Today we offer the latest fare from two long-form masters, as well as an oddball assortment of not-quite-narratives that still get to the heart of a story. CLASSIC NARRATIVES See how Chris Jones and David Grann both build a narrative and then proceed to deconstruct it. “The Mark of a Masterpiece,” by David Grann from [...]
Tag Archives: Esquire
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Interview with Chris Jones: Building a mystery
September 11, 2009 – 11:53 pm
Excerpts from a September 2009 interview with Chris Jones on “The End of Mystery,” in which a team of investigators recovers bodies and determines the cause of a helicopter crash off the coast of Newfoundland: Q: How did you find out about the investigation into the Newfoundland crash? A: I live in Ottawa, Canada. This was a big story [...]
Dissecting disaster: Chris Jones’ “The End of Mystery”
September 11, 2009 – 11:28 pm
The first Notable Narrative for September takes a police procedural as its template. The article begins with the loss of a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter in March 2009 off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. This Esquire story from Chris Jones tracks the investigators who work to unravel the cause and manner of death for all [...]
Esquire‘s Peter Griffin on editing “The End of Mystery”
September 11, 2009 – 5:09 pm
Excerpts from a September 2009 interview with Peter Griffin, deputy editor of Esquire, about an August story on a helicopter crash off the coast of Newfoundland: Can you talk a little about your role in Chris Jones’ “The End of Mystery”? This story was almost entirely Chris’s. He lives in Ottawa, and the crash of the [...]
