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Real True Stories (And How They Happen) The Delacorte Review is the narrative nonfiction publication of the Columbia Journalism School.

New stories appear every month at www.delacortereview.org, and in print four times a year. Its weekly newsletter, Writerland, https://thedelacortereview.substack.com/, is a guide to finding joy in the often difficult work of writing. At the core of The Review's mission is discovery -- of new writers, new voices, new stories, and new readers. We believe that the most powerful stories are the ones writers need to tell. Our commitment is to be home for those stories, and for those writers.

12/29/2025

There is a long and poignant history of posthumously discovered writing. But what is it like when the author was your friend?

I need to begin with a confession.

12/19/2025

How does one deal with that uncreative boss who seems to stifle you at every turn?

“Our editors had, as best we could discern, seized on one phrase from their time in management training as the refrain to be used with any reporter who voiced dissatisfaction: Maybe you’d be happier working someplace else.

I heard it twice. I would indeed be happier, one day. But at those moments, with no sense of what the future might hold, I lowered my head, returned to my desk…My editor went on to become ad salesman of the year for the Yellow Pages.

I tell this story because I have over the past 35 years seen hundreds of students go out into the workplace, hoping that they do not endure what we endured: being made to feel like troublemakers, malcontents, and bad employees for the sin of trying to be creative…”

I was back in Chicago a few weeks ago, seeing friends with whom I worked when we were in our 20s and filled with the bad-case-of-youth combination of ambition, arrogance, and terror that our careers would go no further than covering night meetings in Hinsdale and Naperville.

12/16/2025

Why does the author remember, and what, from meeting NBA All-Star player Michael Ray Richardson, forty years ago? And when the memories return, how does he write what they are telling him?

I teach my final Memory Project class this spring; I’m retiring from Columbia in June – but not from writing, never that.

12/01/2025

Some stories keep recurring in our lives, like those new words we discover, that we then can’t help hearing and reading seemingly everywhere. They function like magnets, attracting unforeseen connections and attaching new details as you go. Soon enough, the desire to write begins to form, nourished by each new coincidence. Here is how one story remained in the author’s life and mind, long after it had been published.

There’s a useful analogy to describe how certain stories keep recurring in our lives: finding them is like discovering a new word, in the sense that, having remained unknown and unheard until then, from that point on, you can’t help hearing and reading it seemingly everywhere.

11/21/2025

Behind the myth of the “Greatest Generation” are lives and narratives awaiting to be retold. This week we spoke to historian David Nasaw, author of “The Wounded Generation.”
“These were the fathers who never spoke about what they had seen and done in the war, fathers who were among the millions of men who came home with scars both physical and emotional that they’d bear for the rest of their lives. They were the fathers who remained mysteries to children who watched them rage and drink and turn ever more inward, fathers whose nightmare screams they’d hear night after night, year after year.”

My friend Dan Sneider emailed the other day about his father.

11/14/2025

“In truth, I found that prospect of spending too much time on a writing project terrifying. What if I lost my way and never found a path out? What if I fell down a bottomless rabbit hole? What painful lessons would I learn about myself if I found a reason to stop and delay starting again? Who was I without a deadline?

One of the most tired refrains about the writing life is that the joy comes not in the work itself but in having done it.

11/06/2025

Reports suggest fewer people are reading for fun, and yet, numbers show many still want to read for pleasure. What is the experience they seek, and which we might offer them? When we look back on the books that made us discover reading, what made it possible? And when our turn comes to write, how do we reconstruct worlds and lives where they might want to go? “There is no substitute for a writer with whom a reader can connect and feel the joy of reading.”

Over the summer a report appeared that confirmed every suspicion, fear, and I-told-you-so about reading habits: fewer people in the United States and United Kingdom were reading for fun.

10/28/2025

Much is made of a writer’s voice, or of finding one’s voice, and other catchphrases. Sometimes it’s not really about the author's voice, or not only. What we listen for, as they listened to themselves, is the voice of the text. But we hear what the text is saying? What can it tell us?

A voice can be telling, in more ways than one.

10/25/2025

There is an inevitability – and utility – to failure in writing and reporting. Things can go wrong, leaving gifted, skilled, competitive women and men feeling frustrated, confused, and humbled.
It is only when that happens that writers begin to learn to be creative, to solve problems, and to overcome constraints. All the things any ambitious story will require.

I make no secret of what a woeful student I was.

10/14/2025

This week we spoke to Jonathan Mahler about his latest , “The Gods of New York”, the story of the city at a pivotal moment in its history: the late 1980s.

“There was a challenge that was unique to this book. I was telling the story of the last four years of the 1980s in New York — but of course those years have a particular resonance now because this was the time and place that produced the most significant political actor this country has seen in a generation. So I wanted the book to work on two levels. It had to be totally immersive, which meant that the story needed to be completely contained to New York during these years (no flashing forward). But I also wanted readers to also feel like they were reading the origin story of our current political moment.”

https://tinyurl.com/3tas4w7k

Few literary devices remind me more of the woeful student I was than a front-of-the-book glossary of characters that presumably I am asked to commit to memory before I am granted entry into the story.

10/08/2025

What can writers learn from athletes and the pressures they face to deliver? To tackle the same foes, the ubiquity of intrusive thoughts, and turn an emotional vulnerability – imposter syndrome – to their advantage.

“I need to write, to wake up and know that my equivalent of a pitcher waiting to throw a fastball past me is a blank page that I am eager to try to fill.”

I suspect it was not Steven Kwan’s intention to offer advice to writers struggling with fear, anxiety, stress – afflictions so many of us endure.

09/29/2025

Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic. Among the least cumbersome, at least in appearance, are those legacies that come in writing. That is, unless you’ve been entrusted with half a century’s worth of unpublished materials, written by one of the most famous writers in the world. We spoke to Matt Salinger about dealing with all that his father, J.D. Salinger, entrusted to him.

“I would say it’s been close to joyful, despite it being grueling, because it’s kept him alive for me. I miss his voice tremendously. I miss his sort of contrarian, rock-solid views of the world. I could always depend on him to have a really frank, interesting, and usually wise take on things, and I miss that. But I’m finding it everywhere I look in the material that he left behind, unpublished.”

Inheritances come in many forms, from the stately to the symbolic, along with every shape of heirloom that accumulates over a lifetime –I’m thinking of a relative’s vast collection of ceramic frogs.

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Our Story

Stories do not write themselves, much as writers may modestly insist they do. Stories exist because writers need to tell them—a need so deep that they will endure false starts, woeful sentences, dead-end paragraphs, two-dimensional characters, flabby prose, wrong turns, and shaky narratives. In short, they will risk all the things that, taken together, comprise the writer’s greatest fear: failure. Specifically, failing to tell the story they need to tell.

Still, they persist. If the best fiction is propelled by imagination, we believe that the best narrative nonfiction is propelled by the relentless and often-lonely business of finding out things that are often maddeningly difficult to find. In a word: reporting. Nonfiction storytelling can be as compelling, riveting, and transporting as fiction—so long as you come back, as they say, with the goods.

Our mission is discovery, and it comes in two parts: First, for our readers to discover new, original works of ambitious narrative nonfiction, often by writers they are reading for the first time. And second: allowing our readers to discover how those stories came to be told. And why a writer needed to tell it. http://www.twitter.com/delacortereview http://www.delacortereview.com