Best Bylines in the Business

Books Become Him

Over the last several weeks I've become enamored of a website called byliner. There, the editors collect the most sophisticated feature journalism around, written in the style of the best fiction.

 

Byliner is a great site to just browse and look for a story that appeals to you. But I particularly enjoy seeing where the site takes me. For instance, check out the writer Gay Talese's collection of work there. For those who don't know, Talese is not only arguably one of the finest journalists in this country's history, he is simply one of its greatest writers.

Check out this passage from "Travels With A Diva," an article he penned not long ago for the New Yorker, about the great soprano Marina Popslavskaya, who passed out on a hot night in August:

"Even after she was revived by two emergency medical technicians, who had come to the apartment at around 8 AM. in response to a call from her mother, Poplavskaya, who is thirty- three, lacked the strength to get to her feet. Her mother placed cool wet towels on her forehead and supported the back of her neck with a chilled bottle of Friuli wine that Poplavskaya had bought at the duty-free shop in the Frankfiurt airport the week before…"

Truth: If I'd been writing this piece, I would likely have been so enthralled by this material that I would have been satisfied to pen: "…supported the back of her neck with a bottle of wine."

Talese, the meticulous, got the region it came from (Friuli), as well as when (the week before) and where (the duty free shop in the Frankfurt airport).

So there's a lot of great writing pulled together by the curators at byliner. But even better, there is often only a fragment of any given piece on the site. Readers can usually see the whole thing by clicking on "read at source." But that button leads to some great surprises, as happened tonight when I clicked through to take in all of Talese's epic, "Charlie Manson's Home On the Range," and found myself staring at scanned pages of the 1970 Esquire it came from. The Beefeater ad alone is worth visiting the page for. But reading the story seemingly from the (digitally) torn out pages of the old magazine is even better—illicit, a stolen pleasure.

Go check it out for yourself and get ready for more beautiful writing, like the lovely way this paragraph shifts gears for idyllic to menacing in the space of a few words:

"He does not remember exactly when they first moved on to the ranch. He believes one group of hippie girls and boys arrived in 1967, possibly having come down from San Francisco, and settled briefly in a roadside church several miles north of his ranch; and eventually, in their wanderings down the hill searching for food, they discovered the many empty shacks along the riding path in the woods. They lived in the shacks briefly and Spahn did not object; but one morning there was a police raid…"

See the rest here.