Search Results for: new yorker

A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads

Longreads Pick

A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 30, 2013
Length: 3 minutes (996 words)

Working Girl

Longreads Pick

Remembering poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who became a literary sensation during the first half of the 20th century:

“Millay’s reach was remarkable, particularly in an age before television. Biographer Nancy Milford recounts how, after winning the Pulitzer, Millay started traveling around the country giving readings to packed auditoriums, and for her audiences, whatever line may have existed between her life and her art was completely obscured by these performances. Onstage she appeared an astonishing creature, a real live New Yorker and honest-to-god poetess who looked and played the part: loose velvet robes dwarfed her pale, tiny frame, making her resonant voice with its clipped consonants and plummy vowels seem all the more dramatic in comparison. By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.”

Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,347 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Slate, Gizmodo, The Awl, Two Serious Ladies, Time, fiction from The New Yorker, and a guest pick by Anna Hiatt.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” George Saunders, The New Yorker (Oct. 2012)

Quote found by Charlie Stadtlander

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New Yorker, Esquire, Miami New Times, Columbia Magazine, New York magazine, and a guest pick by Greg Spielberg. 

Sell Out: Part Two

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] From Simon Rich’s serialized novella for The New Yorker: A pickler strikes out on his own:

“Simon refills his coffee vat and smirks.

“‘Who’s going to hire you? You’ve got no education, no experience, no skills.’

“‘Simon,’ Claire says. ‘That’s rude.’

“‘It’s not rude,’ he says. ‘It’s realistic. I mean, for God’s sake, Hersch, you barely even know how to speak English.’

“My face begins suddenly to burn. It is painful to hear my great-great-grandson say these things. I know I am not so clever. I did not go to kindergarten like a fancy man. But I have always worked my best. I am not as worthless as he says.”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 30, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: Let's Dance, by Sasha Frere-Jones

image

For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re thrilled to share “Let’s Dance,” Sasha Frere-Jones‘s 2010 New Yorker profile of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.

Frere-Jones writes: 

“When you begin writing a profile, your first worry is access. Does the subject talk in soundbites? Will he or she let you see anything that hasn’t been rehearsed? (‘Accidental’ meetings with famous friends, fans showing up en masse at coffee shops, etc.) Will you just get an hour in the hotel lobby? Will the publicist sit by your elbow as you talk for what ends up being less than an hour?

“James Murphy, as a subject, presented none of these problems. Over the course of eighteen months, he opened his home and his studio and his rehearsal space to me. The profile could have been almost any length. His monologue, in Laurel Canyon, on Louis CK’s genius deserved a page-long block quote, and his stories about his family in New Jersey could have made for a complete, stand-alone piece. But what I wanted to focus on in The New Yorker piece was how functionally, logistically independent Murphy is—he can really execute any single part of the record-making process, from conception to fabrication of widgets. And he isn’t just obsessive about detail but obsessive first about locating the important details, and then obsessive about attending to them thoroughly. I’ve spent my life playing with and observing musicians, and I’ve never seen a bandleader make so many small, ongoing demands of a band without alienating anyone. I did not expect all the hugging.

Read an excerpt here.

p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Illustration by Sarah Merlin

Longreads Member Exclusive: Let’s Dance

Longreads Pick

For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re thrilled to share “Let’s Dance,” Sasha Frere-Jones‘s 2010 New Yorker profile of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.

Frere-Jones writes: 

“When you begin writing a profile, your first worry is access. Does the subject talk in soundbites? Will he or she let you see anything that hasn’t been rehearsed? (‘Accidental’ meetings with famous friends, fans showing up en masse at coffee shops, etc.) Will you just get an hour in the hotel lobby? Will the publicist sit by your elbow as you talk for what ends up being less than an hour?

“James Murphy, as a subject, presented none of these problems. Over the course of eighteen months, he opened his home and his studio and his rehearsal space to me. The profile could have been almost any length. His monologue, in Laurel Canyon, on Louis CK’s genius deserved a page-long block quote, and his stories about his family in New Jersey could have made for a complete, stand-alone piece. But what I wanted to focus on in The New Yorker piece was how functionally, logistically independent Murphy is—he can really execute any single part of the record-making process, from conception to fabrication of widgets. And he isn’t just obsessive about detail but obsessive first about locating the important details, and then obsessive about attending to them thoroughly. I’ve spent my life playing with and observing musicians, and I’ve never seen a bandleader make so many small, ongoing demands of a band without alienating anyone. I did not expect all the hugging.

Read an excerpt here.

You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 10, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,103 words)

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)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Los Angeles Magazine, Smithsonian, fiction from The American Scholar and a guest pick from Marissa Evans.