- KMA Sullivan writes about well-intentioned people perpetuating misogyny: “Women Are Bitches.”
- I’ve got mixed feelings about Murakami’s assessment of his The Great Gatsby translation and its reception in Japan.
- The Paris Review recommends fiction: “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh
- The Meaning of White - albinism and a mother’s love
Emily Perper!
Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.
Have you heard? Science fiction is “in.” Cloud Atlas, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Oblivion—nerds at the movies, nerds everywhere. This is thrilling if you are familiar with the genre, but what if you never got into sci-fi in the first place? Where would you start?
Since its inception (ha), speculative fiction has worked as social commentary, satire, and a creative answer to the question “What if?” Here are my personal picks to get you started. Please add your own science-fiction story picks in the comments below.
1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov (1941)
No sci-fi list is complete without Asimov, and not only due to his creation of the Laws of Robotics. If you like this story, I would suggest moving straight on to his “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin stories.
2. The Veldt, Ray Bradbury (1950)
Bradbury, of Martian Chronicles fame and beyond, writes here about the danger of integrating technology too far into human developmental psychology.
3. Bloodchild, Octavia Butler (1995)
A look at the symbiotic relationship between aliens and humans. If you’ve seen any horror movie featuring extraterrestrials, you’ve pretty much seen them all, but sci-fi stories like this one explore more “alien” ideas than the simple “monster from space” trope.
4. Robot, by Helena Bell (2012)
Robots! Here’s a short and wicked story from Bell, a contemporary sci-fi writer who touches on slavery, mortality, and the horror of a slow decline in life.
5. The Country of the Blind, H.G. Wells (1904)
Wells (War of the Worlds, Time Machine) is the oldest pick on my list, and this story imagines just what its title implies.
6. Understand, by Ted Chiang (1991)
Chiang addresses PTSD, advancements in medical science, and the horror of not trusting your own mind. This story is probably one of the best “straight” sci-fi examples on this list—the clear “What if?” develops steadily, and pushes the reader along to its surprising conclusion. Entire novels have been written in this style—Max Barry’s Machine Man is my personal favorite.
Bonus Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Suggestions
I also recommend this list for more great reading material, and if you want to start with something cyberpunky, look out for Neal Stephenson or William Gibson—they’re mostly novelists, and definitely worth your time.
What would you put on your sci-fi reading list? Tell us in the comments.
(Illustration via umbc.edu)
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
1. “The Vice Guide to the World.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013)
“My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way.” Vice pioneers methods of marketing, advertising and reporting while trying to mesh investigative journalism with its party image.
Shirky talks about the nebulous definition of the journalist, the perilous combination of print and online news services, and the relationship between story and audience. Warning: somewhat jargon-y.
Media theory classes have found an unlikely home in the hearts of Christian college students and other evangelical, primarily Reformed Christians. (I should know—the epigraph of this piece is from my Media Ecology professor, to whom I credit my deep unease toward Google Glass.)
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Emily Schultz is the co-publisher of Joyland Magazine and the author of The Blondes, forthcoming from St. Martin’s-Thomas Dunne in 2014. She lives in Brooklyn.
“In writing about Benjamin Percy’s werewolf novel, Red Moon, Roxane Gay’s review transforms into a fascinating essay with bite. She sums up the challenge authors face when examining the militarization of everyday life since 2001: ‘It’s a tricky thing to address pressing issues of the day in fiction without making prose do the work of preaching.’ Artistic success has eluded great authors who took the subject head on and Gay suggests that allegory is the platform that can let the author speak loudest. When I started writing my novel The Blondes I didn’t know that is was about these same subjects but by the time it was finished the world had crept in.
