For those of you who read Sean Penn’s 6,000-word piece on Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez last week in The Nation and thought to yourselves, “This is so good that I would read a piece three times this length”—consider your wish granted. The unedited version, entitled “Mountain of Snakes,” has published in The Huffington Post and it clocks in at 18,000 words. Sample: “I lit a cigarette, took a couple of drags, flicked it into the alley and entered the bar. Downstairs the music was loud. Some quasi-combo of house and salsa. Thump! Thump! Thump! The downbeats shook the floor and tickled my feet.” Mark Hemingway at The Corner calls it “like Raymond Chandler meets John LeCarre as envisioned by a seventh grader.”
Read it at The Huffington Post
