speaking of writers -the5th genre

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anyone know of any really great works of creative nonfiction that aren't terribly long? i have to assign to my class a reading and everything i can think of is too long,so ihave to pick one section and it ends up being all incomplete

― Holly (an appletross), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:15 (twenty-one years ago)

Creative non-fiction?

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:17 (twenty-one years ago)

How about Oliver Sacks? Books are damn accessible, and can be split up into individual case histories.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:18 (twenty-one years ago)

How old are they? Kids? We always had to read "To Kill A Mockingbird" which is short - but grownups might have read it already, "Catcher" as well.

― andy --, Monday, 21 March 2005 23:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Errr... "NON" fiction, I see.

― andy --, Monday, 21 March 2005 23:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Ha ha, Alex! That's what happens when you rag on studying writing: you get pwned by a genre you didn't know existed.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:19 (twenty-one years ago)

In Cold Blood!

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:19 (twenty-one years ago)

Haha that's not a GENRE, Nabisco! It's some publishing departments idea of a JOKE!

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:20 (twenty-one years ago)

In Cold Blood is sort of long, isn't it?

― andy --, Monday, 21 March 2005 23:20 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah NON FICTION! they are my peers, college age. i'm not teaching them, it's just a way for the professor to do less work.

― Holly (an appletross), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:20 (twenty-one years ago)

Just because you've never seen an elephant, Alex, doesn't mean they don't exist.

Capote's a great idea, particularly for swinging way over onto the "creative" side. There are plenty of great single Joan Didion pieces as well.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:21 (twenty-one years ago)

(Plus, dude: "publishing department???")

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:21 (twenty-one years ago)

Apparently it is long. Weird. It flew right by when I read it.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:21 (twenty-one years ago)

See this is where you really get burned, Nabisco. You call PUBLISHERS publishing departments. Either way it's really some marketing teams idea of a joke.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Didion is a good call. any particular pieces you might suggest?

― Holly (an appletross), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:24 (twenty-one years ago)

"Capote" in this case meaning the shorter collected portraits and such -- e.g. Marilyn Monroe. And Alex, I think "literary nonfiction" is as much of an academic distinction as a publishing one.

I can never remember the names of Didio pieces, sadly. The two springing to mind right now, from opposite ends of her career: one of her So-Cal pieces, about a marital murder; another about the Central Park Jogger arrests in NYC (probably from the New York Review of Books).

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:27 (twenty-one years ago)

Well I was only a literature major so what do I know (actually as a literature major who spent most of his time reading 50s and 60s pulply sci-fi novels, I probably know less about this than most so nevermind.)

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:29 (twenty-one years ago)

There's certainly alot of travellish lit that would fall under this: Naipaul, Theroux, Moritz Thomsen... or St Exupery's "Wind, Sand, & Stars." Seems as valid as crime lit.

― andy --, Monday, 21 March 2005 23:30 (twenty-one years ago)

You could pretend that "Flowers For Algernon" was based on a true story.

― See! (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:32 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost alex is being a dick kinda (sorry! xpost!), but beyond the uh "marketing" complaint is the interesting practical & epistemological problem of how a huge range of (not entirely seperable) genres (memoir, travel writing, long form or feature journalism, "true crime," polemic, etc) get lumped into the heading of "fiction, not" so, is it just a linguistic accident, or wot?

I'd recommend richard preston's "mountains of pi" (abt two russian immigrant brothers who built a supercomputer in their NYC apt to compute the digits of pi) which appeared in the new yorker in the late '80s, and is also reprinted in Literary Journalism (Norman Sims & Mark Kramer, eds.)

― f--gg (gcannon), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:35 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh right, I'd second that: went over it last fall and really enjoyed.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:37 (twenty-one years ago)

Haha I wasn't trying to be a dick this time (REALLY!) I'd actually never heard that particular genre description before and it struck me as kind of funny (like Intelligent Dance Music, ya know.) And I was just making fun of my own weird academic path with the Daniel Keyes' recommend. It's not in any way NON-FICTION! Okay! It was just a joke!

Literary non-fiction I have heard and that's how I always remember this stuff being described.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:40 (twenty-one years ago)

And yeah, the whole thing has certain resemblances to Ann Sterzinger's gripe about "literary fiction" as the genre that pretends not to be, except maybe the other way around; using these distinctions to draw together "creative non-fiction" (i.e., what, "Things that are basically true but aspire to the same level of artifice and readability as a novel?" "Journalism but with themes and subtexts and metaphors and nice sentences and shit?") can seem kind of artificial.

xpost - yeah, Alex, "literary non-fiction" = basically the same thing here, and yeah, it's almost exactly like IDM as a category. ("Intelligent" dance music would equate to, what, "literary" journalism, or something.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:42 (twenty-one years ago)

ryszard kapuszinski's books!! (have i spelled him right?)

one of them is abt haile selassie

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:44 (twenty-one years ago)

haha the definition really boils down to: "journalism that has all the stuff put back in that the telegraph cut out" or "it's like a novel but i didn't make anything up"

― f--gg (gcannon), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:46 (twenty-one years ago)

"it's like a novel but i didn't make anything up. . . or if I did you can't prove nah nah nah"

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:46 (twenty-one years ago)

Any John McPhee piece, really.(Except for the boring ones!)

