The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. * * * No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan […]
New York
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year
Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor? Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969 Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page. In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Story About Storytelling
In Conversation: Robert Silvers Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words) Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic. These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
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 […]
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How a Bubble Sheet Killed Learning
“‘There was this transformation of the whole culture—and curriculum,’ Andrea says. ‘I could see it mostly through the homework. It really looked like test prep. There were even Âbubble sheets.’ Oscar had more than a year before the third-grade test, when students start taking the New York State ÂEnglish ÂLanguage Arts (ELA) and math tests—but […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Birth of the Modern American Suburb
“The land Levitt found was in the largely empty farmland of Hempstead, Long Island, and Levitt amassed thousands of acres. His timing could not have been more perfect. Sixteen million G.I.’s were returning from the war, many needing a place to live. There were abundant hard-luck stories of couples living with parents, sleeping in back […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Longreads Guest Pick: Kate Cox on Jennifer Gonnerman's 'The Deliverymen's Uprising'
Kate Cox is a freelance writer and editor living in New York. Nobody will say this, but the secret to New York City survival is a sturdy emotional filter. The flipside of said filter is that hundreds of our daily encounters fail to penetrate: the deli guy, the dry cleaner, fellow commuters—we so rarely engage […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Transport: On Leaving New York for Rehab in Minnesota
“I learned to drive. But I never liked it.”