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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, New York Magazine, Deadspin, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker #fiction, plus a guest pick from author Aimee Phan.

A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris: 

In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits.

It definitely wasn’t appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn’t. Young men generally didn’t kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.

“An American (Working) in Paris.” — Rosecrans Baldwin, GQ

More Baldwin: “Writing Is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin.” The Millions, March 12, 2010

An American (Working) in Paris

Longreads Pick

A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris:

“In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits.

“It definitely wasn’t appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn’t. Young men generally didn’t kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 19, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,069 words)

Featured Longreader: Hugh Lilly, film critic and blogger. See his story picks from the New Yorker, Triple Canopy, GQ, plus more on his #longreads page.

[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath:

Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.

You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.

And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.

“Miss Lora.” — Junot Diaz, The New Yorker

See more #fiction #longreads

The Porn Critic

[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist: 

Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.

“The Porn Critic.” — Jonathan Lethem, The New Yorker

See more #fiction #longreads

As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ:

Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason ‘The Passage of Power‘ took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing ‘Master of the Senate.’ (He also thought he could finish ‘The Power Broker’ in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: ‘Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.’ Gottlieb added, ‘The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.’

“Robert Caro’s Big Dig.” — Charles McGrath, New York Times

See also: “Hatching Monsters: Lessons in Fame from P.T. Barnum’s Autobiography.” — Charles Baxter, Lapham’s Quarterly

Robert Caro’s Big Dig

Longreads Pick

As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ:

“Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason ‘The Passage of Power’ took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing ‘Master of the Senate.’ (He also thought he could finish ‘The Power Broker’ in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: ‘Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.’ Gottlieb added, ‘The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.'”

Published: Apr 14, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,915 words)

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

[National Magazine Awards finalist, 2012] A family’s difficult journey after discovering their youngest daughter has a brain tumor: 

He would remove the tumor, and we would find out what kind it was only after the pathology report. ‘But it looks like a teratoid,’ he said. I didn’t comprehend the word ‘teratoid,’ either—it was beyond my experience, belonging to the domain of the unimaginable and incomprehensible, the domain into which Dr. Tomita was now guiding us.

Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain.

“The Aquarium.” — Aleksandar Hemon, The New Yorker, June 13, 2011

See also: “A Family Learns the True Meaning of ‘in Sickness and in Health’.” Susan Baer, Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2012