Search Results for: publishing

What's in a Home? A Reading List

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

New York, London, Detroit, Indianapolis: What does it look like to make a home? To build a home? To live in an office building, with a Craiglist roommate, with your best friend, in a condemned house, without any electricity, in a bankrupt city, in one of most expensive cities in the world, with mice, with your dog, with your parents? Is home a place or a state of mind or a manifesto?

1. “Getting Uncomfortable With Being Uncomfortable.” (Chloe Caldwell, Thought Catalog, November 2013)

One of my favorite essays from Caldwell’s essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray, about what made the worst (and cheapest!) apartment in Brooklyn a home.

2. “In London, ‘Guardians’ Live in Empty Office Buildings.” (Art Patnaude, Wall Street Journal, January 2014)

To deter squatters, companies hire ‘guardians,’ from young professionals to 50somethings, to babysit buildings slated for construction or destruction. In the zany world of London real estate, the rent is a dream and the waiting list is 2,000 strong.

3. “Why I Bought A House In Detroit for $500.” (Drew Philip, Buzzfeed)

Part personal narrative, part history lesson and part something like hope-in-action, I learned more about Detroit reading this essay than any other: “We want things to flourish, but we want them to have roots.”

4. “Places I’ve Lived: Sleepwalking, Mice Herding, and Craigslist.” (Katherine Coplen, The Billfold, January 2014)

I’ve praised PIL before and The Billfold in general, and this installment is no exception. The writer sings Paul Simon in the shower. Who can resist?

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Photo: Moyan Brenn

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Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Study of Hidden Animals

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I spent this morning exploring The Museum of Unnatural History in Washington D.C. Fueled by the likes of Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and Paul Simon, the museum is the storefront for 826DC, which holds workshops and tutors local kids in creative writing and reading. A venue combining my fascination with cryptozoology, contemporary literature, and teaching kids to write? Sounds positively mythical.

But I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, since middle school; I devoured Paul Zindel’s Loch and Reef of Death. In college, I read that essayist and poet Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary, said, “I hope there is an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen.  And I hope nobody ever sees it.” A week ago, Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” proposed to his fiancé at Loch Ness. And today I admired stencils of chupacabras and jars of unicorn burps. Cryptozoology reveals all the best and worst parts of human nature, and it makes for great storytelling.

1. “The Private Lives of the Cryptozoologists.” (Martin Connelly, The Morning News, March 2013)

Step into the cabinet of curiosities: The International Cryptozoology Museum is in Portland, Maine. It’s stuffed with artifacts ranging from a taxidermy Bigfoot to children’s drawings to blurry photos. It’s staffed by sweater vest-clad Loren Coleman, a foremost authority on cryptozoology and a wonderful tour guide.

2. “Bigfoot.” (Robert Sullivan, Open Spaces Magazine, 2012)

Sullivan interviews several of the men most invested in finding Sasquatch; these profiles read like entries from a delightful almanac. Though their methods range from field work to anthropological study, these men share a rivalry with each other and anger toward the scientific community’s contempt for them.

3. “Dr. Orbell’s Unlikely Quest.” (Eric Karlan, All About Birds, Winter 2004)

Cryptozoology isn’t only Bigfoot and Nessie. These scientists are also interested in animals thought to be extinct. Here, Eric Karlan delves into Dr. Geoffrey Orbell’s triumphant search for the Takahe—a bright, flightless, stocky bird native to New Zealand, supposedly gone forever–which took over 40 years of scrupulous research in the face of naysayers.

4. “Loch Ness Memoir.” (Tom Bissell, Virginia Quarterly Review, August 2006)

With weird, wonderful humor, skeptic Tom Bissell explores Loch Ness with two writer friends and his childhood love of Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

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Photo: JD Hancock

Stories About Unlikeable People

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Last Thursday, the NBC series “Community” returned with its creator and original showrunner, Dan Harmon, at the helm. I like “Community.” I do. It’s warm and dark and funny and self-referential. In spite of its absurdity—perhaps because of its absurdity—it is human; its characters are far from perfect. In this list, I wanted to include unlikeable people who are just that: people. People who do more than they thought they could do, who survive despite heartbreak and prejudice, who show us our truest selves and what we could be and, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “to care and not to care.”

