by Jamal Stone Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has become a rite of passage for middle- and high-school students for its sensitive approach to mature topics such as racism, rape, and murder. But in 1966 some parents found its subject matter “immoral.” At least that was the reason given when Virginia’s Hanover School Board, then embroiled in the...
This week we recommend the Longreads exclusive excerpt of journalist Julia Scheeres’s New York Times bestselling investigative work, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown. In this piece, Scheeres follows the story of Tommy Bogue, a troubled teenager who followed his parents from San Francisco to the ill-fated Jonestown compound founded by Jim Jones deep in the Guyana...
by Carla Dominguez Sanora Babb was a writer, poet, and journalist who spent most of her adult life living in the shadow of John Steinbeck. By a strange twist of fate, the meticulous notes she took during her time visiting migrant workers in the Dust Bowl underpinned two novels: her own, Whose Names Are Unknown, and...
by Carla Dominguez Edward Ruscha was the wrong kind of pop artist. While other pop artists were moving away from the movement’s Dadaist roots and pursuing an avant-garde image, Ruscha maintained the simplicity and quiet truth of the movement using direct, even dull, photographs and paintings. The pop-art movement came loudly and boldly, using images...
This week we recommend an interview with poet and memoirist Mary Karr at The Paris Review, The Art of Memoir No. 1. In the interview, Karr, the author of the memoirs The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as four volumes of poetry and other works, speaks with Amanda Fortini on the nature of memoir,...
This week we’re recommending Jason Diamond’s piece over at Electric Literature posing the question of why, exactly, 2014 seemed to be “the year of the essay.” Citing a wide range of literary memoirs, ranging from the personal to the political, published anywhere from established presses to open-source blogging sites, Diamond writes, “Whether it be from...
The past few months we’ve been following T Clutch Fleischmann’s blog over at The Kenyon Review, where, in a series of posts titled “But is it an essay?”, Fleischmann has assembled a collection of genre-bending or otherwise esoteric texts: Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” performance, staged at the Museum of Modern Art, in which...
by Carla Dominguez Portraits have always been the most popular type of photography. Besides being an excellent preservation of our history, portraits give us permission to stare at people, quietly learning their stories. Hugh Mangum was a self-taught itinerant photographer from Durham, North Carolina who understood the truth that portraits convey. At the beginning of...
This week we’ve been remembering the late writer Don Belton, in particular his essay “Voodoo for Charles,” a touching account of one uncle’s fears and muted hopes for his nephew in the face of overwhelming odds. Taken from a 1995 anthology edited by Belton, Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, “Voodoo for Charles” tells the story of...
In 2006 Claudia Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Late Wife. The deeply personal collection ended with reflections on her second marriage, to Kent Ippolito, a musician who had been widowed by cancer. This morning, Emerson died from complications due to cancer. She was 57, and a much-loved professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Broad Street’s...
Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer who, like many others, found inspiration in nature. He believed the plant “never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes, according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force, compels everything to attain the highest artistic form.” Born in 1863, Blossfeldt spent a lot of time...
Here at Broad Street we love reading about the true-life stories that have inspired some of our favorite fiction. That’s why we recommend a recent piece over at Hazlitt investigating the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner, a New Jersey fifth-grader whose kidnapping at the hands of Frank La Salle, along with the trip Horner made...
