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Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction
Some of the best and most original prose in America today is being written by literary journalists. Memoirs and personal essays, profiles, science and nature reportage, travel writing -- literary journalists are working in all of these forms with artful styles and fresh approaches. In Literary Journalism, editors Norman Sims and Mark Kramer have collected the finest examples of literary journalism from both the masters of the genre who have been working for decades and the new voices freshly arrived on the national scene.
The fifteen essays gathered here
-- John McPhee's account of the battle between army engineers and the lower Mississippi River
-- Susan Orlean's brilliant portrait of the private, imaginative world of a ten-year-old boy
-- Tracy Kidder's moving description of life in a nursing home
-- Ted Conover's wild journey in an African truck convoy while investigating the spread of AIDS
-- Richard Preston's bright piece about two shy Russian mathematicians who live in Manhattan and search for order in a random universe
-- Joseph Mitchell's classic essay on the rivermen of Edgewater, New Jersey
-- And nine more fascinating pieces of the nation's best new writing
In the last decade this unique form of writing has grown exuberantly -- and now, in Literary Journalism, we celebrate fifteen of our most dazzling writers as they work with great vitality and astonishing variety.
The fifteen essays gathered here
-- John McPhee's account of the battle between army engineers and the lower Mississippi River
-- Susan Orlean's brilliant portrait of the private, imaginative world of a ten-year-old boy
-- Tracy Kidder's moving description of life in a nursing home
-- Ted Conover's wild journey in an African truck convoy while investigating the spread of AIDS
-- Richard Preston's bright piece about two shy Russian mathematicians who live in Manhattan and search for order in a random universe
-- Joseph Mitchell's classic essay on the rivermen of Edgewater, New Jersey
-- And nine more fascinating pieces of the nation's best new writing
In the last decade this unique form of writing has grown exuberantly -- and now, in Literary Journalism, we celebrate fifteen of our most dazzling writers as they work with great vitality and astonishing variety.
480 pages, Paperback
First published May 23, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 22, 2011
I picked up Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction because I’ve been experimenting with the genre. Or so I thought. The subtitle of this collection, edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, both trained journalists, is indicative of the confusion inherent in the genre. Nonfiction, as it turns out, appears in many different forms and styles. This collection pays particular attention to what the editors call “Literary Journalism.” The essays in this collection are heavily researched and have the objectivity of journalism with the attention to language of fiction. Almost. There are places in which the research gets in the way of the crafting of language. Places, for example, where the author feels it necessary to list all eleven businesses along a particular stretch of a riverbank where the listing of two or three would have sufficed (and been less tedious). And then there’s tone. The tone of these essays is so straight-forward and to the point that they run the risk, at times, of losing readers to boredom. I mean, if you’re going to write forty pages about river men in New Jersey, it had better be interesting. And in the hands of a short story writer or novelist, it no doubt would. But it is clear that this choice of tone and complete transparency is a sort of unspoken rule amongst those who call themselves journalists first and writers second. And obviously some leniency can be given based on the fact that these writers are held to the truth in a way that writers in other genres are not. Sometimes, let’s face it, the truth is a bit boring.
Still, I found myself more intrigued than not in reading many of these essays which span topics from portraits of individuals and entire families to the farming industries in Russia and France or the history of the Corps of Engineers’ work on the Mississippi River. It’s no surprise to me that the essays to which I felt most drawn were those that looked closely at and told the story of people – rather than those that helped explain how ice forms in rivers or the establishment of money market accounts in the eighties. Don’t hear me wrong – I liked those essays too. And it is perhaps the highest compliment I can give them by saying that I read the entire essay and enjoyed it. But still, it was the essays that formed a portrait in words of interesting (and not-so-interesting) people that kept me enrapt.
There are two essays in this collection that tie for my favorite. The first is titled “The American Man at Age Ten” by Susan Orlean. Here’s an essay about a 10-year-old boy. There is nothing exceptional about him. He is not famous for anything. And yet, through really skilled writing and an attention to detail, Orlean writes an essay that I couldn’t put down. There is no better description of Orlean’s essay than her opening paragraph:
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home…We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals…We would have a very good life.
