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The Best American Travel Writing 2017
“The Best American Travel Writing has been the gold standard for short-form travel writing from newspapers, magazines, and the Internet since its inception.” —New York Times Book Review
Everyone travels for different reasons, but whatever those reasons are, one thing is certain—they come back with stories. Each year, the best of those stories are collected in The Best American Travel Writing, curated by one of the top writers in the field, and each year they “open a window onto the strange, seedy and beautiful world, offering readers glimpses into places that many will never see or experience except through the eyes and words of these writers" (Kirkus Reviews). This far-ranging collection of top notch travel writing is, quite simply, the genre’s gold standard.
Everyone travels for different reasons, but whatever those reasons are, one thing is certain—they come back with stories. Each year, the best of those stories are collected in The Best American Travel Writing, curated by one of the top writers in the field, and each year they “open a window onto the strange, seedy and beautiful world, offering readers glimpses into places that many will never see or experience except through the eyes and words of these writers" (Kirkus Reviews). This far-ranging collection of top notch travel writing is, quite simply, the genre’s gold standard.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 3, 2017
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December 4, 2020
I don't know who Lauren Collins is, but she has good taste. The Hit-to-Miss ratio of this collection was quite high, and one of the essays was truly exceptional. This was written by Shelley Puhak, a poet from Baltimore that I was previously unfamiliar with; I've found some of her other material after reading this and she's truly a talented writer.
Sometimes the most effective way to deal with a devastating topic is to put away the tissues, turn off the violin music and talk about something else -- architecture or spring cleaning or kite flying or something. Then, you have rendered the reader defenseless and can await the perfect moment to stick the dagger in.
Other essays I enjoyed included entries from Tom Bissell, writing about a tour in Israel with a bunch of elderly right-wingers, Jackie Hedeman writing about an unusual trip to the Netherlands, Ann Mah de-romanticizing winemaking, Elizabeth Rogers in China and a couple others.
Sometimes the most effective way to deal with a devastating topic is to put away the tissues, turn off the violin music and talk about something else -- architecture or spring cleaning or kite flying or something. Then, you have rendered the reader defenseless and can await the perfect moment to stick the dagger in.
Other essays I enjoyed included entries from Tom Bissell, writing about a tour in Israel with a bunch of elderly right-wingers, Jackie Hedeman writing about an unusual trip to the Netherlands, Ann Mah de-romanticizing winemaking, Elizabeth Rogers in China and a couple others.
June 8, 2025
The writing quality was good, mostly, the subject matter was the problem. IMHO,the compiled submissions were, in greater part, not travel writing. Series Editor Jason Wilson basically acknowledged this when he wrote, "To be perfectly candid, there was an alarming dearth of travel stories published in 2016." Consequently, Guest Editor Lauren Collins allowed her 22 selections for this 2017 edition to range too far afield for subject matter.
The editors broadly construed travel writing. At turns, it felt like I was reading a book of THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS, THE BEST AMERICAN GENEALOGY WRITING or THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING.
For me, THE BEST travel writing needs to elevate the PLACE one writes about from a mere setting for events to something closer to being a character in of itself. That requires some intention, and I feel more exposition about the place. Just because a piece of writing has a 'setting'(used to identify and establish the time, place and mood of the events of the story) it does not transform the story into travel writing.
In Plum Crazy, writer Gwendolyn Knapp goes to Naples, Florida to attend The International Plumeria Conference. She had no interest in Naples but LOVES the flowering frangipani that most of us know from Hawaiian leis. Her writing reflected this distinction. Naples just happened to be where they held the conference.
In The Secrets of the World Wide Web, (an article that would work much better for, The Best Science and Nature Writing) the writer described the neural network like interaction of plant roots with mycorrhizal fungi in Epping Forest, England. Oh yes, the forest being studied is near London, but that was mostly an incidental part of this science piece.
In The Ones Who Left writer Jackie Hedeman documented her father's quest to ascertain whether the Hademann's of Badenburg, Germany, from whom Jackie and her father descend, are related to some Dutch Hademan's who died in the holocaust. They are not. Amsterdam and the places they visit are really an afterthought. This is really a genealogy piece complete with its long list of Hedeman's - birth, death and where lived data included in uninteresting detail.
