Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov

Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer—but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In Alive in the Writing—an intriguing hybrid of writing guide, biography, and literary analysis—anthropologist and novelist Kirin Narayan introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov: his pithy, witty observations on the writing process, his life as a writer through accounts by his friends, family, and lovers, and his venture into nonfiction through his book Sakhalin Island. By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility.

Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self. A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre’s attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer.

• In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale
• From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• The Qualitative Manifesto
• The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Volume 36) (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
• The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart
• Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (P.S.)
• Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science