What I suspected I liked so much about that essay became even more solidified when I read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s essay “Trina and Trina.” LeBlanc writes about meeting sixteen-year-old Trina when her editor instructed her to write a piece on crack prostitution: “She was sixteen, six months into crack, holing up in a housing development with a thirty-two-year-old night security guard named Joe.” For three years, Leblanc follows Trina’s downward spiral into drug addiction, prostitution, jail and total isolation. Toward the end of the essay, LeBlanc writes: “Sometimes I get messages. I play back her voice on my answering machine and I miss Trina in those minutes–the irascible charm, the oddball wisdom, her hard honesty. Her words waft through my apartment.”
In the end, what turns out to be so engrossing about these particular essays is the plain and simple fact that the authors put themselves into the narrative. So many of the essays in this collection are pure journalism, what the editors call “long journalism” – pieces that require years of research, years devoted to following one particular story. And while those essays are interesting and, for the most part, hold my attention and educate me, it is the essay that includes the writer’s perspective, the journalist’s role, that resonates, that in some small way changes the way I see things or the way I feel. No doubt, it’s breaking the rules. It’s breaking the rules of journalism. But that’s what’s so great about “literary” journalism, like “creative” nonfiction: some of the rules can and should be broken.
By the time I read the last of the essays collected by Sims & Kramer in Literary Journalism, I realized that there is at least one form of nonfiction that I can scratch off my list of the kind of writing I’m doing. Defining where one fits in the broad and rule-riddled genre of nonfiction can be tricky. And while it’s clear to me that I’m not writing literary journalism, there are still things I can learn from having read this collection. Sims and Kramer did a good job of collecting a variety of essays in the genre, of illustrating how far afield one can go and still be considered a literary journalist. It is, for the most part, a good read too. And the essays that drag or don’t hold your attention? Well, you can just skip ahead to the next one that most likely will. I know I did.
Still, I found myself more intrigued than not in reading many of these essays which span topics from portraits of individuals and entire families to the farming industries in Russia and France or the history of the Corps of Engineers’ work on the Mississippi River. It’s no surprise to me that the essays to which I felt most drawn were those that looked closely at and told the story of people – rather than those that helped explain how ice forms in rivers or the establishment of money market accounts in the eighties. Don’t hear me wrong – I liked those essays too. And it is perhaps the highest compliment I can give them by saying that I read the entire essay and enjoyed it. But still, it was the essays that formed a portrait in words of interesting (and not-so-interesting) people that kept me enrapt.
There are two essays in this collection that tie for my favorite. The first is titled “The American Man at Age Ten” by Susan Orlean. Here’s an essay about a 10-year-old boy. There is nothing exceptional about him. He is not famous for anything. And yet, through really skilled writing and an attention to detail, Orlean writes an essay that I couldn’t put down. There is no better description of Orlean’s essay than her opening paragraph:
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home…We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals…We would have a very good life.
What I suspected I liked so much about that essay became even more solidified when I read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s essay “Trina and Trina.” LeBlanc writes about meeting sixteen-year-old Trina when her editor instructed her to write a piece on crack prostitution: “She was sixteen, six months into crack, holing up in a housing development with a thirty-two-year-old night security guard named Joe.” For three years, Leblanc follows Trina’s downward spiral into drug addiction, prostitution, jail and total isolation. Toward the end of the essay, LeBlanc writes: “Sometimes I get messages. I play back her voice on my answering machine and I miss Trina in those minutes–the irascible charm, the oddball wisdom, her hard honesty. Her words waft through my apartment.”
In the end, what turns out to be so engrossing about these particular essays is the plain and simple fact that the authors put themselves into the narrative. So many of the essays in this collection are pure journalism, what the editors call “long journalism” – pieces that require years of research, years devoted to following one particular story. And while those essays are interesting and, for the most part, hold my attention and educate me, it is the essay that includes the writer’s perspective, the journalist’s role, that resonates, that in some small way changes the way I see things or the way I feel. No doubt, it’s breaking the rules. It’s breaking the rules of journalism. But that’s what’s so great about “literary” journalism, like “creative” nonfiction: some of the rules can and should be broken.
By the time I read the last of the essays collected by Sims & Kramer in Literary Journalism, I realized that there is at least one form of nonfiction that I can scratch off my list of the kind of writing I’m doing. Defining where one fits in the broad and rule-riddled genre of nonfiction can be tricky. And while it’s clear to me that I’m not writing literary journalism, there are still things I can learn from having read this collection. Sims and Kramer did a good job of collecting a variety of essays in the genre, of illustrating how far afield one can go and still be considered a literary journalist. It is, for the most part, a good read too. And the essays that drag or don’t hold your attention? Well, you can just skip ahead to the next one that most likely will. I know I did.
