Content Tagged ‘John Jeremiah Sullivan’

New essay era, 17 classics by women

February 21, 2013 | 6 Comments

Bonus: Jake Adam York offers a fine minute of writing advice. We’re living in the golden age of essays, proclaims a February 18 essay by Adam Kirsch in New Republic. In “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The Essay as Reality Television,” Kirsch immediately invokes as an example John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, which in another day, with its roots in magazine pieces and celebrity profiles, might have been labeled journalism—but which, as an exciting hybrid of …

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About John D’Agata

March 7, 2012 | 8 Comments

I believe in immersion in the events of a story. I take it on faith that the truth lies in the events somewhere, and that immersion in those real events will yield glimpses of that truth. I try to hew to a narrow definition of nonfiction partly in that faith and partly out of fear. I’m afraid that if I started making things up in a story that purported to be about real events and real people, I’d stop believing …

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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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David Foster Wallace’s fancy style

November 8, 2011 | 9 Comments

Below is an excerpt from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s interesting review in GQ of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (actually a review of DFW himself). When he speaks of “plain” writing, Sullivan apparently is alluding to Annie Dillard’s distinction, in her book Living by Fiction (reviewed on this blog), between “fine” and “plain” writing. She admires both but seems to prefer plain, the category into which her own lyric style falls, and to consider it the appropriate modern and …

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Richard's books

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

I loved this inquiry and lament about human mortality, a stealth memoir in which we learn about the author indirectly, mostly in relation to his vibrant, dominating 97-year-old father.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

For some reason not as engaging to me as Into the Wild but a great account; his spare style failed to help me see the mountain, but by the end I felt its cold. I am troubled by the human costs of the sport, as is Krakauer, who seems perm...

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home

by Mark Richard

A fascinating experiment in point of view: it opens with an overview in distancing third-person; then it becomes a story told in differently distancing second person. His childhood and child self are fascinating. For me, he did not full...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

by Hal Herzog

As a dog owner, an “animal lover,” and a former farmer, I largely enjoyed Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Author Hal Herzog’s message is simple and clear: humans’ relationship with animals is illogical and emotional. My bona fid...

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women: "Shrewd, volatile, u...

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