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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Classical, National Geographic, Chicago Reader, The Morning News, fiction, plus a guest pick from Kriston Capps.
A son attempts to get an unpublished manuscript of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle for his dying mother, an avid science fiction and fantasy reader:
“Mom is completely nonplussed. I am a little hurt, but then I realize I haven’t seen Mom once the past several weeks with her hands on a paperback or her Kindle.
“I decide that if things come through with the Paolini book—and I spend a lot of time thinking about this, more time than I probably should, because it’s an easy and hopeful thing to think about—I will read it to her myself. Out loud, while she lies in bed too weak to hold the pages up in her hands. When my grandfather was dying of pancreatic cancer, my aunt rubbed lotion into the cracked skin on his feet. She guided a straw from a glass of ice water to his lips. I imagine my reading to Mom will be just like performing these tasks, only different.”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Classical, National Geographic, Chicago Reader, The Morning News, fiction, plus a guest pick from Kriston Capps.
[Fiction] Confessions of a Cuban drag queen:
“When I was seven years old, the Virgin of Fátima appeared to me in the kitchen of my house in Madruga. That’s why people sometimes see a pink halo around my head. It was an apparition that marked my life. I saw her in the kitchen door, but she wasn’t standing on a rock like everybody says, she was on a stool, and she was mulatta. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Virgin of Montserrat, the black one sitting in a big gilded chair, well the Fátima I saw looked just like her, except not as black, just sitting there in all her glory on a stool.
“I’ve always been a lucky person, and that’s probably why. Well, that and I’ve never stepped on anybody’s toes, and I don’t go around sticking my nose in other people’s business. I do whatever I feel like, and that’s all there is to it. I get by because I have a youthful spirit and a positive energy that comes from Saturn, at least that’s what my horoscope says. If you could just see me right now, naked from the waist up, but I’m actually very modest, and I don’t let just anybody see me naked.”
[Fiction] Two friends decide to loot houses after a natural disaster strikes:
I turned onto the first street, where we entered one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods, a pink two story house greeting us in every direction. The houses had fared well, except for their roofs, now without tiles. Every roof looked identical, the neighborhood having managed to maintain its vision, even post-hurricane. Red tiles were sprinkled throughout, mixing with branches and debris, giving the neighborhood an artistic vibe that the residents, had they been around to see it, would’ve commented on favorably. I could see all this, because the moon, as if privy to the artistry of the red clay tiles, had found a cloudless opening. I kept going, crushing a tile, only to realize that pulverizing it only added to the street’s flavor. Still, I kept driving over them, as they were impossible to avoid, an unwilling artist.
‘Cut the lights,’ Danny said.
[Fiction] Two friends decide to loot houses after a natural disaster strikes:
“I turned onto the first street, where we entered one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods, a pink two story house greeting us in every direction. The houses had fared well, except for their roofs, now without tiles. Every roof looked identical, the neighborhood having managed to maintain its vision, even post-hurricane. Red tiles were sprinkled throughout, mixing with branches and debris, giving the neighborhood an artistic vibe that the residents, had they been around to see it, would’ve commented on favorably. I could see all this, because the moon, as if privy to the artistry of the red clay tiles, had found a cloudless opening. I kept going, crushing a tile, only to realize that pulverizing it only added to the street’s flavor. Still, I kept driving over them, as they were impossible to avoid, an unwilling artist.
“‘Cut the lights,’ Danny said.”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.
[Fiction] A closeted gay man’s self-perception shifts through the experiences of his almost-twin brother:
“He was dark; I was fair.
“He was slender and shy; I was stocky and talkative.
“As children our mother dressed us as twins. Matching woolen pea coats and Buster Brown lace-ups, khaki shorts and striped T-shirts, pajamas imprinted with pictures of cowboys and Indians, Davy Crockett coonskin caps. For Easter, matching sailor suits with starched white middy blouses.
“Even so, the neighbors often strained to see the resemblance between us. ‘You’re brothers?’ they asked. ‘You’re really brothers? Which one of you is older?’
“People imagined I was, because I was larger. But in fact he was older, by fifteen months. The bassinet into which I was placed was still warm from his having so recently lain there.
“Was it paradise, living like that, with someone made of the same flesh and blood as I? When Davis and I were little, we lay awake at night in our bunk beds, devising a language only the two of us could understand. ‘Peanut butter’ meant ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Bongo bongo’ meant ‘Go to sleep.’ ‘Applesauce’ meant ‘Laugh!'”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
[Fiction] A man and woman encounter each other every night in their dreams:
“I said: ‘Sometimes in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like- -what do you call it–laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’ve always wanted you to do it sometime.'”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Newsweek, fiction from Boston Review, plus a guest pick from Brian Kahn.
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