ISBN 978-0-393-33003-8
W. W. Norton & Company
$15.95
Among the twenty-seven works collected here, writers explore the sport of competitive eating; ponder the identity of a 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."
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Fame and Obscurity (with appreciation to Gay Talese) and Our Search for the Best Creative Nonfiction
Lee Gutkind
The Cipher in Room 214: Who was Mary Anderson and Why Did She Die?
Carol Smith
from The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Badlands: Portrait of a Competitive Eater
John O’Connor
from Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
’Mbriago
Louise DeSalvo
from Our Roots Are Deep With Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian American Writers
Chores
Debra Marquart
from Orion
Cold Autumn
from waiterrant.net
Consumption
Sunshine O’Donnell
from Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing
The Pain Scale
Eula Biss
from Seneca Review
Full Gospel
J.D. Schraffenberger
from Brevity
The Truth about Cops and Dogs
Rebecca Skloot
from New York
Double Take
from Opinionistas.com
The Trapeze Diaries
Marie Carter
from Hanging Loose
Notes on Frey
Daniel Nester
from Creative Nonfiction
Miles to Go Before We Sleep
Jeff Gordinier
from Poetryfoundation.org
Job No. 51 - Executive Director and Job No. 52 - Psychic Medium
from oliverdavies.blogspot.com
Pimp
Olivia Chia-lin Lee
from Narrative Magazine
The Woot Files
Monica Hsiung Wojcik
from John McPhee’s Creative Non-fiction class at Princeton University
Sleepy Head
from hotcoffeegirl.squarespace.net
The Answer That Increasingly Appeals
Robin Black
from Colorado Review
North Pole, South Pole, Sea of Carcinoma
Dev Hathaway
from The Gettysburg Review
Thirteen More Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Dorie Bargmann
from Prairie Schooner
What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?
Michael Rosenwald
from Popular Science
Like a Complete Unknown
from miminewyork.blogspot.com
My Mother’s Touch
Alexis Wiggins
from Brevity
66 Signs That the Former Student Who Invited You to Dinner is Trying to Seduce You
Lori Soderlind
from PMS poemmemoirstory
Wild Flavor
Karl Taro Greenfeld
from Paris Review
Notes on the Space We Take
Bonnie J. Rough
from Ninth Letter
Tell Me Again Who Are You?
Heather Sellers
from Alaska Quarterly Review
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
Calling all editors!
Editors of any publication may submit up to 5 pieces from their publication for possible inclusion in upcoming volumes of The Best Creative Nonfiction. Please mail a hard copy of each piece to:
The Best Creative Nonfiction
5501 Walnut Street, suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
The deadline for nominations for Volume II is September 15, 2007. Nominations received after that date will be considered for Volume III.
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