“The story begins in the 1930s, with Glenn McCarthy striking oil in Beaumont. McCarthy—who was the inspiration for the Jett Rink character in Edna Ferber’s Giant—used his millions to bankroll the 1949 drama ‘The Green Promise’, starring Natalie Wood and Walter Brennan. The movie was almost immediately forgotten, but McCarthy established a much-repeated role: the […]
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Would Jesus Film?
How North Texas became the production hub for Christian entertainment: And as North Texas grew, the region—with its affordable acreage to site large-scale production facilities and its mostly conservative and religious-minded population—proved attractive to faith-based entrepreneurs. It helped, too, that in the 1980s, a film- and television-production tradition was established here, with secular fare like […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
This Is Living
How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.
Posted inReading List
What's in a Home? A Reading List
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. New York, London, Detroit, Indianapolis: What does it look like to make a home? To build a home? To live in an office building, with a Craiglist roommate, with your best friend, in a […]
Posted inUncategorized
“The problem today is that neither individual homebuyers nor even larger commercial builders drive ‘market forces.’ Instead, the market for real estate construction comprises managers of hedge funds and speculators who buy buildings and homes as rental properties. They are waiting for the value of the buildings to rise, as they had before the 2008 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
La Belle Simone
Simone Levitt was once married to one of the richest men in America: real estate tycoon Bill Levitt, who is widely credited as being the father of American suburbia. Simone now lives in a rented one-bedroom on New York City’s Upper East Side, where she told a reporter about her husband’s rise and fall: “In […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Hell—Nothing Less—And Without End: Six Days in Warsaw
“The uprising,” we told each other immediately, like everyone else in Warsaw. Strange. Because no one had ever used that word before in his life. Only in history, in books.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Loving Books in a Dark Age
In the “dark ages” of Europe, people began reading silently to themselves, and a love of books and learning took hold, pioneered by Bede.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters, Story
'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel
Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words) Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from […]
