Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.) *** My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011: • Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried […]
Tag: longreads
Joan Williams said it best herself when confronted with William Faulkner’s curious and cutting response to a book-jacket-blurb request from her editor. “It was obviously,” she said, “a very petulant kind of thing. Why couldn’t he have just given me a nice quotation?” Yet she knew why. For five years, 1949 to 1953, Williams and […]
Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com. *** When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from […]
The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years […]
Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once […]
Lev Grossman writes about books and technology for Time magazine. He’s also the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and The Magician King. *** • “One Man’s Quest to Outrace Wind,” by Adam Fisher, Wired Why do I never find stories like this? Probably because I’m not working as hard as Adam Fisher. Apparently there’s […]
Since I am not married and because my parents are loving and kind, my mother has borne the brunt of my physical and emotional caretaking these past few months as I struggled with decision-making and the eventual decision’s realities. She’s the one who has heard me most often respond to the question, “Do you want […]
Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl. *** The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt swings gracefully between humor and searing candor in this […]
What a lede. Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, […]
Steve Silberman is a contributing editor for Wired magazine, one of Time‘s selected science tweeters, and the author of the NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science. He is currently working on a book about autism and neurodiversity for Avery/Penguin. (Read recent Longreads by Silberman here.) *** After years of predictions from pundits that the […]
In the cells there were other kinds of torture. Above all they prevent you to sleep. They brought big vacuum cleaners to make a lot of noise. They put on music – I understood the words were bad words. At night, they switched on lights everywhere. If they saw you sleeping, they came shouting: WAKE […]
However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” […]
02:11:21 (Robert) On a pourtant les moteurs! Qu’est-ce qui se passe bordel? Je ne comprends pas ce que se passe. ‘We still have the engines! What the hell is happening? I don’t understand what’s happening.’ Unlike the control yokes of a Boeing jetliner, the side sticks on an Airbus are “asynchronous”—that is, they move independently. […]
Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a high school in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter. He is also a longtime contributor to the #Longreads community and an author for Open Culture. *** • “The Possibilian: David Eagleman and […]
They landed in Memphis, Tennessee, and drove across the Mississippi River to West Memphis. A local reporter showed them around and explained the case in terms of certain guilt. So did everyone else they met. “Absolutely, without exception, every person we met: rotten teens,” Berlinger says. He and Sinofsky decided to embed themselves for the […]
Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever and the co-owner of Emily Books, and also she can’t stop blogging for some reason. *** 1. “Letter from Astana,” by Keith Gessen (New Yorker, sub. required) The New Yorker‘s “Letter From” essays, though they’re always entertaining and executed with finesse, can leave the […]
Kalyn Heffernan is 24 years old, weighs 53 pounds, and measures three feet, six inches tall. She’s light enough to carry, compact enough to hide under a winter coat, and is sometimes mistaken for a child. But Kalyn, who has the brittle-bone disability osteogenesis imperfecta, is hardly innocent, precious, or inconspicuous: The Colorado native dabbles […]
Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.) *** I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction. It’s no secret that the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, One Story and Tin House […]
In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle […]
Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. (See his Longreads page here.) *** First of all, I am not even going to bother listing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Disney World piece because it was obviously the best thing anywhere this year but everyone agrees and […]
Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable […]
Michelle Legro, longtime Longreader, is an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. *** “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Paul Ford (The Morning News) I doubt there are many people that will remember the December blizzard of 2010 better than Paul Ford, limping through the snow with his wife to their IVF procedure without any form of transportation […]
You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.” […]
The broadcast started at eight-thirty, with final predictions from the booth. Gruden looked solemn. “I think the Kansas City Chiefs are in real trouble tonight,” he said. Jaworski looked at Gruden and Mike Tirico. “You guys can call me crazy, but I’m excited about Tyler Palko tonight,” he said. Tirico giggled, but Gruden just squinted. […]
[Part Two of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”] When his cheek was crushed by Boogaard in 2006, Fedoruk’s first thought was to “save face” and skate off the ice. He did. “Their bench was cheering like you do when your teammate gets a guy,” Fedoruk said. “I remember skating by […]
Jessica Pressler is a writer for New York Magazine. See her recent stories here. (Pictured above, inexplicably, with New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2010.) *** Ok, so: There are no New York magazine articles in this Top Five, because I work there, and letting them in would clog up the list and might make […]
[Not single-page] Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men. They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They […]
[Fiction] He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.