Search Results for: Spin

Anna Clark: My Top 5 World Lit Longreads of 2011

Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.)

The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in the U.S. that are translated into English. But even that number is inflated, as it includes technical material — manuals, guides, instructions — and new editions of canonized authors like Leo Tolstoy and Plato. American readers interested in the full-throated energy of contemporary world literature, of global book culture beyond their particular location and language, have limited options. Publishers suggest that literature in translation doesn’t sell — excepting a certain Swedish novelist called Stieg, of course — but my thinking is that readers like good things to read, wherever they come from. Readers are a curious sort.

I am ignited by literature of the world. I am fascinated by the stories and styles that come from different places. My Top 5 Longreads shouldn’t be considered a *best* list; rather, a cultivated selection of the year’s most interesting reading on international literature, translation, and storytelling. But this conversation isn’t finished; there is more to be said.

***

1. The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami by Sam Anderson — New York Times

I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea.

2. The Joyful Side of Translation by Adam Thirlwell — The New York Times

The theory of translation is very rarely — how to put this? — comical.

3. Who Owns Kafka? by Judith Butler — London Review of Books

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv.

4. Arabic and Hebrew: The Politics of Literary Translation by Olivia Snaije — Publishing Perspectives

Today, the 60-plus year conflict between Israel and Arab countries has impacted heavily on translations between the two Semitic languages, which are now viewed by many with mutual suspicion and distrust.

5. These Infantile Times by Jessa Crispin — Kirkus Reviews

Crispin interviews Dubravka Ugresic about her new essay collection, Karaoke Culture. Discussed: the author’s relationship to pop culture and how a Hemingway lookalike contest fits into the same essay as the war criminal Radovan Karadžic.

The Awl's Choire Sicha, Carrie Frye, Alex Balk: Our Top Longreads of 2011

(Left to right: Choire, Carrie, Alex)

Because there are three of us, we trilaterally decided to go for 15. But it’s not really five each; that becomes complicated, too, but… well, anyway, no matter how you cut it, surely at least one of us hated some of these stories. Also to be fair, this list, which is not in order, should really be called “The 15 Best Longreads That We Can Still Remember From 2011—What A Year, Am I Right, Oh Man, It’s December Somehow—After Extensive Googling and Mind-Nudging (Also Only Stories That We Didn’t Publish Ourselves, Because We Could Easily Cough Up 25 Longreads From Our Own Archives That Are Totally As Good Or Better And Also Have Better Gender Parity Probably But Anyway We Don’t Roll Self-Promotionally Like That).” FUN BONUS: Only three of the 15 best stories of the year (yes, sure, that we can remember) were in The New Yorker, so they are ranked in order. — Alex Balk, Carrie Frye, Choire Sicha of The Awl. (See their #longreads archive here.)

***

• James Meek, “In the Sorting Office,” London Review of Books

• Tess Lynch, “No Actor Parking,” n+1

• David Roth, “Our Pizzas, Ourselves”

• Paul Ford, “The Web Is A Customer Service Medium”

• Katie Baker, “The Confessions of a Former Adolescent Puck Tease,” Deadspin

• Emily Gould, “Our Graffiti”

• Jim Santel, “Living Out the Day: The Moviegoer Turns Fifty,” The Millions

• John Jeremiah Sullivan, A Rough Guide to Disney World, The New York Times Magazine

• Anna Holmes, “Spotlighting the work of women in the civil rights movement’s Freedom Rides,” Washington Post

• Michael Idov, “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” GQ

• Evan Hughes, “Just Kids,” New York Magazine

• Tim Dickinson, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich,” Rolling Stone

BONUS:

The year’s three best New Yorker stories, in order:

3. Keith Gessen, “Nowheresville: How Kazakhstan is building a glittering new capital from scratch” (sub. required)

2. David Grann, “A Murder Foretold: Unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy”

1. Kelefa Sanneh, “Where’s Earl? Word from the missing prodigy of a hip-hop group on the rise” (sub. required)

ACTUAL BONUS BONUS:

Paul Collins’ “Vanishing Act” (Lapham’s Quarterly), about Barbara Newhall Follett, was published in the last twelve months, but on December 18, 2010, so to avoid the problem of the year-end list that’s published before the end of the year, ahem, we include it here honorarily.

GQ's Sean Fennessey: My Top Longreads of 2011

Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.)

