An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction.How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D�Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay�which eventually became the foundation of D�Agata�s critically acclaimed About a Mountain�was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D�Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.This book reproduces D�Agata�s essay, along with D�Agata and Fingal�s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between �truth� and �accuracy� and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. Two-color throughout