Blog

  • |

    Teaching Tip: Andrew Marantz’s book “Antisocial”

    When I was teaching, I would often assign Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1989) for the start of any narrative journalism course. Malcolm’s book –while I disagreed with the breadth of its conclusions—was invaluable in getting my students to think about journalistic norms, about literary… Read More

  • |

    The Big Tent Approach

    I’ve never been a big fan of defining “literary” journalism—or coming up with a specific set of aesthetic criteria for studying it. To be sure, what I often call this “is it or isn’t it” question was once seen as important to for achieving broader academic acceptance.… Read More

  • |

    Good Reads: Janet Malcolm’s Voice

    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