Search Results for: new york review of books

But Never a Lovely So Real

Longreads Pick

On the life and career of writer Nelson Algren, one of the most prolific—yet underappreciated—writers of the last century:

“For my money, no book more elegantly describes the world of men and women whom the boom years were designed to pass by. In the decades after Golden Arm, the country obsessed over the behaviors and fates of women and men like Algren’s characters—and dedicated millions to altering them through wars on poverty and drugs—but in 1949 Algren was nearly alone in reminding the country that having an upper class requires having a lower class. For the skill and elegance of its prose, its compassion, and its prescience, I’d rank Golden Arm among the very best books written in the twentieth century. Before Algren’s fall from favor and the onset of his obscurity, many people agreed with that assessment. The book received glowing reviews from Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, even the New Yorker. Doubleday nominated it for the Pulitzer, and Hemingway, who had declared Algren the second-best American writer (after Faulkner) when Never Come Morning was published, wrote a promotional quote that went too far for Doubleday’s taste but pleased Algren so much he taped it to his fridge:

Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow every day, Algren comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer… Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful… Mr. Algren, boy, are you good.

Source: The Believer
Published: Jan 1, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,997 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: David Roth

David Roth is a co-founder of, writer for and editor at the sports website The Classical. He writes columns for Sports On Earth and Vice, co-writes The Daily Fix blog-column for the Wall Street Journal online, and writes for The Awl, GQ and other places when there’s time and when they’ll have him. He’s on Twitter, a lot, @david_j_roth.

I don’t keep track, although I probably should, but I’m fairly certain that I read more words in 2012 than I have in any of the previous years of my life. Some of this is because I think that’s the best thing to do when presented with words and most of it is because I’ve read so much stuff for The Classical, which I started with some other people a little over a year ago; a really healthy (or unhealthy, depending) percentage of the words I’ve read have been for that site, and I’ve read a lot of them as an editor. I suppose I should recuse myself from mentioning any of these pieces, and I’ll do so after acknowledging that the majority of my favorite new writers of 2012 were people I worked with on essays written for The Classical. That’s all the plugging-of-site I can do without getting embarrassed.

Best Crime Story

The New Yorker is The New Yorker, and generally seems to operating at a level a tick or two above virtually any other magazine. I am always amazed at the way it turns itself into an ultra-fatuous luxury publication, all drollery about shopping and famous people’s kids and whatever, for a couple of issues a year, but the depth of the talent on that invisible masthead, and the quality of the work that all those people do, is astonishing. The stories that have stuck with me the most from the magazine over the past year, and which are thus pretty much the best thing I read in a magazine over that period, both have to do with crime. One is Sarah Stillman’s piece on the unconscionably irresponsible misuse and exploitation of wildly unprepared (and very much in danger) informants by law enforcement. The other is Nadya Labi’s story on the bleak, wild life of Detroit hit-man Vincent Smothers. (The latter is, sadly, only available to subscribers in the magazine’s online archive.)

There are several larger critiques embedded within each piece—the drug war and its warping effect on a wide array of priorities, in both cases—all of which emerge organically and forcefully through the simple forward movement of the stories. There isn’t necessarily a dazzling sentence or an image or anything similarly flashy that still sizzles in the memory months or even days after reading, but the stories stick all the same. So, yeah: two great New Yorker stories, in a year that had a great many.

Best Political/Media/Political Media Story

There was, certainly, a great deal of good political writing done during the endless election season. I don’t remember any of it, and what I remember I don’t remember particularly fondly, but given the number of words written—all those anonymous strategists and undermine-y underlings speaking tartly off-the-record; the reverent profiles and irreverent takedowns; the trends and themes and memes and so on—it would be surprising if some long piece or two in there wasn’t especially good. Much better and more illuminating, at least to me, was Alex Pareene’s essay for The Baffler on the pervasive and mostly pernicious influence of the repellent and vexingly influential Politico seemed to distill all the things that were infuriating, facile and otherwise wrong about the way we read the election, day by day. It was also a lot of fun to read. Which, about that:

Best Stylistic Trend

There’s no fixed way to write anything, of course. There’s a way that some types of pieces generally sound—a profile reads like this, a review reads like that—and many magazines have a house intonation and perspective, if not necessarily a house style. What I’ve enjoyed most about the essays I’ve most enjoyed over the last year, though, is the way in which they reflect an emerging style of colloquial, unpretentious, deceptively erudite writing that’s flourishing on the web. This is there in Pareene’s essay on Politico or John Lanchester’s consideration (it’s adapted from a speech) of Karl Marx at 193 years of age in the London Review of Books. It’s also in Adrian Chen’s dazzling piece for Gawker on Reddit, its troll culture and the man who was its foremost embodiment, or in the writing of Maria Bustillos at The Awl—start with her thumbnail history of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty and its weird afterlife, or on the deathless and wearying discursive concern with irony.

