A little shy of midnight on a January night in 1945, someone shot Minneapolis muckraker Arthur Kasherman as he sat with a friend in his Oldsmobile. Firing several more times, the gunman pursued Kasherman as he climbed out of the car. Kasherman died at the scene, and the killer—whose name he seemed to have known—was [...]
Category Archives: print narratives
Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom
When literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly jumped into the newspaper business for their winter issue, much of the buzz was about the concept. A literary quarterly does a newspaper? Layout was debated, along with cost and replicability. But inside “Panorama” lurked a delightful, messy nonfiction narrative by Wajahat Ali.
“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, [...]
Walk on the wild side: animal stories that don’t stand up
When it comes to wildlife narratives, writer Bryan Christy wants more accountability from reporters.
Christy wrote us in response to our Friday issue of the Narrative Digest, which featured coverage of a zoo, a history of animal experimentation, and an essay on a vet in Sierra Leone, among other articles. He added another a item to the list of issues raised by [...]
Aminatta Forna’s “The Last Vet”: a dog’s life
Our latest Notable Narrative traces relations between humans and animals in the poorest country on earth. In “The Last Vet,” which appeared in the winter 2009 issue of Granta, writer Aminatta Forna follows Dr. Gudush Jalloh, the last veterinarian in private practice in Sierra Leone, as he treats and sterilizes dogs at his Freetown clinic.
Living [...]
Chris Jones, Roger Ebert and the possibilities of online narrative (or “does this story ever end?”)
When it comes to writing profiles, Esquire’s Chris Jones is used to getting the last word. But a few weeks ago, when Jones worked his storytelling mojo on Roger Ebert, he took on someone who had his own platform and his own audience.
“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, [...]
Paul Raeburn, Ira Glass, and just some of the ways a story can go wrong
Yesterday, Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker took the stuffing out of a New York Times medical piece. The story, by Gardiner Harris, reveals a secret recording of a 2007 meeting between a cardiologist and executives at a pharmaceutical company. Raeburn dinged it for both structure and content, writing that “sometimes a poorly [...]
Rick Moody’s “Amazing Tale” invites readers to step right up
Our latest Notable Narrative plays a wonderful game of fulfilling expectations in surprising ways. In the January 2010 issue of Details, Rick Moody’s “The Amazing Tale of the High School Quarterback Turned Lesbian Filmmaker” uses a bait-and-switch approach to write about a transgendered person on the verge of attending her 20th high school reunion.
The title [...]
Meg Laughlin on reporting from Haiti: “this is the face of the nation now”
St. Petersburg Times reporter Meg Laughlin recently spent eight days in Haiti and the Dominican Republic covering the aftermath of the earthquake. She managed to file a series of short narratives, mostly at the rate of one a day. Earlier this week, she talked with us about finding stories with local elements, using small moments [...]
Notable Narrative: Meg Laughlin chronicles survivors’ suffering in Haiti
Our latest Notable Narrative concerns the recent earthquake in Haiti but takes place in a public hospital in the Dominican Republic. St. Petersburg Times reporter Meg Laughlin finds one doctor who has done 22 amputations in two days, and another who says he has done 32 in just one day.
Many reporters in the region noticed [...]
Dan Koeppel and narrative tension—Popular Mechanics not for the faint of heart
So what do you do if you fall out of a plane at 35,000 feet, as is apparently the case with “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” in the February issue of Popular Mechanics? I came across this story on TheBrowser.com and almost skipped it, thinking the “helpful hints for disasters” genre has been done, and overdone.
But reporter [...]
