This weekend, The New York Times began running a five-part series from reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008 and remained in captivity for seven months and 10 days. In “Held by the Taliban,” Rohde uses … Read more
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine included a personal essay from novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, “Against Meat,” which recounts his struggles with whether or not to eat (or teach his child to eat) other creatures. As I started … Read more
Excerpts from an August 2009 interview with Michael J. Mooney, reporter for Florida’s New Times, whose stories won a slot in the Best American Crime Reporting and Best American Sports Writing anthologies for 2009: When did you first get interested … Read more
In our second Notable Narrative for June, cook Ines De Costa makes soup at a social club in the ailing city of Fall River, Massachusetts. New York Times columnist Dan Barry uses her preparation as a structure for narrating what’s … Read more
A woman working at a Chinese restaurant refuses a man’s pennies when he tries to pay his bill. The man is indignant; a circus act of politicians and community leaders follows. All express outrage and call for change (so to … Read more
Katharine Moser asks for a genetic test to determine if she will eventually develop Huntington’s disease. She learns she does carry the gene mutation that caused the death of her grandfather and other relatives. Harmon follows Moser as she struggles … Read more
Bearak’s use of first person is especially unusual in this piece about Adam Greenberg, a baseball player who, on his first day in the Majors, gets beaned in the head by a ball. Greenberg’s career is set back, perhaps for … Read more
This story seems to have followed a recipe for compelling narrative: Take a heroic figure, add a group of “endangered children, let them struggle against great odds. Fold in current social issues and moral context. In the Hollywood version of … Read more
This is a fascinating, moving piece of memoir. We admired the masterly sequencing of the reader’s experience, from evocative scene to background and back to scene. But the background is also plot: Brown the character compulsively gathers information; it’s part … Read more
The efficiency of this piece is remarkable. We thought the use of time and floor numbers a tight and evocative way of both structuring the piece and crystallizing a chaotic event. We found the opening lines particularly strong, along with … Read more
