Search Results for: movies

The Spectacle of Crime: On Detectives, Mysteries, and Dead Girls

Photo: Carla216

When I was little, mystery books were my favorite. I read the Boxcar Childrenthe Bobbsey Twins and the Happy Hollisters. In school, there was Cam Jansen, Sammy Keyes and Harriet the Spy. When I visited my grandparents, I read my mom’s childhood books: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden. My mom gives my grandfather the latest Mary Higgins Clark release every Christmas.

In high school and college I abandoned mystery novels and turned to spooky TV shows instead. My family was “Monk”-obsessed; when “Monk” ended, we watched “Psych.” I threw myself into “Lost” during finals and “Criminal Minds” on school breaks. Post-college, I binged “Fringe,” “The X-Files,” “The Killing,” “The Fall,” “Miss Fisher’s Mysteries”—the list goes on. Now that I work in a bookstore, I’ve started to read mystery novels again. To celebrate, here’s a reading list about fictional detectives and the authors who mastermind their literary crime-solving, as well as real-life detectives searching for the truth. Read more…

On Barbs and Demogorgons: A Stranger Things Reading List

In a summer marked by record levels of political angst, Netflix show Stranger Things accomplished an impressive feat. It tells a story of such murky ideological leanings that everyone — from the tinfoil hatters to the vegan socialists — just had to surrender to its expertly executed ’80s pastiche and satisfying emotional pull. (And, sure, all those adorable kid actors.)

Whether you’re still high on the show’s well-calculated nostalgia or already experiencing symptoms of Upside Down withdrawal, here’s a two-part selection of stories to keep you going: from deep dives into the design of the show’s title sequence to a sprawling interview with its creators. See you on the other side!

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Colson Whitehead: An Appreciation

Colson Whitehead
Photo by Madeline Whitehead

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates.

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I was skipping around Google the other day and was reminded of a piece by Colson Whitehead called “How To Write.” You may have read it when it came out in 2012 and laughed and, if you did, I can assure you that if you reread it now you will laugh again. It starts with the observation that the “art of writing can be reduced to a few simple rules” and kicks off with this one:

Whitehead1

It is like putting your broken unicorn out there, isn’t it? Anyway, Whitehead’s new novel The Underground Railroad is coming out Sept. 13, and I’ve been counting down to it.

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In Search of Lost Me Time

Longreads Pick

Even though he fantasized about a night out of town without his family, the childless time drinking with friends and watching movies isn’t as satisfying as Larsen imagined. Sometimes it’s comforting to know that the fantasy of solitude can’t live up to the reality of your family life.

Published: May 31, 2016
Length: 6 minutes (1,518 words)

This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Jane Demuth | Longreads | May 2016 | 11 minutes (2,632 words)

I don’t panic on the afternoon in August 2012 that my sister calls and tells me that our mother has gone insane and her boyfriend has rushed her to the ER. For the full four-week duration of her hospital stay, I don’t feel much of anything for her. Instead, driving to the hospital that first afternoon, I tell myself to keep my ears open in case she slips and says something important and true.

Three months before, she was diagnosed; two months before, she began treatment. Breast cancer, ductal carcinoma in situ, stage two, one sentinel lymph node affected, ER/PR/HER2 negative, BRCA gene double negative. I advised her on what to tell her doctor about her family history so Medicare would pay for the genetic test. She’s prescribed a lumpectomy followed by six months of chemo followed by radiation.

She tells me these things. She shares these details with me, the same way she did twelve years ago when she had an abnormal Pap result, compelling me to consider a part of her body I’m even more reluctant to think about than her breasts. She sends me her path lab reports, as though I were the parent and she was sending me her report cards to hang on the refrigerator. I don’t know how to ask her to stop. I understand all of these details. I analyze cancer data for a living in collaboration with some of the foremost epidemiologists in the world. I’ve been at my job for 13 years. I’ve long since finished my work on endometrial and ovarian cancer, and I’m now branching out from the cervical cancer projects that were my sole focus for almost a decade; breast cancer has become my new specialty. My mother has had a knack for developing personal connections with the cancers that I study.