I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of imagined objectivity, so, no friends; no GQ pieces; no pieces published before January 1, 2011; no stories pseudonymously submitted by my mom; no sandwiches. Here we go, with apologies, to, like, everyone.

***

Lawrence Wright, The Apostate (The New Yorker, February 14, 2011)

An obvious choice made less obvious by the passage of time. It has been only nine months since Wright’s startling, white-knuckled journey to the center of Scientology, with outraged and wounded filmmaker Paul Haggis as his Ahab. In Internet time, this story feels very old—check out Tom Cruise’s new movie, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this Christmas!—but it hasn’t budged an inch. Wright has long been a dogged writer-reporter and interpreter of foreign, pre- and post-Judeo-Christian faiths, but he’s never been so simultaneously zingy and stone-faced. TNY fact-checkers famously sent the Church of Scientology 971 questions for confirmation before this was published, followed by an eight-hour inquiry session with the religion’s spokesman. I have 971 questions for Wright. Question One: How?

Alex French and Howie Kahn, The Greatest Paper That Ever Died (Grantland, June 8, 2011)

An arch and hilarious move by the editors at Grantland to lead their launch week with the story of an ambitious, innovative, and ultimately overextended sports publication. Too cute by half or not, French and Kahn, who have contributed great work like this to GQ, too, talk to damn near every wunderkind, wonk, and graybeard involved in the fast construction and faster crumbling of The National, the first (and last) sports-only newspaper. By turns funny, informative, and oddly thrilling, it presages the too-much media by at least a decade. Also, the characterization of editor-in-chief and sports scribe demigod Frank DeFord as a dashing dandy beyond all, an almost Gatsby-esque sportswriter (?!) is remarkable.

Jessica Pressler, “It’s Too Bad. And I Don’t Mean It’s Too Bad Like ‘Screw ’Em.’” (July 24, 2011)

Access isn’t everything, but it’s a lot of things. Refreshing. Enlightening. Embarrassing. Mirth-making. Other gerunds. That much is clear in this loose, funny portrait of one of the most important people in America, drawn small and sorta goofy, but not without empathy by Pressler. Just a damn good and entertaining profile.

Nathan Rabin, Louis C.K. Walks Us Through Louie’s Second Season (The AV Club, September 19, 2011)

Rabin is a pretty brilliant cultural critic and flotsam scavenger, but he’s secondary here to the form, the increasingly utilized Insta-Tell-All. Though shows like Louie or the rabidly championed Community are seen by relatively modest audiences, rarely exceeding a few million or so, the fandom they inspire is maniacal, bordering on unhealthy. In some instances, I hate this. But when it’s something I care about, I make exceptions. This literal step-by-step, shot-by-shot printed audio commentary track for the second season of comedian Louis CK’s FX series plays out in four parts and in a way that both satisfies in a very grim empty-calorie way and devastates with clarity. Louie isn’t exactly better after you’ve heard about every motivation—it’s fine standing alone, on your DVR. But that doesn’t mean you won’t inhale this series in one sitting and then enjoy this.

AJ Daulerio, The Electric Dock Ellis Acid Test: An Attempt To Recreate His Drug-Addled No-Hitter, On Xbox (Deadspin, July 11, 2011)

Stunt journalism, maybe. Multimedia art project gone wrong, sure. Belly-button-deep inside baseball, yeah, definitely. Doesn’t mean this very funny and very unnecessary attempt to get high and get paid for it (while sort of lampooning the whole Plimptonian, we-can-do-it style of participatory journalism along the way) isn’t a genuinely inventive and uniquely audience-conscious piece of web writing.

Five More

Daniel Zalewski, Show the Monster (The New Yorker)

Guillermo del Toro, a perfect profile subject. Bonus points for savvy multimedia accompaniment.

Dan P. Lee, Travis the Menace (New York Magazine)

Brilliantly crafted. Made a monkey outta me.

Mindy Kaling, Flick Chicks (The New Yorker)

Could probably do with less tweeting and more writing of this kind from Kaling.

Bradford Evans, The Lost Roles of Chevy Chase (Splitsider)
Wherein the Chevy Chase is a Colossal Asshole reputation is burnished, buffed, and efficiently honed in a countdown form that neatly conveys the story of a career coulda-been.

William Bowers, Now What? (Pitchfork)
Made me feel better about all my time spent mining the crevasses of insular music writing.

