From Leslie Jamison’s account of the extreme, bizarre Barkley Marathon to Christopher Hitchens’ meditation on what it means to lose the thing that has helped define him as a writer, here are some of the most interesting things that have been sent to us or that we’ve stumbled across so far this month.
“The Immortal Horizon,” [...]
Tag Archives: Gangrey
What we’re reading: Hitchens speechless, marathon lunacy and a problematic police sting
May 12, 2011 – 11:15 am
What we’re reading: death in all its guises
March 8, 2011 – 1:21 pm
A week into March, we’re eager for spring, but the narrative stories we’ve unearthed lately consistently offer up darker themes that go against the promise of the season. We’ve rounded up a few that focus specifically on death: murder on campus, suicide at work, death in combat and perhaps most surprising, a delicately crafted obituary [...]
What we’re reading: gay culture in the Middle East, stories for a body held hostage, and an athlete dying young
December 2, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Our latest “what we’re reading” draws on the stalwart print newspapers and magazines that have carried the banner of long-form narrative for so long. From a 5-part investigation of a shipwreck to a story of an athlete’s final months, these narratives show that traditional storytelling lives on.
NEWSPAPERS
“Laura Hillenbrand releases new book while fighting chronic fatigue [...]
What we’re reading, in which we contemplate a hit-and-run fatality, the death of Glenn Beck’s mother and the declining lethality of quicksand
September 30, 2010 – 11:55 am
One of the things about stories is that for them to be interesting, something usually goes wrong. As a result, a large number of the articles, profiles and essays we feature cover unfortunate events, whether recent or recalled from the distant past. This week is no exception, but we can promise that each story is [...]
What we’re reading, back-to-school edition: prison voices, the failure of imagination in storytelling, and the secret diary of a hedge fund manager
September 2, 2010 – 12:57 pm
Teenage lifeguards abandon their perches to leathery veterans. The county fair’s bounty of funnel cakes and fried beer peters out. Corduroy shopping starts in earnest. The academic year begins. In honor of those entering the hallowed halls of education, reluctantly or with excitement, we offer these takes on prison, the challenges of teaching and what [...]
Give Me Something To Read: collecting long-form journalism online
June 7, 2010 – 4:12 pm
[One in an occasional series of talks with people highlighting long-form journalism online. Prior posts in this series include a look at Gangrey.com and Twitter’s @longreads.]
From “a really little town” in Berkshire County, England, Richard Dunlop-Walters hopes to give you something worth checking out at a site called, well, “Give Me Something To Read.” The [...]
The Miami Herald: a case study in the rise of literary journalism at newspapers
May 27, 2010 – 2:41 pm
Anyone interested in narrative journalism at newspapers should see David Duwe Stanton’s master’s thesis “The Miami Herald and the Miller Effect: Literary Journalism in the 1980s,” submitted to the University of Florida in 2005. It’s a fascinating look inside The Herald, analyzing the influence that editor Gene Miller had on the paper’s identity. (Miller worked [...]
