Search Results for: publishing

How Covid Is Decimating British Music Journalism

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Few countries have a more robust culture of music journalism than England. “Music is such an inescapable part of the British cultural landscape,” journalist Pat Long writes in the book about the famous music weekly NME, “that it’s strange to think of a time when it wasn’t ghettoised in a weekly newspaper, when families didn’t spend their summer attending well-provisioned inter-generational rock festivals, when parents didn’t swap music with their teenage children.” Imagination is no longer necessary. British listeners have no concerts to attend. Advertisers have no events to sell. And with few stores open to sell physical issues of magazines, Covid-19 is threatening UK music publications, from Uncut to Metal Hammer, the way it has so many communities and business. For The Guardian, Laura Snapes writes about how British music publications are struggling during the pandemic, how they are working together, and what it might take to survive.

Music magazines have “been on the edge of sustainability” for a long time, says Douglas McCabe, of the media research group Enders Analysis. Print advertising has dwindled. There are plentiful free online publications. Key titles have closed: in 2018, NME axed its 66-year print incarnation (the brand survives online). Every year brings headlines about shrinking sales figures.

But many British music magazine editors and publishers say they were thriving in straitened times, at least before the pandemic. “The huge drop-off that most magazines experienced in the early 2010s has, relatively speaking, flattened out for many brands,” says the editor of Metal Hammer, Merlin Alderslade. “Most of our issues in 2019 were actually up year on year.”

Paul Geoghegan, the editor of global music magazine Songlines and managing director of Mark Allen Group music publications including Gramophone and Jazzwise, said the brand’s titles were sustainable before March. Stuart Williams, the publisher at Future Publishing – home to publications including Classic Rock and Metal Hammer – said its 13 music titles were profitable in April 2020, “when half the shops in the UK were closed and the population was barely allowed out.”

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How to Pitch Personal Essays to Longreads: An Updated Guide

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This post is no longer current. Please check out our submission guidelines.


Are you interested in publishing essays on Longreads? It’s important that you read these new submissions guidelines before pitching.

Recently we’ve undergone some budget cuts due to the Coronavirus pandemic and some other changes. As a result, we’re publishing fewer pieces than we used to, and selecting most of those based on whether they fit within a few specific series we’ve developed. While there will still very occasionally be room for some more general, broader interest pieces, we’ll be mainly focusing on the following series for now:

1. Life in the Time of Covid

— In recent months, a new reality has been foisted upon us. Coronavirus has changed our home lives, our work lives, our family lives. These essays will look at the virus’ impact on the way we spend our time now, and its effect on our relationships with friends, family, partners, co-workers, and others. Read more…

The Lie of ‘One Last Time’ with My Ex

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Ella Dawson | Longreads | May 2020 | 15 minutes (3,819 words)

Henry and I had break-up sex on at least four different occasions, maybe more. I wanted to believe it was because we loved each other that much, when really I was unwilling to read the writing on the wall. It took me years to pry my fingers from his pant-leg and let go of our relationship. In fits of pique I wondered if he was the one who got away, less of a daydream than a deep anxiety that I’d bump into him decades later and love him just as much as I did the day we decided it was the last time. And the next time we decided it was the last time. And the time after that.

We technically broke up in May of 2014 at my college graduation only to get back together six days later when we decided we could overcome the hundreds of miles between Bakersfield and Berkeley. He told me his parents offered to pay for half of the gas required to drive up to see me — it was only when the summer was over that I learned he’d lied and paid for everything himself. We were smart kids who knew long-distance was doomed, but there are some lessons you need to learn for yourself lest you spend the rest of your life wondering if you would have been the exception. We weren’t. It only took us another two months of longing and conflict avoidance to break up again in the kitchen of his parent’s home.

The breakup was not mutual. I scream-cried like someone had died. When I stalked off to sob in the guest room, I expected him to follow me and take it back. Instead he folded his hands together on the kitchen table and clenched them tight, his willpower miraculously holding firm. This turn of events was as surreal as it was humiliating: I sat on the floor and stared at the portraits of his relatives above the heavy antique bed, the extended family I assumed would be mine someday. Two months wasn’t long enough to really try, was it? Two months was summer camp. It wasn’t even a full season. How had he already decided this wasn’t possible? Was I just not good enough to fight for?

