The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1

The Best Creative Nonfiction #1

by Lee Gutkind (Editor)

Narrative nonfiction at its cutting-edge best from writers at the cusp of recognition and fame. Lee Gutkind, proclaimed the "Godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair , along with the staff of his landmark journal Creative Nonfiction , has culled alternative publications, 'zines, blogs, podcasts, literary journals, and other often overlooked publications in search of new voices and innovative ideas―essays and articles written with panache and power."The Truth About Cops and Dogs," by Rebecca Skloot, describes a vicious pack of wild dogs, preying on the domesticated pets of Manhattan. Monica Wojcik's "The w00t Files," for the chic geek crowd, comes directly from John McPhee's famous Literature of Fact workshop at Princeton, a launching pad for famous young writers. Daniel Nestor, of McSweeney's and Bookslut , explains James Frey, while the very overweight Michael Rosenwald becomes a Popular Science nearly nude centerfold in a quest for knowledge about high-tech diagnostics.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Writing, Anthologies, Adult

352 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2007

About the author

Lee Gutkind has been recognized by Vanity Fair as “the godfather behind creative nonfiction.” A prolific writer, he has authored and edited over twenty-five books, and is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish only narrative nonfiction. Gutkind has received grants, honors, and awards from numerous organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation. A man of many talents, Gutkind has been a motorcyclist, medical insider, sports expert, sailor, and college professor. He is currently distinguished writer in residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.

Reviews

[sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I get bored reading nonfiction- but this book lived up to its name. I really enjoyed Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale" (comparing her experience of chronic pain to the numeric "pain scale" they use to quantify pain in medical settings), Rebecca Skloot's "The Truth about Cops and Dogs" (her investigation into a pack of abused wild dogs that tore her pet dog to pieces and terrorized her Manhattan neighborhood), and Heather Sellers' "Tell Me Again Who Are You?" (describing her attempt to be formally diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or "face blindness," that makes it almost impossible for her to recognize or tell people apart).

Some entries are included in a "techie" font to indicate that they were pulled from blogs, which seems like a weird choice to me; if the editor thought they were worthy of inclusion, why set them off as different?

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spotty quality here, but the great essays make up for the less successful ones. If you were to do an accounting:

Total number of pieces: 27
Excellent enough to redeem the whole: 6
Quite good but could have been better/more depth: 4
Skipped after 1-2 pages due to being bored: 7
Skipped after 1 page due to it being about death: 2
From blogs;worthwhile: 5;2
Non-traditional style, successful;unsuccessful: 3;2
Almost loved until it was ruined by its conclusion: 1

I would have given this a 4 if it weren't for the stupid introductory paragraphs before each essay explaining what the proceeding essay is about/doing. If the thing the essay is doing is successful, there is no need to explain it ahead of time. If it's unsuccessful enough to warrant an explanation, what the hell is it doing in this collection?

[Jeremy]

I like these.

[Anika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may never finish this book. I'm reading, savoring little by little, picking and choosing and digesting each piece. Enormously evocative.

[Judd Street · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a little outside of my normal style of reading, but was a pleasure to read. "The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol 1" contains 27 short to medium length pieces of non-fiction writing of highly varied topic, style, and audience. It's a little hard to review, as there's no real core argument or thesis to such a book, and one essay's greatness is easily subdued by being followed by a few slogs.

It is worth calling out a few really great essays in particular:
-The Cipher in Room 214 (Carol Smith) is fascinating and a great opener, if leaving you wishing for resolution.
-The Truth About Cops and Dogs (Rebecca Skloot) is perhaps the most exceptional essay of the volume. It's absolutely heart wrenching, but peels back so many layers on a terribly horrific situation.
-Wild Flavor (Karl Greenfeld) is an engaging, page turner account that takes you to the cusp of animal-human spillover in SARS1. Of all the essays, it makes perhaps the biggest claims - and suffers significantly for being somewhat unclear how much is fact and how much is fictionalized - but it's certainly engaging.
- Tell Me Who You Are Again (Heather Sellers) is a really interesting first-person account of living with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. It really takes the reader into the lived experience in a way that I've never really thought about before.

