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narrative nonfiction

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. 

Like a Novel

April 11, 2013

I recently read KatherineBoo’s 2012 National Book Award–winning portrait of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, with my students in a creative nonfiction class at Dartmouth College. Boo spent a little more than three years in the slum [...]