In my world, these three submissions are NOT travel writing because the location of the events is at minimum incidental, and at worst, irrelevant. Everything happens someplace, but that does not make it a travel story.
I do not live in New York, but the editor's expansive view of "travel writing" here would transform the New York Times into a travel newspaper for anybody who does not live in the state.
In Refugees Hear a Foreign Word: Welcome we got straight NYT reporting by Jodi Kanter as she documented the arrival of Syrian refugees in Canada. Also, The New Yorker's, The Away Team was an excellent in depth report of soccer in Eritrea where a player's main goal is to get the fuck out of brutal and repressive Eritrea. My Father's House was a rather dark memoir piece about bringing the author's handicapped father back to Nigeria.
These are unabashed human interest pieces that guest editor Lauran Collins openly sought to inform about the current refugee crisis. As Lauran writes, "I thought it would be stupid to try to talk about travel without acknowledging tightening controls, immigration raids, the refugee ban."
I read the NYT. I get this reporting all the time. When I seek travel writing, in particular, I'm looking for a more timeless creation that embraces location with passion. Current events should season the writing without becoming the entree, else it becomes news reporting or a sociology essay. It also dates the piece.
In what was essentially two genealogy writing submissions, Ms. Collins selected stories of efforts to preserve records of the past. In Finding the Forgotten we learned of a community's effort to clear the extreme plant overgrowth of Richmond Virginia's African-American cemeteries after decades of neglect, and in A Palpable History we learned the extensive writings of the Renaissance era Corsini family of Florence, Italy were moved to a new repository. In both cases the writers were not trying to write travel pieces about either location and as such moved away from discussions of Virginia and Italy, respectively, after providing some historical perspective.
The selection of wide ranging pieces was intentional. Our editor Ms. Collins writes:
What? Ok, is that why we got such far ranging pieces as Citizen Khan and On the Road? The first is a historical account of Zarif Khan's life in Sheridan, Wyoming after his immigration from Afghanistan... in 1907. An interesting biographical piece about a Muslim who found great success in America. A different Time? The second, Gideon Lewis-Krauss never leaves his desk to travel any place. He writes about travel writing and photography in the new social media world and takes a social-media vacation by following his friend David's photo posts on social media after David goes on vacation. A different Place?
So at heart, I feel travel writing must involve ACTUAL travel to a CURRENT place at some DISTANCE away. History writing and philosophical musing are different types of writing. Otherwise every history book, that takes place any place, written from a personal perspective becomes travel memoir. And every social media post about finding a good deal at the farmer's market, or dry cleaner, a travel essay.
The biggest current problem with travel writing is the collision of memoir. I wrote in another review, Mess, that in travel writing, it is very hard to get the correct balance and tone. Talking about oneself during travel is in itself neither insightful nor interesting, the travel writer's goal is to transport the reader to the location and immerse them in the experience, without drifting into some narcissistic monologue. A case in point is the The Currency of Moons. This is memoir through and through.
Author Kim Wyatt was in New Zealand. The year was 2011, one year after a major earthquake. (Why this made it to 2017, I don't know) But Ms. Wyatt talked almost entirely about her marriage. New Zealand faded away as Ms Wyatt, once only a lesbian, wonders whether her heterosexual marriage will survive any longer. It is full of reflection about her past, roads not taken, regret, self negotiation and the reexamining of her personal history. New Zealand was a prop for her and at most a side show.
Another submission, The Big Leap, was better, but it still felt like a memoir of a trip to Belize than travel writing. It is really about the bonding of a step-mother and her new daughter while staying at a fancy vacation resort. Belize was a mere setting I learned absolutely nothing about.
So what submissions involve current travel of some distance to an intentional destination, where PLACE takes center stage as integral part of the composition, and the writer actually knows they are writing a travel piece, on some level? And is other than news reporting, memoir, history essay or political human interest reporting that an editor elected to call travel writing.
