February 16, 2012 update John Jeremiah Sullivan, a Sewanee grad, has somehow created for himself what can only be called the best writing job in the whole world. Magazines like GQ and Harper’s and The Paris Review and the Oxford American send him out to report on all manner of subjects high and low: cave paintings on the Cumberland Plateau, the grotesque celebrity afterlife of Real World stars, Christian-rock concerts, the waning days of the last living Fugitive, scientific opinion about the future of the human race. Sullivan does more than merely report on what he finds, and does more than merely tell the story in an outrageously original way that involves a page-to-out-loud-laughter ratio of something like 1:1. He also manages the kind of alchemy that all great writing ultimately achieves: John Jeremiah Sullivan transforms every subject he writes about into himself, and himself into the subject, and somehow the reader, too, gets transformed along the way.