We broke up for all the same reasons college sweethearts break up: our lives were taking us in separate directions, and long-distance was as shitty as everyone warned us it would be. I was graduating. Henry, two years younger, was moving to Asia for his junior year, for an ambitious study-abroad program and didn’t want to be the guy always on his phone. I was reeling with post-grad identity issues and undiagnosed anxiety and depression, and I often called him crying while my roommate scowled outside my bedroom. Once when my laptop stopped working, I had a full tilt panic attack over FaceTime as he helplessly Googled Apple store locations near my apartment. Simply put, I was a disaster and we were young. It was too much for him to handle and too much for me to understand, and I took our generic problems personally instead of seeing our breakup as the natural progression of events. All I could believe at age 22 was that he’d given up on our future together, and it must mean I wasn’t worth it after all.
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Five Longreads Stories Selected for 2020 Editions of the ‘Best American’ Series

It’s always a thrill when an essay or article we’ve published is selected for publication in one of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s annual, venerated The Best American Series anthologies.

This year Longreads is proud to announce that no fewer than five pieces we published in 2019 will be published in four of the books.

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American Tests

Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words)

I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York City’s alternate side rules? Or that once, after a bottomless brunch, I’d sung loudly on the subway, not caring that someone shouted the suggestion I “stick to shower singing”? My appointment was for noon, and now it was 6 p.m. I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hunger had receded, replaced with anxiety and a thudding headache. All afternoon I’d rocked myself for comfort as people streamed in and out of the interview rooms.

It was 2012 and immigration didn’t feel as fraught as it presently does, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. Getting a new appointment would take four to six months.

Finally, I was moved to a small cubicle with overstuffed binders covering every square inch, including the extra seats. Each one held the dense, intricate details of human migrant history — bloody wars, financial catastrophes, the incurable optimism of new beginnings. Behind the desk sat an overburdened federal worker. She was petite like me, but her caramel skin color contrasted my darker one, a hue my mother once described as the green-black color of boiled cowpea leaves.

“I’m sorry for the wait,” the woman told me. “We misplaced your file.”

I was about to take my citizenship exam.
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This Week in Books: Several Nihilistic Frenchmen

Portrait of the French writer Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). (Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I feel like most of my reading this past week was preoccupied by power: who has it, who can get it, and what it looks like. The overall arc of the revelation seems to be that no matter how acutely we are aware of the answers to the first and second questions (1. the rich; 2. the rich), the answer to the third can still feel surprising: what power looks like, in the end, is nothing more or less than the ability to keep buying food at jacked up prices during a food shortage. “Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops,” writes Camus in The Plague. “The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing.” “We’re all in this together” becomes a pipe dream for Camus in The Plague almost as quickly as it did for us in 2020; it turns out maintaining normalcy during a crisis is the ultimate show of elite strength — even, or especially, at the expense of the rest of us. In that vein, I found Samuel Rutter’s manual for living a 19th-century decadent lifestyle, as described in the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans, to be particularly bonkers and provoking; a perfect covid read. After all, a morose eccentric living alone in the countryside and indulging in simple pleasures may feel relatably disheveled and melancholy during quarantine, but of course by the very fact that he can afford not to work, we know he must be quite rich. Only the rich get to drop out of society with everyman style. Sooner or later, for most of us, the other shoe will drop.