If I were to select some travelish stories for you, I'd read the first four, Cover Story(Turkey, women and wearing head coverings), My Holy Land Vacation (Israel, connection to American conservatives), and Chiefing in Cherokee (less travel but about tourism, a more sociology essay about Cherokee Indians from North Carolina) and Cliffhanger(Bolivia, looking for a crashed plane). Also Waiting on a Whale at the End of the World(Alaska, traditional whaling) and Land of the Lost(Iceland, problems with reliance on GPS).
Wells Tower's long titled family vacation essay is basically an homage to Bill Bryson's time in the Great Smoky Mountains. Not a bad thing.
A gem was Eva, she kill her one daughter, it strikes a great balance. Yet another genealogy story about author's family, though unlike The Ones Who Left, it actually represented place very well. The author's voice was so good that her personality infused the writing. I feel I know Ms. Puhak better than those writers who so labored their personal stories. Unsurprisingly, she was also a poet with a real personal interest in genealogy, genetics and motherhood. Hers is the only piece I read aloud to somebody else.
Other than this last story, and a few others I listed as travel writing, I would suggest you give this 2017 edition... a pass.
Lauren Collins is a staff writer at the The New Yorker. (Her selections often stayed close to these familiar sources.) The essays were drawn from Outside, The New Yorker, and NYT with its associated magazines.
The editors broadly construed travel writing. At turns, it felt like I was reading a book of THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS, THE BEST AMERICAN GENEALOGY WRITING or THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING.
"The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, make voluminous notes, and tell the truth. There is immense drudgery in the job. But the book ought to live, and if it is truthful, it ought to be prescient without making predictions."
Paul Theroux as quoted by Editor.
For me, THE BEST travel writing needs to elevate the PLACE one writes about from a mere setting for events to something closer to being a character in of itself. That requires some intention, and I feel more exposition about the place. Just because a piece of writing has a 'setting'(used to identify and establish the time, place and mood of the events of the story) it does not transform the story into travel writing.
In Plum Crazy, writer Gwendolyn Knapp goes to Naples, Florida to attend The International Plumeria Conference. She had no interest in Naples but LOVES the flowering frangipani that most of us know from Hawaiian leis. Her writing reflected this distinction. Naples just happened to be where they held the conference.
In The Secrets of the World Wide Web, (an article that would work much better for, The Best Science and Nature Writing) the writer described the neural network like interaction of plant roots with mycorrhizal fungi in Epping Forest, England. Oh yes, the forest being studied is near London, but that was mostly an incidental part of this science piece.
In The Ones Who Left writer Jackie Hedeman documented her father's quest to ascertain whether the Hademann's of Badenburg, Germany, from whom Jackie and her father descend, are related to some Dutch Hademan's who died in the holocaust. They are not. Amsterdam and the places they visit are really an afterthought. This is really a genealogy piece complete with its long list of Hedeman's - birth, death and where lived data included in uninteresting detail.
In my world, these three submissions are NOT travel writing because the location of the events is at minimum incidental, and at worst, irrelevant. Everything happens someplace, but that does not make it a travel story.
I do not live in New York, but the editor's expansive view of "travel writing" here would transform the New York Times into a travel newspaper for anybody who does not live in the state.
In Refugees Hear a Foreign Word: Welcome we got straight NYT reporting by Jodi Kanter as she documented the arrival of Syrian refugees in Canada. Also, The New Yorker's, The Away Team was an excellent in depth report of soccer in Eritrea where a player's main goal is to get the fuck out of brutal and repressive Eritrea. My Father's House was a rather dark memoir piece about bringing the author's handicapped father back to Nigeria.
These are unabashed human interest pieces that guest editor Lauran Collins openly sought to inform about the current refugee crisis. As Lauran writes, "I thought it would be stupid to try to talk about travel without acknowledging tightening controls, immigration raids, the refugee ban."
I read the NYT. I get this reporting all the time. When I seek travel writing, in particular, I'm looking for a more timeless creation that embraces location with passion. Current events should season the writing without becoming the entree, else it becomes news reporting or a sociology essay. It also dates the piece.
In what was essentially two genealogy writing submissions, Ms. Collins selected stories of efforts to preserve records of the past. In Finding the Forgotten we learned of a community's effort to clear the extreme plant overgrowth of Richmond Virginia's African-American cemeteries after decades of neglect, and in A Palpable History we learned the extensive writings of the Renaissance era Corsini family of Florence, Italy were moved to a new repository. In both cases the writers were not trying to write travel pieces about either location and as such moved away from discussions of Virginia and Italy, respectively, after providing some historical perspective.
