Search Results for: The Daily Beast

The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis

Longreads Pick

In this classic 1984 essay—reprinted on The Daily Beast—Richard Ben Cramer wonders if Jerry Lee Lewis got away with his wife’s murder.

Jerry Lee wasn’t showing his moods the night of that first party. A great party, Shawn told her friends. Actually, it was just a few drinks in his suite. A couple of other women were already up there. Jerry Lee played piano and sang, while Pam’s little Chinese Shih Tzu dog sat up with him on the stool. Shawn knew she was looking good, in her jeans, cowboy boots and a huggy little white rabbit jacket. And Jerry Lee treated her so nice! He’d turn away from the keyboard as he’d slow down his rhythm for a snatch of a love song. She felt him sing straight to her. It was February 1981. Shawn was twenty-three.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Mar 1, 1984
Length: 70 minutes (17,559 words)

'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

More stories about incarceration

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Reading List: Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal

Flannery O'Connor
Photo credit: AP Images

Known for her grotesque short stories, mythic personality and Southern Catholic faith, O’Connor’s prayer journal ends in her 22nd year, before, as Casey N. Cep writes in The New Yorker, “the literature itself was a prayer.”

“Flannery O’Connor’s Desire For God.” (Jen Vafidis, The Daily Beast, November 2013)

O’Connor believed that any fiction that revealed her own character would be inherently awful writing. In her prayer journal, she critiques her own ideas of love and faith and success, covering oatmeal cookies and metaphysics.

“God’s Grandeur: The Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor.” (Carlene Bauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, November 2013)

Intermixed with excerpts from O’Connor’s letters, this tender review focuses on her seemingly one-dimensional attitude toward human love and clarifies its nuance.

“Inheritance and Invention: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker, November 2013)

Casey N. Cep has fast become one of my new favorite writers. In this excellent review, Cep emphasizes that O’Connor’s prayer journal was a highly internal affair, both a way to get at a more authentic relationship with God and work through her blossoming writing career.

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Photo by Brent Payne

Reading List: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal

Longreads Pick

New story picks from Emily Perper, featuring VQR, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 17, 2013

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Sunmyungmoon

Our picks of the week, featuring The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, Philadelphia Magazine, The New Republic and Politico Magazine, with a guest pick by Casey N. Cep. Read it here.

John Lennon on What Made the Beatles Successful

“‘We thought we were the best in Hamburg and Liverpool—it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on. We were the best fucking group in the goddamn world … and believing that is what made us what we were.’”

-John Lennon, in a 1980 interview. Lennon is quoted in Andrew Romano’s 2013 story for The Daily Beast, which aims to debunk Malcolm Gladwell’s argument in Outliers that the Beatles made their success through thousands of hours of playing in Hamburg.

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Longreads List: Guns in America

Longreads Pick

From The Daily Beast’s David Sessions, a collection of stories on gun violence and policy in the U.S., featuring The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and Mother Jones.

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Dec 15, 2012

The story of Olympian Hope Solo, the U.S. women’s soccer star whose childhood and difficult relationship with her father—who spent time in jail for kidnapping her and her brother—shaped who she would become:

Solo’s last childhood memory of her father is from the following year. One day he reappeared in Richland, begging to take Hope and her older brother Marcus to a nearby baseball game. ‘Then we just kept driving, over the mountains, all the way to Seattle,’ she recalls. ‘We got a hotel room with a pool. We felt like we were living the life. Then I remember waking up one morning, and my dad is like, “Baby Hope, your mom just called, and she said you can stay another three days.” And I remember being like, “I didn’t hear the phone ring.” Right then, I knew that something wasn’t right.’

A day or two later, a SWAT team surrounded Solo in a downtown Seattle bank, ‘put him in the back of a police car, and hauled him off,’ leaving Hope and Marcus ‘alone and scared on the streets of a big city,’ she recalls. Before long, Child Protective Services showed up, and Judy wasn’t far behind. But Hope refused to forgive her mother for alerting the authorities. ‘I remember not talking to her the whole ride home,’ she says. ‘My dad was sitting in jail. I was a confused little girl.’

‘It Takes a Lot to Rattle Me’ — Andrew Romano, The Daily Beast

More Romano

Abigail Woodcraft was seven when she indoctrinated into the Church of Scientology via an arm of the church known as Sea Org. What she endured, and how she escaped:

One of my first jobs as an official member of the Sea Org was in the security department, meaning I had to make sure people obeyed church rules and ethics. It seemed that people were always in some kind of trouble—the place felt ruled by fear. You could get in trouble for random things; for instance, someone might question why there were so many loose papers on your desk. Another thing you could get in trouble for: masturbation. Early on in my new job, I had to sit down with a man in his 40s who had admitted to masturbating, and tell him to cut it out. I was 15 years old.

“Scientology’s Sea Org.” — Abigail Woodcraft via Abigail Pesta, The Daily Beast

More on Scientology

Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:

By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’

Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.

Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.’

“Whitey Bulger’s Women.” — T.J. English, The Daily Beast

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