Writers and editors throw the term narrative journalism around loosely, and many don’t really know how to define it. Here’s my own short definition: narrative journalism is reported nonfiction that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven the story. Those techniques might include scene-setting, character sketches, and extended dialogue (rather than quotes gathered through interviews). A work of narrative journalism requires an artful structure that gives the story an arc or some kind of dramatic progression. The writer is present as a narrator and not just as an invisible, objective witness.

Here is a sampling of some of the best works of narrative journalism that have been published in books. (Get reading!)

Collections of Narrative Journalism

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Beacon Press 1984 (original published in 1955).

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-fiction by Joan Didion. Everyman’s Library 2006

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now by Alma Guillermoprieto. Vintage 1994.

Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, with a foreword by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001.

The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling. North Point Press 2004 (original, 1956).

The John McPhee Reader by John McPhee (Edited by William L. Howarth). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1982.

Fame and Obscurity by Gay Talese. Ivy Books 1995 (original, 1970).

Anthologies of Narrative Journalism

The Best American Magazine Writing edited by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Columbia University Press annual series

Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America’s Best Writing 1979-2003 edited by David Garlock. Wiley-Blackwell 2003.

The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. Scribner 1997.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present edited by Phillip Lopate. Anchor 1997 (original, 1994).

The Princeton Anthology of Writing edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot. Princeton University Press 2001.

Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Houghton Mifflin 2000.

Best Newspaper Writing edited by the Poynter Institute. Poynter Institute Press annual series

New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine edited by Tom Wolfe and the editors of New York Magazine. Random House 2008.

Book-Length Works of Narrative Journalism

Black Man’s America by Simeon Booker. Prentice Hall, out of print (originally published in 1964).

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Vintage 1994 (first published in 1966).

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, three volumes to date (first volume originally published in 1982).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass. Available online at www.gutenberg.org/etext/23 (original published in 1845).

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Picador 1998.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Ballantine 1993 (original, 1972).

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1996 (original, 1932).

Hiroshima by John Hersey. Vintage 1989 (originally published in 1946).

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin 1998.

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes. Vintage 1987.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Bay Back Books 2000 (original, 1981).

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian LeBlanc. Scribner 2003.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton & Co. 2003.

The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve Lopez. Putnam Adult 2008.

Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail by Ruben Martinez. Picador USA 2001.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989 (original, 1966).

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Ballantine Books 1999.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. Penguin 1993 (original, 1986).

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Simon & Schuster 1995 (original, 1986).

Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2007 (full version originally published in 1989).

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin, with foreword by John Gregory Dunne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 (original, 1993).

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Presidio Press 2004 (original, 1962).

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Penguin Classics 2007 (original, 1941).

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Picador 2008 (original, 1979).

Some chewy bits and pieces to offer you this week. First, kudos to David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers was just named the recipient of the Anthony Lukas prize. I’ve long been an admirer of Finkel’s narrative journalism, which came to my attention when I edited the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest. The Good Soldiers offers an interesting counterpoint to The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins.

Both books are examples of masterful war reporting, but they also make a study in contrasts about the role of the narrator in nonfiction storytelling. Finkel choses the third person, zooming on his soldier protagonists. (See this Washington Post excerpt.) Filkins, on the other hand, uses his book to write in a way that is impossible in his New York Times stories, as he explains in “Up Close and Personal in Iraq,” an article by Ankush Khardori in The American Prospect. Just read the first few pages of each, and you’ll notice the difference in point of view.

How will books like these fare in the future, as traditional publishing adapts to new technology? You may have seen the host of recent news articles about e-books, and you may even be considering buying a brand-new iPad. In the Sin and Syntax Salon, Sarah Baker gives you the lowdown on what she calls the “chaotic bazaar” of book publishing.

Motoko Rich also had an interesting (if oddly written—did anyone else think it went in circles?) article about how e-readers kill the fun of looking at what others are reading. Is the Kindle a conversation killer? I once sat next to a handsome guy on a plane who was reading The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. My asking how he liked the book kicked off a conversation that took us to Frankfurt. And it gave me a cool connection in Washington, D.C. (He was a staffer for Congressman John Conyers.)

OK, now back to our conversation about writing. I wanted to share some suggestions from my California colleague Nora Isaacs, who is a terrific journalist as well as a freelance editor.

Nora is good on tips. I appreciated the ones in her book Women in Overdrive. And taking some of those tips to heart, I will stop writing and start assembling some literal bits and pieces for a dinner party tonight.

An intriguing collection of unlike things ends up on the New York Times list of 100 notable books each year. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction claims that nonfiction is losing its “frisson.” I hardly agree—see my essay in Talking Story—but if you need further convincing, go no further than the NYT’s top 100.

Here is the Connie Cull:

I draw much inspiration from reading about the lives of writers and artists, and this year offers a good crop of such biographies, including Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka; Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon; and Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. (“Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave,” wrote Joy Williams in her review of this short story writer. “O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so.”)

Some question whether memoir counts as journalism—or narrative journalism. I tend to include it in the broader category of nonfiction, and scrutinize the credibility of the authors. These two pass muster: City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, by Edmund White, and Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan.

Then there’s the world of ideas, some of the hardest books to write for a lay audience. Robert Wright succeeded in The Evolution of God, as did the every-interesting Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

For sheer drama—reported tales that read like a novel but tell us something important about our world—my picks are Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (a pal from the early days of Wired and his then-magazine, Might), The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (my newest favorite writer for his mastery of character and suspense), and The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. (I’m cheating on that last one: it’s not on the Times Top 100, but I think it should be.)

