About the book
Creative Nonfiction scoured alternative publications, blogs, literary journals and other often-overlooked publications in search of new voices and innovative ideas for essays written with panache and power.
In these works, writers explore the sport of competitive eating; ponder the identity of mysterious woman who killed herself in a Seattle hotel room; undergo medical testing to see what the future might hold; follow a pack of wild dogs around Manhattan; and trace the migration of one of China's first SARS victims during the "Era of Wild Flavor."
Editor Lee Gutkind writes, "Beneath the cover of The Best Creative Nonfiction is an unusual and unforgettable literary experience for readers, writers and bookstore browsers seeking a porthole into literature that makes a personal connection with the writer and captures real life with the power of cinema and the integrity of fact."
Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review
This anthology, an offshoot of the journal Creative Nonfiction, kicks off an annual series drawing together the best representatives of a fertile (if ill-defined) genre still struggling for recognition. In his introduction, Gutkind tries to clarify the subject, a seeming "contradiction in terms," but the pieces speak for themselves, blending precise research and astute observation with flavorful, fascinating narratives. Carol Smith, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, contributes an account of "The Cipher in Room 214," a 1996 female suicide found in a downtown Seattle hotel who left behind no clues as to her identity; Eula Biss details powerfully her experience with chronic illness by riffing off the 0-10 scale on which her doctors ask her to rank her pain. Most pieces are first-person, memoir-style accounts—writers include a former stripper, a fatally ill man, a narcoleptic and a prosopagnosic (a woman who can't recognize faces)—but a smattering of profiles include an insightful Poets & Writers piece by Daniel Nester on notoriously over-creative nonfiction writer James Frey. Happily, Gutkind reaches several steps beyond the literary journal scene—blog excerpts turn up, and a piece on the secret language of hackers (or "h4ck3rs") comes from John McPhee's Princeton University creative nonfiction class—to find a wide range of topics and styles; though some selections are stronger than others, the richness of the "real" makes the anthology work as a cohesive whole. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From OK Gazette
