Community Updates
Dept. of Congrats Spotlight: Javier Sinay
GrubStreet is thrilled to congratulate instructor Javier Sinay! Javier published the book Después de las 9:53 (After 9:53), by Penguin Random House in Argentina on July 1. It's a 432-page-lenght crónica: narrative journalism, about a terrorist attack committed in 1994 in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people.
The title refers to the time of the attack and the book focuses on the first 30 days of the investigation, as well as the impact of those days over the next three decades.
“I focused a lot on the first month because I consider it to be a scale model of everything that comes later,” he said. (NBC News)
Sinay explains that the structure of his book is rooted in a 66-page ruling that first established “a why, a how, a who” for what happened, just 23 days after the bombing.
The book is also based on research from other court documents, including 14 folders containing 200 pages each, and media reports, as well as interviews with 26 people involved in the case — including two former intelligence officials off the record and a head judge in the investigation.
We asked Javier how his time at GrubStreet influenced his accomplishment:
"My time as an instructor at GrubStreet (two years, so far) has helped me in the description and in the arc of the main characters of this true story about terrorism and justice. By teaching crónica, essays, and especially memoirs at GrubStreet, I thought deeply about the ambiguity of every person — even the protagonists of a world-famous case. The writers at GrubStreet have helped me notice this intriguing truth."
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