At the same time, I did almost put down the volume once or twice because of long-ish interludes of essays that didn't really do a whole lot for me. My guess is that this is a highly subjective experience (and that the essays I've highlighted above would be sour points for other readers), and I think perhaps I came in assuming too strongly that 'great creative non-fiction' would transcend this, to a degree. Still, it was an enjoyable read and good enough to encourage me to pick up the next couple volumes, if I ever see them.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first story, interestingly, fits nicely with Housekeeping. If Sylvie or Ruthie had been wandering around, visiting Sylvie's friends in Seattle and decides to end their life there and then, it would not be too hard for them to become another Mary Anderson. Loss and loneliness made them lost souls and blurred the boundary between what's lost and what's remaining, they are only a thin sheet of paper away from death or life.

[sisterimapoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of creative nonficiton pieces - as always some connect more than others depending on areas of personal interest and appeal, but even the ones that didn't speak to me as loudly were still quality writing. Looking forward to the the other two volumes in this set.

[Annie Burch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it-it was fun! A cool concept and I liked the format of the book a lot. There were a few essays that were boring that I had a hard time getting through, but the ones that were really good completely made up for the ones that weren’t. A big fan!

[Dawn Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I flew through this book. There were a lot of really good reads in it. I highly recommend it.

[Pam Laine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag. Some real gems amongst a fair amount of duds. My favorites: 'Mbriago and The Truth About Cops and Dogs.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF I did not like the first six essays at all. There was nothing spectacular about any of them. Disappointing.

[Walkeo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting, wide-ranging collection in terms of topic and voice. Thoroughly enjoyed every selection.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any anthology, I liked some of the selections better than others.
I found that I DO like creative nonfiction, though.

[Jeremy Jl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent selection of CNF pieces from the genre's godfather

[Sriya Prathuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this collection just as much as the 3rd edition

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag. The editor, Lee Gutkind, has clearly labored in assembling such a varied collection. The presentation is great: appealing and understated cover design, thoughtful introduction, etc. Gutkind subscribes to a notion that the most exciting writing comes from new faces, unafraid to push and even break down conventional notions of the form. There are no big names, and there shouldn't be: It's all about experimentation.

But as with most experiments, there are a number of duds, particularly the anonymous blog entries that, to me, hardly seem noteworthy and are certainly not groundbreaking (or, in Gutkind's words, "rough and raw... piercing and provocative"); they're more reminiscent of teenagers' over-emotive, hyper-personal LiveJournal posts. Nearly all of the best selections — at least, those I liked most — were taken from literary journals, and moreover, while some writers successfully played with the form, there's nothing here that hasn't been done before.

The inclusion of a piece (Monica Hsuing Wojcik's "The Woot Files") from an undergraduate creative nonfiction class is a nice touch, but the content of the piece (which is an outsider's examination of the phenomenon of "leetspeak", told through the tired-seeming gimmick of alternating between first-person expert narrative and instant-message threads) is emblematic of a generation gap regarding just how (un)interesting it is to break the traditional format of nonfiction. Did my parents' generation suffer from book after loathsome book of tedious, direct, non-narrative nonfiction — and would that explain why forms of writing that attempt to "subvert" (too strong a word, I feel) this structure are inherently thrilling?

Another work included, "Tell Me Again Who Are You?" by Heather Sellers, is a first-person account of a fascinating disorder, prosopagnosia — the inability to distinguish faces. But Sellers' style is rough and curt, suggesting either that she's not a trained writer (and was therefore included because Gutkind believes it's the story, not the quality of the writing that matters), or, more likely based on the explanation she gives before the story for why she uses creative nonfiction, that Sellers adopts a colloquial, simple, and easily impressed persona for this piece — appearing that she's quite inexperienced as a writer — in order to manufacture attention for herself (which seems both dishonest and not really nonfiction) and play up her non-elite upbringing in an industry filled with Ivy League degrees (again seeking undue attention). This is unsettling.

After reading collections like this, I'm left feeling that the best creative nonfiction works within the system — that is, at least within the system as it's already been broken down by creative writers of the last 40 years ("New Journalism" or whatever you want to call it). Sure, some of the pieces in here are fascinating or clever, but attempting to redefine this pseudo-genre in a way that prefers experimentation and inexperience to craft and quality appears to be wholly unsuccessful. Gutkind's message in the introduction would sadly be more convincing without the rest of the anthology.

