At last year’s Power of Narrative conference at Boston University, the poet Verandah Porche asked Gay Talese which women writers he admired. “All of us seem to be on the beat of retrieving what’s missing, what’s unheard.” He couldn’t … Read more
Why is it great? Yes, we deliberately launched this cool new feature with the first sentence of one of the most famous magazine articles of all time. Go big or go home. Fifty years later, this lede is still … Read more
So I leave the country for a few weeks, and I miss the latest Twitter storm surrounding Gay Talese. The world may have moved on to Pokemon (and by the time you read this, it will no doubt have moved … Read more
We just posted our 100th “Why’s This So Good?,” Abeer Najjar’s look at the Susan Dominus story in the New York Times Magazine, “Hana.” Nearly twice a month since June 2011, we’ve had accomplished journalists … Read more
To help celebrate Floyd Patterson’s birthday, let’s turn for a moment to Esquire Hall of Famer Gay Talese, who called Patterson a “writer’s dream.” Esquire Classic: You wrote more than thirty stories on Floyd Patterson for The … Read more
Happy Narrative New Year! If you resolved to get better at narrative in 2016, or even just to figure out what it is, here’s a list of conferences and workshops where you can listen, learn and network. From the practical to … Read more
Since it debuted in 1933, Esquire has helped launch and promote the careers of dozens of renowned writers, from Raymond Carver and Richard Ford to Cynthia Ozick and Elizabeth Gilbert. Under the leadership of Harold Hayes and fiction editor Gordon … Read more
I’ve been thinking about Mike Sager’s story, “The Devil and John Holmes,” for a long time. I first read his chronicle of the famous porn star and the Wonderland murders when it came out in 1989; I was 10 … Read more
[Editor’s note: John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s “Upon This Rock” is by now a modern classic of literary journalism: writer rents an RV, experiences a Christian rock festival (and certain revelations) with a bunch of guys from West Virginia. In … Read more
