The American Society of Magazine Editors - Best American Magazine Writing 2013

Here you can read online The American Society of Magazine Editors - Best American Magazine Writing 2013 full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Columbia University Press, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Best American Magazine Writing 2013
Author:
The American Society of Magazine Editors
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
Genre:
Books / Detective and thriller
Year:
2013
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Best American Magazine Writing 2013: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Best American Magazine Writing 2013" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the stories in this anthology include National Magazine Award--winning works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. This years selections include Pamela Colloff ( Texas Monthly) on the agonizing, decades-long struggle by a convicted murderer to prove his innocence; Dexter Filkins ( The New Yorker) on the emotional effort by an Iraq War veteran to make amends for the role he played in the deaths of innocent Iraqis; Chris Jones ( Esquire) on Robert A. Caros epic, ongoing investigation into the life and work of Lyndon Johnson; Charles C. Mann ( Orion) on the odds of human beings survival as a species; and Roger Angell ( The New Yorker) on aging, dying, and loss. The former infantryman Brian Mockenhaupt (Byliner) describes modern combat in Afghanistan and its ability both to forge and challenge friendships; Ta-Nehisi Coates ( The Atlantic) reflects on the complex racial terrain traversed by Barack Obama; Frank Rich ( New York) assesses Mitt Romneys ambiguous candidacy; and Dahlia Lithwick ( Slate) looks at the current and future implications of an eventful year in Supreme Court history. The volume also includes an interview on the art of screenwriting with Terry Southern from The Paris Review and an award-winning short story by Stephen King published in Harpers magazine.

The American Society of Magazine Editors: author's other books

Who wrote Best American Magazine Writing 2013? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Best American Magazine Writing 2013 — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Best American Magazine Writing 2013" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

2013

THE BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE WRITING

2013

Compiled by the American Society of Magazine Editors

Columbia University Press
New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53706-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISSN 1541-0978

ISBN 978-0231-16225-8 (pbk.)

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Cover Design: Catherine Casalino

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

I have had it with long-form journalism. By which I meandont get me wrongIm fed up with the term long-form itself, a label that the people who create and sell magazines now invariably, and rather solemnly, apply to the work you will find in these pages. Reader, do you feel enticed to read a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart not sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? (Ooohyou should really read Moby-Dickits super long.) Editors presumably care about words as much as anyone, so it is particularly mysterious that they would choose to promote their work by ballyhooing one of its less inherently appealing attributes. Do we call certain desserts solid-fat-form food or do we call them cakes and pies? Is baseball a long-form sport? Okay, surebut would Major League Baseball ever promote it as that?

This choice of words matters, I think, not only because of the false note it sounds about stories like these but also because of the message it sends to the world about magazines ambitions these days. The term long-form has come to stand for magazine journalism during the same periodover the past twenty years, and particularly the past tenthat magazines have had, as the politicians say, some challenges. I think this wrong turn in our taxonomy is a sign of, and may even contribute to, the continuing commercial upheaval and crisis in confidence. The story of the transition from an industry that was within memory so exuberant and ambitiousso grandiose, really, in its conception of its cultural and societal rolethat it could declare itself to be inventing a New Journalism, to an industry wringing its hands over preserving something called long-form journalism, does not sound like a long-form story with a happy ending. It certainly doesnt sound like one Id want read, much less live through. New Journalism is a stirring promise to the wider world; long-form is the mumbled incantation of a decaying priesthood.

And, in the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you dont have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or fouryou can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? As a magazine writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit and, no, that color wasnt so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning merely a lot of words.

This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism. This was the year that the sports department of the New York Times pulled off the most digitally ambitious accomplishment in feature journalism, Snow Fall, a narrative of skiers buried in an avalanche that was told through the layering of words, video, and graphics. The story brought in countless readers and a Pulitzer Prize. (Actually, you can count the readersthe Times said Snowfall generated 3.5 million page views in one week alone.) This was also the year that digital upstarts like Buzzfeed and The Verge turned to long-form editors to create big features, and produced compelling work. Heralding a coming renaissance of long-form journalism, the twitchy news site Politico hired away the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine to commission writerly, deeply reported stories. High-impact, magazine-style journalism is not a throwback to the past, Politicos editors declared in a memo that should chasten the hand-wringers. It is a genre that is even more essential in todays hyperkinetic news environment. It is a style of reporting and a mindset about illuminating what matters most that has a brilliant future.

Is this just a fad, maybe even a fraud? Cynics would say that publishing a few big feature stories is a shortcut to respectability, and theyd be correct. But realists, Im happy to say, would comment further that such features work: they draw in a lot of readers. As social networks of human beings displace search algorithms, digital editors are discovering that not just headlines but overall quality matters more and more, whether a story is short or long. If you hope to entice a real person to pass your story on to a friend, then reporting matters, writing matters, and design matters. As journalism and its distribution on the Web mature, the most meaningful distinction is turning out to be not short versus long but good versus bad.

All of which brings me, at last, to the journalistic triumph that is Brian Mockenhaupts feature The Living and the Dead, which appears in this volume. For a feature story, it is really, really long. But I defy you to find a wasted word among the 22,000 that Mockenhaupt assembled. Length here is not a virtue in itself; it is, like a notebook or a computer or curiosity, a writers tool, one that Mockenhaupt deploys, as he does the others, to maximum effect. As we follow a marine platoon on its rounds in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, details accrete, characters deepen, drama builds. We witness, over time, the shocking and more subtle consequences of abrupt twists in the action. (This is why length is so important in baseball, too, by the way). Few magazines these days could afford to devote the many pages that Mockenhaupts story would have required. I say would have because this story was published by Byliner, a digital platform for what its creators have the wit to call quick reads.

Among the paradoxes of this era, when commercial travails are menacing the most costly forms of reporting, is that we have coincidentally produced maybe the greatest generation of war correspondents in the countrys history. You will encounter the work of several of them in this volume. It is instructive to read Mockenhaupts piece against Dexter Filkinss haunting memoir of war, Atonement, for the insights the comparison yields into storytelling technique and into the depth of experience these reporters have gained from so many years covering war. Mockenhaupt, an Iraq War veteran, vanishes into his story. His reporting is so precise, so knowing, that he never uses the first person to describe what he has witnessed. Filkins, by contrast, is central to his tale. Ten years ago he was there, in Baghdad, after Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-Third Marine Regiment accidentally opened fire on a family fleeing a scene of fighting. Filkins chanced to meet the survivors, and he wrote about the family back then for the

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Best American Magazine Writing 2013»

Look at similar books to Best American Magazine Writing 2013. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

The Editors of 5280

Mile High Stories: 25 Years of Our Best Writing

Sid Holt

The Best American Magazine Writing 2022

The New Yorker Magazine

The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

Sid Holt (editor)

The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

The Editors of New York Magazine

The Encyclopedia of New York

The Oprah Magazine Editors of

Words That Matter: A Little Book of Life Lessons

Magazine Editors of Popular Photography

Get The Picture: 150+ Ways to Make the Most of Your Camera

Editors of Time Magazine

Inside the Red Border

Sid Holt

The Best American Magazine Writing 2019

Editors at Cooks Illustrated Magazine

The Cooks Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of Americas Most Trusted Cooking Magazine

Brian Hayes

Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions

The Editors of Imbibe Magazine

The American Cocktail: 50 Recipes That Celebrate the Craft of Mixing Drinks from Coast to Coast

Reviews about «Best American Magazine Writing 2013»

Discussion, reviews of the book Best American Magazine Writing 2013 and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.