The selection of wide ranging pieces was intentional. Our editor Ms. Collins writes:
The distinction between what we by habit think of as travel stories and the stories that materialize every time we travel, even to the dry cleaners, struck me as arbitrary. ... Travel writing, in 2017, might be thought of simply as writing about space and time."
What? Ok, is that why we got such far ranging pieces as Citizen Khan and On the Road? The first is a historical account of Zarif Khan's life in Sheridan, Wyoming after his immigration from Afghanistan... in 1907. An interesting biographical piece about a Muslim who found great success in America. A different Time? The second, Gideon Lewis-Krauss never leaves his desk to travel any place. He writes about travel writing and photography in the new social media world and takes a social-media vacation by following his friend David's photo posts on social media after David goes on vacation. A different Place?
So at heart, I feel travel writing must involve ACTUAL travel to a CURRENT place at some DISTANCE away. History writing and philosophical musing are different types of writing. Otherwise every history book, that takes place any place, written from a personal perspective becomes travel memoir. And every social media post about finding a good deal at the farmer's market, or dry cleaner, a travel essay.
The biggest current problem with travel writing is the collision of memoir. I wrote in another review, Mess, that in travel writing, it is very hard to get the correct balance and tone. Talking about oneself during travel is in itself neither insightful nor interesting, the travel writer's goal is to transport the reader to the location and immerse them in the experience, without drifting into some narcissistic monologue. A case in point is the The Currency of Moons. This is memoir through and through.
Author Kim Wyatt was in New Zealand. The year was 2011, one year after a major earthquake. (Why this made it to 2017, I don't know) But Ms. Wyatt talked almost entirely about her marriage. New Zealand faded away as Ms Wyatt, once only a lesbian, wonders whether her heterosexual marriage will survive any longer. It is full of reflection about her past, roads not taken, regret, self negotiation and the reexamining of her personal history. New Zealand was a prop for her and at most a side show.
Another submission, The Big Leap, was better, but it still felt like a memoir of a trip to Belize than travel writing. It is really about the bonding of a step-mother and her new daughter while staying at a fancy vacation resort. Belize was a mere setting I learned absolutely nothing about.
So what submissions involve current travel of some distance to an intentional destination, where PLACE takes center stage as integral part of the composition, and the writer actually knows they are writing a travel piece, on some level? And is other than news reporting, memoir, history essay or political human interest reporting that an editor elected to call travel writing.
If I were to select some travelish stories for you, I'd read the first four, Cover Story(Turkey, women and wearing head coverings), My Holy Land Vacation (Israel, connection to American conservatives), and Chiefing in Cherokee (less travel but about tourism, a more sociology essay about Cherokee Indians from North Carolina) and Cliffhanger(Bolivia, looking for a crashed plane). Also Waiting on a Whale at the End of the World(Alaska, traditional whaling) and Land of the Lost(Iceland, problems with reliance on GPS).
Wells Tower's long titled family vacation essay is basically an homage to Bill Bryson's time in the Great Smoky Mountains. Not a bad thing.
A gem was Eva, she kill her one daughter, it strikes a great balance. Yet another genealogy story about author's family, though unlike The Ones Who Left, it actually represented place very well. The author's voice was so good that her personality infused the writing. I feel I know Ms. Puhak better than those writers who so labored their personal stories. Unsurprisingly, she was also a poet with a real personal interest in genealogy, genetics and motherhood. Hers is the only piece I read aloud to somebody else.
Other than this last story, and a few others I listed as travel writing, I would suggest you give this 2017 edition... a pass.
Lauren Collins is a staff writer at the The New Yorker. (Her selections often stayed close to these familiar sources.) The essays were drawn from Outside, The New Yorker, and NYT with its associated magazines.