[L. Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is difficult to review a collection comprised of a genre rather than a theme, comprised of dozens of authors, rather than the renowned or requited works of one. Do you let your favorite stories, masterful and mindblowing, cast a halo around those that required sheer force of will to work through, or do you meet in the middle letting some of the gilt rub off the good for the sake of telling the truth about the bad? I chose to meet in the middle, in a very literal sense, giving this book three stars, though really I would say it's earned three and a half.
The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 1 is a buffet of the choice bits of the nonfiction world, the short stories showcasing a genre that most mentally reserve for biographies and textbooks. You may not like everything on the buffet line, there's bound to be flavors you find repulsive or bland, but it's all you can eat, and you choose how far your money goes. Personally, I am not a fan of forgoing stories in my collections or chapters in my books. I eat them all, taking the good with bad and weighing them as one. After cleaning my plate, I can say this collection is worth its weight in time and twice that in consideration. I'll certainly be back for seconds with Vol. 2.
For those who are new to creative nonfiction and find themselves wanting to understand it, either as readers or writers, this collection can give you an insight into the power of truth in prose and the diversity of styles and methods applied to that truth. For those who already appreciate the genre, this is a thoughtful reminder as to why. And for those of you who were hoping to find a definition for creative nonfiction, I'll leave you with mine: Creative nonfiction is simply the truth told in a way that remembers it is worth telling. It is the truth clad in prose, made worthy for readers without tarnishing its integrity. But really, it's simply another type of story. If the writers are doing their jobs, you should not be able to tell creative fiction from creative nonfiction because a well written story is well written whether or not it actually happened first. So before you deem a book bland because it's true, remember, life fuels the fire of fiction and can be lit just as easily outside of it.

[Ploni Almoni · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mixed bag, but some of it is truly excellent. Heather Sellers “Tell me again who are you?”; and particularly Karl Taro Greenfeld “Wild Flavor”.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stories in this anthology fall into predictable categories. The better, more coherent and structurally sound pieces are those selected from major publications ("The Truth About Cops and Dogs," from New York, "Wild Flavor," from Paris Review, "The Cipher in the Room," from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine," from Popular Science), presumably because such publications have editors with more exacting standards. Stories from small-circulation journals vary in quality from the really good ("Notes on Frey," from Creative Nonfiction, "Tell Me Again Who Are You?" from Alaska Quarterly Review) to the solidly mediocre ("Badlands," from Creative Nonfiction) and not very good ("Pimp," from Narrative Magazine), likely because small-circulation literary journals tend to offer only limited editorial guidance when preparing manuscripts for publication. Poorest of all were blog entries. While they are surely gems amid the blogosphere wasteland, they're also angsty, brimming with a kind of torrid self-consciousness, and full of observations that aren't very original. In other words, they are representative of the flaws of blogging as a literary medium. And here, they are novelties. In sum, though, this is good collection to sift through.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book while out of town and then immediately lent it to someone to read "The Pain Scale." So, I can't write the thorough review of it I wanted to, but will hopefully do so when I get the book back.

Overall the book was better than I expected, but uneven as compilations usually are. There were a number of gems, of which "The Pain Scale" (as mentioned below) was the best, plus a memoir of a high-class prostitute, a student seducing former professor story told in the form of a list, a report on eating contests, a recounting of homicidal dogs and NYC bureaucracy and an inside look into the beginning of SARS and Chinese capitalism. There were also a number of throw away stories, many of which were ones culled off of blogs. Once I get the book back, I'll do a story-by-story review!

The piece is "The Pain Scale" by Eula Biss and if you happen upon it, I would absolutely recommend it. It's simple and spare, yet says so much about several topics that seem to be impossible to comprehend.

[Lisi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book for Christmas and then read it in Puerto Rico. It was perfect for my short attention span on the beach.


North Pole, South Pole, Sea of Carcinoma was an essay written by Dev Hathaway about the last year of her life after receiving a diagnosis of renal cancer (a bad deal). I have always wondered what the patient feels, because I think the experience is often sugar coated or medicalized.

