Longreads Pick
[Fiction] A family prepares for their father’s business trip:
“Their Da was going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys had said nothing about it, but were awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, probably no underpants—some objection he had at the moment to them, as if they were practically nappies and grownups never wore them. The first fight began as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing and that odd, flat roar Shawn has started to produce whenever he truly loses himself and just rages. No tantrums for Shawn, not anymore. He is seven now. He has the real thing. He has rage.”
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Published: Jul 30, 2007
Length: 12 minutes (3,055 words)
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[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic:
The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair coming out of that mole, but hers was bald. Real gypsies don’t have breast implants either, but she had those too.
I told her, ‘Say something about me first so that I know this is for real. That’s a lot of money. Look into the shithead future real fast.’ That’s how high my expectations were.
‘You like to drink,’ she said. ‘You can’t dance. You’re looking for women.’
‘That’s not psychic,’ I said. ‘This is a loser bar.’
“What to Do?” — Sean Ennis, Swink
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic:
“The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair coming out of that mole, but hers was bald. Real gypsies don’t have breast implants either, but she had those too.
“I told her, ‘Say something about me first so that I know this is for real. That’s a lot of money. Look into the shithead future real fast.’ That’s how high my expectations were.
“‘You like to drink,’ she said. ‘You can’t dance. You’re looking for women.’
“‘That’s not psychic,’ I said. ‘This is a loser bar.'”
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Published: Jun 13, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,221 words)
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[Fiction] A couple returns home from Israel:
It’s six-thirty now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.
She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.
“The World Without You.” — Joshua Henkin, Guernica Magazine
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] A couple returns home from Israel:
“It’s six-thirty now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.
“She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.”
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Published: May 31, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,020 words)
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Longreads Pick
[Fiction] Bob Dylan comes to Thanksgiving Dinner:
“We park in front of my mom’s house, my mom who has been waiting for us at the door, probably since dawn. Her hello carries over the lawn. Bob Dylan opens the car door, stretches one leg and then the other. He wears a black leather coat, and has spent the entire ride from New York trying to remember the name of a guitarist he played with in Memphis. I pull our bags from the trunk.
“‘You always pack too much,’ I say.
He shrugs. His arms are small in his coat. His legs are small in his jeans.
“‘Hello hello,’ my mother says as we amble toward her.
“‘This is Bob,’ I say.
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Published: Jun 4, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,460 words)
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Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, a longtime Disney fan, finally goes to Disneyland.
The new appreciation of history begins with the responsibility in the hands of a man I trust, Walt Disney. In Disneyland he has proven again that the first function of architecture is to make men over make them wish to go on living, feed them fresh oxygen, grow them tall, delight their eyes, make them kind.
“The Machine-Tooled Happyland.” — Ray Bradbury, Holiday Mag, Oct. 1965
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Longreads Pick
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, a longtime Disney fan, finally goes to Disneyland.
“The new appreciation of history begins with the responsibility in the hands of a man I trust, Walt Disney. In Disneyland he has proven again that the first function of architecture is to make men over make them wish to go on living, feed them fresh oxygen, grow them tall, delight their eyes, make them kind.”
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Published: Oct 1, 1965
Length: 10 minutes (2,594 words)
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[Fiction, 2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid:
At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.
‘Baba, who are you looking for?’ I once asked.
He shook his head and said, ‘No one.’
But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for.
“Naima.” — Hisham Matar, The New Yorker (2011)
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