MEMBER BLOG TAG: gourevitch
| Thursday, May 7, 2009 11:53PM | | | | Is Fiction Literature? | Tags: Nonfiction and Literature, Nonfiction and fiction, Nobel Prize, Norbert Gstrein, Literary Memoirs, Philip Gourevitch, Colum McCann, V.S. Naipaul
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Is it snobbery, a club mentality, or territorial insecurity that underlies the suggestion that literature consists of fiction and poetry, and only fiction and poetry? For me, this tenuous notion was decisively exploded by the late Seymour Krim, Columbia University prof, at whose “Creative Nonfiction” class most of what was read in the class was either actually fiction, or difficult to distinguish from the best fiction; Krim said he observed only one taboo: Physical violence against a fellow student was absolutely prohibited. (The story of that class is told in my literary memoir, The Killing of an Author.) Indeed, if you were to start reading V.S. Naipaul somewhere in the middle of one of his books, it would be hard to tell the... | | | | | | | Friday, May 4, 2007 1:43PM | | | | Tribute to Ryszard Kapuscinski | Tags: Kapuscinski, reporting, Polish Press Agency, Salman Rushdie, Michnik, Breytenbach, Emcke, Gourevitch, Wechsler
| | | Although his name may not be familiar to some readers—the erudite manager of my local, independent bookstore didn’t know it—the Polish journalist and author Ryszard (pronounced Ree-SHAR) Kapuściński is venerated among leading writers, filmmakers, and other artists in the U.S. and Europe as a master of reportage and a literary giant, and as a man of great sweetness, vision, and generosity. For his job as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, which he joined in 1962, he threw himself into dire situations all over Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, filing one-page reports when he could. Hungry to chronicle the novelistic details of what he witnessed, as well as to portray the individuals he met along the way, he began to... | | | | | |
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