John Jeremiah Sullivan Explores the World of Massage
For this weekend’s read, we’re in a throwback mood and recommending John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2012 piece for the New York Times Magazine, “My Multiday Massage-a-thon.” In the piece, Sullivan, the author of the 2011 essay collection Pulphead and contributor to publications such as The Paris Review and GQ, first declares himself something of a massage...
The Andy Warhol-Mama Cass Elliot Project That Never Happened
Thanks to Longreads we recently came across this Guardian reprint of a fascinating 1967 piece written by Danny Fields for the now-defunct rock magazine Hullabaloo, outlining a series of encounters between Andy Warhol and singer “Mama” Cass Elliot of The Mamas and the Papas and other seminal acts. In a few fleeting scenes Fields charts the...
Writing from the Space Between Us
by Hannah Morgan The New York Times recently published an article by Joshua Rothman entitled “Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy,” and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. In the piece, Rothman analyzes excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway and comes to the conclusion that Woolf conceives of life as “a gift that you’ve been given, which...
Truly Embellished Nonfiction
Nonfiction writers and readers are no strangers to the dialectic between those who think there is room in nonfiction for embellishment, and those who disapprove of any kind of fact-bending. At the heart of the debate seems to be a disagreement of what it means for a story to be true. Is a story true...
Lee Gutkind’s ‘The Yellow Test’ and Other Advice
Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, wrote an article in the New York Times back in 2013 about the importance and function of scene in writing nonfiction. The article is aptly named “The Yellow Test,” which is the technique Gutkind proposes writers use in order to check that their work is scene-heavy. The test simply involves highlighting...
