Search Results for: fiction

The Stations of the Sun

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] According to Chinese mythology, the goddess Nugua formed the first mortals from yellow mud. An artist, she carefully sculpted each limb, pressed closed each fingertip, contoured each nose, creating individuals. But at some point she became impatient with the demands of craftsmanship and dipped a vine in darker soil, flung it every which way. Lumps of mud fell from the skies, and became human.

And so the land was divided into two races: the hand-formed pale-skinned nobles, and the darker commoners who had never known the goddess’s touch.

Chinese people, Annabel’s mother said, shaking her head. Such snobs. But in the lamplight, her mother’s face shone paler than the moon.

Author: R.O. Kwon
Source: Kenyon Review
Published: May 1, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,119 words)

Brain Pickings' Maria Popova: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker.

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I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when done correctly, they become indistinguishable from one another. Like architecting your life and your social circle, architecting your mind’s life is an exercise in immersing yourself in an eclectic mix of viewpoints and directions of thought. In that way, longform is like the most intense of friendships, where the time dedication and the active choice to show up far eclipse the noncommittal acquaintanceship of soundbite culture. A healthy longform diet must thus include something that breaks your heart, something that gives you hope, something by someone you find a little self-righteous, something by someone with whom you’re a little bit in love—and, ideally, the inability to fully tell which is which. With this in mind, here are the five finest pieces I laid eyes and neurons on this year, which did for me all of the above, and then some.

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“Mark Twain in Love,” by Ron Powers (Smithsonian)

A bittersweet story about Samuel Clemens, but really about something profoundly and universally human: love, timing, and the often tragic misalignment of the two. And in that story lies a subtle reminder that unless we pursue the heart’s desire with complete clarity of purpose and intention, we’re left forever playing out those could’ve-beens, as Twain did, in our dreams.

“Thus it was Sam’s stubbornness that foreclosed any further encounter with Laura Wright. Yet they did meet, time and again, over the years, in Clemens’ dreams. And dreams, Samuel Clemens came to believe, were as real as anything in the waking world.”

“Post-Artifact Books & Publishing,” by Craig Mod

As both a marginalia obsessive and a hopeless bibliophile torn between the love of books and the mesmerism of the web, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of books—or, more accurately, about the function books have traditionally served as a medium for arguing and teasing out ideas of significance and cultural gravity. Hardly anyone fuses a bibliophile’s profound respect for books with a designer’s sensitivity to the reading experience and a digital entrepreneur’s visionary bravery more fluidly, articulately, and thoughtfully than Craig Mod.

“Manifested properly, each new person who participates in the production of digital marginalia changes the reading experience of that book for the next person. Analog marginalia doesn’t know other analog marginalia. Digital marginalia is a collective conversation, cumulative stratum.”

“How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)

Gopnik is one of my favorite nonfiction authors working today. And this is no ordinary book review of what eventually became my favorite history book of 2011—it paints a riveting connect-the-dots portrait of information’s history and future through such fascinating and surprisingly related subjects as African drum languages, the Morse Code, Marshall McLuhan, and Google.

“Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.”

“Lessons According to Salt,” by Liz Danzico

There is something magnificent and magical that happens when we open ourselves up to the poetry of possibility—of “overlookedness,” if you will. (Lesson #1.) 

“The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing. Says nothing about its role. Its intention. Its history as a gift born out of a romance between my maternal grandparents. Says nothing of its possibilities.

But add people, and it becomes a central iterative device. The license to change, to iterate, to test, to add, to make, to make over, to create (clearly, with food). It gives license and latitude to stray from what has been written (recipes) for those too shy to do. Therefore, it gives strength. It gives iterative powers to those not comfortable with version control. With its subtlety comes comfort in change.

One might say the saltbox, and access to it, is magic.”

“Wikipedia And The Death of The Expert,” by Maria Bustillos (The Awl)

Picking just one of Maria Bustillos’ many brilliant pieces was excruciating, but this meditation on the future of authorship, content curation, and intellectual innovation is simply exquisite, and tickles my own restlessness about the changing currencies and sandboxes of authorship in the age of information overload.

“All these elements—the abandonment of ‘point of view,’ the willingness to consider the present with the same urgency as the past, the borrowing ‘of wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either,’ the desire to understand the mechanisms by which we are made to understand—are cornerstones of intellectual innovation in the Internet age. In particular, the liberation from ‘authorship’ (brought about by the emergence of a ‘hive mind’) is starting to have immediate implications that few beside McLuhan foresaw. His work represents a synthesis of the main precepts of New Criticism with what we have come to call cultural criticism and/or media theory.”

