The Wild, Sublime Body
Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.
Great articles, every Saturday.
Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.
Melissa Febos The Yale Review Mar 2021 15min Permalink
Narratively, how sweet it would be to describe in words that she learned to roast a chicken, she never took another pill again, she now takes care of me through cooking. But that’s not the truth.
MARIELLA RUDI Bon Appétit Oct 2020 10min Permalink
My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us.
Vivian Gornick Village Voice Mar 1987 30min Permalink
Everything I had going against me he had going for him. Us young Black dudes who were slanging were hated, hunted and haunted for our role in the drug war. He was praised and honored and rewarded with overtime.
D. Watkins Huffington Post Highline May 2020 40min Permalink
The author unearths the story of Frank Yerby, one of the the most prolific African-American novelists in history.
KaToya Ellis Fleming Oxford American Mar 2020 35min Permalink
When a young author started her novel years ago, she saw it as a romance. She sees it differently now.
Lila Shapiro Vulture Feb 2020 20min Permalink
On the bohemian poet’s hidden career as a prolific copywriter.
Dale Hrabi The Walrus Nov 2019 25min Permalink
On life as a police patrolman.
Originally published in 1997 under a pen name in The New Yorker. Appears now for the first time under the author’s known identity.
Edward Conlon The Sun Magazine Nov 1997 35min Permalink
What it means when an investigative reporter’s undercover work is framed as a personal journey.
Suki Kim The New Republic Jun 2016 10min Permalink
The author ponders the dissolution of his own marriage, and others.
Pat Conroy Atlanta Magazine Nov 1978 15min Permalink
At the age fifteen, Jenny Diski, a “foundling,” went to live with Doris Lessing. For fifty years, the two talked every week. Diski promised Lessing that she would never write about her but now, after Lessing’s death, Diski has begun to recount the story of their relationship.
The question of how to name her relationship with Lessing plagued Diski.
Lessing invited Diski into her home, but did she want her there?
Jenny Diski London Review of Books Oct–Dec 2014 40min Permalink
The allure of dangerous sports.
Eva Holland SB Nation Jun 2014 20min Permalink
A memoir of Santa Cruz.
Manjula Martin Maura Magazine Jun 2013 10min Permalink
An informational interview during which the author is advised, “Find a rich husband, and then you can work at whatever you like on the side, and it doesn’t matter, because you already have money.”
Mallory Ortberg The Toast May 2014 10min Permalink
A Confederate soldier’s point of view on the Civil War.
George Cary Eggleston The Atlantic Jun–Dec 1874 40min Permalink
“When I was fourteen, I had a relationship with my eighth grade history teacher. People called me a victim. They called him a villain. But it’s more complicated than that.”
Jenny Kutner Texas Monthly Dec 2013 30min Permalink
How our memories become contaminated by inaccuracies.
Erika Hayasaki The Atlantic Nov 2013 10min Permalink
A profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, whose bestselling memoir may have sunk her literary career.
Steve Almond New York Times Magazine Sep 2013 20min Permalink
“I love my mother a not-normal amount.”
Mary H K Choi Aeon Apr 2013 10min Permalink
Diary of a veteran gadfly.
George Gurley The New York Observer Mar 2013 35min Permalink
Writing a “stunt memoir” in the waterpark capital of the world.
Jason Albert The Morning News Aug 2012 20min Permalink
Growing up with Charlie Brown.
Jonathan Franzen New Yorker Nov 2004 30min Permalink
Nora Ephron on adolescence.
Nora Ephron Esquire May 1972 Permalink
Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves.
Caitlin Flanagan The Atlantic Jan 2012 25min Permalink
Coping with a brother’s suicide.
We tell stories about the dead in order that they may live, if not in body then at least in mind—the minds of those left behind. Although the dead couldn’t care less about these stories—all available evidence suggests the dead don’t care about much—it seems that if we tell them often enough, and listen carefully to the stories of others, our knowledge of the dead can deepen and grow. If we persist in this process, digging and sifting, we had better be prepared for hard truths; like rocks beneath the surface of a plowed field, they show themselves eventually.
Philip Connors Lapham's Quarterly Dec 2011 15min Permalink