Search Results for: romance

The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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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. Read more…

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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Lust in the Golden Years

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, ‘You certainly don’t look your age.’ Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn’t going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the no pile. So it wasn’t Herb’s ‘Have Viagara, Will Travel’ that consigned him to the no pile; it was its brevity.”

-From A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a memoir based on a simple ad taken out in The New York Review of Books: “BEFORE I TURN 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Read more on romance.

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Photo: killerciao, Flickr

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What It's Like to Grow Up Hapa

“The question of nationality perplexes my little brain. Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why? She sings us the song she learned at her English school. She tells us tales of China. Tho a child when she left her native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to the story of how she was stolen from her home. She tells us over and over again of her meeting with my father in Shanghai and the romance of their marriage. Why? Why?

“I do not confide in my father and mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them—a stranger, tho their own child. ‘What are we?’ I ask my brother. ‘It doesn’t matter, sissy,’ he responds. But it does. I love poetry, particularly heroic pieces. I also love fairy tales. Stories of everyday life do not appeal to me. I dream dreams of being great and noble; my sisters and brothers also. I glory in the idea of dying at the stake and a great genie arising from the flames and declaring to those who have scorned us: ‘Behold, how great and glorious and noble are the Chinese people!’”

From an 1890 essay by Sui Sin Far, on growing up half Chinese, half white. Read more stories from the 19th and early 20th Century.

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Photo: Washington State University

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When Heartbreak Turns Into Inspiration

“What Roosevelt sheepishly omits is that he started working on the book just after Thanksgiving as a way to cope with a broken heart. He’d fallen head over heels for Alice Hathaway Lee, a golden-haired girl with a sharp mind who loved to laugh. ‘As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me,’ he wrote of their first meeting in October 1878. Alice had gently refused his marriage proposal, tendered at the end of his junior year. When Roosevelt returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1879, he believed their romance would continue. Instead, he found her cold to his attentions. ‘Oh the changeableness of the female mind!’ he complained in a letter home. His grief at losing her led to terrible bouts of insomnia, during which he read voraciously about the War of 1812. He found the differing accounts offered by American and British historians hard to reconcile, both in terms of fact and approach, so he decided to write his own.”

Meredith Hindley, in Humanities Magazine, on how love factored into the making of Teddy Roosevelt’s book The Naval War of 1812.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Rebecca Hiscott on Mark Harris's Profile of Director Spike Jonze

Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable.

I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be ‘a cautionary meditation on romance and technology’ and ‘a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.’ The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn’t paid off. Harris’s lush prose mimics Jonze’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as ‘disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places”; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.

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Him and Her

Longreads Pick

A Longreads Guest Pick from Rebecca Hiscott, a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable:

“I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be ‘a cautionary meditation on romance and technology’ and ‘a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.’ The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn’t paid off. Harris’s lush prose mimics Jonze’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as ‘disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places”; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.”

Published: Oct 6, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,477 words)

The Real History of Love & Marriage

“Though the murky concept known as ‘love’ has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. ‘Love was considered a reason not to get married,’ says Abbott. ‘It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.’”

Collectors Weekly on the non-romantic origins of marriage. More in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Caught Up in the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher

Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words)

The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community.  Read more…

Roosevelt the Revisionist

Longreads Pick

On Teddy Roosevelt’s early life as an author, and the making of his book The Naval War of 1812:

“What Roosevelt sheepishly omits is that he started working on the book just after Thanksgiving as a way to cope with a broken heart. He’d fallen head over heels for Alice Hathaway Lee, a golden-haired girl with a sharp mind who loved to laugh. ‘As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me,’ he wrote of their first meeting in October 1878. Alice had gently refused his marriage proposal, tendered at the end of his junior year. When Roosevelt returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1879, he believed their romance would continue. Instead, he found her cold to his attentions. ‘Oh the changeableness of the female mind!’ he complained in a letter home. His grief at losing her led to terrible bouts of insomnia, during which he read voraciously about the War of 1812. He found the differing accounts offered by American and British historians hard to reconcile, both in terms of fact and approach, so he decided to write 
his own.”

Published: Sep 16, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,390 words)