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Bethlehem Shoals: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Bethlehem Shoals is an editor at The Classical and the founder of FreeDarko.com.

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• “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas,” Zach Baron, The Daily 

Hunter S. Thompson has a tendency to overshadow his subject matter, as if he invented the entire world in his own image, and this were a tenet of non-fiction. The dirty little secret of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that Las Vegas was, and is, pretty damn weird in its own right. It may have made Thompson, or at least his most famous work, as much as he made it. The Daily dispatches Zach Baron to Sin City, where he deftly balances archaeology and immersion. When it becomes impossible to separate the two, Baron just goes with it, exactly the kind of impulse that got Thompson into trouble in the first place—and made him something other than a mere egoist. (Part OnePart Two)

• “The History and Mystery of the High Five,” Jon Mooallem, ESPN Magazine

I’m not sure if Jon Mooallem’s cultural excavation of the high-five is a perfect piece of writing, but it pretty much epitomizes everything I think sports writing should do, or at least be allowed to do when the occasion demands it. This past week, David Remnick reviewed the new Howard Cosell biography. Before getting to Cosell, he made the case that sports are relevant because they overwhelm, overpower, and more or less preoccupy us. Sports make big noise; endless broadcast, commentary, and web opinion compel us to stick around indefinitely. It’s a grim vision of our relationship with games that, for many of us, are both a source of joy in themselves and anything but a closed system of stupid. Mooallem picks a fairly simple, if ubiquitous detail—one that connects the playing field to daily life, rather than forcing separation of imitation—and proceeds to chase down its origins, false leads and all. The high-five began in sports, but now belongs to us all. As it turns out, understanding the various creation myths behind it requires an acknowledgment that sports are never just what they seem. If sports envelope us, they do so as part of the big picture—not an alternative to it.  

• “Lonelyheart,” Kent Jones, Notebook

When a retrospective comes to New York, it’s time for the sharpest film writers to revisit old masters. This past summer, Robert Ryan got the treatment. I have a bad habit of vehemently disliking actors that any sane cinephile holds in high regard. I know them, I just can’t stand them. It always seems to be the ones who demand the deepest sympathy while unsettling audiences, anti-heroes whose heroism is a comfort to none. Ryan is one such outsider who invites no company, and Kent Jones’s piece—bloggy, to be sure, but vital and organized as any manicured feature—brought me that moment of conversion. The actor I couldn’t stand became an object of fascination; Jones acknowledges all that’s surface about Ryan, while honing in on a peculiar kind of pain that locates a leading man trapped inside the creep. As Jones observes, no one does alone like Robert Ryan. At that point, it’s no longer about our response, but his wooly brand of gravitas. 

• “The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him,” Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica & Frontline

I originally saw this story on Frontline, which led me to ask Mark if I could include a television program on this list, since longform non-fiction television was itself a dying cult. Luckily, all Frontline stories double as ProPublica features, so on a technicality, I can slide it onto my list. “The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How the U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him” isn’t quite the same without the solemn voiceover and grainy footage of eighties Philadelphia and military surveillance tapes. But the story of David Coleman Headley epitomizes the new narrative of terrorism. Instead of something shadowy and exotic, it’s full of plot twists and evasions that turn familiarity into something inherently sinister. Headley’s mother founded the Khyber Pass, one of Philly’s main indie venues by the time I got there in the mid-nineties. I had no idea that the name referred to mama Serrill Headley’s mysterious time in the region, or that for a time, her son—drug runner, future informant and jihadist—managed the place. “It could happen anywhere” is chilling, if contrived; “it has roots in your backyard”, this piece’s tacit refrain, is about the process of us becoming them, a delineation that really can’t comfort us for much longer. 

• “A Murder Foretold,” David Grann, The New Yorker

I’m sure that half the known world included this David Grann banger on their list, but when making these picks, Grann is pretty much the five-hundred ton elephant in the room. 

Writer Maria Bustillos: My Top Longreads of 2011

Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl.

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The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt swings gracefully between humor and searing candor in this account of her growing ambivalence toward the religious, political and cultural institutions she’d grown up taking for granted. It’s a high-wire act of great elegance and sensitivity that will stay with me for a long time to come.

In “The Fire This Time” (Los Angeles Review of Books) Reza Aslan likewise makes a compelling case in opposition to conventional wisdom. I thought it by far the best of the 9/11 pieces that came out on the 10th anniversary of the catastrophe.