And for reasons that have never been clear to me, my company has always assigned me to the lady cancers. The irony in this has been coming in waves which are about to break on my shores—my birth certificate describes me as male, and up to this point I have grudgingly embodied that identity as well as I could. Less than a year after my mother’s hospitalization, though, in June of 2013, I’ll have begun my physical transition to female, something I’ve secretly wanted to do since early childhood, long before I could articulate it. Read more…

Beautiful Nowheres: ‘No Man’s Sky’ and the 500th Anniversary of ‘Utopia’

Image courtesy of Hello Games / No Man's Sky

June 21, 2016, is one of the most anticipated dates in recent gaming history: it’s the day when No Man’s Sky, a galaxy-exploration game in the works since 2013, is finally released in the US.* Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about the game’s genesis in the New Yorker last year; the game will allow players (at least those fortunate enough to be immortal) to visit no fewer than 18 quintillion planets, each with its own distinct biomes and landscapes. I haven’t touched a console in almost two decades, yet the promise of endless virtual worlds to wander around — taking flânerie to the cosmic level, as it were — sounds incredibly seductive.

In its own way, this virtual cosmos — unexplored, gorgeously designed, and effectively empty (its scope ensures you could avoid other players forever, if you so wished) — is yet another iteration of our contemporary drive to project real-world longings onto virtual spaces. Second Life, the shared, multiplayer virtual universe, has capitalized on similar desires (though with a more obvious layer of social interactivity), and shows no signs of slowing down well into its second decade.

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

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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…

One Man’s Quest For His Vinyl and His Past

Eric Spitznagel | Old Records Never Die: One Man’s Quest for His Vinyl and His Past | Plume | April 2016 | 8 minutes (2,029 words)

Motivated by a potent mix of seller’s regret and old-dude nostalgia, a journalist sets off in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—Eric Spitznagel wants the exact records he owned and sold. It’s a premise that musician Jeff Tweedy describes as “not… entirely insane” in his preface to the book.  Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Old Records Never Die. You decide.  Read more…

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

Two sisters in their traditional, everyday, Lancaster County Amish attire. Photo: Tessa Smucker

Kelsey Osgood | Atlas Obscura | March 2016 | 28 minutes (7,014 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Kelsey Osgood, and is co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Author’s Note: “Alex” and “Rebecca” are not the real names of two people interviewed. They felt strongly that they should not be identified by name out of respect for their faith’s general belief in the body above the individual.

The road that runs through the main village of Berlin, Ohio, only about 90 minutes south of Cleveland, is called “Amish Country Byway” for its unusual number of non-automotive travelers and it’s true that driving down it, you’ll have to slow down for the horse-drawn buggies that clog up the right lane. But those seeking the “real” Amish experience in downtown Berlin might be disappointed. It’s more Disney than devout: a playground for tourists full of ersatz Amish “schnuck” (Pennsylvania Dutch for “cute”) stores selling woven baskets and postcards of bucolic farm scenes.

You only see the true Holmes County, which is home to the largest population of Amish-Mennonites in the world, when you turn off Route 62 and venture into the rolling green hills interrupted periodically by tiny towns with names like Charm and Big Prairie. You’ll likely lose service on your cell phone just as the manure smell starts to permeate the air. On my visit this past summer, I saw Amish people–groups of children sporting round straw hats, the young women in their distinctive long dresses–spilling out of family barns, where church services are held, in the distance. The Amish don’t have any spiritual attachment to a geographical location, the way Jews have to Jerusalem or Mormons to Salt Lake City; this spot, along with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is probably the closest they come to an idea of God’s Country. Read more…

Eight Stories About #HB2 and Its Ramifications on the Transgender Community

I have tried to put together this reading list on the passage of House Bill 2 in North Carolina from a dozen different angles, and all I can come up with is this past week was awful on every conceivable level. I want to believe people are inherently good. If you live outside the United States or aren’t attuned to current events, you may not be familiar with HB2 or its ramifications for the transgender community. I hope the following eight stories will be of use to you, to educate my cisgender readers and provide support and solidarity to my transgender siblings. You are not alone.

1. Autostraddle has the most incisive scoop, as usual: “With the Passing of HB2, North Carolina Signs Hate Into Law.”

The author, Alaina Monts, is a non-binary student at the University of North Carolina. My favorite part of their coverage is the emphasis on the queer and POC activists dedicated to staying in North Carolina and doing the hard work of fighting these oppressive laws, rather than the proponents of the #WeAreNotThis hashtag, who hastened to distance themselves from their home state’s history of oppression. Read more…