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Haha, has anyone seen the "New New Journalism" book that was just published? Apparently "New New Journalism" is just regular old "new journalism" made kinda boring.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:51 (twenty-one years ago)

haha all the academic surveys of this stuff all say, backhandedly, "oh yeah and tom wolfe can suck it"

― f--gg (gcannon), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:55 (twenty-one years ago)

richard meltzer's lawrence welk piece (it's collected in a whore like all the rest)

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 21 March 2005 23:57 (twenty-one years ago)

I second Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. E.B. White's essays are great as well and not too long. Then there's David Foster Wallace - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and "Getting Away from Pretty Much Getting Away from It All", which are both hilarious but also pretty long (you could excerpt though?)Michael Ondaatje's book Running in the Family is also creative non-fiction and broken into essay-like chapters.
I love (and accept the genre of) creative non-fiction/essays. Obviously.

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 04:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Tom Wolfe really can suck it.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 04:50 (twenty-one years ago)

I decided on slouching towards bethlehem, since i wanted to use something i was a little bit farmiliar with, i have to lead a discussion and all that.
I think creative nonfiction as a genre is legit, but maybe hard to define, who can really tell if you're making it up, or if you're phillip gerard and you start manipulating things and people to be the way you want, so you get a good story.

― Holly (an appletross), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 04:51 (twenty-one years ago)

And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison is pretty good. It's a whole book, though.

"My Misspent Youth," by Meghan Daum is good, too. It's essays, so you can pass out like, one essay or something.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 04:53 (twenty-one years ago)

If for something recent, I have truly enjoyed the narrative style of Jonathon Lethem's autobiographical essays from _The Disappointment Artist_. The content is interesting, universal and likely to be enjoyed by college students.

― firstworldman (firstworldman), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 04:56 (twenty-one years ago)

I kind of think the argument re: who can tell if you're making it up or not is a thing of the past, especially now that kids are learning about 'media awareness/criticism' in school these days (okay, probably not all kids, but at least it's part of some coursework now whereas it didn't exist or wasn't named even 10 years ago.) What I mean is that people are becoming more aware of the blurring of fact and fiction and of how "fact" and "fiction" are more abstractions than definitions. And that pretty much all writing (and other forms of expression) have elements of both in them. (Sorry, I'm so into arguments against dualism(s) these days that it seeps into everything...)

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 05:10 (twenty-one years ago)

The Sojurns section of Joan Didions White Album

― anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 05:50 (twenty-one years ago)

or dave hickeys essay on norman rockwell, in air guitar.

― anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 05:54 (twenty-one years ago)

oo i need to read some dave hickey.

― f--gg (gcannon), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 06:09 (twenty-one years ago)

air guitar is the most prophetic, handsome, gorgeous, funny, sexy, dangerous, important, sexy, organic and holy book on the venacular nature of america and americans since whitman.

it should come when one is born or becomes a citizen.

― anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 06:13 (twenty-one years ago)

You could try a little Joe Mitchell, seeing as how the dude kind of invented the genre.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 06:34 (twenty-one years ago)

(is air guitar really that good? maybe I should order it)

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 06:34 (twenty-one years ago)

ive given away 5 copies. i just bought my 6th

― anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 06:39 (twenty-one years ago)

"Mind over Matter--Conversations with the Cosmos" by K.C. Cole. Blurbs from the back cover: This book should be read by anyone interested in taking a stroll through the cosmos,stopping to admire new ideas, and appreciating our place in this universe. (Wendy Freidman) If you're off in search of wonder, K.C. Cole gives you a map you can keep in the glove box. (Alan Alda) etc. etc. Each piece is about 2 1/2 pages long. Ms. Cole teaches at UCLA and writes for the Los Angeles Times.

― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 17:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Edward Abbey's desert essays

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Tuesday, 22 March 2005 18:07 (twenty-one years ago)

I just got Air Guitar out of the library yesterday - yes, it is that good. After reading the first essay/chapter, I picked up the phone and read a paragraph into a friend's voicemail. So. Good.
xpost

― rrrobyn (rrrobyn), Wednesday, 23 March 2005 14:29 (twenty-one years ago)

(I actually did order it after reading Anthony's endorsement. Reading ILX threads costs me a lot of money.)

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Wednesday, 23 March 2005 15:02 (twenty-one years ago)

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