduled to visit the White House. The president’s aides, knowing that their boss was unimpressed by celebrities, worried that Bush would blow it. ‘[Chief of Staff] Josh Bolten comes in and said, “Now, you know who Bono is, don’t you?” Just as he’s leaving the Oval Office, I said, “Yeah, he’s married to Cher.” ‘ Bush raised an eyebrow. ‘Get it?’ he asked Tyler. ‘Bone-oh. Bahn-oh.’
“Afterward, I asked Tyler about the Bono joke. He said, ‘Sounds like something goofy you would say.’ But for me, the exchange was an eye-opener. Tyler was terse, even rude, but Bush was solicitous. Rather than being thrown by Tyler’s idiosyncrasies, he rolled with them, exactly as he had in the Oval Office nine years earlier. He responded to every clipped answer with another probing question. Bush, a man who famously doesn’t suffer fools or breaches of propriety, gave my son the benefit of the doubt. I was beginning to think that people are more perceptive and less judgmental toward Tyler than his own father is. Bush certainly was.”
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Published: Nov 29, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,644 words)
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Longreads Pick
A brief history of the LGBT movement:
“I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a ‘pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.’ David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)’—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that ‘if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.'”
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Published: Nov 5, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,526 words)
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Longreads Pick
A writer-comedian reviews his successes and failures, realizing there’s not much difference between the two:
“You might be thinking to yourself, ‘How do you know the fear never goes away?’ It could just be me. It could just be pessimism, or cynicism. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks a few years back after witnessing an eye opening conversation in the green room of the UCB Theater. I saw two very accomplished comedians talking in one of the side rooms. One of these people was a cast member on SNL. The other was a correspondent for The Daily Show. (Luckily being at UCB there are multiple people who have passed through that have gone on to those illustrious jobs and I can use those specific examples without outing anyone. Please don’t ask who they were. It’s not important.) Person one said something along the lines of ‘I’m just not sure what I’m going to do.’ Person two said, ‘Yeah, things have been so fucking dry lately. I’m really, really worried.’ The conversation proceeded from there and sounded like the exact type of conversation I was having with my own friends who were in the trenches performing all around NYC with me. (To give you the context of where I was at, this was around 2008 or 2009, before the Comedy Central show, before my book, when I really was just a guy who was known on stages throughout NYC but could not catch a break for the life of me and was kind of becoming sadly infamous for it.)
“These were two people who both had careers I would kill for. Being on SNL! Being on The Daily Show! I think for any of us whose dream it is to do comedy, those would be two crown jewel jobs. Those would be two jobs that most of us would think feel like a life-altering accomplishment. Getting those gigs would feel like grabbing on to the brass ring we’ve been chasing. Those are the types of gigs that you imagine lead to the validation, wealth, and fame that we chase so hard. You have to imagine that’s true, right? Those jobs? You will feel like you did it. You made it. Your life can have a movie ending where the sun rises and the credits roll and the hard times are over, you’ve done it. You’ve won.
“But I eavesdropped on those two individuals, and realized – the fear is inside us. It’s part of why we do what we do.”
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Published: Aug 9, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,411 words)
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