Harlan Ellison Isn’t Dead Yet
The cult author, 57 years into his writing career.
The cult author, 57 years into his writing career.
Jaime Lowe New York Jul 2013 10min Permalink
On literary manifestos, long-distance reading, and the egg of death.
Elif Bautman n+1 Apr 2010 20min Permalink
How Robert Gottlieb quelled a rebellion and saved The New Yorker.
Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.
Elon Green The Awl Jul 2013 15min Permalink
On the writers, poets and beats in a reclusive California town, where residents repeatedly tear down highway signs indicating its location.
Kevin Opstedal Jack Magazine Nov 2001 25min Permalink
On the sins of the lazy translator.
Vladimir Nabokov The New Republic Aug 1941 10min Permalink
What the writer’s newly revealed letters mean for her long-debated legacy.
Hermione Lee New York Review of Books Jun 2013 15min Permalink
On Japanese writer Gengoroh Tagame, who creates gay manga work “in the artistic tradition of Pasolini, de Sade, Yukio Mishima and Lolita.”
Chris Randle Hazlitt Jun 2013 10min Permalink
On cushy jobs in web development, deeply un-cushy opportunities in writing, and our assumptions about the value of labor.
James Somers Aeon Jun 2013 15min Permalink
On writer James Agee.
David Denby New Yorker Jan 2006 20min Permalink
An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”
B. R. Cohen Public Books May 2013 15min Permalink
A profile of the writer.
Plus: An excerpt from McCann's new novel, TransAtlantic. (via Longform Fiction)
Joel Lovell New York Times Magazine May 2013 10min Permalink
“The supernatural stuff doesn’t get to me anymore. But here’s the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle-age, sitting at a table and writing a story. And the story goes something like, then the branches creaked in the - and she stops, and she says to her husband: What are those things? I can’t think of them. They’re in the backyard, and they’re very tall, and birds land on the branches. And he says, why, Iris, those are trees. And she says, yes, how silly of me. And she writes the word, and the movie starts. That’s Iris Murdoch, and she’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Terry Gross NPR May 2013 30min Permalink
The outing of a failed writer who spent years anonymously grinding axes on Wikipedia.
Andrew Leonard Salon May 2013 20min Permalink
“No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.”
James Baldwin, Jordan Elgrably The Paris Review Apr 1984 35min Permalink
Dinner with the novelist, the book critic and “Myshkin, a 14-year-old female dachshund who is deaf but decidedly not mute.”
Boris Kachka New York Apr 2013 15min Permalink
A profile of the spy writer.
Dwight Garner New York Times Magazine Apr 2013 15min Permalink
An investigation into a scholarly hoax.
On the business of selling books.
How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.
John Swansburg Slate Mar 2013 45min Permalink
An interview with the late writer.
Jerome Brooks The Paris Review Dec 1994 30min Permalink
“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”
George Orwell Horizon Apr 1946 20min Permalink
A son tries to make sense of his mother’s end.
Jacob Bernstein New York Times Magazine Mar 2013 25min Permalink
On reading and writing fan fiction.
Katherine Arcement London Review of Books Mar 2013 10min Permalink
The economics of being a young writer.
Keith Gessen n+1 Mar 2006 10min Permalink
Confessions of a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter.
Amy Boesky The Kenyon Review Feb 2013 20min Permalink