Skip to main content

Katherine Book

Behind ​the ​Beautiful Forevers. By Katherine Boo. Random House, 2012. 288p. HB, $27.

Like a Novel: The Marketing of Literary Nonfiction

Offered up by blurbers with the best of intentions, the immediacy implicit in the description like a novel suggests that the book on hand can be engaged with as art rather than as fact, so realist it’s not real; a story rather than the state of things, a condition in which we might be complicit.