Veteran magazine writer Michael Paterniti visited the Nieman Foundation a couple of weeks ago for a discussion about literary journalism with narrative writing instructor Paige Williams’ class and other fellows. Winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing (and a six-time finalist), Paterniti has written powerfully about everything from the crash of SwissAir 111 [...]
Tag Archives: Esquire
Michael Paterniti on narrative voice, the power of rewrite, Bill Clinton, old cheese, and flying Spaniards (part 1)
November 29, 2010 – 1:06 pm
What we’re reading, in which we contemplate a hit-and-run fatality, the death of Glenn Beck’s mother and the declining lethality of quicksand
September 30, 2010 – 11:55 am
One of the things about stories is that for them to be interesting, something usually goes wrong. As a result, a large number of the articles, profiles and essays we feature cover unfortunate events, whether recent or recalled from the distant past. This week is no exception, but we can promise that each story is [...]
Joe Donnelly on Slake, long-form journalism and launching a vision: “it’s about finding the right rhythm and the right way of presenting it”
July 21, 2010 – 1:22 pm
Last month, we heard rumors from the West Coast of a new magazine devoted to long-form storytelling – a magazine that existed in print only and had no digital presence. The ghostly enigma turned out to be Slake, an upstart publication run by an editing team formerly with the L.A. Weekly. (Slake has since rolled out [...]
C.J. Chivers in The New York Times on hitting the mark in Marja
May 5, 2010 – 1:32 pm
Readers familiar with the work of C.J. Chivers might know him best for his portrait of Vladimir Putin from Esquire or the writing that helped The New York Times score the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Lately, however, he has not only been writing traditional articles for print while blogging about Marines who shave [...]
Gay Talese at Boston University narrative conference: “I don’t want something juicy; I want the closest I can get to the truth”
April 24, 2010 – 7:57 am
The son of Italian immigrants grew up in a house where there were virtually no books. In the small, World War II-era town of Ocean City, N.J., Gay Talese spent afternoons listening to plump ladies with deep pockets tell stories from across the counter of his mother’s dress shop.
They were talking about the war, their [...]
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, [...]
Charles Pierce on the future of narrative journalism: “anyone not concerned isn’t paying attention”
January 7, 2010 – 1:06 pm
I talked this week with Charles Pierce about the end-of-decade summary he did for Esquire. Pierce, who also works for The Boston Globe Magazine, talks (and perhaps writes—see end of interview) faster than any human being alive today. Here, he offers his thoughts on dystopian thinking, recent stories he’s liked, and how good writers get turned [...]
Charles Pierce on the lost decade
January 6, 2010 – 11:53 am
In the universe of Charles Pierce, the decade just discarded was not a keeper. It’s hard to argue otherwise, but in the hands of the unerringly unsettling Pierce, the litany of catastrophes—9/11, war, war again, Katrina, and the economic collapse—takes a back seat to worry about our ever-increasing distance from reality. In his Esquire article “The [...]
Esquire’s Tom Junod looks for “One Good Man”
November 23, 2009 – 4:19 pm
Esquire’s Tom Junod crawls under his subjects’ public masks and starts asking questions. Junod has long specialized in profiling symbols such as a man falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the modern would-be mercenary.
His latest profile, “Can One Good Man Redeem a Nation for the Sins of Guantánamo?,”begins [...]
