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LIMBs

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home:

“A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on LIMBs.

“‘Elise.’ He squints at her. ‘You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.’

“She flashes her dentures but says nothing.”

Source: Tin House
Published: Apr 1, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,494 words)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Inquiry, The London Review of Books, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Nicholas Jackson.

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week: Tim Carmody examines Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Ketchup Conundrum,” which was originally published in The New Yorker’s Food Issue in Sept. 2004:

Note: I can’t stand ketchup. Any ketchup. I think it’s disgusting, and always have. I was averse to it as a kid, and unlike almost every other one of my wide list of childhood prohibited foods, it never made it off that list. But I am riveted by the story of ketchup regardless, because Gladwell’s offered me a route, through history, science, and the words of men and women here and now, to understand these odd human beings around me who love the stuff.

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 35: Malcolm Gladwell on Ketchup

His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work: 

On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round table, infinite-void-of-nothingness that is the Charlie Rose set. Each responded to Rose’s questions about the state of fiction more or less in character: Franzen, who had a wavy pageboy haircut that frizzed out untempered to nearly chin level, defended the classical novel as an oasis for readers who feel lonely and misunderstood. Leyner, wearing a robust, Mephistophelian goatee — perhaps fitting for the man Wallace once accused of being “a kind of anti-Christ” — said simply: ‘My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.’ Wallace looked much as we picture him now, posthumously chiseled into Mount Literature: the ponytail, the bearish features, the rough scruff on his jaw. He played the part of a calming, Midwestern-inflected mediator, saying, ‘I feel like I’m, if you put these two guys in a blender… . ‘

“Mark Leyner, World-Champion Satirist, Returns to Reclaim His Crown.” — Adam Sternbergh, New York Times

See also: “Just Kids.” — Evan Hughes, New York magazine, Oct. 10, 2011

Mark Leyner, World-Champion Satirist, Returns to Reclaim His Crown

Longreads Pick

His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work:

On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round table, infinite-void-of-nothingness that is the Charlie Rose set. Each responded to Rose’s questions about the state of fiction more or less in character: Franzen, who had a wavy pageboy haircut that frizzed out untempered to nearly chin level, defended the classical novel as an oasis for readers who feel lonely and misunderstood. Leyner, wearing a robust, Mephistophelian goatee — perhaps fitting for the man Wallace once accused of being “a kind of anti-Christ” — said simply: ‘My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.’ Wallace looked much as we picture him now, posthumously chiseled into Mount Literature: the ponytail, the bearish features, the rough scruff on his jaw. He played the part of a calming, Midwestern-inflected mediator, saying, ‘I feel like I’m, if you put these two guys in a blender. . . . ‘”

Published: Mar 21, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,744 words)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.

Gravity at the End of the World

[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life:

Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. He doesn’t hate himself for being a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We’ve been together for eleven years, since we were sophomores in high school. We had a baby once, a little girl named Emma. She had his eyes and his dimples and my smile and my temper. She died when she was four and a half—got sicker than we knew was possible and needed the kind of help people like us can never afford. Craig asks me to marry him every month or so but I don’t know how to say yes in a world where our child isn’t alive. I don’t know how to say no either. I tell him soon.

“Gravity at the End of the World.” — Roxane Gay, Knee-Jerk

See more #fiction #longreads

Gravity at the End of the World

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life:

“Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. He doesn’t hate himself for being a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We’ve been together for eleven years, since we were sophomores in high school. We had a baby once, a little girl named Emma. She had his eyes and his dimples and my smile and my temper. She died when she was four and a half—got sicker than we knew was possible and needed the kind of help people like us can never afford. Craig asks me to marry him every month or so but I don’t know how to say yes in a world where our child isn’t alive. I don’t know how to say no either. I tell him soon.”

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: Knee-Jerk
Published: Jan 1, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,419 words)

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week: Deborah Blum examine’s Buzz Bissinger’s “Shattered Glass,” which was originally published in Vanity Fair in Sept. 1998:

You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.

Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 34: Buzz Bissinger Trails A Fabulist

[Fiction, not single-page] A lawyer can’t stop walking:

He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse — too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look up, surprised again — not just by the darkened office. By his re-entry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He’d have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.

That was happiness.

“The Unnamed.” — Joshua Ferris, Granta, Winter 2009

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