John Jeremiah Sullivan writes reported essays that begin somewhere ridiculous and end somewhere serious without ever announcing the transition. Pulphead (2011) collects the best of them: a week at a Christian rock festival in an RV he cannot drive; the Tea Party read through the lens of nineteenth-century mesmerism; Michael Jackson; Axl Rose; a brother electrocuted by a microphone; the animals of reality television turning on their handlers. The trick is that Sullivan takes his subjects' own accounts seriously for longer than a magazine writer normally would, which leaves him nowhere to hide when the piece turns. The collection was widely named one of the best books of its year and made him the most imitated American essayist of his generation. Blood Horses (2004) began as an assignment about his dying father, a sportswriter, and became a history of the horse. His long investigation into the earliest Delta blues musicians, and his search for the two women who recorded as the Mississippi Sheiks' contemporaries, ran in The New Yorker. Sullivan is Southern Editor of The Paris Review and lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.