Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Over the weekend, I attended the annual National Book Festival in Washington D.C. One of the highlights was Tamora Pierce’s presentation. Pierce is a young adult fantasy lit author, known for her great writing and awesome female characters. […]
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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
My Top 5 #Longreads on the Business of Film, Music and Books
Longreads’ Mark Armstrong on Steven Soderbergh’s “State of the Cinema” and four other recommended stories about the movie, music and publishing industries.
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 inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia
Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on […]
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 inEditor's Pick
The Ghost Writes Back
The writer reflects on her old part-time job—ghostwriting the Sweet Valley High book series: “Sweet Valley High set its fables of ‘same and different’ in a 1980s world of new wealth and upward mobility, latching on to an innovative publishing reality: create a mass-market paperback series for young female readers, keep the price point low […]
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.
Posted inFeature, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category.
