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| Photo: Lisa Larson-Walker |
“As a writer, I prefer to get bossed around by my notebook and
the facts therein,” David Carr wrote in his reported memoir The Night of the Gun,
one of Slate’s 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. Carr was
mulling over the difference between fiction and nonfiction, the
novelist’s art and the reporter’s craft. “They may not lead to a
perfect, seamless arc, but they lead to a story that coheres in another
way, because it is mostly true.”
In the work of canon-building, nonfiction tends to get short shrift. While memoir
has gained a foothold in the literary conversation, narrative and
reported nonfiction tend to be ignored. It can be easy to dismiss these
forms as the worthwhile but fundamentally unliterary assemblage of facts
into paragraphs. Yet what reader hasn’t had her mind expanded, her
heart plucked, her conscience stirred by a nonfiction book? The
responsibility the writers of such books take on, to arrange the facts
of the world into a form that makes sense of its tumult, can produce in
the reader a kind of clarity of thought that no other genre can match...
Slate’s list of the definitive nonfiction books written in English in the
past quarter-century includes beautifully written memoirs but also
books of reportage, collections of essays, travelogues, works of
cultural criticism, passionate arguments, even a compendium of household
tips. What they all share is a commitment to “mostly truth” and the
belief that digging deep to find a real story—whether it’s located in
your memory, on dusty archive shelves, in Russian literature, in a slum
in Mumbai—is a task worth undertaking.
Source: Slate
