Posted inUncategorized

Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle. 1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, […]

Posted inUncategorized

Reading List: What We Believe

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s reading list explores religious understanding and our different beliefs. 1. “Your Belief Here.” (Joelle Renstrom, Killing the Buddha, October 2013) Renstrom’s cross-wearing Christian classmates didn’t understand her agnostic Unitarian beliefs, which blend […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

To Steal a Mockingbird?

According to a lawsuit, Harper Lee’s agent Samuel Pinkus duped the To Kill a Mockingbird author to assign him the copyright to her only book. An investigation into Lee’s fight to regain the book’s copyright, which continues to earn millions of dollars in royalties: “His first move was to obtain the copyright to To Kill […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

Why Is Science Behind a Paywall?

Why is scientific research still stuck in a model that requires that work be published in a small number of journals owned by a small number of companies? “Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

On the Business of Literature

What we can learn about the future of books from its past: “Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the ‘business of literature.’ Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

Money Matters: Neal Pollack

The writer reflects on his professional and financial mistakes, and how he’s changed his focus: “I was still just a guy with one book under his belt. And a book that, despite all the attention it was getting, sold maybe 10,000 copies. It wasn’t some sort of international publishing phenomenon. It was, at best, sort […]

Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction

The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.

Gift this article