Here, I’m going to be talking about useful or interesting texts in the field of literary and narrative journalism. Sometimes, I’ll be talking about scholarship in the field; sometimes, about interesting long-form essays or books. Classics and current.
When scholars talk about why readers sink their teeth into works of literary or narrative journalism, customarily they focus on a feeling of immersion, or being “caught up in the story” and/or its descriptive details. As John Hartsock has emphasized, the longform writer dispenses with the so-called… Read More
It isn’t often remembered that one of the leading entries in Norm Sims’ field-opening collection Literary Journalism in the 20th Century (2007) was a pairing of two essays by Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform” and “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” both from the 1950s. (The latter sometimes appears as “Unsettling…”).… Read More
I’ve always regretted the fact that I never had a chance to teach Aleksandar Hemon‘s “The Aquarium” in a narrative journalism class. If you don’t know it–it’s reprinted in Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (2013), and you sometimes see it online–it tells the heart-wrenching story of the fact that Hemon’s… Read More