Discuss a longform magazine or newspaper article with a group of longreads fans in this new monthly club from the Magazines and Newspapers Center. It’s like a book club, but instead of books we discuss periodical articles of approximately 10,000 words in length, which take about an hour to read.
To participate, read the month's selection ahead of time, then join the discussion at the appointed time and location.
The agenda of the meeting includes round-robin introductions, a forty-five minute discussion utilizing the shared inquiry method, and then a final twenty minutes to share any other thoughts the article brought up for you.
Typically, selections can be investigative journalism, creative writing, personal essay or another genre, as long as it was originally published in a periodical.
Get the monthly selections and after-discussion summary delivered to your inbox.
“The Fisherman’s Secret: A Modern-day Treasure Hunt” By Tara Duggan and Jason Fagone; Photos by Santiago Mejia
San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 3, 2019
Giuseppe Pennisi: Do you want to see something that I found on the bottom of the ocean with my camera?
It’s a really big secret.
You have to promise.
Not to show anyone.
-- Tara Duggan, reporter: OK. You are making me nervous.
Can you guess what this is?
-- Drugs?
It’s not drugs. What color is it?
-- Yellow?
-- Treasure.
This is something big so we should talk about it at the dock.
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“The Missing Person: Kafka the Tourist” by Kate Zambreno
Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2019
Judging from how Kafka talks about traveling in his diaries, he’s a frail and neurotic man urged by the obsession to write—but in this patchwork essay of tidy squares and literary headings, Zambreno associates him with photography, Paris, Lake Maggiore, art theft and historical occurrences both literally connected to his life and figuratively relevant. Does Kafka get what Kafka complains about wanting? In reconstructing Kafka’s history through her own obsessive research and placing the writer’s process within the essay itself, Zambreno presents a portrait both splintered and replete of the famous Czeck author as a young man.
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“Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise” by David Foster Wallace
Harper’s Magazine, January 1996
One week on a cruise ship, otherwise known as a “supposedly fun thing I'll never do again,” and twenty thousand words later, we get to know how DFW really feels about this luxury experience that he absolutely does not enjoy. This piece of travel writing is a classic example of the extended literary journalism genre, and we're closing out our literary summer by puzzling over its intriguing prose and meandering footnotes.
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