The Craft of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”
“Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, […]
What Every Writer Needs to Know
Now this is valuable information for all writers, drawn from a handy book, published in England in 1900, called How To Write For Magazines. The author, apparently a successful practitioner of the craft, chose the catchy pseudonym, “£600 A Year From It.” Should MSS. be Typewritten? “Should my work be typewritten or not ?” That is […]
Forty Years Later, the Power of Piers Paul Read’s “Alive” Lives On
Forty years ago, Piers Paul Read’s landmark work of nonfiction, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, was published. It’s the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a chartered plane carrying 45 people — the Uruguayan rugby team along with family members, friends and a five-man crew — that crashed in the Andes in October 1972. A […]
The Art of Antique Typewriter Ribbon Tins
Vintage typewriter tins are a collectible form of advertising memorablia. These lithographed square or round tins were introduced around the late 18oos when a new technological innovation, at first called a “Type Writer,” used keys that struck paper through an inked ribbon. Like razors and blades, the typewriters lasted but ribbons had to be constantly […]
A Broadcast Psychologist’s Life-saving Call
In a lovely essay about the late Joyce Brothers in The New York Times Magazine in December, writer Kim Tingley reconstructed a memorable moment in the life of the psychologist best known for counseling on her own syndicated radio and TV shows. On January 4, 1971, Brothers took a call from a woman who said […]
Murder, He Wrote
In 1991, Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon published a best-selling nonfiction book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, about 12 months he spent with detectives from the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit. Hollywood director Barry Levinson turned it into a TV series, Homicide: Life on the Street, and eventually Simon quit his reporting job to write episodes for […]
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “magic journalism”
Seven years ago this month, the great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński, died of a heart attack at 74. I first came across Kapuściński when I read his remarkable book, Another Day of Life, an account of three months he spent immersed in the Angolan Civil War in 1975: “The whole Trivoli Hotel was packed to the […]
Gay Talese Meets the Ginger Man
The great actor, Peter O’Toole, died last Saturday (December 14th). Fifty years ago, he spent the better part of a month in the company of Gay Talese, considered among the greatest narrative nonfiction writers, for an Esquire profile published in August 1963 [see link below]. The piece opens on a plane from London to Ireland, […]
Adrian Nicole Leblanc on opening Random Family
I remember reading Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s stunning debut as a nonfiction author: “Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx,” published in 2003 after she’d spent 1o years researching it. Being the 10th anniversary of the book, The New Yorker interviewed her about it earlier this year. Most writers will say that […]
Listening to Susan Orlean
The great narrative nonfiction writer, Susan Orlean, talks about writing, ideas, storytelling, etc. The author of The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend, she’s also written countless memorable articles, including the much-anthologized “The American Man At Age Ten” (in Esquire) and “Life’s Swell,” her Outside magazine feature on a group of young surfer […]