The Lede

Dispatches from a Life in the Press

By: Calvin Trillin

Narrated by: Robert Fass

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 the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami, a swashbuckling New York Times reporter, and an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague into a crude connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. There are pieces on the House of Lords aspirations of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding 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 unparalleled portrait of one of our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.

©2024 Calvin Trillin (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“If this book, which gathers together the best and the brightest of the Trillin oeuvre, were a candy sampler, it would be a fistful of peanut butter cups, truffles, and nut wreaths. If it were a vinyl music album, it would carry the ‘greatest hits’ title. Between hard covers, it is simply called an anthology. . . . [The Lede] is a public service because the world seems a little brighter when a reader is reminded of why Trillin is a master craftsman, or when another reader gets to discover Trillin for the first time.”—The Boston Globe

“Calvin Trillin’s newest collection is a reminder that there is no one better working in journalism today—or, as Trillin likes to call it, in ‘the trade’—than him. . . . His book reminds us not just of his brilliant plying of the trade but also of what the trade once was.”—Los Angeles Times

“In journalism, the ‘lede’ is the introduction to a story, a sentence or paragraph designed to entice readers to continue. For example, the lede in a review of Calvin Trillin’s The Lede might be: Calvin Trillin is an annoyingly good writer. . . . If you knew what I know, you’d run out and buy this book right away, if only to remember what writing is like when it goes past 140 characters.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune