Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently: A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You . . .
My friend Kate Christensen, whose work I knew and loved before I knew and loved her, closes out the second season of Girls Write Now’s Chapters with a reading from her new novel, The Astral, possibly my favorite of her books so far. I invited her to read because her work is funny, candid, and uncannily perceptive, both vulnerable and . . .
On Friday, June 10, I’ll be discussing the late, great Eudora Welty at Granta’s Truly Yours, Eudora Welty: An Evening on Writing and Influence with editor Patrick Ryan and writer Sheri Holman. Rhonda Keyser will read the job application letter Welty sent to the New Yorker as a young woman, in 1933. “Gentlemen,” it begins, “I suppose you’d be more . . .
“His voice had once been so musical that when he recited passages like, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ it must have been nothing short of the sound of God.” Ben Cohen remembers Reynolds Price.