The Best American Travel Writing
Anthology Edited by Susan Orlean & Jason Wilson
2007 edition is a must read for both aspiring and veteran travel writers. Contributors include Jonathan Stern, George Saunders and David Halberstam.
Travel writers should beware: this book can make you feel that you have a bit more work to do on your craft, but this is the anthology to inspire you to do just that.
Best American Series
The Best American Travel Writing, 2007 (edited by Susan Orlean, Jason Wilson, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007) is one of a series of annual ‘Best American’ volumes. Some years the selections chosen are better than in other years. The 2007 edition of travel writing falls into that ‘better than’ category, with pieces that are wonderfully varied and extremely well-written.
Skilled Editors
This edition was edited by Jason Wilson, who chose from hundreds of pieces from publications as varied as the subject matter of the writing. He then passed on a whittled down group of candidates to Susan Orlean, for her final decision. Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the best-selling author of The Orchid Thief (the inspiration for the film Adaptation – read more in Movies for Writers).
Inspiring Travel Writing
The Best American Travel Writing, 2007 is filled with writing that will amuse, evoke wanderlust, and inspire aspiring travel writers and veteran travel writers alike to further hone their craft.
Dip into the book and laugh out loud at Jonathan Stern’s parody of the guidebook-writing industry. His essay, “The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment”, was originally published in The New Yorker.
Under the section “Local Customs”, Stern warns about “a daily ritual of bitching.” He also warns visitors to his apartment not to be “put off by impulsive sobbing or unprovoked rages. These traits have been passed down through generations and are part of the colorful heritage of My Apartment’s people.”
If you read George Saunders’s “The Incredible Buddha Boy”, you will be intrigued from the beginning, when he writes: “Last December, I got an e-mail from my editor at GQ. A fifteen-year-old boy in Nepal had supposedly been meditating for the past seven months without any food or water.” Who wouldn’t want to settle back and read on?
The sense of another time is brilliantly evoked in David Halberstam’s essay “The Boys of Saigon”. Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, tragically died in an automobile accident before this volume was published, but we are left with writing like this to savour: “I came of age as a food person in Saigon – not just as someone who came to love eating well, but as someone who believes that the very act of eating after a long and difficult day of working is a necessary and well-earned celebration of the day.”
For more ‘Best American’ writing, read A Great Essay Collection.
