I don't know the difference between a personal essay, creative non-fiction, or non-fiction writing, but the way the stories are presented here makes me interested all the same. I don't know why there needs to be so much discussion about labeling any individual work. There is an obvious difference between fiction and non-fiction, but aren't all the other categories really just for classification? Anyone looking for a good story can find it here. Some are structured around narrative devices, some are personal stories, some are researched, some are merely commentaries on a singular observation.

The appeal of non-fiction is being able to tell the facts and the truth from personal experience. There is no need to speak through a character or formulate a plot.

Truth is stranger than fiction. I laughed when I read "Instead of the Rat Pack". I wanted to find the old July 2001 article in Smithsonian magazine about the "friendly floatees" from "Moby Duck", and after I read "Errands in the Forest", I wanted to read even more nature writing. ( )

It's rare that an editor's introduction gets me seriously psyched to read a collection, but Lee Gutkind's gave me a whole new appreciation for creative nonfiction. In fact it's probably the best introduction I've ever read. It's the only one that really stands out in my memory, and if the introduction is that good the collection has to be good. I wasn't disappointed.

I had a writing professor who threw those words around a lot- "creative nonfiction" - but I was never sure what she meant. What's the difference between nonfiction and CREATIVE nonfiction?

This collection is smart, funny, poignant, and poetic. Nonfiction poetic? Yes. The advance-reading collection starts with a bitter memoir piece about the lasting bond of hate between mother and daughter, and moves directly to an philosophical essay on life written in an experimental style as a final exam. The travel story on walking across Andorra is written as a satire about how to write a travel story. A blog about watching one's mother suffer from Alzheimer's is written in a fragmented, poetic style. There is an especially caustic eulogy for the "N-word." Another blogger rips Facebook while admitting that he has been sucked into the networking culture. This is creative nonfiction.

The collection also includes more conventional nonfiction pieces. "Moby-Duck" seems to be the centerpiece, and like the novel to which the title alludes, it is a sprawling epic, mixing research, memoir, and environmental worries. "Figurines" deals with a mixed-race marriage and those little uncomfortable reminders of race relations in America, like decorative wooden figures of stereotyped African-Americans from southern days gone by. A journalistic article examines the likely murder of a nineteen-year-old, who was found in an alley beneath a nine-story parking deck; the police ruled it a suicide. "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex" is a interesting mini-biography of the man who authored the 1970's bestseller, The Joy of Sex.

My favorite of the collection is "Cracking Open," an intense and beautifully written narrative of a young Polish woman who gives birth to a damaged son on her kitchen table in the 1960s. The mother agonizes as her child is prodded and studied by doctors and medical students. She is escorted out of the hospital after visiting hours on a regular basis. He suffers numerous operations; one leaves him in a body cast with a hole in the side for his urine to drain (his ureter has been closed). Flies are attracted to the hole. She is told he will not reach his first birthday, and then she is told that he will not make it past puberty. Yet, she hopes and endures.

Overall, it's a great collection. The range of material and style is surprising. Several exciting new voices are presented, and the collection demonstrates that blogs have the potential to be good literature. One or two shorter pieces were dry and mediocre, but the good outweighs the bad. I look forward to volume 3. ( )

This is a refreshing collection of the latest creative nonfiction pieces. What I found especially interesting is that the editor chose to accept and publish pieces that were previously published only on personal blogs. This method resulted in finding some unknown talent.

The works in this anthology are all good and some are outstanding. I think that this book will stay on my shelf for a while and be perused frequently. ( )

The 2nd entry in what may be an enduring series, The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2, edited by Lee Gutkind, is marked by wideness of range in approaches to nonfiction. Genres include memoir, humor, and history, and experimental nonfiction. The writing is almost uniformly excellent, and this book serves as an introduction to many strong writers as well as a small-scale survey.

Where this collection falters is in the selection of form-driven nonfiction. Works by Carol Richards, Rolf Potts, and Desirae Matherly all seem captive to the structure of form; content and language never seem to truly mesh. However, they serve as an exposure to this less widely published genre, usually the province of literary journals.
The strongest pieces in this volume, including work by Pagan Kennedy and James Renner, are closer to traditional journalism.

This book would be a useful addition to any library serving high-school and college students, who would appreciate the somewhat broader-than-usual scope of this survey but find enough work within their range of experience.

From memoirs to journalism to polemical blogging, this book is a sampler to the so-called nonfiction genre. It seems that every possible subject matter is covered in this anthology. There are stories about pollution, homosexuality, guns, marriage, careers, politics, race relations, childbirth, academics, and death, and, with some of the death-related entries towards the back, I wonder if the sequencing is supposed to loosely mirror life. The anthology also shows that nonfiction can be very personal or strictly expository - the nonfiction styles range from biographies, montage essays, rants, and how-to's. The only common thread, the editor implies, is that the art of writing creative nonfiction lies in being selective with the details, so that a story can be brought out of the facts.

There is one particularly lengthy and ultimately underwhelming piece about plastic rubber ducks that could have been interesting, but lost me as it didn't seem to have a point - is this about the ecological footprint of plastic, chaos theory, or oceanography? There is also a piece about academic test taking that takes the form of a test - the end result being a piece that in its attempts to be creative ends up being a little gimmicky and weak. Fortunately, there are many gems in the collection: A few stories later there was an excellent account of the toll an abortion can take on the dynamics of a relationship; a work that by its end takes an unexpectedly romantic turn for a piece of non-fiction. The collection is at its most creative and, once again, romantic in "Anti-Aliasing,' where the author describes dealing with an ended relationship through the metaphor of editing digital photography. On the more expository end of the spectrum, there is a fantastically well-researched biography on the little-known life of Alex Comfort, author of Joy of Sex, and a real-life Austin Powers of sorts. A trip to Alex Comfort's paltry Wikipedia entry reveals just how well-researched the piece was.

This is also one of the first nonfiction collections I have read that shows that personal blogs can be an exciting source of creative nonfiction. ( )