We were never warned that we were going to be pepper-sprayed.

Lt. Pike walked up to my friend, and I am told that he said, “Move or we’re going to shoot you.”

Then he went back and talked to a few of his police officer friends. A couple of other officers started to remove people who were sitting there, blocking exit. Pike could have easily removed us, just picked us up and removed us. We were just sitting there, nonviolent civil disobedience.

But Pike turned around and I am told that he said to the other officers, “Don’t worry about it, I’m going to spray these kids down.”

He lifts the can, spins it around in a circle to show it off to everybody.

Then he sprays us three times.

As if one time of being sprayed at point blank wasn’t enough.

I was on the end of the line getting direct spray. When the second pass came, I got up crawling. I crawled away and vomited on a tree. I was yelling. It burned. Within a few minutes I was dry heaving, I couldn’t breathe. Then, over the course of the next hour, I was dry heaving and vomiting.

“Interview with a Pepper-sprayed UC Davis Student.” — Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing

See also: “Bad Education.” N+1, April 25, 2011

Interview with a Pepper-sprayed UC Davis Student

Longreads Pick

We were never warned that we were going to be pepper-sprayed.

Lt. Pike walked up to my friend, and I am told that he said, “Move or we’re going to shoot you.”

Then he went back and talked to a few of his police officer friends. A couple of other officers started to remove people who were sitting there, blocking exit. Pike could have easily removed us, just picked us up and removed us. We were just sitting there, nonviolent civil disobedience.

But Pike turned around and I am told that he said to the other officers, “Don’t worry about it, I’m going to spray these kids down.”

He lifts the can, spins it around in a circle to show it off to everybody.

Then he sprays us three times.

Source: Boing Boing
Published: Nov 20, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,131 words)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: St. Petersburg Times, The New Republic, Deadspin, Capital New York, Tod Kelly, plus a guest pick from David Lidsky, articles editor at Fast Company.

Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said Steinbrenner had sent him a prostitute. Even a hint of incredulity nettled him: “I know what’s been told to me in the past 22 years. That I’m the biggest scumbag in the world, that I’m worse than a pedophile, than a terrorist. I’ve made innumerable mistakes, but the only thing I don’t do is lie.”

“The Last Act Of The Notorious Howie Spira.” — Luke O’Brien, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Greetings from Helen

Longreads Pick

(Featured Longreader Justin Heckert’s pick of the week.) Every September, Helen, a town of 750 people clustered on two square miles in a mountain valley, braces to accommodate up to 300,000 guests over the course of this uber-party. Steins will be hoisted; spindly, pale thighs will chafe under lederhosen; and someone inevitably will fall and sprain an ankle while doing the ungainly “chicken dance,” providing onlooking buddies with enough snickering material for another Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Other spectacles just as memorable, but not likely to be remembered clearly, will unfold in the tavern parking lots, including fist-fights, heaving expurgations, and acts of urgent carnal release—sometimes all involving the same two people. In a strange hybrid of highland folkways, Helen is where gemütlichkeit—the arm-linking, swaying-together fellowship of the Alps—abets the hell-raising volatility of Appalachia.

Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,717 words)

Frank’s Story

Longreads Pick

Frank Shorter is the father of the modern running boom. An enduringly popular speaker, he spins a captivating narrative about winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon. The story he hasn’t told is the dark truth about his own father. “I explained how I tried to anticipate my father’s moods and movements, and about the enormous daily effort it took us kids to keep out of his way. I talked about searching for an outlet for my fear and anger, and finding it in running. I admitted that I ran to escape. I described the guilt I felt for not being able to save the rest of my family.”

Author: John Brant
Published: Aug 31, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,241 words)

GPS and the End of the Road

Longreads Pick

There is a hint in these claims of some stronger truth that the neuro-concerns are grasping at. The decline of driving, and of finding our own way around, means that we are losing a broad set of skills and practices. And while it is true that the rise of driving itself spelled the decline of other skills and practices, driving also opened up in their place a wide range of new faculties for us to exercise — new modes of excellence, and novel, exciting, adventurous ways of experiencing the world. But if the glorious future consists mostly of things like getting to text more, oughtn’t we to wonder what new skills, what novel forms of adventure, are taking the place of what is being lost with the decline of driving and navigation?

Published: May 1, 2011
Length: 52 minutes (13,195 words)