King | Ira Glass | In Cold Blood | Michael Lewis | Kansas

The king is dead. More specifically, the old king of literary nonfiction - a form that incorporates fictional-writing techniques such as dramatic arc, scene setting, and extended dialogue to flavor books about true occurrences - is dead. That king would be Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood, an account of a murder in rural Kansas, is often called the first nonfiction novel. Now, 42 years after In Cold Blood was first published and 23 years after Capote's death, Ira Glass of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life is declaring, "Long live the new kings!"

In a new compendium, Glass brings together 14 top current writers of literary nonfiction. The collection does not include works from the most visible living progenitor of literary nonfiction, the dapper Tom Wolfe, but it does include works from several familiar writers. The most recognizable are probably Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, and Mark Bowden. Others whom followers of literary nonfiction - or, at least, voracious readers of magazines - may recognize are: Jack Hitt, Lawrence Weschler, Bill Buford, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace, Lee Sandlin, Coco Henson Scales, Dan Savage, Michael Pollan, and James McManus.