We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in arts and culture writing.
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Posted inBlog Post, Nonfiction, Quotes
Muhammad Ali: Literary Muse
What made Muhammad Ali such an appealing subject for so many writers.
Posted inBlog Post, Commentary, Nonfiction
Writing Without Access: The Craft of the Write-Around
How do you write about someone without her involvement?
Posted inNonfiction
What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?
Barbara Williamson co-founded one of the most famous radical sex experiments in America. Then she got wild.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?
Barbara Williamson co-founded one of the most famous radical sex experiments in America. Then she got wild.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up
In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Tom Wolfe on the Birth of the ‘New Journalism’
In 1973, Tom Wolfe published The New Journalism; the seminal book was part manifesto for a new style of nonfiction writing and part anthology of its early greatest hits. It contained work by Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, among others. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s first chapter, where […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
1964: A Sidelong View of Sports
Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston. * * * Fifty years ago, a champion boxer picked up his son from school, a literary critic was tackled by NFL players, and a famed NASCAR racer tended to his chicken farm. Such was the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
1964: A Sidelong View of Sports
Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston. * * * Fifty years ago, a champion boxer picked up his son from school, a literary critic was tackled by NFL players, and a famed NASCAR racer tended to his chicken farm. Such was the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Gay Talese and ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
Gay Talese’s classic 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra with annotations from the author: “The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking […]