Power didn’t only come up this week in reviews of books by dour Frenchmen, either! It’s there in Maisy Card’s description of the way she felt, while conducting archival research for her debut novel, when she read accounts of enslaved women and girls who found ways to rebel against servitude and sexual violence (“They were victims of course, but it was also comforting to know that, as brutalized as they were, many of them still found the strength to disobey”); it’s there in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, which explores the twisting violence enacted by “federal language” against Native people during the Termination era, a time when the government tried to eliminate tribal existence through bureaucracy and mandates; and of course it’s the constant thread woven through a New Yorker review of the latest book by Mike Davis, whose City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear seemed to presage the Rodney King Riots and the Woolsey Fire respectively, and whose The Monster at Our Door, about the potential for an avian flu pandemic, apparently scared him so badly that he couldn’t keep a copy in his house. Davis’ latest, the memoir-ish Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, is intended as a guide for young radicals, although its lessons are somewhat crushingly framed as a tutorial on failure: “I realized eight years ago… that the experience of that generation had to be recovered, and recovered in a way that would provide lessons and balance sheets to the current generation of activists… To understand what people fought for and what strategies they used and why, at the end of the day, we were defeated in every important sense.”

The fact that nearly every article in the newsletter this week seems to be about power could of course just be my own preoccupations at work, but I also can’t shake this feeling that a leaf has been turned, and we are on a crash course with something brand new — or perhaps very, very old. So much of what has happened lately has been completely unfathomable (even at the same time that it was totally predictable, if that makes any sense at all) but I simply can’t wrap my head around this thing where people are forced to go back to work when the virus is still widely circulating and untraced. This seems untenable? I know Americans are a surprisingly meek people when it comes to doing the bidding of our bosses, but it seems like a bridge too far, even for us.

I think something’s going to happen to stop it. Or maybe I just hope it does.

1. “A Dandy’s Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation” by Samuel Rutter, The Paris Review

Samuel Rutter scours Joris-Karl Huysmans’ classic of French decadent literature Against Nature for advice on how to live the way we must now — that is, like we are eccentric recluses “[taking] pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude.”

2. “Pointing the Finger” by Jacqueline Rose, The London Review of Books

Jacqueline Rose revisits Camus’ The Plague and re-examines old arguments about whether it is lax in assigning blame. “Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him.”

3. “Artforum” by César Aira, Lit Hub

An excerpt from César Aira’s Artforum. And yes, the entire excerpt is about how one man’s copy of Artforum magazine has gotten very, very wet.

4. “Holy Simplicity: On Louise Erdrich’s ‘The Night Watchman’” by Thomas J. Millay, The Los Angeles Review of Books

This review of Louise Erdrich’s latest novel The Night Watchman situates the book in its historical context of the Termination era, when the federal government attempted to erase Native identity and nationhood by “giving” Native Americans citizenship. Reviewer Thomas J. Millay writes that the novel draws a purposeful contrast between the plainspoken language of the story’s protagonists — members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa or Ojibwe Indians — and the deceitful speech of the federal government. “Federal language twists and turns, appearing good on its surface but in fact initiating great evil.”


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5. “Maisy Card: ‘There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.’” by Mickie Meinhardt, Guernica

Mickie Meinhardt interviews Maisy Card about her novel These Ghost Are Family, which is based on 12 years of archival research about her family’s history in Jamaica and the legacy of slavery. “I can easily make a character’s anger my own, and I’ll find myself walking around with those feelings after working on the book, as if I forgot that I was writing about fictional people.”

6. “We’re All Living in the Bathroom Now” by Annabel Paulsen, Electric Literature

This reflection on what Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom (an incredible novella about a man who lives in his bathroom and refuses to ever leave it) can teach us about quarantine is, you may have noticed, the THIRD time a sort of nihilistic Frenchman has appeared in the reading list this week. Which is pretty remarkable considering I haven’t even mentioned the Houellebecq thing.

7. “Mike Davis in the Age of Catastrophe” by Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker

Dana Goodyear reviews Mike Davis’ movement history Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties and asks him, the oracle of L.A. apocalypse, what to worry about next. The answer is less than reassuring for Angelenos, I assume: “Davis kept worrying it over, the alternative ending that might reorder everything again. ‘What if the big one happened now?’ he said. I’ve already plundered my earthquake kits for face masks and hand sanitizer. And now Davis has said my midnight fear out loud.”

