Search Results for: fiction

Can’t A Guy Just Make Some Friends Around Here? Maybe.

Longreads Pick

The difficulties of making friends in a city with few singles. The writer attempts to find some using Craiglist:

“I chatted with a divorced businessman who wanted a lunch-break buddy, and with a perfectly normal-sounding guy who wanted somebody to go with him to a nudist camp. And I met up with a friendly bouncer and UMKC student named George, who hung out with his buddies regularly but had trouble convincing any of them to come smoke shisha. We went to Jaskki’s, in the West Bottoms, and puffed on a hookah.

“Then I met up with a woman, an introvert named Audrey, whose ad said she’d moved to Kansas City around a year ago but couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone out socially with anyone. We hung out for a while in the fiction section of Barnes & Noble and talked about our favorite writers.

“But I saw neither George nor Audrey again. Maybe because of the way we’d arranged our meetings, the energy in them was too low to demand follow-up. Or maybe because I hadn’t been serious enough about doing it. Making friends cold turkey turns out to be oddly like dating — sometimes you’re more into somebody than that person is into you, and the doubt and anxiety that come with that imbalance don’t feel good. And sometimes a response I sent to an interesting Craigslist ad was met with silence, as though we’d already broken up.”

Source: The Pitch
Published: Nov 6, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,356 words)

The Eye

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] From Munro’s collection Dear Life: A young girl develops a special bond with her housekeeper:

“I suppose all this was making me ready for Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn’t. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.

“The most unusual thing about Sadie – though it was not a thing stressed in our house – was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.

“‘Hello, hello, hello, everybody – ‘”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 7, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,160 words)

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring stories from Orion Magazine, Harper’s, Atlanta MagazineFortune Magazine and The Rumpus, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick from N.V. Binder.

The Cottage on the Hill

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A man, his relationship with his family, and his trips to a vacation home:

“For the better part of a week, Richard and Evelyn and the children told stories around the fire, went fishing and boating, walked in the woods, cooked rustic meals, and sang along to songs on Richard’s guitar. As the days passed, employees could be seen to come and go down below at the substation, and sometimes they caught sight of the family and waved. It was a funny little vacation, but it had, at least for a while, the intended effect—Evelyn and Richard regained some of their closeness, and they enjoyed their children more than ever before. Many times over the next few years, Richard would look up from his desk with a wistful memory of those days at the cottage behind the substation, wishing it were easier to restore to his family the good feelings the trip had generated. But nothing lasts, he reasoned, most of all those things on which we place the greatest value.”

Published: Oct 31, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,388 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Mother Jones, SB Nation, Wired, Dissent Magazine, Playboy, fiction from The American Reader, and Mike Spry’s guest pick from GQ.

His Mother’s Wish

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A son reluctantly helps his mother die, and moves on with his life:

“When Chup Vakil came home from his interview, he didn’t expect his mother to ask him to help her die. As he contemplated his mother’s request, the day flashed through his mind: pale grey cubicles, women clerks, black ties matching thick mustaches, firm doors—an inauspicious, solid black—cold air from the AC raising the hair on his arms, and a large street sign reading Golconda Legal Associates of Radhapur in Hindi.

“‘Why should we hire you?’ They spoke only in English—not his mother tongue—but he managed. He had been a lawyer for nine years, recently laid off due to financial reasons but with good references and not a blemish on his record. The conference hall smelled of lilac air freshener and dark coffee. He sat alone on one side of the table in his lucky suit.”

Source: Indian Review
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,736 words)

West of the Known

Longreads Pick

[Fiction, not single-page] Loyalty, betrayal and a final judgment for a brother-sister duo in the Old West:

“My brother was the first man to come for me. The first man I saw in the raw, profuse with liquor, outside a brothel in New Mexico Territory. He was the first I know to make a promise then follow on through. There is nothing to forgive. For in the high violence of joy, is there not often a desire to swear devotion? But what then? When is it ever brung off to the letter? When they come for our blood, we will not end, but go on in an unworldly fever.

“I come here to collect, my brother said from the porch. If there was more I did not hear it for Uncle Bill and Aunt Josie stepped out and closed the door. I was in the kitchen canning tomatoes, standing over a row of mason jars, hands dripping a wat’ry red when in stepped a man inside a long buckskin coat.

“I’m your brother, Jackson, the man smiled, holding out his hand.”

Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,136 words)

The Dead Are Real

Longreads Pick

Inside the imagination of Hilary Mantel, now two-time Booker Prize-winning author of historical fiction including Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies:

“When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once.

“When she’s starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it’s like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you’re in until you’re focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing The Giant, O’Brien: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted ‘Yes!’ But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 40 minutes (10,098 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas MonthlyVanity Fair,Outside MagazineNarrativelyThe New York Review of Books, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Catherine Kustanczy.

[Fiction] An aunt recalls how she met her husband. (From Mo Yan, 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ‘63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.’

“Frogs.” — Mo Yan, Granta

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