The article critically evaluates journalistic concerns in Mohsin Hamid’s novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It aims to investigate how social and political realities are journalistically fictionalized. Literary journalism means a piece of nonfiction that contains verifiable content, embraces narrative and rhetorical techniques associated with fiction and transforms it into a story. Mark Kramer views literary journalism intrinsically political, democratic, pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite style of news reporting. Norman Sims determines immersion (deep research), structure (organization of the storyline), accuracy (verifiable content), voice (author’s viewpoint), and symbolism to be the salient features of literary journalism. Moth Smoke historically construes the political issues of Indo-Pak animosity about the Kashmir dispute and the race for nuclear deterrents. Consequently, this political rivalry caused corruption, poverty, and political instability in Pakistan. The Reluctant Fundamentalist interprets immigration, refugee crisis, and polarity between the eastern and the western civilizations in the wake of the 9/11 incident bringing out the reasons for fundamentalism and civilizational clashes. Hamid novelizes journalistic concerns and produces fictionalized reportage of social and political issues of the contemporary world, a literary and subjective style of fiction writing, and uses allegory and symbolism to reveal various aspects of human nature and bring out the complications caused by events of mass importance.

Index Terms- Journalistic concerns, literary journalism, accuracy, immersion, voice, fiction