Why’s This So Good?

Around the turn of the millennium, big changes swept Hollywood. Suddenly and as never before, screens were clotted with the teen-fodder likes of Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and…

Politics should, in theory, be the subject of some of the most compelling narrative journalism. There’s built-in drama! There are winners and losers! The stakes are high! That’s why it’s…

Phyllis Fletcher opens this wonderful piece of rescued history and solved mystery with a simple declaration: “Ina Ray Hutton was a stone cold fox.” The correct response to this kind…

You could argue that a writer has no business critiquing the work of one of his closest friends. Knowing the person behind the words influences the reading experience, making it…

We may as well begin the way Gary Smith begins – with a question, and near the end. Why is it that when you finish reading “Lying in Wait,” Smith’s…

I often tell students, both undergraduate and graduate, that beautiful stories are everywhere. You can head off to Iraq and Afghanistan and pen a riveting war epic, but you can…

When the Winter 2005 issue of The Oxford American arrived, I flipped through the pages, glimpsed the reptilian close-ups accompanying Wendy Brenner’s profile of Dean Ripa, creator and caretaker of…

The story I want to tell you about, “In the Monster's Maw,” was published in 1997, and that's important. Because in 1997, when Burkhard Bilger went out to Oklahoma for…

Where is Edna Buchanan when we need her? Admittedly, the lede on this recent Associated Press story wasn’t half bad:MIAMI — A witness says a naked man chewing on the face of…

When I decided to become a journalist, I believed that I had to choose between writing and my love for visual imagery and sound. David Gonzalez’s “House Afire,” a three-part…