In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Professional Writer Never Skips Exercise
Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa. I know […]
Posted inUncategorized
An SNL Sketch Comes Down to the Wire
“As Rhys was watching down the final cut, he noticed two errors: one shot slipped into the cut without being ‘un-squeezed’ and another repositioned shot had lost its repo. We all know that these kinds of errors happen all the time, but they rarely happen when you are literally gun-to-the-head, minutes away from a live […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
It’s Adventure Time
The writer spends some time with the creators of “Adventure Time”—a wildly popular animated TV series on the Cartoon Network—to discuss what makes the show so magical: We began by talking about humor. Children’s humor, I suggested, is commonly thought of as a kind of “diversion” from fear or sadness. But Adventure Time confronts very […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Family, a Fire and the Aftermath
Grant Cunningham’s violent death ricocheted over 18 years in the final fate of his brother Blair: The air was cool and damp, the temperature hovering above zero but feeling colder, the last bite of winter pushing back against the warm spring sun. By the last Saturday in March, 2013, Blair Cunningham had moved into a […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Theorizing the Drone
What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. * * * I Smoked Pot with […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
How Karina Longworth Is Reimagining Classic Hollywood—and the Podcast—in ‘You Must Remember This’
“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Mission To Mars
How Rob Thomas—creator of the beloved TV series Veronica Mars—used Kickstarter to bring his show to the big screen: On the morning of March 13, 2013, Thomas hit the “Launch Project” button on his laptop screen. He’d also installed the Kickstarter app on his iPhone, with the notifications option turned on. For the next several […]
