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What we're reading: Stories on teenage gumption, secret clinical trials, wrongful imprisonment and the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald

What we’re reading: Stories on teenage gumption, secret clinical trials, wrongful imprisonment and the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald

We love December for its inevitable bouquet of great year-end stories. Lots of good stuff out there right now, including these, four of our recent favorites:Anne Hull’s poverty piece, “In…
December 13, 2012

"Why’s this so good?" No. 68: Jonathan Lethem and the godfather of soul

Sometime in my last year of college, James Brown played a show in the small East Coast city where I lived. I had all sorts of reasons not to go:…
December 11, 2012
Andrew Corsello on authorial empathy, the problem of goodness, the writer-editor relationship, the importance of rule-breaking, and naps

Andrew Corsello on authorial empathy, the problem of goodness, the writer-editor relationship, the importance of rule-breaking, and naps

In yesterday’s post, guest curator Michael Fitzgerald wrote about the storytelling power behind “The Wronged Man,” a 2004 GQ piece by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello. Fitzgerald, a Massachusetts-based business…
December 7, 2012
Andrew Corsello and the wronged man

Andrew Corsello and the wronged man

Guest curating today’s Notable Narrative is Michael Fitzgerald, a business and technology writer and former Nieman Fellow, who chose Andrew Corsello’s “The Wronged Man,” from GQ. Check back tomorrow for…
December 6, 2012

"Why’s this so good?" No. 67: Dan P. Lee and Travis the killer chimp

It was a sideshow story whose horror was so extravagant that it bordered on vulgarity: On Feb. 16, 2009, a 14-year-old male chimpanzee named Travis, who had been raised from…
December 4, 2012
Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2

Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2

In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt's Pulitzer-winning "The Wreck of the Lady Mary," Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter…
November 30, 2012

Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 1

This is the third in an occasional series of line-by-lines with narrative writers and their work, adapted from a project called Annotation Tuesday! on Tumblr. Earlier, we featured the Tampa Bay Times‘ Michael…
November 29, 2012

"Why’s this so good?" No. 66: Eli Sanders and the bravest woman in Seattle

The friend who first sent me “The Bravest Woman in Seattle” told me it was stunning but also so unsettling that I should not read it before going to bed.She…
November 27, 2012
Eli Saslow on detail, dignity, nut grafs, patience, reporting v. writing, and what's in his notebook

Eli Saslow on detail, dignity, nut grafs, patience, reporting v. writing, and what’s in his notebook

Our latest Notable Narrative is an Eli Saslow story called “Life of a salesman,” about a swimming-pool salesman struggling in a terrible economy. Yesterday, we listed some of the story’s…
November 23, 2012

Eli Saslow and the swimming pool salesman

Eli Saslow’s stories for the Washington Post and ESPN The Magazine show a narrative journalist in control of his craft. The guy is incapable of writing a forgettable story. If…
November 22, 2012