John McPhee’s great subject has always been work. From his first book, “A Sense of Where You Are,” which came out in 1965 and portrays basketball star and Rhodes Scholar Bill Bradley, to “Uncommon Carriers” (2006), with its truckers and … Read more
The new storytelling collective Deca launched late last week with a Kickstarter campaign and a debut title, “And the City Swallowed Them,” about the murder of a Canadian model in Shanghai, by … Read more
Fast Company‘s Chuck Salter recently came up with an innovative way to address the unfolding narrative that is Detroit. The city, long depressed, is now bankrupt. Unemployment stands at double the national rate; buildings have been famously abandoned; dozens … Read more
If you missed a post or two in our weeklong recap of this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, here’s the roundup: On Tuesday, the Tampa … Read more
Tomorrow through Friday we’ll feature exclusive outtakes from this month’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference at the University of North Texas. This year’s correspondents: veteran journalists Lee Hancock and Charlie Lewis, whose bios you’ll find below. (In … Read more
In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. Since the former is the ideal relationship with the reader, the more you can bring that non-point of view to nonfiction narrative, the better. In other words, as a writer, no matter what the hell you’re writing, do your best to kill your ego, even if those are mutually exclusive ideals. (i.e.: He could have told the story of the effect of that atomic bomb on an innocent city by telling us what he found when he went over there, and it would have been a good piece. Instead he gave the story over to the six survivors, and it earned a place in immortality.) Read more
The Hurricane Sandy storylines are still unfolding, but one thing became clear on Monday as winds and water overtook New York City and New Jersey in historic proportions: Digital media deepened the transformation of the disaster narrative. Here’s some of what’s … Read more
The first week of fall term ends today at Harvard, and the Nieman Foundation’s newest class of fellows is settling in. The Nieman fellowship, which next … Read more
Lori Waselchuk describes herself as a “documentary photographer and arts activist.” We’ve wanted to talk with her for a while about her latest project, “Grace Before Dying,” which focuses on a prison hospice program in Louisiana. Read more
I’ve never met William Langewiesche, and I don’t know many of his secrets, but I know he and I have at least one thing in common: We’re guided by the same terrible fear. “You have this precious, incredibly … Read more
