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1 week ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway once argued that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the headwaters for “all modern American literature,” adding, “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” (He also argued that the last twelve chapters of the novel were dispensable.) Plenty of writers, including William Faulkner, argued much the same.
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2 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
On at least two occasions, Thomas Keller, the exhaustively acclaimed chef of the French Laundry and Per Se, has served mushroom soup to restaurant critics via a glass bong—an allusion to a negative review published nearly ten years ago.
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3 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
For decades, train hoppers have maintained—and guarded access to—the Crew Change Guide, a handbook for riding freight throughout the US and Canada. “You can’t buy such a book, can’t download it, can’t trace its often multiple authors,” Jeremiah David writes. “But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.” For The Paris Review, David, who never properly asked for his own copy, tells the story of how he came to possess one anyway.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
When Viktoriia Roshchyna was 26 years old, Russia announced the annexation of several regions in Ukraine, including Zaporizhzhia, her birthplace. Now, Zaporizhzhia “sits behind the thick fog of an unmoving frontline,” Phineas Rueckert and Tetiana Pryimachuk write for Forbidden Stories.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
The headline for Jia Tolentino’s latest could double as a category heading for a certain type of essay—think the titular essay from Joan Didion’s The White Album—in which the flotsam of our cultural wreckage resists, by rate or by scale, the author’s abilities to make conventional sense of it.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
Lauren Oyler “rode the internet’s appetite for a well-argued pan to prominence.” A Goodreads user claimed that all subsequent reviewers of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake lived “in the shadow of Brandon Taylor’s vicious takedown” of the same title.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
The Verge‘s “American War” project—edited by Kevin Nguyen and Sarah Jeong, with support from more than a dozen others—marks a half-century since the Fall of Saigon with a collection of features that skip the rote banalities typical of anniversary coverage.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
One year ago, a website publicly outed Blaire Fleming, a starting member of the San Jose State University volleyball team, as a trans woman. That incident, writes Jason Zengerle for The New York Times Magazine, elevated Fleming from “a mostly unknown college volleyball player to an unwilling combatant in the culture war” concerning identity and competitive sports.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
I found myself swiftly transported to the other side of Henri Cole’s essay for The Paris Review, delivered there by a succession of scenes delivered with crisp authority, like a friend handing you a series of photographs. Cole, best known for his poetry, moves episodically through his relationships with a small, close group of writing teachers and friends—primarily James Merrill, a Pulitzer Prize winner who died thirty years ago—as the AIDS crisis looms and then descends upon them.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
During the past century, “creativity” evolved from a mess of privately held notions to a cultural panacea. Beginning in the 1950s, some psychologists interviewed and tested prominent intellectuals, including the architect I.M. Pei and the writer Truman Capote, to better understand the creative individual.