May 30, 2021
This is a worthwhile read for journalists, prospective journalists and writers. It's a form of writing that's almost like a nonfiction novella, with detail usually found more in nonfiction magazines. They are all worthwhile reads for those interested in this writing style. A couple stories are kind of dry and were a bit too long and delved too much in the minutia, but most I enjoyed, such as The Mountains of Pi, The American Man, and The Road is Very Unfair. That last one especially struck a chord and serves as a reminder as to why making lasting change is so difficult.
March 17, 2019
Lot's of promise here, but it just didn't deliver. The historical and academic aspect is spot on, but many of the chosen stories simply don't stand up anymore, which made this book extremely hard to get through.
September 8, 2019
I read and was very inspired by this book back when I was only a few years into making journalism my full-time career.
May 18, 2011
This book is old, but holds some of narrative journalism's powerhouse writers - many of which are professors of literary nonfiction today. Ted Conover, John McPhee and Mark Kramer. There are 15 little nonfiction stories in this, most of which are interesting on the surface. There are four in particular that I thought were written very well AND had interesting topics. Ted Conover's account of riding with a truck driver through rural Africa and talking about AIDS was very very good. Then, I also liked how Susan Orlean went into the mind of a 10-year-old who already knew what he wanted to be in life. Mark Singer writers about this eccentric filmmaker, and that piece has its funny parts. I loved it though. Finally, I thought Adrian N. LeBlanc's story about a drug addicted, teen girl hooker was amazing. She put a lot of herself into that story, which turned out to be OK. Conversely, there were three stories in this book that went over my head or just didn't tickle my fancy. I thought Brent Staples piece was a jumbled rant about moving to Chicago to become a professor. I didn't catch the theme of it or the tone at all. I felt the same way about David Quamen's piece cleverly titled Strawberries Under Ice. I thought John McPhee's piece on the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana was a bit too long, repeated some material and didn't have enough drama and action to it. And it wasn't his fault. A lot of the real action (a.k.a incredible floods of the Mississippi) happened when he was negative six years old. He had to recant A LOT of the stories he told in the piece. So, to me, it came off as flat. Mark Kramer has an interesting essay at the beginning of the book that includes steps on how to write this genre, if anyone is interested in taking on such projects. As with most anthologies I read, I would recommend that (if you pick up this book) select only a few to read. Reading this entire book could prove to be too dense of an undertaking.
July 19, 2007
The best book about writing I've ever come across. From the get-to where the editor quotes Samuel Johnson: "The true state of every nation is the state of common life" I was hooked. Used to be there were grumblings from some tradition-bound quarters about "literary non-fiction" but those seem to be in the minority now. Anyway, the best piece for me in the collection is Richard Preston's article on the mathematician-brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky who were calculating the digits of pi from their homemade super-computer. Unforgettable characters.
October 16, 2012
I bought this book because I wanted to understand what journalists call narrative non-fiction or literary journalism. If you're looking for a book that's going to break narrative non-fiction down and explain processes then there are better books for that. Originally when I bought this book I had hoped for advice from these amazing writers in addition to their stories. I have come to appreciate this book now for what it is, an anthology, and have found other books that speak to process.
January 6, 2024
A dated collection of work, but interesting none the same. I'm glad I dusted off this old college textbook to get a great cross section of American creative nonfiction. Though most of the material is drawn from authors who have written for the New Yorker, they span a vast range of subjects and provide many interesting voices and approaches to the topic of literary journalism.
July 14, 2011
: Mau saya sandingkan dengan Jurnalisme Sastrawi karya Raymundus Masri Sarep Putra, rupanya ada benang merah yang sangat signifikan, yakni sama-sama mengagungkan sisi human interest, meski beda kebijakan penerbitan pers di Negara Berkembang.
April 30, 2008
all the best writers...
November 7, 2008
Strawberries Under Ice by David Quammen is one of the best short pieces I've ever read. Insightful, curious, entertaining and beautifully written. Bring your dictionary though.
April 25, 2009
For a nonfiction writing class. It is just OK.
Want to read
September 30, 2011Nicebook
January 18, 2016
A decent anthology that illustrates good journalism techniques.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews