In a prescient post on Jezebel last month, Catherine Nichols wrote about how, in reading Chronicles, Dylan’s 2005 memoir, she came to see the musician her father had introduced her to as a true literary artist.
Literature
Posted inBlog Post, Books, Nonfiction
The Cat’s Meat Man, From Dickens To Jack The Ripper
Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. *** Harriet Hardiman was ‘a cat’s meat man.’ That is, she went out most days with a handcart full of chopped meat on skewers […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Unattributed: A Reading List on Plagiarism
In the internet age, plagiarizing has become easier to detect—and harder to resist.
Posted inNonfiction
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
You Can Do Anything if You Just Do it Slowly: An Interview with Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff on not knowing what you’re doing, the thrill of the mess, and using all your senses to find a way in to the story.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
‘The World Is Full of Obvious Things’: A Sherlock Holmes Reading List
Sherlock Holmes feels uncannily contemporary these days — from his dizzying array of post-hipsterish quirks (Cocaine user! Virtuosic violin player! Exotic tobacco aficionado!) to a social aloofness that feels straight out of a Millennial INTP‘s playbook. (His knack for Twitter-ready aphorisms doesn’t hurt, either.) I’ve been rereading Conan Doyle’s stories for almost 20 years, and the guy has never felt more fresh.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Thoughts on a Gentrifying San Francisco, In Honor of His 96th Birthday
Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.
Posted inBooks, Quotes
How ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ Got Its Name
John Steinbeck—born 113 years ago Thursday—wrote more than thirty books, and The Grapes of Wrath, which you were most likely assigned to read in high school, is widely considered to be his best work. The novel was published in 1939 to great acclaim, both critically and commercially; it “was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read.” It was also the New York Times’ bestselling book of 1939, and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.