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Also by Jim Fingal:

The Lifespan Of A Fact, March 2012
Paperback

Also by John D'Agata:

The Lifespan Of A Fact, March 2012
Paperback

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT
By: Jim Fingal, John D'Agata

W. W. Norton
March 2012
On Sale: February 27, 2012
128 pages
ISBN: 0393340732
EAN: 9780393340730
Paperback
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Non-Fiction

An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction.

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This book reproduces D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and 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.

Media Buzz

On The Media - September 22, 2012