Robert S. Boynton is the director of the Literary Reportage program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He was graduated with honors in philosophy and religion from Haverford College, and received an MA in political science from Yale University.
His book, The Invitation Only Zone, about North Korea’s Japanese abduction project, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2016. The New New Journalism was published by Vintage Books in 2005.
He has written about culture and ideas for The New Yorker (where he has been a contributing editor) and Harper’s (where he has been a senior editor). His byline has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and many other publications.
Forty years after Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese launched the New Journalism movement, Robert S. Boynton sits down with nineteen practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their methods, writings and careers. Interviews with:
Gay Talese, Jane Kramer, Calvin Trillin, Richard Ben Cramer, Ted Conover, Alex Kotlowitz, Richard Preston, William Langewiesche, Eric Schlosser, Leon Dash, William Finnegan, Jonathan Harr, Jon Krakauer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, Ron Rosenbaum, Lawrence Weschler, and Lawrence Wright.
People began disappearing from Japan’s coastal towns and cities in the fall of 1977. A security guard vacationing at a seaside resort two hundred miles northwest of Tokyo vanished in mid September. In November, a thirteen- year- old girl walking home from badminton practice in the port town of Niigata was last seen eight hundred feet from her family’s front door. The next July two young couples, both on dates, though in different towns on Japan’s northwest coast, disappeared. What few knew at the time was that these people were abducted by an elite unit of North Korean commandos. Japanese were not the only victims…