8. “The Stages of Not Going on T” by Danny M. Lavery, The New Inquiry

A gorgeous piece of writing excerpted from Danny M. Lavery’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You. “Oh, I don’t want to go on T. That’s not what this is. I can see where you got the idea, I suppose, but I’m afraid hormones simply aren’t for me. I don’t even want the ones I have! I’ll never go on testosterone, but it’s simply wonderful for you. You look great. Better than ever, honestly. If I were stuck in a room for the rest of my life and could only look at one thing for some reason, it would be you (I hope that’s not weird to say), but that’s really not the same thing. I just want you to go on hormones and for me to be able to watch you do it.”

9. “Making My Moan” by Irina Dumitrescu, The London Review of Books

Irina Dumitrescu reviews a very scholarly sounding book of absolutely incredible medieval smut, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “Gloriously, the poem ‘I pray yow maydens every chone’ features a merchant offering his podynges (‘sausages’) to a group of young women. ‘Will ye have of the puddings come out of the pan?’ he asks, and they reply firmly: ‘No, I will have a pudding that grows out of a man.’”

10. “Are We Seeing a New Movement to Organize Publishing?” by Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

An interview with Amy Wilson, who runs the Twitter account Book Worker Power, which she made as a more direct-action oriented response to the emergence of the popular satirical Publishers Weakly account. (You can read an interview with the anonymous people who run that account on Electric Literature. I believe they gave this interview just before their first two cancelings, which came in kind of admirably quick succession.)

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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No Shelter

Longreads Pick
Published: Apr 30, 2020
Length: 9 minutes (2,484 words)

Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I read books by Pico Iyer and Donald Richie, novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and collected countless online stories about everything from Japanese architecture to history to customs. I wanted to understand more about this island chain that has been inhabited since at least 30,000 BCE. I wanted to know more about this aggressively innovative culture simultaneously committed to tradition, a country that is famously easy to navigate by train but difficult to integrate into as an outsider. I wanted to understand Tokyo, the world’s largest city, whose allure comes partly from its incomprehensibility.

My library was filled with anthologies on my other passions California, the American South, jazz. But while I had stellar fiction anthologies on Japan, like The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction and Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll, the nonfiction book I wanted didn’t exist.  I couldn’t find a single, English-language anthology collecting longform nonfiction about Japan. So I made it.

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This Week In Books: I Bought Some Books

Soldiers read books while maintaining social distancing due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic at Foca Transport and Terminal Unit in Izmir, Turkey on April 29, 2020. (Photo by Mahmut Serdar AlakuÅ/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

My concentration is pretty much shot. So I have to confess I haven’t gotten very far into A Distant Mirror. I’ve mostly been playing Unciv on my phone and watching Devs and making curry and cleaning out the closet and periodically tweeting at A24 that I would really like to watch First Cow now and feeling slightly removed from my body. But that hasn’t stopped me from ambitiously and somewhat compulsively ordering even more plague books: The Great Mortality (about the black death) and The Great Influenza (about the 1918 flu, of course) from The Book Table in Oak Park, Illinois; Asleep (about the mysterious pandemic of “sleeping sickness” that followed on the heels of the 1918 flu) and The Ghost Map (cholera) from The Bookstore at the End of the World; Pox Americana (smallpox) and Epidemics and Society (all of them!) from Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. (I also ordered Joan of Arc In Her Own Words from Split Rock Books in Cold Spring, New York, but that’s related to an entirely different phase I’m going through.)

I’m not sure what I feel like all these plague books will achieve. Will I read them all? Probably not. Will they all sit on my desk talismanically protecting me from getting sick? Of course, but that goes without saying. Will they make me feel more or less anxious? TBD, I’ll let you know.