“American Marvel” (GQ), Edith Zimmerman’s profile of Chris Evans, the star of Captain America, upends everything one is accustomed to think about “movie stars” and celebrity, plus she blasts many assumptions about popular writing—and about reporters describing the world we inhabit—to absolute smithereens. Flesh-and-blood people suddenly appear on the screen where one had been expecting a cartoon. Steven Mikulan’s “Dr. Drew Feels Your Pain” (Los Angeles Magazine), by contrast, conjures a nuanced portrait out of the media fun-house mirror the old-fashioned way, via the painstaking layering up of detail through long and patient, keen observation. It has a similar payoff to the Zimmerman piece, in that you’re seeing a real world spring by magic out of the Potemkin one.

Spencer Soper’s Morning Call exposé of the sweatshop conditions at Amazon’s Allentown, Pa., warehouse came just as the Occupy movement was beginning to take hold. The disparity between the friendly face that Amazon crafts for public view and the abject brutality with which they treated their employees in Allentown demonstrated perfectly and at just the right time the terrible cost of profit-obsessed corporatism (and bargain-obsessed consumerism).

At Inside Higher Education, Steve Kolowich interviews Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College, regarding the coming digital revolution in academic research and publishing. Sounds a little dry, maybe, but check it out. Fitzpatrick and her forward-thinking colleagues have identified, and are carefully nurturing, the phoenix egg from which a new and improved academy is already beginning to hatch.

Bonus:

Fiction: George Saunders, Tenth of December (The New Yorker): best fiction of any length I read all year.

Humor: David Roth, Brief Interviews with Hideous Football Players (The Awl), a comic tour de force that fans of David Foster Wallace will particularly enjoy.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Writer Elliott Holt: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.)

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I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction. It’s no secret that the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, One Story and Tin House publish great fiction, but there are also a lot of excellent online literary magazines, so I wanted to include work from a couple of them here. I had to include one story from The New Yorker, though, because Alice Munro is one of my favorite writers.

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Reese Okyong Kwon, “Stations of the Sun” in Kenyon Review 

Alice Munro, “Gravel” in The New Yorker

Nahid Rachlin, “Bijan” in Guernica

Laura van den Berg, “Mansion” in Guernica

Colson Whitehead, “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” in Grantland

Photo credit: Rebecca Zeller

[Fiction]

He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check.

“Exquisite Corpse.” — Justin Wolfe, The Awl

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Exquisite Corpse

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check.

Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 2, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,693 words)

Anna Clark: My Top 5 World Lit Longreads of 2011

Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.)

The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in the U.S. that are translated into English. But even that number is inflated, as it includes technical material — manuals, guides, instructions — and new editions of canonized authors like Leo Tolstoy and Plato. American readers interested in the full-throated energy of contemporary world literature, of global book culture beyond their particular location and language, have limited options. Publishers suggest that literature in translation doesn’t sell — excepting a certain Swedish novelist called Stieg, of course — but my thinking is that readers like good things to read, wherever they come from. Readers are a curious sort.

I am ignited by literature of the world. I am fascinated by the stories and styles that come from different places. My Top 5 Longreads shouldn’t be considered a *best* list; rather, a cultivated selection of the year’s most interesting reading on international literature, translation, and storytelling. But this conversation isn’t finished; there is more to be said.

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1. The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami by Sam Anderson — New York Times

I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea.

2. The Joyful Side of Translation by Adam Thirlwell — The New York Times

The theory of translation is very rarely — how to put this? — comical.

3. Who Owns Kafka? by Judith Butler — London Review of Books

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv.

4. Arabic and Hebrew: The Politics of Literary Translation by Olivia Snaije — Publishing Perspectives

Today, the 60-plus year conflict between Israel and Arab countries has impacted heavily on translations between the two Semitic languages, which are now viewed by many with mutual suspicion and distrust.

5. These Infantile Times by Jessa Crispin — Kirkus Reviews

Crispin interviews Dubravka Ugresic about her new essay collection, Karaoke Culture. Discussed: the author’s relationship to pop culture and how a Hemingway lookalike contest fits into the same essay as the war criminal Radovan Karadžic.

[Fiction]

On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourthgrade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. I’l bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.” 

“Gryphon.” — Charles Baxter, American Story

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Photo via Flickr

Gryphon

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourthgrade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. I’l bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”

Source: American Story
Published: Nov 1, 1985
Length: 26 minutes (6,518 words)