"Creative nonfiction" is a wide-ranging literary genre. It includes memoir, narrative journalism, biography, lyrical essay, and other forms.
Lee Gutkind, who founded the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, has written a short history on the journal's website. In this piece, he says that writers of creative nonfiction have many different purposes and use different forms, but what they have in common is that they are "writing true stories that provide information about a variety of subjects, enriched by relevant thoughtful ideas, personal insight, and intimacies about life and the world we live in."
Have you ever wanted to write a true story? This book will help you craft notable narrative nonfiction. After you discover a topic, you'll move on to collecting facts and charting your course. This book offers examples, quotes, and short writing exercises to inspire you. Whether your goal is to tell your own story or someone else's, this book will help you bring the details to life.
A literary analysis of the popular genre of the informal primatology field narrative. Explores the works of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, and others in the contexts of scientific, literary, and conservation discourses.
Though creative nonfiction has been around since Montaigne, St. Augustine, and Seneca, we’ve only just begun to ask how this genre works, why it functions the way it does, and where its borders reside. In this collection, sixteen essential contemporary creative nonfiction writers reflect on whatever far, dark edge of the genre they find themselves most drawn to.
In a series of linked lyric essays, Detailing Trauma explores in vivid, sometimes graphic detail the many types of wounds from which the human body and spirit may suffer--and heal. Mapping the diseases and injuries that can afflict the body, the author asks how we can continue to live and love in the face of the great potential for suffering and loss. She names each section of the book for body parts or processes, then juxtaposes the functions and failures of human anatomy with experiences in her own life and those of people she knows and loves, meticulously stitching together life's fractures and ruptures with skillful narrative.
In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwin's words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generation's most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns.
In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later-in 1951-and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. In this foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics.
With The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. The Omnivore's Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
A remarkable meditative foray into the strange and seductive beauty of swamps and bogs. Barbara Hurd writes about people with the canny poise of Cheever, and about nature with the loving exactitude of Thoreau. And everywhere in her work is a speculative energy and elegance that make her essays a ra