1. “‘Community’ Two: Electric Boogaloo.” (Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker, January 2014)

The characters of “Community” are beloved, sure, but that doesn’t make them likable. Chevy Chase/Pierce Hawthorne was booted off the show for Harmon’s sake. His character was the worst human ever and probably the most human of all “Community” characters, but that’s neither here nor there. Nevertheless, the show is back, Jeff Winger is making ethically questionable decisions again, and we get to watch friendship avert the darkest timeline—hopefully.

2. “Enjoy the Show.” (Pixie, Rookie, December 2013)

A short story about falling in love and placeholders and Christmas gifts and when people you like do things you hate.

3. “Not Here To Make Friends.” (Roxane Gay, BuzzFeed, January 2014)

Gay ponders why it feels important to like the characters in the books we read, and why we feel revulsion to those who don’t immediately endear themselves. She approaches several novels written by women and explores what makes their characters unlikeable and therefore worthwhile: “Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.”

4. “I Used to Love the Bride.” (Anna Pulley, Salon, April 2013)

“You have no idea what kindnesses you’re capable of,” Anna writes, because Anna loves Ellie. They were going to get married, but it fell apart, and now Ellie’s engaged to someone else. Anna’s going to be in the wedding.

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Reading List: A Little Help From My Friends

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

One of my favorite things about the Longreads community is the dialogue among readers. I know each of the readers below personally. They are all exquisitely well-read. They all have different interests; they all read different publications, and I get so, so excited whenever they email or tweet me a piece they love. This week, we present Joss Whedon and Wikipedia and David Byrne and a cross-dressing not-so-Everyman from Wyoming. (I told you these were good.)

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1. “The Decline of Wikipedia.” (Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review, October 2013)

Recommended by Jordan. Can Wikipedia’s bureaucratic policies and shrinking volunteer team stay afloat?

2. “David Byrne: Will Work For Inspiration.” (David Byrne, Creative Time Reports, October 2013)

Recommended by Elena. What makes a city inspiring? Byrne critiques New York’s increasingly exclusionary nature and longs for a future where aspiring artists can afford to express themselves.

3. “In Wyoming, He’s Tough Enough to be a Sissy.” (John M. Glionna, LA Times, October 2013)

Recommended by Hännah. Sissy Goodwin, a cross-dressing cowboy, reclaimed a derogatory epithet, stands up to bullies, and inspires his students and family daily.

4. “Serenity Now! An Interview with Joss Whedon.” (Jim Kozak, InFocus, August 2005)

Recommended by Elizabeth, who sends me biweekly reading recommendations and introduced me to Firefly and Lost. It’s no surprise she passed along this vintage Whedon interview.

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Photo of David Byrne: Wikimedia Commons

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Reading List: When We Fall In Love

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

What does love look like and feel like and sound like to you? What have you read that changed the way you think about love? I’d like to know. Reblog your suggestions or comment or drop them in dietcoker.tumblr.com/ask.

1. “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made The Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year.” (Mark Harris, Vulture, October 2013)

Have you heard of Her? Spike Jonze’s latest is about a man who falls in love with his cell phone’s AI interface. Sound hokey? If you know anything about Jonze (and you will after reading this), then you know Her will be anything but.

2. “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School.” (Alex Morris, New York magazine, February 2006)

In this 2006 piece, privileged New York school kids navigate the lack of binary between friendship and romance.

3. “Love Love Love.” (Lizzy Acker, The Rumpus, September 2013)

So often Rumpus essays read like songs. This, thankfully, is no exception: “When you love someone, you will sacrifice everything for them, even if that means they never exist at all.”

4. “K in Love.” (Hannah Black, The New Inquiry, February 2013)

Cop goes undercover. Cop meets girl. Cop falls in love. Cop’s cover is blown. Cop sues his superiors. “Love is most private, most public, of all.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Reading List: Teenage Girls As Role Models

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

When I was a teenager (I know, plop me in a rocking chair and call me Grandma), I pored over my mom’s Seventeen magazines from the ’70s and ’80s and amassed a huge collection of my own. My 13-year-old style icon was Lindsay Lohan’s character in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (I’m proud of that phase), and later, Freaky Friday. I studiously went out to Best Buy one January after reading the music issue of a now-defunct teen magazine and chose CDs that radically altered my future tastes in music. I was on the edge of the “nostalgia in real time” Tavi Gevinson discusses in her latest Editor’s Letter (see below), but didn’t yet have access to the unmitigated internet archivism and alt-teen community. I think part of me is trying to reclaim my teen years as I listen to One Direction at my nine-to-five job, collage and self-consciously drink coffee with a notebook at hand. I’m learning to be a post-teen: all the insecurity of a twenty-something with the creative menace of an adolescent. I’m navigating a transitional space; my role models are teenage girls.

