By now you’ve probably heard the story: In October 2011, a suicidal man named Terry Thompson uncaged dozens of wild animals that he kept on his farm in Zanesville, Ohio, and then shot himself. The sheriff’s department spent a tense … Read more
The subject of death has proven inexhaustible, from the Greeks to Hamlet to E.B. White’s pig. In “The End,” Ben Ehrenreich examines The Inevitable from an unexpected postmortem angle, and with a clever bit of a wink. The story explores death … Read more
Reading Amy Wallace‘s profiles is like sitting around your favorite bar with your favorite super-witty friend and talking about people over cocktails: You come for the companionship and vibe, you stay for the juicy details. It’s hard enough to … Read more
Mary Roach’s voice is so distinctive you could take her byline off her stories and her NYT best-selling books and still know who wrote them. Roach immerses herself in worlds that other journalists might rather avoid – human … Read more
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 narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked … Read more
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 Kruse and his story about a woman who … Read more
In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it partly by dumpster-diving for personal details … Read more
Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” which in 1979 won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, ran 33 years ago but never loses its power to captivate or instruct. Franklin followed a brain surgeon through a tense operation … Read more
