40 Towner Katie Kilkenny reviews a public conversation at Dartmouth between documentary filmmakers Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Little Dieter Needs to Fly) and Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball, The Central Park Five) for arts site Hyperallergic. It was a revelatory conversation, and Katie captures each filmmaker's particular genius. 

The review came about through a request for a 40 Towner from Dartmouth alumnus Mostafa Heddaya, an editor at Hyperallergic and one of the creators of a site I've written about before, American Circus. Mostafa writes with good news: American Circus has just won a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, for this cranky but witty conservative critique of modern art. I didn't know that was a going fight, but if it must be fought, this is a pretty entertaining way to do it.

Hey, look! A Dartmouth literary mafia is starting to cohere...

--Jeff Sharlet

Literary journalism isn't just you-are-there scenes and dialogue, cinéma vérité in print. The genre ranges widely between narrative and criticism. Susan Faludi, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist who became famous for her 1991 book on anti-feminism, Backlash, is one of the best of the narrative critics, a fact sometimes overlooked because Backlash was closer to traditional muckraking. The book that followed, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, veered toward narrative, to the point that Faludi's arguments--central to her work, which is polemical in the best sense--were sometime lost. In 2007, she published The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, a work of criticism that drew heavily on her instincts as a narrative writer. 

The same might be said of her latest essay, "Facebook Feminism, Like it Or Not," published in The Baffler. The bulk of the essay is a historical analysis of the way capitalism can co-opt feminism and women's rights movements; it's bookended by two set pieces, the first of which -- an account of a rally led by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, is a strong entry in the long tradition of skeptical reports from religious revivals. Like Mencken in Dayton in 1925, without the snark, like Sarah Comstock marveling over the theatrical power of Aimee Semple Mcpherson in 1927, Faludi gives us the power of Sandberg's presentation even as she reveals what she'll argue is the con. It's bait-and-switch as literary technique, well worth studying.
--Jeff Sharlet

Here's a strange and compelling New England town story from Ellsworth, Maine, aka "The Eel World" -- heart of the lucrative, and well-armed, eel industry. By Peter Andrey Smith.

A back to school literary journalism special from 40 Towns publisher Jeff Sharlet: "Ditto Boys," on how a Christian college fell prey to the "spiritual abuse" of a secretive organization. 

"Not long after Ben got to college, a group of older students 'sock and dimed' him: they scooped him up, drove him to the beach, stripped him naked, and left him with a sock to cover his crotch and a dime to make a phone call..."

READ MORE.

I've added a new title to our virtual newsstand's "nonfictions" department: The Seneca Review. It is, in some ways, a traditional literary journal, but it has also been at the forefront of development of the "lyric essay," which John D'Agata and Deborah Tall define here. I'm a little leery of the formalism implicit in setting the lyric essay apart from other forms of nonfiction that pursue similar ends or rely on similar means. There are journalists who are lyric essayists and lyric essayists who veer toward journalism. The cross-pollination matters more to me than the demarcation. That said, I'm glad that The Seneca Review has made space for those essays that more conventional journals would puzzle over and reject as "in between." It's worth reading on a regular basis; and I recommend especially the Fall 2007 lyric essay special.
--Jeff Sharlet

Seven Days, Vermont's fine alternative weekly paper, has just published a long profile of 40 Towns by writer Corin Hirsch:

40 Towns, which debuted in June, is named for the 40 or so towns that compose the Upper Valley. Its aim is to collect the region’s stories and “myths of small places” into “artifacts of real life along a northern stretch of a cold river,” according to its website. The 14 inaugural stories — all of them written by students from Sharlet’s creative writing and nonfiction classes — plumb the murky, quirky depths of the Upper Valley, puncturing its Rockwellesque façade of friendly neighbors with unlocked doors...

Read the whole thing at Seven Days.