| Russ Hunt Robert Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. New York: Vintage, 2005. In the thirty years since Tom Wolfe published his manifesto, "The New Journalism," a group of writers has been quietly securing a place at the very center of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven long form nonfiction. These New New Journalists–Adrian LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Lawrence Weschler, Eric Schlosser, Richard Preston, Alex Kotlowitz, Jon Krakauer, William Langewiesche, Lawrence Wright, William Finnegan, Ted Conover, Jonathan Harr, Susan Orlean, and others–represent the continued maturation of American literary journalism. They use the license to experiment with form earned by the New Journalists of the sixties to address the social and political concerns of 19th century writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis and Stephen Crane (an earlier generation of "New Journalists"), synthesizing the best of these two traditions. Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated and politically aware, the New New Journalism may well be the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction. The New New Journalism d explores the methods and techniques these journalists have developed, and looks backward to understand their dual heritage -- their debts to their predecessors from both the 1890s and the1960s. The New New Journalists bring a distinct set of cultural and social concerns to their work. Neither frustrated novelists nor wayward newspaper reporters, they tend to be magazine and book writers who have benefited enormously from both the legitimacy Wolfe's legacy has brought to literary nonfiction, and from the concurrent displacement of the novel as the most prestigious form of literary expression. This movement's achievements are more reportorial than literary, which is why the focus of The New New Journalism is on journalistic practice and method, as opposed to the theory or state of the genre. The days in which nonfiction writers test the limits of language and form have largely passed. The New Journalism was a truly avant garde movement that expanded journalism's rhetorical and literary scope by placing the author at the center of the story, channeling a character's thoughts, using nonstandard punctuation and exploding traditional narrative forms. That freedom to experiment has had a tremendous influence on many of the New New Journalists. [text stolen from the publication's Web site, http://www.newnewjournalism.com/] |