Of those, only the latter two live entirely on the web. They’re not about similar things, or written for similar publications or audiences, or really even written in ways that outwardly have much in common. But there’s an energy and vitality to all of them, a sense that the people writing respect their obligation to tell the stories they’ve chosen, but also that they’re intensely into those stories. There are some good jokes and striking sentences and a great deal of elegant (or infuriating) and illusion-free (or opinionated) thought in all of them, but there is not show-offery or grandiosity or stuffiness. They’re stories told and arguments made by people who seem impassioned and informed, and told in the voices—different-sounding, as they should be—of people alive in and engaged with the world and the ideas loose in it, and conversant with both in the fast, open way of the web. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good writing.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Awl and Los Angeles Review of Books was featured on Longreads this year.


In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other.

I’ve enjoyed a number of essays from The American Conservative this year, but my favorite may have been Mike Lofgren’s “Revolt Of The Rich”. It’s a blistering reproof of our moneyed classes and their disconnect from the historic aspirations of our country.

The tagline of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, is “Biased and Balanced.” An earlier incarnation of the Dish bore another, equally good: “Of No Party Or Clique.” I consider Sullivan an indispensable companion, not least because his views so often diverge from my own. I can’t choose just one entry from his heady, rapid-fire mix of opinion, reporting, photographs, jokes, poems, ideas. But Sullivan’s great heart, his compassion and intellect, are a salutary test of my own convictions most every day.

The scholar Aaron Bady exposes the fatal weaknesses in the arguments of those promoting “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, in a resoundingly persuasive and passionate essay in Inside Higher Ed. Absolutely crucial reading for anyone remotely interested in the academy.

Mike Konczal, known on Twitter as @rortybomb, led a breathtaking debate on debt relief at the Boston Review that blew my wiglet sky-high. In the lead essay, Konczal makes an ironclad case that a strong social safety net, including debt relief, is crucial to the economic health of the country. Splendid, limpidly clear, beautifully reasoned.

It’s scarcely too much to say that The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson single-handedly rescued my sanity from the maelstrom of this year’s election. I pretty much hop on Twitter and start banging out exclamation points every time she posts, but her recent column on the public confrontation of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by a gay Princeton University student will serve as well as any to demonstrate her unwavering clear-mindedness, her sensitivity, fairness and brilliance.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Emily M. Keeler

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Emily M. Keeler is a writer and the founding editor of Little Brother Magazine.


Best Pair of Essays on Loneliness

Emily Cooke, “The Lonely Ones” – The New Inquiry

Susan Sontag is a force that continues to be reckoned with, and the publication of her second volume of journals this year occasioned this incredible piece. I think I’ve re-read this essay three or four times now, and I just keep coming back for more.

Sonya Chung, “On Loneliness” – The Millions

Tacking a different walk down the same path, Chung looks to DFW’s adage about being a fucking human being and unpacks it until all that’s left is that intense feeling of being alone, but together. The problems of how to be alone and how to be with others are not new, but at the same time both Chung and Cooke cast reassuring lights onto this well worn and sort of depressing path.

Would’ve been a contender in this category, but for it being six years too early: Sheila Heti’s 2006 Trampoline Hall talk, “Why Go Out.”


Best Essay on the Museum of Innocence

Elif Batuman, “Pamuk’s Museum” – London Review of Books

Batuman has a bit of a magic touch in her ability to put you right on the scene, and she generously seems to fill your head with her knowledge and enthusiasm beforehand. For a diary entry, it’s surprising how quickly Batuman comes to seem just slightly out of frame, revealing instead the mysterious world of Orhan Pamuk’s strange, physically embodied and built literature.


Best Pair of Bookish Essays on Pornography

Josh Lambert, “James Deen vs. the Nebbishes” – Los Angeles Review of Books

It seems as though 2012 could’ve been called the year of James Deen. The charming porn star received so much media attention, and was the cause of so much hand-wringing this year, that for a time it seemed like he and his widely beloved penis were all anyone could talk about. Or maybe that was just my particular Twitter feed. Anyhow, this LARB piece was my favorite of the ones I read about Deen.

