The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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.
***

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.
***

In The Billfold, my very long conversation with Kevin Roose about Young Money, Roose’s book about young Wall Street workers recruited straight out of college that came out earlier this week. You can read excerpts of the book at NPR, and an adapted chapter about Wall Street plutocrats dressing up in drag and cracking jokes at the 99 percent at New York magazine.

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and in New York magazine, Matthew Shaer looks at the rise and fall of retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, which is attempting to reposition itself in a the current market, where stores like H&M have found success. A+F CEO Mike Jeffries helped rebrand the company in the ’90s to much success, but has unable to keep the company up with a changing consumer market. Read more business stories at Longreads.
***
Photo: Daniel Spills
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)
Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

As we all recently learned from the now-Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio’s campaign, America is becoming increasingly divided along class lines. Major cities, such as de Blasio’s New York (or #deblasiosnewyork, if you like Twitter), are keeping up with that trend. These are three stories of hellish renting experiences in major American cities:
Smiley’s story about renting in the most expensive city in the country isn’t a very light read, but her nuanced view is essential to understanding the current political and societal climate in San Francisco.
The story of how one family gamed the system and is charging the government $3600 per month, per room, to house some of New York’s many, many homeless.
Bates’ story about nightmare landlord Anwar Faisal is a terrifying portrait of what it’s like to be a college student renting in Boston.
* * *

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.
* * *
No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort, Silvio Berlusconi, or the kids from Saturday Night Fever?
While Jay Gatsby may have spent lavishly, in the end he did it for love; in Martin Scorese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort does it all for the money.
Before we were rolling with the homies, director Amy Heckerling had to figure out if Cher Horowitz would totally gag if she had to go to a party in the Valley.
The hottest club in Las Vegas has Italian princes, ten-thousand dollar tables, a champagne fairy, air of pure oxygen, and you’re not invited.
The era of Berlusconi may be at an end, but the legend of this Italian version of Benny Hill will never be forgotten, nakedly chasing after topless nymphettes while running the country into the ground.
Truman Capote kept telling people that he was going to invite everybody to his party at the Plaza Hotel in November of 1966. Guests were required to wear only two colors, black and white, to mirror the ascot races in My Fair Lady. Masks were to be worn by all upon entry and removed only at midnight.
By day, Vincent sold paint in a Bay Ridge hardware store; by night he was the best disco dancer in all of New York City. And in 1977, he would be played on screen by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Cohn, meanwhile, later admitted to making most of the story up.

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969
Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.
In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.
***
Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Vulture, New York magazine, The Rumpus, and The New Inquiry.

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
What does love look like and feel like and sound like to you? What have you read that changed the way you think about love? I’d like to know. Reblog your suggestions or comment or drop them in dietcoker.tumblr.com/ask.
Have you heard of Her? Spike Jonze’s latest is about a man who falls in love with his cell phone’s AI interface. Sound hokey? If you know anything about Jonze (and you will after reading this), then you know Her will be anything but.
In this 2006 piece, privileged New York school kids navigate the lack of binary between friendship and romance.
So often Rumpus essays read like songs. This, thankfully, is no exception: “When you love someone, you will sacrifice everything for them, even if that means they never exist at all.”
Cop goes undercover. Cop meets girl. Cop falls in love. Cop’s cover is blown. Cop sues his superiors. “Love is most private, most public, of all.”
***
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.
You must be logged in to post a comment.