"My worktable becomes a disaster area when I’m working and I am always pleasantly surprised when art crawls out of that mess."

Ok: So it has happened again, just as it does every few years—we’re embroiled in a discussion of Truth in nonfiction. At this point, you probably know the drill: Some writer, ostensibly of creative nonfiction, pulls the wool over our eyes and tells us a fascinating, compelling, enlightening, unforgettable true story … that turns out to be a lie.

I’m heading to the post office again, the sweat sparked by the outdoor oven of a Tucson summer meandering down my back, the manila envelope in my hand gently thrumming my thigh in rhythm with my expectant stride.

1997–a year situated at the beginning of the dot-com bubble and fewer than four years after the Web became free for everyone to use.

Hardly a month goes by, it seems, without some minor (or major) flap about the current state of creative nonfiction, what with authors caught self-aggrandizing, novelists denigrating the other team or reviewers lumping all memoirists into the sensationalist-victim camp.

A writer colleague referring to a document she had written, confessed: “I totally D’Agata’d this.” I couldn’t help laughing. But her comment was unsettling because she meant she had fudged her story, made some of it up. And I suspected that the man behind the reference, John D’Agata, co-author of the book “The Lifespan of a Fact,” would be pleased.The

Searching for a 19-year-old lost in the Grand Canyon, a park ranger reflects on the risks young men take

It’s a ravishing Tuesday morning in May, one of those lengthening days in the sweet rush toward summer when all things seem possible.

It’s January in Hanoi and Santa and his reindeer are everywhere, not just in the hotel lobbies, where (I’d assumed) the artificial Christmas trees, wrapped boxes and prancing reindeer were set up for the pleasure of Westerners.

I enter the stands at Las Ventas to find the crowds of seated aficionados punctuated by arena officials in the most ridiculous hats I have ever seen worn in earnest.