Search Results for: fiction

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.

Casino

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories:

“When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates how much she does for them. All she does is give, give, give, without getting anything back, et cetera. I don’t really mind—I enjoy a good martini, and while Trisha rants I don’t have to worry about getting sloppy, given that she’s always sloppier—except that even her complaints are part boast. She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming. There’s a needle in every one of these remarks, pricking at my skin, saying See, Sherri? See?”

Author: Alix Ohlin
Published: May 1, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,225 words)

Homecoming

[Fiction] An urban teen moves to Virginia and tries to stay out of trouble:

When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on the track team at Boys and Girls, a solid B student. A good boy, everyone said. Even as a baby, his mama liked to say, he wasn’t any trouble. He cried so little that she would forget all about him.

His aunt Tiff was twenty-two and good-hearted, but no one could say that she was good. Ever since Marcus could remember, Tiff was always deciding between boyfriends, and the May when Marcus moved into her apartment was no exception.

“Homecoming.” — Belle Boggs, At Length

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Homecoming

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] An urban teen moves to Virginia and tries to stay out of trouble:

“When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on the track team at Boys and Girls, a solid B student. A good boy, everyone said. Even as a baby, his mama liked to say, he wasn’t any trouble. He cried so little that she would forget all about him.

“His aunt Tiff was twenty-two and good-hearted, but no one could say that she was good. Ever since Marcus could remember, Tiff was always deciding between boyfriends, and the May when Marcus moved into her apartment was no exception.”

Source: At Length
Published: Nov 1, 2009
Length: 57 minutes (14,448 words)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, GQ, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Oregonian, fiction from Granta, plus a guest pick from Declan Fay.

The Bedford Quarry

[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life:

It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected the pose of injured innocence when accused. It helped a lot that she had strings of goateed boyfriends around the house, guys with bottle openers on their key rings. I started coming to the quarry after dark. At night, the quarry was a completely different story.

“The Bedford Quarry.” — Michael Rosovsky, AGNI

(Thanks Instafiction)

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The Bedford Quarry

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life:

“It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected the pose of injured innocence when accused. It helped a lot that she had strings of goateed boyfriends around the house, guys with bottle openers on their key rings. I started coming to the quarry after dark. At night, the quarry was a completely different story.”

(Thanks Instafiction)

Source: AGNI
Published: Jan 1, 1999
Length: 23 minutes (5,967 words)

[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5: 

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes.

“Hand on the Shoulder.” — Ian McEwan, The New Yorker

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Hand on the Shoulder

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5:

“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes.”

Author: Ian McEwan
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,730 words)

[Fiction] [Not single-page] Mail-order brides on a journey across the ocean:

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and re-dyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

“Come, Japanese!” — Jule Otsuka, Granta

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