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from Issue 37
Essays from the Edge
$16.95








  ENLARGE COVER

  TABLE OF CONTENTS




Anyone still asking, “What is creative nonfiction?” will find the answer in this collection of artfully crafted, true stories. These stories—ranging from immersion journalism to intensely personal essays—illustrate the genre’s power and potential. Edwidge Danticat recalls her Uncle Moïse’s love of a certain four-letter word and finds in his abandonment of the word near the end of his life the true meaning of exile. In “Literary Murder,” Julianna Baggott traces her roots as a novelist to her family’s “strange, desperate (sometimes conniving and glorious) past” and writes about her decision, in The Madam, to kill off a character based on her grandfather. And Sean Rowe explains why, if you must get arrested, Selma, Alabama, is the place to do it. This exciting and expansive array of works and voices is sure to impress and delight.

Purchase this book alone or as part of the Best Creative Nonfiction box set.

on writing "Grasshopper"
by Margaret Conway


I write nonfiction because I have no other choice. The characters who clamor inside my head refuse to be fictionalized or tethered to a conventional plot. My mother once said, "You're a writer? Then write about me. I don't even care if you say bad things about me—just let them know who I am before I croak." Who she is? I've been trying to puzzle this out for eons, and so I value the supple, capacious medium of creative nonfiction where there's ample room to wrestle with a character's baffling complexities before letting her take over, as she's determined to do. Also, writing needs its wild side, its far frontier. Which is why I pray that the medium does not allow itself to become codified, regulated, explained. Let the mustangs run free. Let there be one last place on a writer's earth that keeps to its essential mystery.