Occupational Hazard, continued

The blessing part of the blessing and curse is that when you work in a library, you happen upon all sorts of fascinating books just by walking around. Today, I will share one such find with you.

I saw Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing 1979-2003, 2nd edition, sitting in the reshelving area of the 2nd floor when I was walking past last week. It's a thick book, and it was on the end of a row, both characteristics which helped attract my attention.

Now, I don't know anything about Pulitzer Prizes, but it sounded interesting, so I decided to invite the book home for a little visit.

It's a fabulous find! Feature writing is one of the categories of journalism prizes awarded since 1979. Other current categories are explanatory reporting and beat reporting. This book, edited by David Garlock, a senior lecturer and head of the magazine writing department at the University of Texas at Austin, includes the text of all the prize winning feature stories since 1979. Garlock briefly introduces each story and author, and after presenting the story, he provides a short analysis of the writing in the story.

The Pulitzer Board says that the feature writing prize is awarded "for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision." In his analyses, Garlock points out aspects of these stories that readers usually associate with fiction stories, rather than non-fiction stories. A story is a story, however, whether it's fiction or not. A good story, true or not, has an engaging character who must confront and resolve some obstacle or problem. And the same techniques and literary devices that contribute to good fiction writing--pacing, character development, point of view, etc.--are important to good feature writing.

So far, I have read all the crime and medical stories in the book, since that's where my interests chiefly lie. I plan on reading the remaining stories, however, and I can't recommend the book highly enough. If you are like me, you won't stop at the stories, but you'll find Garlock's analyses great reading as well.

If you need help locating this book at a library near you, you know who to ask, right?