Articles Tagged with #longreads
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Reading Roulette
Olga Slavnikova
We’ve emptied half the cylinder in our Reading Roulette series of contemporary Russian literature—stories you won’t find anywhere else in translation, unfortunately. This month we usher to the table a 2013 Russian Booker Prize contender for a shot at blowing your mind.
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Birnbaum V.
Martin Amis, Redux
Our man in Boston sits down with Martin Amis for their sixth chat to discuss Nabokov, dictionaries, spiteful reviews, the death of Christopher Hitchens, and the freedom of writing fiction.
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The Revenge Desk
Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pee on the Wall
Everyone says they’ve got a book inside, but hundreds of people actually write them—and are preyed upon by scam artists. The greatest story of literary vigilantism ever told.
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Fact-Checking
Here There Be Monsters
A professor teaches his students skepticism by instructing them to create hoaxes with the web as their laboratory.
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Personal Essays
The Wolf Is Waiting
Imperceptibly and without warning, your pulse accelerates, your mind races, and panic grips your body—for anxiety attack sufferers, every day is a case in survival. A journey to the wild to confront the fear.
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Our Passions, Our Day Jobs
Down and Out in a Repurposed Troop Carrier
Stunt memoirs are ubiquitous: writers who eat, pray, and love straight into their bank accounts. But what happens when the material for your book—for which you took a dozen amusement park jobs to acquire—isn’t all hijinks and zany locals? What if it’s rather nice?
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Reading Roulette
Nikolai Klimontovich
Our series of contemporary Russian literature continues—six months, six stories from some of Russia’s best working writers, plus interviews with their authors, all of it sponsored by Powells.com. This month we feature one of Moscow’s finest chroniclers.
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The American Artist
Go Away
Artist colonies are mysterious places. Available only to a select few, supposedly teeming with alcohol, affairs, and creative hoodoo. But the rumors aren’t true—they just lack detail. Scenes and lessons from three residencies.
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America, America, Burning Bright
Soldier’s Heart
A post-World War II documentary, banned by the military in 1946 but lately released online, is one of the earliest depictions of psychotherapy. But it says even more about contemporary Americans’ interest in the veterans they love to praise.
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Birnbaum V.
Jess Walter
Our man in Boston sits down with the author of The Financial Lives of the Poets to talk about his latest novel, how to survive in Hollywood, the ins and outs of contemporary publishing, and that unheralded Paris of the Northwest, Spokane.
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Palliative Measures
Songs in the Key of Death
America’s funeral parlors rely on one man to provide the theme music for your grandmother’s memorial service, the pop radio for your cousin’s wake. Welcome to “semi-spiritual” ambient music and the stuff of contemporary mourning.
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Profiles
The Heretic
For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.