“Since writing a novel about a worldwide calamity and how its narrative unspools through the media, I’ve been haunted by its resonances with real events, but tragedy and unspeakable crime have always been documented. Today, we crowd source reflexively filmed camera footage to solve cases, but in the aftermath of the Second World War a Hollywood contingent hunted down and sifted through the propagandists’ own footage to build evidence against the Nazis for the Nuremberg trials. Budd Schulberg was a morally complicated screenwriter and author of the classic Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? In ‘Budd and Leni’ Bruce Handy tells the story of how Schulberg arrested director Leni Riefenstahl. The story is complex, the material is harrowing, and the facts sometimes blur into strange humor, such as the Communist guard who is also a film critic.”
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.
To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work.
Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.
If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to aileen@longreads.com.
Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University.
Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o.
The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.
Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.
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Know of a writer or publication we should keep an eye on? Tell us about it in the comments below.
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together:
I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would hopefully earn me a billion dollars in movie franchise royalties when my third kid was born. There were complications. I find that ‘complications’ is the universal euphemism for anything bad that happens during the birth and early life of an infant. It can mean anything, really: birth defects, mental illness, a lost limb, an ambulance driven into a tree, etc.If you’ve ever experienced complications with a baby, you know that it immediately makes any other difficulty you’ve ever experienced in life seem harmless by comparison. Your life can be neatly separated into Before Complications and After Complications. They always say that having a kid changes you, but that’s a lie. It’s having a kid on the brink of dying that changes you.So I had to table the novel for a bit and get this out of my system. I had to write about my third kid, and I had to write about my family as a whole, about this whole unit of people that needed to be strong enough to go through what we were about to go through. And that’s how Someone Could Get Hurt came to be. This is the first chapter.
In case you’ve missed them, here’s a quick list of some of the most recent #longreads #fiction picks from the community:
1. “The Side Sleeper” (Emily Schultz, Taddle Creek)
RT @taddlecreek: “The Side Sleeper”: a longish short story by @manualofstyle (Emily Schultz). taddlecreekmag.com/the-side-sleep… #longreads #fiction
— Joyland Magazine (@joylandfiction)
2. “We Have Always Lived On Mars”(Cecil Castellucci, Tor.com)
.@misscecil’s “We Have Always Lived On Mars”bit.ly/13rR9bs #longreads #fiction
— alexanderchee (@alexanderchee)
3. “Paper Losses”(Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker, 2006)
Lorrie Moore’s ‘Paper Losses’ newyorker.com/archive/2006/1… via @newyorker #Fiction #Longreads #LorrieMoore #ShortStory
— Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh)
4. “Burning Bright” (Ron Rash, Ecotone Journal, 2008)
Ron Rash’s ‘Burning Bright’ ecotonejournal.com/index.php/arti…#Fiction #Longreads #RonRash #ShortStory
— Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh)
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Michael is the associate publisher at The Awl network.
“Earlier this week, Vladislav Surkov—also known by his nickname, the ‘gray cardinal’—resigned (i.e. was fired) from his position as a leading cabinet official in Medvedev’s government. As a character, Surkov is endlessly fascinating. On one hand he’s a ruthless political operator whose genius maneuvers have drawn comparisons to Machiavelli. On the other he’s a master ironist who has turned Russia in to his own ‘postmodern theatre’. This October 2011 profile by Peter Pomerantsev in The London Review of Books is easily one of the best things written about him and the strange state of Russian politics in general. Pomerantsev beautifully weaves together fragments of Surkov’s personal biography with broader cultural observations to make deep points about power politics in Russia. I really, really enjoyed this piece and I hope you do too.”
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week:
(Photo: Böhringer Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons)
UPDATE: Here are some additional Mother’s Day recommendations from you:
I went rogue and made my own Mothers’ Day @longreads list. ow.ly/kSx9D
— simone eastman (@SimoneEastman)
My most favorite mother essays # 1: Baby Weight by @cherylstrayedbrainchildmag.com/2013/02/from-t… #longreads
— Molly Beer (@tornmap)
My most favorite mother essays # 2: Moonrise by Penny Wolfson theatlantic.com/past/docs/issu… #longreads
— Molly Beer (@tornmap)
My most favorite mother essays # 3: Private Ceremonies by Trish O’Connorbit.ly/15Uf7QV #longreads
— Molly Beer (@tornmap)
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