journalism

The 100 best nonfiction books?

February 26, 2012 | 14 Comments

The Modern Library on its website lists the “100 best” English-language books in fiction and nonfiction. Alongside each are the best according to an online poll—and the readers’ choices consist of much trash: the top three slots of each list, fiction and nonfiction, are filled by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. Modern Library’s own considered nonfiction list is fascinating because it’s wildly diverse, reflecting the genre’s diversity, no doubt. It mixes histories and works of philosophy that have had …

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What’s an essay, what’s journalism?

February 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

“From journalism to the essay to the memoir: the trip being taken by a nonfiction persona deepens, and turns ever more inward.” —Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story Over thirty years ago, in the heyday of the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe enumerated the techniques, associated with fiction, that can make journalism equally absorbing. He repeated his precepts recently in an essay, “The Emotional Core of the Story,” collected in the excellent 2007 textbook Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s …

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Noted: William T. Vollmann

November 26, 2011 | 9 Comments

I believe in the American myth that it is both admirable and even possible to devote one’s life to a private dream. The probability of failing oneself, either through laziness, incompetence or bad luck, or else, worse yet, through dreaming what one only imagined one desired, is terrifying. All the same, you had no more obligation to public dreams which dreamed you wrongly.—William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere I believe Vollmann is some kind of genius, as well as being …

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Rampant use of the term ‘narrative’

November 15, 2011 | 4 Comments

I want to raise the question of what the world thinks “narrative” means, what educated media commentators and writers mean by it, and what relationship does the widespread use of “narrative” have to do with the use of the term narrative journalism?—Gerald Grow, “The Invasion of the Term ‘Narrative’ “ Gerald Grow, now retired, a Shakespeare scholar who ended up teaching journalism at Florida A & M University, keeps an eclectic and useful web site about writing and teaching. It brims …

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Noted: Anthony Lane on reviewing

October 31, 2011 | No Comments

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, on the perils of reviewing: On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily—which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films—I started taking notes. These went “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did …

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Patricia Hampl: memoir’s excitement

July 24, 2011 | 11 Comments

The big fiction advice is “Show, don’t tell,” but this is not what memoirists are embroidering on their pillows and sleeping on. It’s instead “Show and Tell.” It’s the idea that you can’t tell unless you can show, but you don’t just show. You have to talk about it. You have to somehow reflect upon it. You have to track or respond to it, this thing that’s happening. And in the intersection of these two things is the excitement we …

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Jen Knox defends ‘romantic’ semicolon; 25 ‘terrific novels’ for J-students

June 17, 2011 | 7 Comments

Jen Knox, a fiction writer and author of the memoir Musical Chairs, recently issued a nice defense of the semicolon on her blog: Kurt Vonnegut is famous for saying the following: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Great quote, but total bullshit.  The semicolon is beautiful, the epitome of a soft pause that gives cadence to an …

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