Our second October Rountable looks at “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age,” by Jessica Pressler. Pressler introduces readers to former stripper Diane Passage, and a world in which a beautiful woman with enough ambition can get what she wants – at least for a while. The story ran last month in New York magazine [...]
Tag Archives: New York
October Editors’ Roundtable No. 2: New York magazine updates an archetype
October 27, 2011 – 2:24 pm
Life in the cave: highlights from Boston University’s “The Rebirth of Storytelling” conference
May 10, 2011 – 12:50 pm
What does it take to make a great story? Boston University’s “The Power of Narrative” conference, held on campus April 29-30, aimed to offer some insights. The event included the kind of writing techniques and “show don’t tell” advice you’d expect (and hope for) at such a gathering. But beyond hearing about the mechanics of narrative [...]
What we’re reading: underground art, sleepy shrinks and killings by a CIA contractor in Pakistan
March 22, 2011 – 2:44 pm
This week’s installment is a grab bag, offering both comedy (a courtroom debate over what exactly a copying machine is) and tragedy (the tsunami in Japan). These stories’ styles also vary wildly, ranging from a non-narrative yet suspenseful investigation into the killing of two Pakistani men by a CIA contractor to an unsettlingly intimate encounter [...]
What we’re reading: the long arc of reporting on Scientology, a different kind of drug war, and a new narrative collaboration
February 15, 2011 – 11:46 am
The long-form buzz this last week has been all about Lawrence Wright’s piece on Scientology for the New Yorker, “The Apostate.” It’s ostensibly a profile, but it’s also investigative journalism and a compelling narrative. Wright’s deft storytelling was recently addressed on this site by Roy Peter Clark, who looked at a passage from “The Looming Tower,” [...]
Richard Morgan on payback, freelancing and the myth of the “made man”
August 12, 2010 – 3:57 pm
Richard Morgan recently found a new measure of fame writing about writing, with his funny/terrifying piece “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” Though Morgan’s work has appeared in some of the best-known outlets in print journalism – from New York magazine to Wired and The New York Times – [...]
Killian Mansfield: a holiday lament
November 25, 2009 – 10:47 am
Before the Thanksgiving holiday, we step away from the future of story and transmedia discussions to offer a classic print narrative. David Amsden’s “Never Mind the Pity” traces the elegant arc of the last year of a boy’s life and the musical collaborations that transformed his final days.
The story, from the October issue of New York magazine, resists many of [...]