1. “Lorde Sounds Like Teen Spirit.” (Ann Powers, NPR, December 2013)

Her stripped synth beats kicked Miley out of the number one spot, but Lorde’s not finished yet. Ann Powers posits that she’s the Nirvana of pop music and examines the intersection of class and race with Lorde’s bohemian roots and youth experience.

2. “What ‘Forever’ Means to a Teenager: Editor’s Letter.” (Tavi Gevinson, Rookie, December 2013)

Tavi is one of the most self-aware humans on the planet, so it’s no surprise that her analysis of “Forever” (“the state, exclusive to those between the ages of 13 and 17, in which one feels both eternally invincible and permanently trapped”) is stunning and tender and meta.

3. “Time for Teen Fantasy Heroes to Grow Up.” (Laura C. Mallonee, The Millions, November 2013)

I’d also like to add Eliana’s plea: “petition to make young adult authors stop writing about girls whose lives change when they meet a boy.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.

1. “The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska.” (Gene Kwak, The Rumpus, June 2013)

I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.

2. “London’s Great Exodus.” (Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times, October 2013)

Middle-class London residents can’t afford to live in a city where property is currency and international moguls move in.

3. “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Elizabeth Minkel, The Millions, July 2013)

A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”

4. “Why I Am Leaving New York City.” (Mallory Ortberg The Toast, November 2013)

Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.

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Photo: Don O’Brien

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Reading List: Religion Gone Extreme

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Each of these stories this week is about a facet of religion gone extreme, and each is an example of why these pieces of longform journalism are important. There is detailed, professional storytelling, gripping subject matter, the opportunity to delve behind-the-scenes and try to get at the truth. It’s so easy to make assumptions about folks who don’t take their sons to the doctor, or the daughters of cult leaders, or the woman who studies the daughter of cult leaders, but good reporting forces us to reassess our assumptions.

1. “The Fall of the House of Moon.” (Mariah Blake, The New Republic, November 2013)

Though his espoused family values and extreme legalistic moralism attracted the Republican Party, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church enforced harmful sex rivals and fostered an environment of bitter sibling rivalry, drug abuse, and adultery. I’m in awe of Blake’s thorough investigation. I read most of this article to a friend of mine as she gaped.

2. “Why Did the Schaibles Let Their Children Die?” (Robert Huber, Philadelphia Magazine, October 2013)

Herbie and Cathy Schaible lost two young sons to treatable illnesses because their independent Baptist denomination does not believe in man-made medicine. They believe unacknowledged sin, not lack of medical treatment, caused their sons’ deaths.

3. “Caught Up In the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher.” (Susan J. Palmer, University of Toronto Press, 2001)

Cult-lover or sympathetic scientist? In courts of law, Susan Palmer is summoned to explicate her studies of New Religious Movements (NRMS). In this (delightful!) bear of an essay, she discusses the ethical dilemmas of investigating NRMs.

4. “A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?” (Tom Bartlett, Religion Dispatch Magazine, May 2012)

When your leader’s prophecies don’t come true, what do you do? Bartlett interviewed followers of doomsday herald Harold Camping. It’s a solid companion to Palmer’s essay about NRMs.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Most Difficult Age to Be When You Work in Hollywood

“The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it ‘The Gap.’ It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an excellent pension plan for writers who have more than seven consecutive years of service. When I finally hit 65, my WGA pension combined with Social Security means I should have a comfortable retirement.

“I was 46 when I had my last writing job in television. That meant I faced a 19 year Gap. As with other writers facing The Gap, my resume was a problem. I worked as a publishing executive before becoming a writer. I had a nice, solid resume that showed constant forward progress in my publishing career from financial analyst to business manager to circulation director. Which is great… except that progress ended in 1991 and I was applying in 2004.

“I sent off resumes and scored occasional interviews. But the interviewers mainly wanted to hear Hollywood stories and then said, ‘Thanks we’ll be in touch.’ I don’t blame them. I’d hire the person currently working in the magazine business instead of the guy who had a lot of amusing stories about comedy writing but hadn’t worked in a publishing environment for more than a decade.”

David Raether, a former sitcom writer who went from a $300,000 income to being homeless in Los Angeles, in a Priceonomics excerpt from his new book. Read more on being homeless.

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The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

Read the story

Photo: gpoo, Flickr