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

Peter Trachtenberg, one of the most innovative -- and wittiest -- nonfiction writers at work, on "thin facts," "thick facts," and Another Insane Devotion. 

Literary journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes on the problem of facts and the great Janet Malcolm's new book, Forty-One False Starts. 

40 towns began with the two courses in reading and writing creative nonfiction, emphasis literary journalism, that I taught at Dartmouth College in 2013. We began the course by listening to documentary radio producer Larry Massett's "A Night on Mt. Shasta" (the fourth story in this episode of Hearing Voices) and subscribing to Valley News, a remarkable local paper we read to begin developing our sense of the region in which we'd find our stories. So we began with the fantastical and the factual. Between the two courses, the books we read all or most of were:

Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
John Berger, A Fortunate Man
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

The books we read parts of were:

Norman Sims, ed., True Stories 
Lawrence Joseph, Lawyerland 
Rosemary Mahoney, Whoredom in Kimmage 
Sonia Faleiro, Beautiful Thing 
Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel
Peter Dexter, Paper Trails
Tracy Kidder, Hometown
Tom Bissell, Magic Hours
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Lucas Mann, Class A
Kathleen Norris, Dakota
Ben Hecht, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago
William Craig, Yankee Come Home
Greg Bottoms, The Colorful Apocalypse
Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days
John McPhee, Pieces of the Frame

Additional essays we read were:

Michael Paterniti, “Driving Mr. Albert” (Harper's)
David Foster Wallace, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” (Rolling Stone)
Terry Williams, "Voices from the Tunnel" (Grand Street)
Leslie Jamison, "Fog Count" (Oxford American)
JoAnn Wypijewski, "The Secret Sharer" (Harper's)
JoAnn Beard, "Undertaker, Please Drive Slow" (Tin House)
Matthew Teague, "The Aftermath" (Philadelphia)
Jeanne Marie Laskas, "Underworld" (GQ)
Jeanne Marie Laskas, "America is Bull" (Esquire)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, "You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!" (NYT Magazine)
Joe Tuzzo, "Toro! Toro! Torito!" (The Revealer)
Vivian Gornick "On the Street" (The New Yorker)
David Searcy, "El Camino Doloroso" (Paris Review)
Mary McCarthy, "Artists in Uniform" (Harper's)

We also looked at photographs by Robert Frank, Vivian Maier, Mary Ellen Mark, Milton Rogovin, Sebastio Selgado, Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, John Thompson, and William Eggleston.

A number of students took on extra reading in the genre or close to it, including work by Janet Malcolm, Jane Kramer, Wendy Doniger, John D'Agata,  David Shields, Ted Conover, Michael Lesy, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

--Jeff Sharlet