Search Results for: Prison

Tony Judt’s Life with ALS: A Reading List

The Ice Bucket challenge raised millions for ALS research, not to mention awareness about the disease: the motor neuron disorder, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, affects thousands of Americans. It’s also served as a reminder about the work that Tony Judt did to convey what it was like to live with ALS, in his diary entries for the New York Review of Books. Judt died in August 2010. Here is a short collection of stories: Read more…

Call It Rape

Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words)

The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.
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Still life with man and gun

Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It’s near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he’ll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away. Read more…

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…

First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

Twenty Years After Infamous Bronco Chase, O.J. Simpson Is Still a Mystery

Longreads Pick

After riveting the nation with the Bronco chase and dividing it with the Trial of the Century, O.J. Simpson settled into a strange life as a celebrity pariah and ended up behind bars on unrelated crimes.

Inmate No. 1027820 works at the gym. He supervises other prisoners who clean and set up for basketball games, during which he operates the clock and scoreboard. He also manages a slo-pitch softball team that plays in the yard. He can’t bat because of a balky elbow and bad knees, but he likes to taunt the opposition, yelling, “Sit your ass down!” after missed swings. He loves playing dominoes, watches SportsCenter and crime dramas such as Person of Interest, and telephones his lawyer and old friends. He reads USA Today and the Game of Thrones books. He works out, though not as vigorously as he used to. He misses golf. He plays fantasy football; last season his team included Peyton Manning, Robert Griffin III and Alfred Morris. He also admires Marshawn Lynch. The way the Seahawks’ running back plays reminds the inmate of another life. The life he once had.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,262 words)

Food For Thought: A Reading List

This week, we return to your regularly scheduled Longreads programming. The theme? Food: queering food, eating Pokemon, the potential of Soylent, tasting curly fries for a living, and Canadian food trucks.

1. “America, Your Food is So Gay.” (John Birdsall, Lucky Peach, June 2013)

“It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture—this is the legacy of gay food writers who shaped modern American food.”

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Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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'Solzhenitsyn Was My Virgil'

I read far and wide during my ten-year bit. I read all of the longest works of the world, the thousands of pages of Proust and Musil and Joyce and Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. And I could follow whatever interested me at the time. I acquired a taste for Sir Richard Burton’s 19th century travelogues and read them all. But reading books on prison in prison is a wholly different and even surreal experience.

Prison books don’t work as a safe safari to someone else’s exotic pain when you’re locked up. Reading inside was a way of conquering time, mapping the regions of my new home and understanding what it all meant—no one is looking for armchair travel to hell when they are reading on a cot in a cell.

Solzhenitsyn was my Virgil many a time as I passed through the circles of incarceration. He taught me a personal lesson in bravery. The experience of reading books on prison in prison is rare and compelling. It is one of the only times I can think of when life imitates art to the very bleeding edge of an aluminum shank.

Daniel Genis, writing in The Daily Beast about his experience reading prison novels while incarcerated.

Read the story here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Reading List: Leslie Jamison, Author of ‘The Empathy Exams’

“When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say ‘all kinds,’ but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.” – Leslie Jamison

This week, Choose Your Own Adventure with Leslie Jamison. I’ve compiled a collection of interviews with and essays and short stories by the author of The Empathy Exams. But the way you approach this list is up to you. Ready? Let’s begin.

To read Jamison’s interview with the Virginia Quarterly Review, proceed to number 1 (this is a good introduction to the author, if you’ve never heard of her or only know her a bit).

To read Jamison’s interview with Flavorwire, proceed to number 2 (best if you’ve already read The Empathy Exams, or are about to).

To read Jamison’s interview with The Paris Review, proceed to number 3 (best if you love the particular flavor of Paris Review interviews and have not read The Empathy Exams yet, because a version of this interview appears there).

Want to get to know Jamison through her writing first? To skip these interviews altogether, proceed to numbers 4 or 5.

1. “An Interview with Leslie Jamison.” (John Lingan, VQR, April 2014)

 

2. “‘The Empathy Exams’ Author Leslie Jamison on the Empathy of the Internet and the Limits of Opinion.” (Elizabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire, March 2014)

 

Read more…

Cell to Cell

Longreads Pick

How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil’s Prisons:

On January 18, 2013, prison guards in the Brazilian city of Joinville rounded up a group of inmates and began torturing them. Over the course of four hours, the naked men were shot with rubber bullets and doused with pepper spray. In a video clip, the men are seen in the fetal position, waiting for the attack to end.

The prisoners’ counterattack was swift and deadly. Days after the video surfaced, prisoners organized attacks across the six-million-person state of Santa Catarina. The homes of prison officials, police stations, and public busses were all attacked. “Prisoners decided to orchestrate the attacks to call the attention of the population and authorities to issues of management in the prison system,” said Col. Nazareno Marcineiro, the commander of Santa Catarina’s military police.

Source: Motherboard
Published: Apr 14, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)