Search Results for: fiction

Longreads Guest Pick: Hilary Armstrong on 'The Horla'

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If you really love a story, we want to hear from you. Share your favorite stories with Longreads—old or new, nonfiction or fiction, book or magazine feature—and then tell us why you love it. If we like it, we’ll feature you and your pick. 

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Today’s guest pick comes from Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at UC Santa Barbara and Longreads intern. She’s chosen “The Horla,” the 1887 short story that you can read for free right here. Hilary writes: 

“There is nothing quite as exquisite as a fashionable French protagonist. The author’s full name sounds like eating a truffle: ‘Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant.’ I have never been to France, but this piece is, to me, a free trip there. That, mixed with subdued horror and confusion, make for a read that does not show its age.

“‘The Horla’ is Poe mixed with breezy summer days—a pleasant trip to France at its most romantic, slowly descending into Lovecraftian madness. If you are on a train, read to the middle and stop, because the ending will make you feel claustrophobic and anxious. This piece is Fantastic, meaning both the compliment and the genre, and there are few things that make me feel as classy as I do when reading fantastic literature. Enjoy.”

Longreads Guest Pick: Hilary Armstrong on ‘The Horla’

Longreads Pick

If you really love a story, we want to hear from you. Share your favorite stories with Longreads—old or new, nonfiction or fiction, book or magazine feature—and then tell us why you love it. If we like it, we’ll feature you and your pick. 

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 4, 2013

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, fiction from Electric Literature, plus a guest pick from Moses Hawk.

Something to Remember Me By

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A young man goes on a journey:

“When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won’t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work as it relates to me. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn’t tell a child what I am about to tell you now. You don’t talk about deaths and vortices to a kid, not nowadays. In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way around.”

Published: Dec 19, 2001
Length: 50 minutes (12,684 words)

The Comedian

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] On a life in stand-up:

“One time on a talk show, before he made the change in his comedy, the comedian was asked why he started telling jokes. He took a sip from his mug and responded that he just wanted some attention. As a child he’d felt unseen. He was a handsome baby (photographs confirm) but his impression was that no one cooed at him or went cross-eyed to make him smile. Common expressions of affection, such as loving glances, approving grins, and hearty that-a-boys, eluded him. His mother told him ‘Hush, now,’ when he came to her with his needs or questions and he frowned and padded off quietly. He received a measly portion of affirmation from grandparents, elderly neighbors, and wizened aunts who never married, folks who were practically in the affirmation-of-children business. In kindergarten, he was downright appalled to find the bullies stingy with noogies and degrading nicknames. The comedian believed that he was unseen, overlooked, and not-perceived to a greater extent than other people were unseen, overlooked, and not-perceived, when in actuality he was overlooked as much as everyone else, he just felt it more keenly. The talk show host asked him what his first joke was. He said he didn’t remember, but he must have liked what happened because he did it again.”

Published: Feb 19, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,948 words)

Her Husband’s Hands

Longreads Pick

[Sci-fi, Fiction] A man comes home from a war transformed:

“Her husband’s hands came home on a Friday. Rebecca had received word of the attack, which had claimed the lives of seven other soldiers in his unit and reduced three others to similar, minimal fractions of themselves: One man missing above the waist, another missing below, a third neatly halved, like a bisected man on display in an anatomy lab.

“The Veteran’s Administration had told her it could have been worse. The notification officer had reminded her of Tatum, the neighbor’s daughter so completely expunged by her own moment under fire that only a strip of skin and muscle remained: A section of her thigh, about the size and shape of a cigarette pack, returned to her parents in a box and now living in their upstairs room, where it made a living proofreading articles on the internet. That’s no life, the notification officer said.”

Published: Feb 17, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,892 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Slate, Gizmodo, The Awl, Two Serious Ladies, Time, fiction from The New Yorker, and a guest pick by Anna Hiatt.

The Embassy of Cambodia

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A maid from Ivory Coast works in northwest London:

“The only good thing that happened in Carib Beach was this: once a month, on a Sunday, the congregation of a local church poured out of a coach at the front gates, lined up fully dressed in the courtyard, and then walked into the pool for a mass baptism. The tourists were never warned, and Fatou never understood why the congregants were allowed to do it. But she loved to watch their white shirts bloat and spread across the surface of the water, and to hear the weeping and singing. At the time—though she was not then a member of that church, or of any church except the one in her heart—she had felt that this baptism was for her, too, and that it kept her safe, and that this was somehow the reason she did not become one of the ‘girls’ at the Carib Beach Resort. For almost two years—between her father’s efforts and the grace of an unseen and unacknowledged God—she did her work, and swam Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn, and got along all right. But the Devil was waiting.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 4, 2013
Length: 34 minutes (8,524 words)

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” George Saunders, The New Yorker (Oct. 2012)

Quote found by Charlie Stadtlander

Sell Out: Part Three

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] The latest installment of Simon Rich’s serialized novella, in which the pickler hero attracts attention in Williamsburg:

“I do not know his words but I sense I am starting to lose him. I decide it is good time to make pitch.

“‘Whole Foods sells pickle jar for seven. I sell for four and include all the scum.’

“I point to the scum, which has collected nicely inside top of jar. The man smiles tightly as he hands me back the jar.

“‘I’ll come back later,’ he says.

“I sigh as he rides off on bicycle. It is almost seven and still I have no sales.

“‘Pickles here!’ I scream. ‘Pickles with garlic and scum!'”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,525 words)