My favorite story in this book, by far, was The Truth about Cops and Dogs. It involves the author (and former veterinary technician's) dog, Bonny, being ripped apart on the streets of Manhattan by a pack of junkyard dogs. The essay chronicles the author's fight to make the streets safe for the dogs of New York. The first few pages of this story are horrifying and made me squeeze out some tears at the hotel pool. I tried to remind myself it wasn't real, but then I realized it WAS real and that is why I am obsessed with this entire book!

[Dafna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I normally find reading or reviewing anthologies as tedious, because there is so much good mixed in with the bad. This particular anthology started off strongly, the stories in the beginning were beautifully written, the subjects were interesting and kept my attention. Towards the end of the book, I found the subject matter of the stories to be boring, and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Ever read something that someone wrote because they thought it would make them seem edgy or a more intelligent writer? I ran into pages of that towards the end of this book.

If you're interested in writing short stories, and want to dissect their construction, then yes, I would recommend this to others. I had to read it for school, and I'm glad that I got it out of the unread pile, so that I read something better.

[ModCloth]

Being that I wanted an overview of current creative nonfiction, I thought this would be a good place to start. Published by the Pittsburgh literary journal of the same name, I found a good mixture of creative nonfiction styles and topics. A few of the essays I couldn't get into such as Biss's "Pain Scale," which I felt was a little melodramatic. I also found O'Donnell's "Consumption," while thought-provoking and engaging, maudlin. I did enjoy Lee's "Pimp," which is apparently part of a larger memoir that I look forward to reading someday. As for more writer-centered essays, I found Nester's "Notes on Frey" an interesting comment on the validity of storytelling in the ever developing genre of creative nonfiction. - Angela, Fashion Writer

[Kati · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creative non-fiction is one of my favorite genres to read and this book demonstrates why. While not every selection struck me, the whole book was worth it just for "North Pole, South Pole, the Sea of Carcinoma" by Dev Hathaway, a radiantly-written account of the author's last year of life. Reading this essay brought me psychically close to my own death, which felt a little frantic and important.

My other favorites were "The Pain Scale" by Eula Bliss, "Pimp" by Olivia Chai-Lin Lee, "The Answer that Increasingly Appeals" by Robin Black and "Tell Me Again Who You Are?" by Heather Sellers.

Rebecca Skloot has a piece in this collection and though the subject matter was only marginally interesting to me, she kept me riveted. Like she does, that talented woman.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading anthologies, you're bound to enjoy some stories over others, but this batch was very disappointing. I would rate only about 25% of the stories worthy of "Best." I'm not a fan of stream of consciousness writing and/or poetic prose, and this book featured several pieces of that type.

Among the more enjoyable chapters were Carol Smith's "The Cipher in Room 214," Debra Marquart's "Chores," Eula Biss's "The Pain Scale," Rebecca Skloot's "The Truth About Cops and Dogs," and "Wild Flavor" by Alexis Wiggins.

I won't be bothering with Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2.

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

A decent bus/break book. I did find a lot of the writing to be a bit dramatic (over-thought?) though. Possibly because a lot of it came from the memoir genre and it was a bit odd to be given snippets from random people. I go for memoirs when there is something specific about it, or the author, that I'm drawn to and I didn't find I was drawn to any of the included pieces, so that could be the issue.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The genre of creative nonfiction was very interesting to me. I enjoyed the reporting and educational aspects that were delivered by personal stories. It was very interesting to me and I can tell how difficult to perfect. Some stories had more reporting while others were more personal. I learned a lot from some. Most were good and written in interesting ways, but some were very boring and hard to stick with.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am one of the bloggers that appeared in the book...but I have to say that I really enjoyed the whole thing. I think that they did a good job at representing the genre...although I am curious to hear what other people think about how they offset the blogging pieces with a different type. I am on the fence.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthologies are always kind of strange experiences because one piece might be the greatest thing ever, and the next one might leave me cold. This is no exception, but most of the pieces are pretty good. I think my favorite is the piece on James Frey; I'll probably even use that in classes, because he always, always comes up. I also like that they included some blog posts.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Wild Flavor" by Karl Taro Greenfeld was, by far, the stand-out story of this compilation for me, but all of them were excellent and the pieces were very well spaced out--a short one here, following a long one, a funny and a slightly more serious one following that, etc. I can't wait to read the other volumes.