Tuesday, March 20, 2012

& finally, Judith Schalansky's ESSAY PRIZE winner interview etc.

is up at the Essay Prize website. Happily, we might add. And at last. And maybe interesting to consider in terms of the puffed-up Internetted brouhaha sparked by John D'Agata's The Lifespan of a Fact (Craig's lovely post is just below this one on Essay Daily, and if you can still get it up to care about the conversation, here are three links on the LA Review of Books: one, an introduction to the convo and a great little anthology that just came out, Essayists on the Essay, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French; two, a post by one of the main progenitors of the genre and catch-all term "creative nonfiction," Lee Gutkind; and three, an irritable response to all of this by myself).

From the interview, Schalansky notes that "I didn’t, in fact, invent anything at all. And the parts set in italics are actual quotes. I could write a footnote for every detail. But I don’t know whether or not they’d be true; this doesn’t interest me. The island stories are closely based on the personal reports of certain authors, whom I made into protagonists. Partly to preserve their authorship, and partly to make their experiences palpable."

Fact-checker to the OR, stat!

Or not.