Ordering the books was a circuitous choice for me because I’ve been having some trouble coming to grips with the fact that the American lockdown fell so short of what it should be; that we began talking about reopening before we ever, it seems to me, fully closed. All these bookstores I ordered from are places I used to work or are owned by friends of mine, and I know they’re doing their best to keep themselves and all their employees safe and paid (though The Bookstore at the End of the World is a Bookshop site begun by a group of bookstore employees who were covid-furloughed by their employers). What that means, practically, is that because none of these stores have employees on site, all of these orders were fulfilled “direct,” which, in the rarefied parlance of bookselling which I know from my years in the business, means they were shipped directly to me from one of the wholesaler’s warehouses (the bookstores get a cut of the sale, although a smaller cut than normal). The wholesaler in this case — in all cases, as far as I know, including orders placed through Bookshop — is Ingram, the behemoth book distributor rivaled in reach only by Amazon and owned by the billionaire Ingram family. Early on in the pandemic, as lockdown began rolling across the country, I thought for certain that the warehouses themselves would soon close — not just Ingram and the smaller regional wholesalers, but the publishers’ warehouses as well, not to mention the printers! I thought the whole industry would have to, at least momentarily, pause. But while many publishers have pushed back the release dates for their spring titles and laid off employees (so that’s not going well) and one major printer has closed (while another has filed for bankruptcy, so that’s not going well), the major publisher warehouses themselves, as far as I can tell, have stayed open — with social distancing measures in place, of course. (The situation at the Big Five publishers feels a little opaque to me, but smaller publishers/distributors such as Small Press Distribution, a longtime distributor of micro presses, have been clear about their need to raise money.) Ingram, meanwhile, has been considered essential throughout the country during the pandemic and its warehouses have remained open and shipping direct to customers (as well as, of course, to stores in states where things like curbside pickup and receiving/shipping in and out of the store are still allowed — Point Reyes Books in California made an excellent video of what that looks like).

And so, what I’m trying to get at is that in the beginning of the pandemic I thought the best way to support bookstores was to order gift cards and donate to fundraisers (special shout out to Unnameable Books in Brooklyn and The Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago) or maybe order audiobooks or ebooks if that is your thing (though independent bookstores earn somewhat slim percentages of those sales, when they are able to offer them at all), convinced as I was that any sort of physical shopping would be tantamount to forcing warehouse and postal workers to endanger themselves, and that those warehouses would soon close down anyway! But I suppose that lately, despite few if any tangible signs that the spread of the virus has begun to decline in America, I let the growing narrative that “corona is nearly over now” and “the country is reopening soon” seep into my brain. And so, to be frank, I ordered some extremely nonessential stuff.

I guess I stopped expecting that the book warehouses would shut down. I stopped expecting the peak and have settled for the plateau.

But I’m sitting here staring at this copy of Epidemics and Society, which has already arrived and which I have set in a “decontamination pile” because we’re running low on disinfectants in my apartment, and I’m wondering, if I’m afraid to touch it, should I really have had someone send it? It’s a ghoulish feeling.

When the pandemic was starting, my feed was full of people tweeting about buying Nintendo Switches, so I mean, I’m aware that I’m not the only person in the world to buy something nonessential during the pandemic. I guess it’s possible I’m just being overwrought, here.

But it still seems like something is fishy about all this. I still feel like a ghoul. I feel like we have settled for a rolling epidemic until (purely theoretically!) herd immunity is reached, but we are doing it without admitting that that’s what we are doing— or acknowledging who will suffer for it (prisoners, warehouse workers, grocers, nurses!). And business owners are being forced into this mass casualty scheme because federal and local governments refuse to provide financial relief.

So, yeah, I have no idea where I’ve landed here. Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books? I mean, ok, yes; we all know the answer is yes.

I’m a ghoul with just enough plague books to tide me over until the second surge.

1. “The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction” by Charles Yu, The Atlantic

Sci-fi writer Charles Yu weighs in on reality. “Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of time. Life freezes in place. The protagonist, who works in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise, takes the elevator down to the lobby and walks out onto the street to find the world on pause, its social rhythms and commercial activity suspended. In the air is a growing feeling of incipient chaos. I got about midway through page 3 and stopped. I didn’t know what it meant.”

