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Literature and journalism are two field of study that has been a never-ending discussion throughout the history. The two fields, regardless of being considered as separate entity, has its association in the course. This paper dwells into the two fields together, that is, on literary journalism and how literary journalism examines the blurring of boundaries between narrative writing and factual reporting through comparison of select works of narrative nonfiction. The text analysed is a novelistic piece, “The Yoga Store Murder” (2013) by Dan Morse. The study confronts the reluctance to acknowledge this form of reportage as authentic and reliable because its literariness is misconstrued as compromising the objectivity of the piece. The authors also examine how literary journalism fits within the rubric of both literature and journalism. The study addresses the following research questions: where do fact and fiction meet in literary journalistic narratives? how do we navigate questions of authenticity, reliability and journalistic integrity in narrative journalism? The questions will be attempted to be answered with a detailed analysis of a text of investigative journalism that is also nonfiction writing, though literary in nature.

The global trend towards decentralization of discourse and the shifting focus from the centre to the periphery has revealed itself in the late XXth century Latin American literature in the form of testimonio, a hybrid genre which combines nonfiction documentary material with artistic recreation. The first book written in this genre was Biography of a Runaway Slave by a Cuban writer Miguel Barnet. Many more works appeared in the following decades (1970–80s) including some of the best-known examples of this genre such as Let Me Speak: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines by M. Viezzer, I, Rigoberta Menchu by E. Burgos as well as guerrilla chronicles by O. Cabezas and S. Ramirez. In the most general terms, testimonio can be defined as a nonfictional first-person account of oppression. Just like the writers of the Boom, the authors of testimonial literature have developed their own artistic method – nuevo verismo. This term was coined in 1978 by a prominent Columbian writer and critic Carlos Rincón. Nuevo verismo changes the way we view documentary in quite a dramatic way. With its factuality and truthfulness of the material, it becomes a powerful artistic device which defines the way in which this material is presented. The purpose of the paper is to examine this new method and highlight its characteristic features. A special attention is paid to the composition of the testimonio, its narrative structure and stylistic devices.

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