This anthology, curated by Talese and Lounsberry, offers a diverse helping of nonfiction pieces to help a reader learn nonfiction. Prefaced by Lounsberry, she claims they have collected a range of stories with different subject matters and styles as examples to show nonfiction is a diverse realm of writing (Talese & Lounsberry, 1996, p. vii). Talese is introduced with a short autobiography, and the twenty-nine story selections make up the rest of the book. Prolific writers included in the collection are Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion.

Gay Talese is a nonfiction writer of “fourteen books. He was [also] a reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965” (“Gay Talese,” 2019). Katie Roiphe of the Paris Review states that “[Talese] gained attention with his artful magazine pieces for Esquire in the sixties, including “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which the editors later selected as their best piece in seventy years” (Roiphe, 2009). Both sources state that Talese is the originator of the reporting form called New Journalism.

On her website, Barbara Lounsberry states that she retired as an English professor at the University of Iowa in 2006. During her time there, she received the 1994 Distinguished Scholar award and the 1998 Outstanding Teacher award (Lounsberry, 2019). She is the author or editor of nine books, and currently still makes presentations about nonfiction writing and other topics, her most frequent talk being “Nancy Drew: Iowa's Heroine to the World” (Lounsberry, 2019).

The two writers introduce each of the stories in the collection with each one’s background, reception, and style. The styles used in each story are just as creative as the authors claim. The “Rat on the Waterfront” by Joseph Mitchell, he writes on the types of vicious rats that plagued New York in the 20th century, using large, descriptive paragraphs. Contrarily, “The Executioner’s Song” by Norman Mailer is sectioned with shorter paragraphs, resembling the intimate memories and relationships of its subject, an executed criminal.

The way the editors have organized the anthology into three sections, “Reality Researched,” “Reality Presented—With Style,” and “Reality Enlarged,” enables the writing to educate the reader through these categorized stories. “Parts I and II of this anthology focus on the research and writing of the Literature of Reality,” the editors say. “Part III salutes the final product and suggests that the best literary nonfiction not only re-creates reality, but enlarges our understanding of the world as well” (Talese & Lounsberry, 1996, p.179).

Reviewers on Goodreads had mostly positive reception to the anthology. Some, like Stacy Cacciatore, were interested in specific writers. “I enjoyed understanding more about [Joan Didion’s] style,” she wrote (Cacciatore, 2018). Other reviewers were reading to study nonfiction methods: “This book encompasses the art of writing nonfiction with creating dramatic interest without losing the truth of what is being written” (Sukoco, 2015). The variety of the editors’ selections has evidently enabled these reviewers to learn about reporting, voice, and style.

I would definitely recommend this book to both fiction and nonfiction writers. It is clear that these stories, having been curated by these expert editors who are both writers of their own merit, will teach through example. This anthology is a textbook of nonfiction that demonstrates the most essential lesson of writing—show don’t tell. The stories in the book are a valuable read for beginning, intermediate, and perhaps even expert writers to learn from or attune to their own styles.