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, [...]
Tag Archives: print narratives
Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom
March 11, 2010 – 12:12 pm
Walk on the wild side: animal stories that don’t stand up
March 8, 2010 – 3:51 pm
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
March 4, 2010 – 2:23 pm
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?”)
March 2, 2010 – 3:19 pm
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, [...]
Rick Moody’s “Amazing Tale” invites readers to step right up
February 17, 2010 – 11:21 pm
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”
February 4, 2010 – 2:09 pm
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
February 3, 2010 – 4:22 pm
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
February 2, 2010 – 12:54 pm
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 [...]
Poetry as narrative journalism? You’d be surprised.
January 21, 2010 – 11:00 am
When people talk about journalism tottering off into quaint irrelevance, there is a tendency to compare journalism to poetry. In a post this week at PBS Idea Lab, Spot.Us founder David Cohn considers whether journalism, like poetry, might not be sustainable.
Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in droves—as [...]
Paige Williams on “Finding Dolly Freed”
January 15, 2010 – 9:45 am
Yesterday on the Storyboard, we looked at a new approach to narrative by focusing on Paige Williams’ self-published project “Finding Dolly Freed.” That post considered the possiblities for crowdfunded narrative journalism, but we were intrigued enough with the rest of what Williams had to say to offer more of it here. Below are excerpts from this [...]
