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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Narratively, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, fiction from New England Review, and a guest pick from Matthew Herper.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Narratively, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, fiction from New England Review, and a guest pick from Matthew Herper.
[Fiction] A young boy and his nuclear family leave their extended family in a remote village for the city slums:
“One cold, dewy morning, you are huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since, wealth-obsessed though you will come to be, you’ve never in your life seen any of these things.
“The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood. The virus afflicting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum. It kills only about one in fifty, so you’re likely to recover. But right now you feel like you’re going to die.
“Your mother has encountered this condition many times, or conditions like it, anyway. So maybe she doesn’t think you’re going to die. Then again, maybe she fears it.”
[Fiction] A story about an unemployed ethnomusicologist, gray whales, and Miranda July:
“‘Garfield was my favorite president,’ said Brandon.
“‘James A. Garfield?’ said Kara. ‘President from March to July of 1881?’
“‘From Ohio?’ she said.
“‘That’s the one,’ said Brandon.
“He said: ‘I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d been given the chance.’
“Charles put his hand on Kara’s knee.
“‘That’s funny,’ said Charles. ‘Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, is my favorite presidential assassin, and it’s not just because we share a name.'”
Our fiction pick of the week, from Electric Literature: “Hello Everybody,” by A.M. Homes. (Thanks, Elliott Holt.)
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Vanity Fair, The Billfold, The New Yorker, Wired and New York magazine, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick by Brittany Shoot.
[Fiction] A grieving family’s privileged, plastic life:
“She hears his car grinding up the hill. At the edge of the driveway, the engine shudders, continuing on for a few seconds before falling silent. Walter buzzes the front gate; Esmeralda, the housekeeper, lets him in. The gate closes with a thick metallic click.
“‘Where are you?’ he calls out.
“‘I’m hiding,’ Cheryl yells from the backyard.
“He enters the through the pool gate.
“‘Shouldn’t that be locked?’ she asks.
“‘I remembered the code,’ he says.
“‘The pool boy’s code, 1234?’
“He nods. ‘Some things never change.’
[Fiction] Julie goes on a midnight ride with her big sister:
“When Tabitha Thatch argued, her little sister Julie always thought about cats. It was rare that Tabitha argued, much more common that she agreed to rules or demands her mother or the world imposed on her, then did the opposite of what she’d agreed to, but when she did argue her jaw relaxed open and her voice, high-pitched and ragged, folded in on itself in a hundred tissue paper layers of connotation, implication, meaning, all of her yowling protest in way you couldn’t ignore. You could listen to Tabitha arguing like a cat for hours; Julie—her own voice like a dog’s, she thought, short and hoarse and barky—had listened to Tabitha for hours. You could listen and you would be struck by how raw and vibrant that voice was, but then you’d realize that Tabitha was just saying she was going to go to the mall and buy Adderall swallow it with beer, then hang around the food court talking about the Misfits with some college kid. In a raw and vibrant and catlike way she’d tell you that and you would believe in her.
“Linda, Tabitha and Julie’s mother, had never been vulnerable to Tabitha’s voice, and Julie had always hated Linda a little for that.”
[Fiction] A woman at the end of her rope turns to a pastor for help:
Seven months into her husband’s depression, Diane called the church secretary. She wanted the elders to come over and anoint Mitch with oil. He hadn’t put his pants on in a month. In the past week he hadn’t left the bed. When he spoke, it was about endings—the end of his career, the end of suffering. This morning, at 3:00 a.m., he’d woken her to ask if summer was over yet. It was early June. Diane was afraid he might kill himself.
She’d seen anointings performed twice before. The first time was at a Baptist summer camp when she was nine. During evening worship—held in a makeshift auditorium beneath a stained canvas tarp—a boy with braces on his legs was brought forward by his mother, his wheelchair leaving tracks in the sawdust. The camp’s pastor removed the braces, knelt in front of the chair, and rubbed oil all over the boy’s white calves as if he were applying sunscreen. The following summer the boy came back to camp still wearing the braces, though now he used crutches with metal cuffs around the wrists.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sady Doyle, Rolling Stone, The Awl, Guernica, The Believer, plus fiction, and a guest pick from Jared Keller.
[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant:
In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?’ In the lyrics, practically:
Life stories told through rap/Niggas actin’ like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov’ did that/So hopefully you won’t have to go through that. But can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? Out hustlin’, same clothes for days/I’ll never change, I’m too stuck in my ways. Can’t he still rep his block? For Jay-Z, pride in the block has been essential and he recognized rap’s role in taking ‘that embarrassment off of you. The first time people were saying: I come from here — and it’s O.K.’ He quotes Mobb Deep: ‘No matter how much money I get, I’m staying in the projects!’ But here, too, he sees change: ‘Before, if you didn’t have that authenticity, your career could be over. Vanilla Ice said he got stabbed or something, they found out he was lying, he was finished.’ I suggested to him that many readers of this newspaper would find it bizarre that the reputation of the rapper Rick Ross was damaged when it was revealed a few years ago that he was, at one time, a prison guard. ‘But again,’ Jay says, ‘I think hip-hop has moved away from that place of everything has to be authentic. Kids are growing up very differently now.’
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