New York Times' media guy David Carr wasn't kidding in January when he reported, "How Esquire Survived Publishing’s Dark Days." But as he named Esquire's "narrative horsemen," he left out Chris Jones. Maybe Carr considered Jones too young to be a horseman, but the magazine writer has been more than driving his share of the beast these days.

The best long-read you read this week — or the best you were going to find next week — was Jones' narrative journalism on the rogue-zoo escape and suicide in Zanesville, Ohio. The best long piece you read two years was Jones' profile of Roger Ebert. Two year before that, a soldier profile wasn't as viral, but it won a National Magazine Award.

He also has written a blog about writing. And building his house and other things. And he appears to be more than generous with words. This interview with him about writing is open, thoughtful and helpful.

Toward the end: "You know what you did? You made me forget it was an interview. Which is really the key.  When you do an interview, you both should gradually forget who the other person is. No one has the upper hand. No one is on guard. It’s just two guys talking about life."

So, to show more than a long-sitting browser tab for his work about the zoo, here are ledes and links to a few of his pieces. Go! Go read!

2012, "Animals."

The horses knew first. Terry Thompson kept dozens of them on his farm just west of Zanesville, Ohio, a suffering river town and the seat of Muskingum County. Most of the living things in Zanesville had been born in Zanesville, or in the county at least; Thompson was one of the few importers. He had a particular eye for the unwanted. His horses weren't pretty animals except that they were horses: worn-out chestnuts, muddy grays, a semihandsome paint named Joe. There was even a donkey and a fat little pit pony in the mix, and now they were together in the pasture, more tightly packed than usual, running in a wide circle. They were rolling almost, the bunch of them moving slowly at first and now finding their old legs, picking up speed like starlings, like the bands of a hurricane.

Date unknown, "Meeting the wife."

Back when we were in college, Lee and I had summer jobs working for Parks Canada. Part of my job included dressing up as Boomer, the Parks Canada Beaver. Part of Lee's official duties was to act as the "beaver handler."

She was terrible at it.

2010, "With Randy Quaid in a Windowless Room."

The day begins for Randy and Evi Quaid inside Hearing Room 1 at the Immigration and Refugee Board. The room is windowless. There is a small clock on one wall. It's a few minutes after ten. A Canadian flag hangs in the corner, a coat of arms mounted beside it. Acoustic-tile ceiling. Florescent lights.

2010, "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man."

For the 281st time in the last ten months Roger Ebert is sitting down to watch a movie in the Lake Street Screening Room, on the sixteenth floor of what used to pass for a skyscraper in the Loop. Ebert's been coming to it for nearly thirty years, along with the rest of Chicago's increasingly venerable collection of movie critics. More than a dozen of them are here this afternoon, sitting together in the dark. Some of them look as though they plan on camping out, with their coats, blankets, lunches, and laptops spread out on the seats around them.

2008, "The Things That Carried Him."

Don Collins stood in the sun and mapped out in his mind a rectangle on the grass, eight feet by three feet. He is forty-nine, wears a handful of pomade in his hair, and no longer needs a tape to take the measure of things.

Indiana state law dictates that the lid of the burial vault be two feet below the surface. That meant Collins had to dig down five feet, ultimately lifting out about a hundred cubic feet of earth. He wouldn't need a tape to measure that, either. Since 1969, his father, Don Sr., has owned the Collins Funeral Home, just up Elm Street, just past the little yellow house with the two yellow ribbons tied to the tree out front. As a boy, Don Jr. had lived upstairs with the spirits and the rest of his family, over the chapel. He and his younger brother, Kevin, would later work with their dad in the back room, embalming the bodies of their neighbors at three o'clock in the morning, and he still assists his father in his capacity as coroner. But Don Jr. has had enough of bodies in back rooms. He likes it better outside, in the sticky air, working with the earth.

Now he pushed a slick of bangs off his low forehead and lifted a square-bladed shovel out of the back of his pickup truck. It was the second to last day of May, but it was already summer hot, and he moved slowly, surveying again his imaginary rectangle. Satisfied that it lay parallel to the path, the hedgerow, and the train tracks beyond it, Collins made his first cut into the grass.

…

As I finished writing the above this morning, I received email from Lori about the other new Zanesville read, from Chris Heath in GQ. Work had been busy, and I'd missed the industry-site comparisons. Poynter staff even turned up one more new long-read on Zanesville, from Cincinnati Magazine's Jonah Ogles. Reading the Heath and Ogles pieces tonight, they're both good. But I still liked Jones' piece best. His narrative was tighter than Heath's, and I wasn't a fan of Ogles' present-tense style.

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