Literary Journalism Studies, an official publication of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies, is an international, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that invites scholarly examinations of Literary Journalism, a genre also known around the world as literary reportage, narrative journalism, creative nonfiction, the New Journalism, nuevo periodismo, reportage literature, literary nonfiction and narrative nonfiction. Published in English but directed at an international audience, the journal will welcome contributions from different cultural, disciplinary and critical perspectives. To help establish comparative studies of the genre, the journal is especially interested in examinations of the works of authors and traditions from different national literatures.

There is no single description of the genre, but the following definitions help to establish a meeting ground for its critical study.

· "The art and craft of reportage-journalism marked by vivid description, a novelist's eye to form, and eyewitness reporting that reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know." -- Granta

· "Reportage Literature is an engagement with reality with a novelist's eye but with a journalist's discipline." -- Pedro Rosa Mendes, Portugal

· "I think one of the first things for literary reportage should be to go into the field and to try to get the other side of the story. Reportage should give a fresh vision of a topic." -- Anne Nivat, France

· "A good reportage must not necessarily be linked with topical or political events which are taking place around us. I think the miracle of things lies not in showing the extraordinary but in showing ordinary things in which the extraordinary is hidden." -- Nirmal Verma, India

· It is a "journalism that would read like a novel . . . or short story." -- Tom Wolfe, United States

Such definitions are not comprehensive and may at times conflict, but they should help to establish an understanding of this fundamentally narrative genre, which is located at the intersection of literature and journalism.

At the critical center of the genre lies cultural revelation in narrative form. Implicit to the enterprise are two precepts: (a) that there is an external reality apart from human consciousness, whatever the inherent problems of language and ideology that may exist in comprehending that reality, and (b) that there are consequences in the phenomenal world, whether triggered by human or natural agency, that result in the need to tell journalistically based narratives empowered by the use of literary technique.