Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words) Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community.
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Posted inFirst Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Jesus Land
“They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction
An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel
Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words) * * * Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here. For more, read our Roxane […]
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The writer becomes pen pals with an ornery old poet, Hayden Carruth: For most of his life, the beard was cropped and average — it was an unserious beard. But by the time I met him in 2003, it was the broad, white beard of a poet in exile, grown out in his desolate corner […]
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Musician Jim White on Knoxville, and how Cormac McCarthy saved his life: In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take […]
