Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction
Author(s): B.J. Hollars
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: 1 Mar. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 280 pages
ISBN-10: 0803236484
ISBN-13: 9780803236486
Book Description
Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form.
This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today’s most renowned teachers and writers―including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer’s personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form.
Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Inspire[s] oblique imitation by simply collecting so much excellent writing in one place. . . . Well-suited to student-writers, which should include all of us, because [the essays] allow us to look under the hood and see the machinery that makes such moving creative nonfiction.”—Fourth Genre
“A nifty little book.”—Paul L. Martin,
Teacher’s View
From the Author
B.J. Hollars is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is the author of several books including From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, The Last Lynching in America and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, and Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds.
About the Author
B.J. Hollars is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is the author of numerous books, including Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds (Nebraska, 2017), Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail (Nebraska, 2021), Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (Nebraska, 2019), Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction (New Mexico, 2014), This Is Only a Test, From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us about Life, Death, and Being Human (Nebraska, 2015), and Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America. Hollars is also the founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild.
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