Search Results for: fiction

A Liberated Woman: The Story of Margaret King

Emma Garman | Longreads | May 2016 | 16 minutes (4,200 words)

 

In October 1786, 27-year-old feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed from London to her new temporary home: an imposing Palladian-style mansion in County Cork, Ireland. Set in 1,000-plus acres of woodland, flanked by colonnades leading to outbuildings, and featuring statued terraces, vineyards, and conservatories, Mitchelstown Castle was the seat of Robert and Caroline King, who as Lord and Lady Kingsborough were the country’s largest landowners.

To Wollstonecraft’s radical sensibilities, such aristocratic excess was anathema. (As, no doubt, was the depiction of The Rape of Proserpina that graced the mansion’s entrance hall ceiling.) Still, she needed to financially support herself, as well as her two sisters, so had agreed to join the Kingsborough household’s 80-strong staff as governess to three girls. Caroline, it was rumored, had dismissed Wollstonecraft’s predecessor for sleeping with Robert. But she viewed the new hire as trustworthy, a principled woman of intellect unlikely to catch her husband’s eye. And Wollstonecraft, who had already written her first book—the soon to be published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters—wasn’t about to start batting her eyelashes at his lordship. His “countenance,” she wrote sniffily to her sister Eliza, “does not promise much more than good humour.” Read more…

Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present

Demobilized soldiers returning to New York. Via Flickr.

David Reid | The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia | Pantheon | March 2016 | 31 minutes (8,514 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Brazen Age, by David Reid, which examines the “extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

Probably I was in the war.

—NORMAN MAILER, Barbary Shore (1951)

*

A hideous, inhuman city. But I know that one changes one’s mind.

In march 1946 the young French novelist and journalist Albert Camus traveled by freighter from Le Havre to New York, arriving in the first week of spring. Le Havre, the old port city at the mouth of the Seine, had almost been destroyed in a battle between its German occupiers and a British warship during the Normandy invasion; huge ruins ringed the harbor. In his travel journal Camus writes: “My last image of France is of destroyed buildings at the very edge of a wounded earth.”

At the age of thirty-two this Algerian Frenchman, who had been supporting himself with odd jobs when the war began, was about to become very famous. By 1948, he would become an international culture hero: author of The Stranger and The Plague, two of the most famous novels to come out of France in the forties, and of the lofty and astringent essays collected in The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus’s visit to the United States, sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs but involving no official duties, was timed to coincide with Alfred A. Knopf’s publication of The Stranger in a translation by Stuart Gilbert, the annotator of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the spring of 1946 France was exporting little to the United States except literature. Even most American readers with a particular interest in France knew of Camus, if at all, as a distant legend, editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat and an “existentialist.”

Reviewing The Stranger in the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, usually omniscient, confessed that he knew absolutely nothing about existentialism except that it was enjoying a “furious vogue.” If there were rumored to be philosophical depths in this novel about the motiveless murder of an Arab on a North African beach, they frankly eluded him. For Wilson the book was nothing more than “a fairly clever feat”—the sort of thing that a skillful Hemingway imitator like James M. Cain had done as well or better in The Postman Always Rings Twice. America’s most admired literary critic also had his doubts about Franz Kafka, the writer of the moment, suspecting that the claims being made for the late Prague fabulist were exaggerated. But still, like almost everyone else, especially the young, in New York’s intellectual circles Wilson was intensely curious about what had been written and thought in occupied Europe, especially in France.

“Our generation had been brought up on the remembrance of the 1920s as the great golden age of the avant-garde, whose focal point had been Paris,” William Barrett writes in The Truants, his memoir of the New York intellectuals. “We expected history to repeat itself: as it had been after the First, so it would be after the Second World War.” The glamorous rumor of existentialism seemed to vindicate their expectations. Camus’s arrival was eagerly awaited not only by Partisan Review but also by the New Yorker, which put him in “The Talk of the Town,” and Vogue, which decided that his saturnine good looks resembled Humphrey Bogart’s. Read more…

Jenny Diski: 1947-2016

Jenny Diski wrote 11 novels and seven non-fiction books. She wrote 150 articles and 65 blog posts for the London Review of Books. She wrote about drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll; she also wrote about animals and train travel. She wrote historical fiction and memoir, and essays about literature and fashion. She wrote about her family, her loves, and in the last two years since her cancer diagnosis, she wrote about the life she lived. She wrote herself until the very end.

Jenny Diski died in April 2016 at the age of 68. Here are nine stories celebrating Diski and her work.

1. Jenny Diski’s End Notes (Giles Harvey, New York Times Magazine, June 2015)

Last July, when the English writer Jenny Diski was told she had inoperable lung cancer and, at best, another three years to live, she responded to the news characteristically — that is, in wry poor taste. “So,” she said, turning to her husband, the poet and academic Ian Patterson, “we’d better get cooking the meth.” The Poet — as Diski always refers to Patterson, with tender-ironic reserve, in her personal essays — was just about able to keep up his end of the morbid repartee that is the currency of their marriage: “This time we quit while the going’s good.” The oncologist and the nurse, apparently not watchers of “Breaking Bad,” looked on blankly.

Read more…

What Was Virtual Reality?

If you visited a tech blog in the past two years, you will have undoubtedly noticed: no topic has been generating more buzz than non-real-reality (virtual, mixed, augmented—pick your flavor).

One of the more fascinating aspects of this tidal wave of excitement (and venture capital) is its obliviousness to its own history — a rich tradition of gamers, tech geeks, and scientists building and hyping virtual worlds. At Backchannel, a reprint of “Being in Nothingness” by John Perry Barlow, a seminal essay from 1990, shows the uncanny similarties between our current conversations and the obsession over “cyberspace” 30 years ago. It also brings home a crucial point: that cutting-edge technology is not only about slick, robot-filled futures; it’s fueled just as much by our undepletable nostalgic longings.

