The Real Story is a celebration of creative nonfiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with fiction. Look, we like making stuff up as much as anyone else does, but we’re more excited about the creative possibilities of telling the truth. We love true stories (and even mostly true stories), personal essays, memoirs, diaries, sketches and literary journalism. After all, real life is so much stranger than fiction.

The Considering series is a place to focus on one particularly amazing essay or short piece of non-fiction. If you’d like to contribute, get in touch! I came across No Name Woman in my current favourite essay collection: The Best American Essays of the Century (edited by Joyce Carol Oates). I later learned the essay is the first section of...

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When considering the best essayists from across the Atlantic, a number of names come to mind. David Sedaris and Gore Vidal (amongst others) might appear but, for me, the king will always be David Foster Wallace. Author of three novels (The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, posthumously), he also wrote a...

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My wife has been ill. This essay was supposed to be finished days ago but my wife has been ill. I have spent more time with the baby. Babies prefer monkeys that rattle to essays about Nonfiction heavyweights. Progress has been slow. Without Gay Talese, it is arguable that I couldn’t have started this...

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This week, we’re launching the Considering series, a place to focus on one particularly amazing essay or short piece of non-fiction. If you’d like to contribute, get in touch! Picking up my copy of The Best American Essays of the Century (edited by Joyce Carol Oates - gah! She’s on Twitter!) is a risky endeavor; I can...

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This post was submitted by Dan Toller, of the excellent The Electric Typewriter archive. Thanks, Dan!   I saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was teenager. It pretty much put me off reading anything by Hunter S. Thompson for about a decade. It’s not a bad film, but it was heavy on...

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