Notable Narratives

What consistently sets Siegel’s writing apart from many other newspaper narratives is his ability and willingness to construct an authoritative, muscular “argument.” In this case, he shows how a middle-class…

The title of this piece triggered our mawkishness radar: It signals tragedy; we wondered how such tragedy would be handled. Reading, we thought the piece teeters on the edge of…

This is a thorough and nuanced examination of the war’s impact on American lives. The story of the main character, Jeannette Mulligan, the wife of a soldier, provides an overarching…

Viser writes about a young man, Zack Weinstein, who has “started an unusual process: healing by blog.” Weinstein writes about his experiences on his blog following a spinal injury that…

You might say radio has an inherent advantage when it comes to scene-setting. Put  ambient sound in the background, and you’ve placed a listener in a particular place at a…

We liked that DeGregory emphasized the human component in this story about the loss of her dog: her children and their reactions, her husband’s and her own reactions as well.…

Rakan is a 12-year-old who, through extraordinary intervention by several powerful men, is flown to an American hospital from Iraq following the death of his parents and his own injury…

This is a beautiful example of writing well about endangered children. Wilkerson’s voice is at once poised, solemn, compassionate and engaging. The detail she has gathered and included is fine…

Orwell uses himself as a character in this piece, in the service of irony. Another character is a dog. We found the dog to be a brilliant, devastating, well-exploited detail.This…

Wilkerson wrote about Angela Whitiker’s son in her Pulitzer Prize-winning story "First Born, Fast Grown." Twelve years later, she chronicles his mother’s successful struggle to earn a nurse’s degree and…