Back in March after hearing about Robert Boynton’s book of interviews with journalists called The New New Journalism, I put together a post that listed some of the books by this select group of writers. At the time, my friend Garth was taking a class at NYU taught by Lawrence Weschler (himself a “New New Journalist”), and felt that we had only scratched the surface. Weschler had introduced Garth and his fellow students to a wealth of “creative nonfiction.” Garth wrote to share his experience with the class and the marvelous list of books that was at its heart. This is long, but it’s worth it.
As alluded to earlier, here’s a slightly more in-depth summary of the Weschler Literary Nonfiction Class. This was a ridiculous class, in the best sense of the word. The reading list was incredible, handouts of poems were constantly circulating, and every five minutes we were treated to a “you’ve got to read this” digression. Highly recommended; for a quick summation of the ideas treated in the class, check out the Weschler interview in Robert Boynton’s new The New New Journalism.
I kept careful notes on what was being mentioned and read, and in the end, I probably had twice this many names on my list. In order not to divulge Weschler’s trade secrets, I cut a lot of stuff out, but I wanted to share with you some of my amazing discoveries from this class. The top 10 list is my actual top 10 list, though, in general, I tried to omit what we actually read, because with some of these guys – [Joseph] Mitchell, [Ryszard] Kapuscinski, [John] McPhee – it’s all amazing. What’s in parentheses may be stuff on the syllabus, or may be something that was mentioned in class that sounded fantastic, or excerpted on a handout – stuff definitely to check out. We also read maybe 25 others, but many of them ([Susan] Orlean, etc.), you’ll be familiar with. I included the four Of Note because they were relatively new to me, except for [Christopher] Hitchens, whom I loathe, but who apparently used to write pretty compelling essays. The second part of this list compiles allusions that came up in class and handouts that we received. Again, this is less than half of what we got in class, but I’ve included only stuff I couldn’t bear not to share, or stuff I had never heard of before. Divided up by genre. Hopefully, to the degree that syllabi and course materials are the instructor’s intellectual property, I’ve managed to obscure what the actual syllabus looked like, while still managing to convey a fraction of the stimulating panoply of material we were exposed to. I never knew I liked journalism so much.
I. Top 10 Writers We Read, In My Humble Opinion:
Joseph Mitchell (Everything This Man Ever Wrote. My Ears Are Bent (recently republished), Up in the Old Hotel)
Ian Frazier (see esp. “Canal Street” (New Yorker, April 30, 1990), and the book Family)
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Susan Sheehan (Is There No Place On Earth for Me?)
George Orwell (“Reflections on Ghandi“)
David Foster Wallace
John McPhee (Oranges, Annals of the Former World)
William Finnegan (see esp. “Playing Doc’s Games,” (New Yorker, Aug. 24 and 31, 1992)
Jamaica Kincaid (A Small Place)
Lawrence Weschler (I especially like Calamities of Exile, Boggs, Vermeer in Bosnia)Other Writers of Note Whom We Read:
Christopher Hitchens (before he became a right-winger, e.g. Prepared for the Worst)
Alastair Reid (Oases)
Jane Kramer (someone in class mentioned The Last Cowboy)
Diane AckermanGo Look This Up:
Columbia Journalism Review symposium, July 1989
Transom.org (resources for radio journalists)
Omnivore prototype issue at mjt.orgII. Mentioned in Passing, Piqued My Interest
A. Nonfiction (Roughly in order of Interest)
A.J. Liebling
Walter Murch (In The Blink of An Eye, The Conversations (w/ Michael Ondaatje))
John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
Jonathan Schell (Observing the Nixon Years)
Rebecca Solnit (River of Shadows)
Susan Sontag (on Abu Ghraib in NY Times Magazine)
Wendy Lesser (Nothing Remains The Same)
Curzio Malaparte (Kaputt)
Vijay Seshadri (essays in The Long Meadow)
Norman Mailer (Executioner’s Song)
Neil Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie)
Dave Hickey (Air Guitar)
Jonathan Raban (Passage to Juneau)
Mark Salzman (True Notebooks)
Adam Menendes (80s reportage on Central America)
Adam Michnik (Letters from Prison and Other Essays)B. Philosophy
Nicholas of Cusa (Of Learned Ignorance)
H. Vaihinger (The Philosophy of As If)C. Poetry
[The Poles:]
Wislawa Szymborska
Czeslaw Milosz
Stanislaw Baranczake
Zbigniaw Herbert (Mr. Cogito)
Tadeusz Rosewicz
[The Rest:]
Nazim Hikmet
Christopher Logue (translations of Homer)III. Drama/Film:
Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska)
Wallace Shawn (The Fever)
Roberto Rossellini (The Rise of Louis XIV)IV. Fiction:
Grace Paley
Norman MacLean (A River Runs Through It)
Jose Saramago (Blindness)
Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger)
Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
Joseph Heller (Something Happened)
Nicholas Mosely (Hopeful Monsters)
Stanislaw Lem (A Perfect Vacuum)
Bruce Duffy (The World As I Found It)
Wow, a tremendous list. There’s a lot to mine here.