The list of possibilities is literally bounded only by the imagination. Working bodies for the damaged. Teleconferencing with body language. Virtual surgery. Hey, this is a practical thing to do!

And yet I suspect that something else altogether, something not so practical, is at the root of these yearnings. Why do we really want to develop Virtual Reality? There seems to be a flavor of longing here which I associate with the desire to converse with aliens or dolphins or the never-born.

On some level, I think we can now see the potential for technology, long about the business of making the metaphorical literal, of reversing the process and re-infecting ordinary reality with luminous magic.

Or maybe this is just another expression of what may be the third oldest human urge, the desire to have visions. Maybe we want to get high.

Read the story

A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse

Ramzi Fawaz | The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics | New York University Press| January 2016 | 25 minutes (6,662 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The New Mutants, by Ramzi Fawaz, which examines “the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

We’ve changed! All of us! We’re more than just human!

—THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1 (November 1961)

We might try to claim that we must first know the fundamentals of the human in order to preserve and promote human life as we know it. But… have we ever yet known the human?

—JUDITH BUTLER, Undoing Gender (2004)

*

Who might legitimately represent the human race?

In November 1992 Superman died. The Man of Steel would fall at the hands of the alien villain Doomsday, a thorny-skinned colossus who single-mindedly destroys life throughout the cosmos. Arriving on Earth seeking his next conquest, Doomsday meets his match in the planet’s longtime guardian, known to few in his civilian garb as the meek journalist Clark Kent but beloved by all as the caped hero Superman. After an agonizing battle in the streets of Metropolis, Superman’s urban home, Superman and Doomsday each land a final fatal blow, their last moments of life caught on camera and broadcast to devastated viewers around the world. The fictional media firestorm surrounding Superman’s death mirrored real-world responses to DC Comics’ announcement of their decision to end the life of America’s first superhero earlier that year. Months before the story was even scripted, national print and television media hailed Superman’s death as an event of extraordinary cultural significance, propelling what initially appeared as an isolated creative decision into the realm of public debate.

Public opinion ranged widely, from those who interpreted Superman’s downfall as a righteous critique of America’s moral bankruptcy to those who recognized it as a marketing stunt to boost comic book sales. In an editorial for the Comics Buyer’s Guide years later, leading comic book retailer Chuck Rozanski claimed that upon hearing about the decision, he had called DC Comics editor Paul Levitz, pleading with him that “since Superman was such a recognized icon within America’s overall popular culture . . . DC had no more right to ‘kill’ him than Disney had the right to ‘kill’ Mickey Mouse.” According to Rozanski, by choosing to kill Superman for sensational purposes, DC would be breaking an implicit promise to the American people to preserve the hero’s legacy as a “trustee of a sacred national image.” Read more…

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2016 Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced: The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum won the prize for criticism. Lin-Manuel Miranda won the drama prize for “Hamilton.” The New York Times’s Alissa J. Rubin won the international reporting prize for her work investigating the abuse of Afghan women. The Boston Globe’s Farah Stockman won the prize for commentary for her series examining race and education in Boston after busing.

A list of the all the winners and finalists can be found here. Below is a short list of other books and features that were honored today:

Explanatory Reporting: “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” (T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project)

Read more…

Longreads Turns Seven Years Old: Unfinished Business

Just a few of the many current Longreads contributors, to whom we are thankful.

Seven years ago this month I started Longreads. To say the word “longread” has taken hold beyond my wildest expectations would be an understatement. It was a Twitter hashtag experiment — which I started because I wanted story recommendations for my subway commute — that turned into a company, a meme, an original publisher, and, of course, an endless cycle of writers debating whether longform storytelling is good or bad for the internet. (Well, thank god for that.) Read more…

How They Disappeared: A Reading List

Disappearance takes many forms. It can be self-imposed (going off the grid), a medical metaphor (dementia, amnesia or Alzheimer’s) or an act of violence (kidnapping, murder, conspiracy).

Last week, Longreads brought you Grace Rubenstein’s “The Vanishing: What Happened to the Thousands Still Missing in Mexico?” This week, I wanted to share five more stories about what it means to disappear—either against your will or by your own volition. Read more…

Jim Harrison, Free-Spirited Writer of ‘Legends of the Fall,’ Dies at 78

Longreads Pick

An obituary for writer Jim Harrison, whose “lust for life—and sometimes just plain lust—roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh.”

Published: Mar 27, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,460 words)

Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ and the Racism of The Little Rascals

Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty. Image via PBS NewsHour

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

-Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The Sellout, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction (and now the 2016 Man Booker Prize), is a brutally funny-awful-sad-funny riff on racism in America, about an African American man who attempts to re-segregate his hometown — a fictional suburb of Los Angeles called Dickens. Beatty’s protagonist paints a border around Dickens, distributes “No whites allowed” signs to the local businesses, and gets help from a local celebrity, Hominy Jenkins, who was an understudy to Buckwheat and the last surviving cast member of the 1920s and ’30s serial “The Little Rascals.”

Through Hominy we also get a primer on the racist history of Hollywood — what was removed from public view, and what is still on display today. Beatty’s book led me back through my own childhood memories watching “The Little Rascals” in reruns during the early 1980s, unaware of the racist humor that was excised from syndication. Through The Sellout we get a tour of our ugly cultural past — Our Gang and Looney Tunes as just a start — and Beatty’s humor guides us through the injustices of the present.

Further reading:

• Interview with Paul Beatty (Scott Simon, NPR)
• New York Times Book Review (2015)
• An excerpt from The Sellout