Narrative News

On identity: men who created it, women who lost it, a writer who escaped it

A weekly roundup of some favorite things, for your reading and listening pleasure

By Kari Howard • July 21, 2017

Marion Abrahams-Welsh grew up with four generations of her family on hilly Sheppard Street in the Cape Town neighborhood known as District Six.

Read More

Story Craft

In a South African cookbook-memory book, recapturing a life that was lost to apartheid

"Huis Kombuis" offers an old-fashioned spin on multimedia storytelling: a collective memoir with lovingly hand-stitched recipes honoring a demolished neighborhood -- and a past that couldn't be destroyed

By Heather Richie • July 20, 2017

One Great Sentence

“And one day he made an error, and then struck out, and it sounded like all of Fenway was booing, and he ran to the bench with his head down, the red rising in his face, the shame in his belly, and the rage. Ted thought: These are the ones who cheered, the fans I waved my cap to? Well, never again.”

Richard Ben Cramer, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" Esquire, June 1986.

By Kari Howard • July 19, 2017

Featured Contributors

Davis Harper

Katia Savchuk

Tom McNichol

Jasmine Bager

David L. Ulin

More contributors

Featured topics

Investigative Reporting Short Narratives Tom Junod Poverty Narrative Journalism
Show section navigation Hide section navigation ⨂

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Luke Mogelson and “The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS”

By Francesca Borri
July 10, 2017

The writer talks about his tour-de-force story for The New Yorker about an Iraqi SWAT team's fight to save their city -- and the price they paid to do it

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Jason Fagone and “What Bullets Do to Bodies”

By Davis Harper
June 26, 2017

The writer talks about his Huffington Post Highline profile of a trauma surgeon, and wanting readers to get a “visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot”

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Susan Dominus and “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”

By Davis Harper
June 20, 2017

The New York Times Magazine writer talks about how her controversial story changed her views on non-monogamy -- and made her appreciate her own marriage more

Notable Narratives

The Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay and a story of love, and art, lost to the Holocaust

By Katia Savchuk
April 25, 2017

The writer talks about reporting history in real time as he stumbles on the untold tale of a promising composer killed by the Nazis -- and the woman who has missed him for the rest of her life

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Daniel Miller and the Los Angeles Times’ “Selling Stardom”

By Katia Savchuk
March 16, 2017

The show business reporter takes a walk on the seamier side of Hollywood, and meets a lot of wannabes with broken dreams (plus an agent who breaks down in front of him)

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Bernt Jakob Oksnes and “The Baby in the Plastic Bag”

By Kari Howard
March 7, 2017

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet bucked the short-attention-span trend by committing to a nine-part serial -- and it paid off both in readers and a powerful narrative about an infant left for dead

Notable Narratives

Two top New York Times editors talk about the yearlong project “Murder in the 4-0”

By Kari Howard
November 29, 2016

With crime at historic lows in the city, the paper decided to "delve deeply into deaths, and lives, that might otherwise be ignored" in a Bronx precinct where homicides persist. A series of heartbreaking narratives is the result.

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Shane Bauer and “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard”

By Davis Harper
July 21, 2016

The Mother Jones reporter on the risks, rewards and lessons learned after going undercover inside America’s private prison system

Notable Narratives

From Esquire Classic: Tom Junod on “Missing”

By Alex Belth
May 6, 2016

Tiffany Whitton was last seen on video surveillance footage from a Marietta, Georgia, Walmart one night in September 2013. The video shows the twenty-six-year-old woman intoxicated and shoplifting; with her is boyfriend Ashley Caudle. When … Read more

Notable Narratives

Esquire Classic: Mark Warren on the odyssey of Stephanie Lee, “Patient Zero”

By Alex Belth
March 2, 2016

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, Esquire executive editor Mark Warren and writer at large Tom Junod drove to Mississippi to visit the displaced families of National Guardsmen who had been … Read more

Notable Narratives

Esquire Classic: Mark Zwonitzer on the making of “What It Takes”

By Alex Belth
February 24, 2016

“What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s exhaustive account of the 1988 presidential election, took so long to report and write—six years in all—that it wasn’t published until the 1992 election. Clocking in at … Read more

Notable Narratives

From Esquire Classic: Bill Zehme and Johnny Carson’s last interview ever

By Alex Belth
February 16, 2016

Esquire marked Trevor Noah’s transition to hosting “The Daily Show” by putting him on the cover of its March 2016 issue (see “Trevor Noah…Is Not Like You”). Noah has to step out of the … Read more

More stories