Avi Steinberg, “Checking Out” – The Paris Review Daily

Steinberg is a perpetual favorite of mine, in part because of the offbeat and unexamined subjects he chooses to write about, but mostly because of his thoughtful and good humored sensibility. On the topic of the relationships between librarians and pornography, he is simply without parallel. Who else could trace pretty much everything great in this world back to pornos? From who else would I be able to take a question like “What was the relationship between these library fuckers and what I had been reading?” completely on its face?

Best Profile of Jay-Z

Zadie Smith, “The House that Hova Built” – New York Times T Magazine

Duh. One of Smith’s many gifts is her ear, and it was thrilling to see one of my favorite language manipulators enraptured fannishly before another dextrous word slinger.


Most Likely To Lead You Down a Penn and Teller YouTube Rabbit Hole

Chris Jones, “The Honor System” – Esquire

Seriously, this Chris Jones story radically altered the texture of my life; for weeks afterward I became obsessed by magic. I watched at least one episode of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us per night, but usually more than one. I sacrificed a thing I tend to hold pretty sacred (my sleep) in order to feed a hunger I haven’t felt since I was child. This story made me ravenous for real magic, for showmanship, for being told the right kind of lies. The key to the joy of this story is, I think, in how Jones refuses to give away any of his or Teller’s tricks and instead zeroes in on the delight that the magician imparts on his audience—how pleasurable it is to revel in our own foolishness, for a change, to feel that ticklish sense of wonder.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

Featured: Eric Steingold’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, plus more.

The killing of three sisters shocks a country where the past decade has seen a rise in violence toward women: 

Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were the size of the United States, this would add up to 110,000 women murdered in a decade. And conditions are only worsening with the passage of time. In 2000, 213 women met violent deaths in Guatemala, compared to 720 in 2009 and 675 in 2010. Worse still, only an estimated 2 percent of these cases have received legal action. The victims are mostly the ‘nobodies’ of society, poor women, in many cases indigenous, from families lacking resources and education. Their bodies are often found mutilated, with indications of rape. Investigations are routinely botched, if they’re even pursued. ‘She was a prostitute,’ a police investigator might say if the victim has a belly-button ring or is wearing a miniskirt. The investigation is closed before being opened.

“Letter from Guatemala.” — Aaron Shulman, Los Angeles Review of Books

See also: “A Murder Foretold: Unravelling the Ultimate Political Conspiracy.” — David Grann, The New Yorker March 28, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Inquiry, The London Review of Books, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Nicholas Jackson.

“The most powerful newspaper in Great Britain.” A history of the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” as a former prime minister said dismissively. Its daily readership is now four and a half million, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic, with 52 million unique visitors per month: 

On January 25th, the model Kate Moss went to some parties in Paris. The next morning’s Mail read, ‘The Croydon beauty had very obvious crow’s feet and lines beneath her eyes as well as blemished skin from years of smoking and drinking.’ Another journalist, interviewing her that day, asked why she thought the Mail was so focussed on her aging.

‘I don’t know. ’Cause it’s the Daily Mail ?’ Moss replied. ‘They just get on everyone’s tits, don’t they?’

“Mail Supremacy.” — Lauren Collins, New Yorker

See also: “Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead.” — Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 9 2011

Another perspective on the city’s struggles, and the attempts to revive it:

A recent New York Times article lauded Detroit as a ‘Midwestern Tribeca’ of socially aware folk; but off of its bustling main drag, Corktown is surrounded by Detroit’s burned-out industrial structures and houses, weedy lots, and subsidized housing. For every white entrepreneur in an inner-city neighborhood, a score of young, college-educated kids live in dense, hip suburbs like Royal Oak and Ferndale. The Detroit perceived by artists like Catie and Marianne — often from privileged, suburban backgrounds — is radically different from the city visible to EMS workers. I have doubts about the city’s oft-vaunted creative scene, which I was part of for much of the year: to what extent were we dancing to electro-pop while Detroit burned?

“Letter from Detroit.” — Ingrid Norton, Los Angeles Review of Books

See more #longreads from the Los Angeles Review of Books

Before Wonder Woman there was Miss Fury, the first female superhero, introduced in 1941:

Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well as for superhero comic readership, would have depended more on the influence and perspective of actual women.

“Heroine Chic.” — Evie Nagy, Los Angeles Review of Books

See also: “Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself.” — Dan Kois, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 27, 2011