And then there’s Columbine, by Dave Cullen, which does make the list. Cullen is a Denver journalist with whom I’ve stayed in touch since we both attended a Niemen Foundation seminar. Reviewer Jennifer Senior commends him for resisting narrative cliché (i.e., starting his tale 48 hours before the notorious killing spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, stopping the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooling back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass). In my book this is reason enough for nomination. But narrative skill takes more than just resisting cliché. About the central surprise of the book Senior writes, “I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the entire school was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism.”

How’s that for frisson?

A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review set me on edge. In “The Rise of True Fiction,” my colleague Alissa Quart writes about a trend she perceives in the literary landscape: “an increase in the blurring of neat and certain categories of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ into something that we might call ‘true fiction.’”

I would recommend the essay to anyone practicing fiction, nonfiction, or memoir, with some caveats.

Quart launches her column by discussing The Hurt Locker, a fictional action-movie whose “forensic, formalist style” she writes, aligns it with documentaries or biopics. (The film is rooted in a deeply reported article originally published in Playboy, and its author worked hand-in-glove with the film’s director.) Then Quart mentions books whose authors do the deep reporting, then depart from strict facts in their books—for example, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, and Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls. The latter calls her recent book about her grandmother a “true life novel.”

So far, I’m with Quart. The list of writers who report or conduct historical research and then write fiction based on real-life stories is long and broad: in addition to the trio Quart mentions (Orwell, Capote, Mailer), there are Mark Twain (whose reporting set up his satire), John Steinbeck (whose journalism informed The Grapes of Wrath), and contemporary novelists whose deep historical research makes their fiction come alive, like David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), and Ian McEwan (Atonement). And let’s not forget Shakespeare, whose history plays were based on the lives of English kings and used events like The Wars of the Roses as departure points.

It’s when Quart starts talking about nonfiction that I begin to quibble. Or, in certain cases, quake. She makes the surprising assertion that “the category ‘nonfiction’ no longer has the frisson it once did or the assurance that a book or film will sell.” Tell that to Dexter Filkins, whose balancing of journalistic restraint and downright eloquence found expression in The Forever War. Or to Anne Hull, whose reporting on Walter Reed won her the Pulitzer, among other awards. Or to Adam Hochschild, whose King Leopold’s Ghost hardly disappeared into remainder bins.

(And when has there ever been “assurance” that an important work of nonfiction would find a commercial audience?)

Quart, who is a fellow this year at the Nieman Foundation, where I teach narrative journalism, quotes another colleague, Andrea Pitzer, the editor of the Narrative Digest: “The newshole for narrative nonfiction is shrinking,” Pitzer says. “You have to have a lot of dazzle to get it published at all. Letting the work go over a little to fiction lets it be more salable.”

The newshole may indeed be shrinking, but no editor I know would prefer a piece, however dazzling, that departed from fact over one with startling news or insight. There is a big difference between letting work “go over a little to fiction” and borrowing the techniques of fiction, which is, I suspect, what Pitzer meant. (Full discloser: I was the editor of the Digest for two years; Pitzer succeeded me.)

But since when are those techniques—plotting a drama, crafting character, describing scenes, capturing dialogue, parceling out details to heighten suspense, finding a narrative voice—the province of fiction anyway? Most of us consider them just elements of great writing, any great writing.

Quart says hipster online editor Larry Smith suggests that the graphic novel A.D. is just journalism in a new guise, and she quotes John D’Agata, the editor of the new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, who asks “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Perhaps the problem is the word nonfiction, which may be so broad as to blur some important lines. I would argue that we indeed read journalism—news stories, whether told in a straight news style or in an artful narrative style—for information, and we want that information to be credible and fair. We read narrative journalism—factual stories told using writerly (not fictional) techniques like plot, suspense, description, and artful language—for information, too; it tells us something important about our world. And we read essays and even blogs for the ideas of their writers. Art—and certainly artfulness—can surface into any of these forms, but the primary reason to read nonfiction is to learn factual truths about our world.

Memoir, one the other hand, is a form that does slide away from reported facts and toward remembered impressions. That, indeed, we read for its emotional rather than factual truths.

In the end, perhaps we blur lines by lumping a variety of genres writing into the binary categories of “fiction” and “nonfiction.”

—Constance Hale

I’m fascinated with writing that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven nonfiction, whether in print, online, over the radio or in documentary films.

Ken Burns is hard to ignore—not just because his The National Parks: America’s Best Idea preempted PBS prime-time programming last week—but also because he has the chops and the resources to do great narrative journalism. I mainly agreed with Mary McNamara’s LA Times review, but while watching endless footage of razorlike mountains and verdant plains, I couldn’t help muttering, “Does it have to be so long?” “Could the writing have more frisson?” “Can Burns do tone that isn’t elegiac?”

As editor of the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest, I once wrote a column called “Narrative” Is Not a Synonym for “Long.” In it I offered examples of some who write tight but still trace a narrative arc:  Charlie LeDuff, in “Frozen in Indifference,” published in The Detroit News, keeps his focus pointed and poignant. Matthew Parker’s “A Student of Intimacy, Step by Step” is one of many examples in the Modern Love column of the Sunday The New York Times. Another Sunday Times short narrative I hate to miss is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, “The Rural Life.”

Touché to Burns for stretching our attention spans, but the dude needs a tough editor. Some of the footage is so familiar as to be predictable (like Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial). Internal repetitions need paring, especially when interviewees echo each other. Then there are the musical schemes, fresh in The Civil War but hackneyed now.

In one voiceover, a park lover comments on the “artistic restraint” of wolves in the wilderness. We all need some of that artistic restraint.