NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating portrait of journalism and the people who make it, told through pieces collected from the incomparable six-decade career of bestselling author and longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin

“The Lede contains profiles . . . that are acknowledged classics of the form and will be studied until A.I. makes hash out of all of us.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.

In The Lede, Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and their world. There are pieces on a legendary crime reporter in Miami and on an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from a connoisseur of the French nouvelle vague into a fan of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. Trillin writes about the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the icebreaker he'd use if he met one of his subjects socially (e.g.: “You must be wondering why I referred to you in Time as a dork robot”), and the origins of a publication called Beautiful Spot: A Magazine of Parking.

Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

"Calvin Trillin can write just about anything-and has. He covered the Civil Rights movement in the South for Time, chronicled stories from small towns and cities for The New Yorker, and wrote comic poetry for The Nation. He has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America" (The Miami Herald), "our funniest food writer" (The New Yorker), and "one of the most brilliant humorists of our time" (Charleston Post and Courier). But one of his favorite subjects across the years-a superbly good fit for Trillin's unique mâelange of reportage and comedy-has been his own professional milieu: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers over a half century of his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. A small roadside restaurant is thrown into upheaval after being named the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly. Trillin and New Yorker editor Wallace Shawn have a showdown about "obscene language." A local weekly newspaper in Savannah gets unexpectedly embroiled in a missing person case. The line between journalism and protestor erodes at a reunion of Freedom Riders. Plus pieces on outrageous film reviews, the carefully manufactured elitism of Vanity Fair, the early days of food website Chowhound, controversial baron and publisher Conrad Black, and the Fortune 500 (what would it be like to be 501st?)"--