Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. During rough weeks, I tend to refer back to a good #longread over and over. Here are four of the funniest around. Bookmark them, read them to your best friend on the phone, or save them for a particularly […]
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Posted inUncategorized
Playlist: 5 Podcast Episodes on the History of Hip-Hop
Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life, a frequent longreader, and a fan of podcasts. 1. How Hip-Hop Works (Stuff You Should Know, 52:13) In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck and Josh discuss the history of hip-hop, from The Sugar Hill Gang to the present. They add their own […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters, Story
First Chapters: ‘You Are One of Them,’ by Elliott Holt
Elliott Holt | The Penguin Press | 2013 | 12 minutes (2,854 words) Our latest First Chapter is from Elliott Holt’s novel, You Are One of Them. Thanks to Holt and The Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community. * * * Prologue In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones
[Fiction, National Magazine Award finalist, 2004] A girl is sent to stay with her cousin in Israel: “My cousin says that when I go home I should encourage my parents to keep kosher, that we should always say b’rachot before and after eating, that my mother and I should wear long skirts and long-sleeved shirts […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’
How Disney CEO Robert Iger engineered the deal, and whether George Lucas can really retire: “Iger understood Lucas’s concerns. ‘George said to me once that when he dies, it’s going to say “Star Wars creator George Lucas,” ’ he says. Still, Iger wanted to make sure that Lucas, who was used to controlling every aspect of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction
How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s: “Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. ‘Too vile, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh
The director on what’s wrong with Hollywood today, why you should never use his name in a pitch, and why he’s retiring from movies to focus on painting: “The worst development in filmmaking—particularly in the last five years—is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
4:52 on Christmas Morning
One year after a fatal fire in Stamford claims the lives of their children and her parents, a family tries to make sense of what happened: “He tells me that seeing children can sometimes make him feel better and other times worse. The last photo ever taken of the girls—of the three of them in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Human Centipede; Or, How to Move to New York
A depressed writer sends a letter to a popular advice columnist: “I couldn’t seem to go above the Twelfth Street location of my class, not to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York Public Library. I had no interest in going below Twelfth Street, either. I definitely couldn’t go to […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Film Studies
An excerpt from Thomson’s new book about the “story of the movies.” Thomson looks at some of the first novelists to work in film (Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner), as well as the early work of filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola: “‘Why should I do it?’ Francis Coppola asked his father, […]
