Search Results for: fiction

Longreads Best of 2013: Open Thread

Longreads Pick

We’re kicking off the Longreads Best of 2013 series tomorrow—and we want your help.

In the comments below, share links to your favorite nonfiction and fiction stories, or your favorite books, writers and publishers of the year. We’ll keep this thread open all through December.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 1, 2013

Does Journalism Still Work?

The Unwinding is a powerful and important work, but even so, I can’t help but think that it has arrived very late in the day. Ask yourself: how many books have been published describing the destruction of the postwar middle-class economic order and the advent of the shiny, plutocratized new one? Well, since I myself started writing about the subject in the mid–1990s—and thus earned a place on every book publicist’s mailing list—there have been at least a thousand.

“Two things need to be said about this tsunami of sad. First, that the vast size of it, when compared to the effect that it has had—close to nothing—should perhaps call into question the utility of journalism and argument and maybe even prose itself. The gradual Appalachification of much of the United States has been a well-known phenomenon for 20 years now; it is not difficult to understand why and how it happened; and yet the ship of state sails serenely on in the same political direction as though nothing had changed. We like to remember the muckraking era because of the amazing real-world transformations journalism was able to bring; our grandchildren will remember our era because of the big futile naught accomplished by our prose.”

Thomas Frank, in Public Books, on George Packer’s National Book Award-winning The Unwinding and whether, as good as it is, people have tuned out. Read more on the recession in the Longreads Archive.

(h/t The Browser)

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Reading List: Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal

Flannery O'Connor
Photo credit: AP Images

Known for her grotesque short stories, mythic personality and Southern Catholic faith, O’Connor’s prayer journal ends in her 22nd year, before, as Casey N. Cep writes in The New Yorker, “the literature itself was a prayer.”

“Flannery O’Connor’s Desire For God.” (Jen Vafidis, The Daily Beast, November 2013)

O’Connor believed that any fiction that revealed her own character would be inherently awful writing. In her prayer journal, she critiques her own ideas of love and faith and success, covering oatmeal cookies and metaphysics.

“God’s Grandeur: The Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor.” (Carlene Bauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, November 2013)

Intermixed with excerpts from O’Connor’s letters, this tender review focuses on her seemingly one-dimensional attitude toward human love and clarifies its nuance.

“Inheritance and Invention: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker, November 2013)

Casey N. Cep has fast become one of my new favorite writers. In this excellent review, Cep emphasizes that O’Connor’s prayer journal was a highly internal affair, both a way to get at a more authentic relationship with God and work through her blossoming writing career.

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Photo by Brent Payne

Doris Lessing on What It Means to Be a Writer

“I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.

“It’s just habits. When I was bringing up a child I taught myself to write in very short concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I’d do unbelievable amounts of work. Now those habits tend to be ingrained. In fact, I’d do much better if I could go more slowly. But it’s a habit. I’ve noticed that most women write like that, whereas Graham Greene, I understand, writes two hundred perfect words every day! So I’m told! Actually, I think I write much better if I’m flowing. You start something off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I’m writing well. I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every single phrase.”

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), in the Paris Review. Read more on Lessing from Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books.

Read the interview
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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Isaac Asimov's Rules for Writing and Revising

Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov. Photo: AP Images

“Over and over again, we are told about the importance of polishing, of revising, of tearing up, and rewriting. I got the bewildered notion that, far from being expected to type it right the first time, as Heinlein had advised me, I was expected to type it all wrong and get it right only by the thirty-second time, if at all.

“I went home immersed in gloom and the very next time I wrote a story, I tried to tear it up. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I went over to see all the terrible things I had done, in order to revise them. To my chagrin, everything sounded great to me. (My own writing always sounds great to me.) Eventually, after wasting hours and hours–to say nothing of suffering spiritual agony—I gave it up. My stories would have to be written the way they always were—and still are.

“What is it I am saying, then? That it is wrong to revise? No, of course not—anymore than it is wrong not to revise.”

-Revisions, by Isaac Asimov, in the collection Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: 20 Dynamic Essays by the Field’s Top Professionals.

 

“To suffer from gender dysphoria (G.D.), as Michelle Kosilek does, is to exist in a real state for which our only frame of reference may be science fiction. You inhabit a body that other people may regard as perfectly normal, even attractive. But it is not yours. That fact has always been utterly and unmistakably clear to you, just as the fact that she has put on someone else’s coat by accident is clear to a third-grader. This body has hair where it shouldn’t, or doesn’t where it should. Its hands and feet are not the right sizes, its hips and buttocks and neck are not the right shapes. Its odors are nauseating. To describe the anguish a G.D. patient suffers, psychiatrists will allude to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: For Michelle Kosilek, the gulf between human being and insect is precisely as wide as that between woman and man.”

Nathaniel Penn, in The New Republic, on convicted murderer Michelle Kosilek and her quest to have the state provide sexual-reassignment surgery. Read more from Penn in the Longreads Archive.

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Rodolfo Walsh and the Struggle for Argentina

Longreads Pick

Walsh was an artist, activist and investigative journalist whose book Operation Massacre is credited by many as the first “nonfiction novel,” having been published years before Truman Capote defined the term with In Cold Blood. Phelan explores Walsh’s life and impact on Argentina:

Having famously declared, “The typewriter is a weapon,” he had come to doubt that words alone were any real substitute for bullets in effecting change, and particularly the fine words of literary artists. “Beautiful bourgeois art!” he later wrote. “When you have people giving their lives, then literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover, but a cheap and common whore. There are times when every spectator is a coward, or a traitor.”

Source: Boston Review
Published: Oct 30, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,800 words)

“As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.

“‘You mean robots,’ said my best friend, Jeremy. ‘You want to play robots.’ I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.”

From Max Barry’s Machine Man, about an engineer in pursuit of physical perfection at the expense of life and (literal) limb. Read more on science fiction in the Longreads Archive, including a list of the Best Robot Fiction.

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Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members

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My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.

What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.

Our service is self-funded, built by four people (and many contributors) who have worked nights and weekends to create something we believe in.

Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.

Today, we’re announcing the Longreads Member Drive: A new way for you to support this service and give the entire #Longreads community a stake in our future.

You can sign up for as little as $3 a month or $30 a year or make a donation via PayPal.

Our goal is to reach 5,000 Longreads Members—right now we’re at just over 1,000 paid members, so if you are thinking about joining, now is the time to show your support.

We can get to our financial goal faster if you contribute more, and Top Contributors to Longreads will also get special recognition for their support.

Here’s what your Longreads Membership pays for:

  • Our site, plus weekly emails, and RSS & Twitter feeds that link directly to the original publishers’ work.
  • Open access to Longreads from your favorite reading apps.
  • Editors who recommend only the stories they truly love, from hundreds of publishers and writers across the web.
  • Rights to exclusive stories from publishers and writers.
  • Future expansion of our service—more details coming soon.

Our business model relies on both memberships and advertising, but the bulk of our support needs to come from you, the community.

Your support is critical for our survival.

It would be an honor for us to continue to keep this service running and keep building. Join us.

Mark Armstrong

Founder, Longreads

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Photo by Dorothy Brown; Special thanks to Walden Pond Books in Oakland.

Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members

Longreads Pick

My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.

What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.

Our service is self-funded, built by four people (and many contributors) who have worked nights and weekends to create something we believe in.

Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.

Today, we’re announcing the Longreads Member Drive: A new way for you to support this service and give the entire #Longreads community a stake in our future.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 13, 2013