Julia Scheeres Documents the Untold Story of Jonestown
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...
Edward Ruscha’s Deadpan Artistry
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...
T Clutch Fleischmann asks: But Is It An Essay?
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...
Revisiting Don Belton’s “Voodoo for Charles”
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...
The Real People Behind Characters
It’s common literary practice to use the people around you as inspiration for fictional characters. Sometimes, truth can be more interesting than fiction, and, as writers, we come across people who give us inspiration for a story to tell. These truths might mean more than what one can think up from scratch. Many authors have used the facts of the...