2. “What Rousseau Knew about Solitude” by Gavin McCrea, The Paris Review

Novelist Gavin McCrea writes about Rousseau’s lonely years, noting that the thinker’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker are haunted by the society they seek to avoid. “Looking at himself through the eyes of society, he is ‘a monster,’ ‘a poisoner,’ ‘an assassin,’ ‘a horror of the human race,’ ‘a laughingstock.’ He imagines passersby spitting on him. He pictures his contemporaries burying him alive. Rumors about him are, he believes, circulating in the highest echelons: ‘I heard even the King himself and the Queen were talking about it as if there was no doubt about it.’” This version of Rousseau sounds, to me, pleasantly like a morose Twitter poster. It just feels very familiar. I feel like I could scroll through Twitter right now and see some defeated soul posting that if they ever walk in public again, they will be spit on and the Queen will hear about it.

3. “Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” by Nicole R. Fleetwood, The New York Review of Books

An excerpt adapted from Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, in which she surveys art created by incarcerated people or made in response to incarceration. Fleetwood describes the unique challenges of documenting prison art: “…many of the artists, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, do not have possession of their art, nor any documentation of their work, nor knowledge of how and where their art has circulated… art made in prison may be sent to relatives, traded with fellow prisoners, sold or ‘gifted’ to prison staff, donated to nonprofit organizations, and sometimes made for private clients. There are people I interviewed who described their work and practices to me but had nothing to show.”

4. “The Exclusivity Economy” by Kanishk Tharoor, The New Republic

Author Kanishk Tharoor reviews Nelson D. Schwartz’s The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business, an exploration of the byzantine hierarchies that have emerged in all manner of consumer-facing industries to separate the wealthiest customers from the chaff. “What these changes augur, in [Schwartz’s] view, is the crystallization of a caste system in the United States and the birth of a new aristocracy.”


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5. “Gay Literature Is Out of the Closet. So Why Is Deception a Big Theme?” by Jake Nevins, The New Yorker

Jake Nevins surveys recent queer fiction and finds that deception is a major theme, even when it’s not explicitly the deception of the closet. “For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Dorian Gray to Tom Ripley, the lie of the closet was the hinge upon which queer literature would pivot, reflecting what were then the often judicial or mortal costs of being openly gay. Insincerity, ‘merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities,’ as Dorian Gray put it, was the mode of congress gay men had been taught to adopt for the sake of self-preservation…”

6. “The Surreal Stories of ‘Lake Like a Mirror’ Show How Power Distorts Reality” by YZ Chin, Electric Literature

YZ Chin interviews Chinese Malaysian author Ho Sok Fong about her short story collection Lake Like a Mirror, recently translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce. Ho says her stories try to reflect the way the exercise of power distorts reality. “I think a surrealist style can twist the surface of a reality that presents as neutral. Then we can see reality as a screen that has been yanked askew, and its seemingly solid surface starts to be pulled apart. Through this we realize that reality can be distorted by power. This isn’t something realism can achieve.”

7. “What if, Instead of the Internet, We Had Xenobots?” by Garth Risk Halberg, The New York Times

In his review of the long-awaited second novel from Adam Levin (author of the 1,000-page widely lauded high school bildungsroman The Instructions), Garth Risk Halberg writes that “Levin can make the kitchen-sink ambition of (mostly white, mostly male) midcentury postmodernism feel positively new.” His latest book, Bubblegum, is about “a novelist-cum-memoirist-cum-unemployed schlub named Belt Magnet, of the fictional Chicago suburb of Wheelatine, Ill.” who can “hear the suicidal pleas of certain inanimate objects through a telepathic ‘gate’ above his right eye” and was one of the first patients therapeutically paired with a “botimal” aka “a mass-produced… velvety soft, forearm-length, ‘…flesh-and-bone robot that thinks it’s your friend®!’”

8. “No Sleep till Auschwitz” by Jeremy M. Davies, The Baffler

New fiction from Jeremy M. Davies, author of The Knack of Doing, presents a fictionalized publishing industry that is — purely fictionally speaking, of course! — terrible. “Drucksteller saluted the long con of literature by way of the time-honored method of stealing a ream of copy paper and not flushing the toilet on his way off the estate.”

Stay well,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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The Hate Store

Longreads Pick
Source: Pro Publica
Published: Apr 7, 2020
Length: 17 minutes (4,268 words)