The crazy font was annoying to read although I can understand why someone thought it might be a good idea - performance reading concept? Not sure. Relevant for understanding how a story can be approached and rewritten by assumptions, desired response/outcome, editorial pressures. Overall worth reading if you can get beyond the font. ( )

The majority of this book is composed of high spirited banter and a recital of the distance between D'Agata's prose and the facts. The meat of it comes in a one-two punch at the end: the issues regarding a definition of nonfiction come to a head in a conversation between the author and fact-checker that goes beyond particulars, and then Fingal ends with the only twist, in retrospect, that this text could have. I appreciated the layout, especially, which provided a pragmatic alternative to footnotes and a couple of interesting comparisons with medieval biblical manuscripts: both the formatting of original text centered in each page and the use of red ink as accent. Surely no other text is as relevant in comparison when considering our cultural understanding of truth. ( )

The four star rating is for the discussion rather than the written content. The debate was interesting, but having worked for a newspaper I'm not sure that making things up is a great approach. ( )

In recent years, there have been a number of scandals involving news agencies and their staff fudging or adjusting reports or manipulating photographs in order to present a story more dramatically or in a way that will increase the attention-grabbing factor. And in the age of the Internet, almost anything can, and will, be checked against the sources (whether those are reliable sources or not). In this short book, John D’Agata, author of an essay and Jim Fingal, a doggedly determined fact-checker, debate, argue, and yes, fight, over truth versus accuracy, and whether the form of essay-writing should be held to higher journalistic standards.

The design of the text itself is rather confusing at first, as the body of the essay is printed in the center of each page, with the fact-checker’s commentary and dialogue with the author printed footnote-style around the borders of the page. It’s a little difficult to read straight through, but this isn’t the kind of book that you’d want to just read flat out anyway. The fact-checker is extremely thorough, to the point of nitpicking, and though I wholeheartedly support his efforts, I do feel for the author, whose irritation with the whole process shows through.

The back cover of this books reads, [this] “is a brilliant ad eye-opening meditation on the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy,’ and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.” This is an extremely high-blown and overly wordy way of saying, “here is a writer and a fact-checker arguing over their work;” as a librarian and an employee of a community college where we struggle daily to introduce the concept of information literacy to our students, I lean strongly towards the case of the fact-checker, whose attempts to track down and cite the references of the author are often futile. However, I wouldn’t put this book on any must-read lists, simply because the dialogue between the two tends to drag on and even becomes disillusioning after a while. ( )

Did John D'Agata plan this all along?

He's an awareness-raiser for the essay, and an envelope-pusher when it comes to genre. Was the making of this book just a 7-year plot to lean against the edges of what we expect an essay to be?

Here's what happened: D'Agata submitted a piece to The Believer for publication, a piece which was, ostensibly, a true account of the suicide of a Las Vegas teen. The article-essay also included D'Agata's own personal experience of the chain of events and explored the nature of our ideas about Las Vegas. But when fact-checking intern Jim Fingal got a hold of the piece, he quickly realized that it was riddled with factual inaccuracies - nearly all purposeful. ("I needed two beats there," John says to explain why he changed pink vans to purple vans; but much of his fact-massaging was significantly more...significant.)

Each page shows a section of D'Agata's work in the center with Fingal's fact-checking notes - and their correspondence - around the margins. As D'Agata responds with caustic snark and bluntly refuses to change anything, Fingal gets more nit-picky and obnoxious (at one point requesting D'Agata's mother's phone number so he can confirm that she has a cat, which D'Agata had mentioned in passing).

I predict readers will end up choosing sides - and I expect most will side with Fingal. Although a bit of a tedious read, the book was still funny and made somewhat of a comment on the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, Truth and truth. ( )