January 4, 2018
The main thing to celebrate here is that there are more women writers represented. The odd thing about this year's collection is that so many of the essays do not read as travel, but rather reportage on an issue (Refugees Hear a Foreign Word) or on science that is rooted to a place (Secrets of the Wood Wide Web). About eight of the essays I found rose to the top. Of these six were by women, and the thing I liked about them was how personal they were and how they related travel to examinations of family, marriage, children, and postpartum depression. That interior look seems to set them apart from male examination of place. They seem riskier even if they are not high on a mountain or trudging the arctic. Count among these the excellent Cover Story, which does the best at blending place, reportage and the personal in thinking about Turkey, politics, Batuman's heritage, feminism and headscarves. Wow.
February 6, 2018
Each year this is one of my favorite anthologies. I always look forward to purchasing this each year.
June 16, 2018
Fascinating stories, but didn't read as what I would understand as travel writing. I have been wanting to pick up one of these anthologies for years, this was my first experience with the series and am not sure, I have been missing anything. At least in terms of the travel aspect.
April 12, 2018
I enjoyed many of the stories in this book. I found the story of how Canadians are sponsoring refugees an innovative step to a big problem. I also enjoyed learning how the lichens on the trees in the forest help with communication.
January 3, 2024
I read these essays one a day.
September 3, 2017
Travel writing has come a long way since it became a separate category in the bookstore. There have always been adventure stories and tales of people visiting distant and exotic lands, but the genre came into its own in the 1980s with writers like Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby, Paul Theroux, Dervla Murphy, Martha Gellhorn, Pico Iyer. Those writers combined memoir, journalism, and politics to come up with something way beyond fluffy Conde Nast style luxury travel writing. Now travel writing seems to have transcended geography almost entirely, which will please some readers and disappoint others.
I enjoyed most of the pieces in the 2017 edition of Best American Travel Writing, and I found myself rethinking what travel writing is. Some of my favorite articles in this edition were David Kushner's Land of the Lost, about how it is possible even with GPS to lose your way, Stephanie Elizondo Griest's Chiefing in Cherokee about phony vs. authentic cultural heritage, Elif Batuman's Cover Story about her dilemma over whether to wear a headscarf in Turkey or not, and Kathryn Schulz's stunning Citizen Khan, about the all-American experiences of an Afghan immigrant to Wyoming in the early 20th century.
This collection may not get you planning your next luxury cruise, but it makes for thoughtful and exciting reading nonetheless.
I enjoyed most of the pieces in the 2017 edition of Best American Travel Writing, and I found myself rethinking what travel writing is. Some of my favorite articles in this edition were David Kushner's Land of the Lost, about how it is possible even with GPS to lose your way, Stephanie Elizondo Griest's Chiefing in Cherokee about phony vs. authentic cultural heritage, Elif Batuman's Cover Story about her dilemma over whether to wear a headscarf in Turkey or not, and Kathryn Schulz's stunning Citizen Khan, about the all-American experiences of an Afghan immigrant to Wyoming in the early 20th century.
This collection may not get you planning your next luxury cruise, but it makes for thoughtful and exciting reading nonetheless.
September 28, 2019
The stories in this collection covered wildly varying topics and were each quite well written, but I often found myself thinking back to the foreword in the book which talks about how travel writing has changed, has evolved and today can be said to cover "not just [about] where one goes, or who makes the trip, or how they travel, or why. It's also about when that journey takes place" (xi). And the reason this stuck with me was because these stories take opportunities to look at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the personal conflict of luxury traveling to countries where life is anything but luxurious for those who actually live there, the doldrum-like life of the Eritrean people and so many other period specific problems of our world. Which were super interesting and informative but also made me wonder about the difference between Travel Writing and Journalism. Especially when in many of these short stories, the author's travel is secondary or non-relevant to the story.
---
"Rather, the conservative Christian love of Israel, seems bound up in a notion of God the Father, who has two children: Israel and the United States. This Israel - not a nation but a wayward brother - lies beyond history, beyond the deaths and wars that made it, beyond the United Nations, beyond the Oslo Accords, beyond any conventional morality. Understand that and you have passed the Israel test" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (20).
"I don't know why Christians aren't going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East," Prager says. "I'm going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East." I have another explanation" those being targeted are all Middle Eastern Christians who belong to sects - Syrian Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean - so conceptually unfamiliar to Western Christians that they may as well be Muslims" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (27).
"When was the last time that anyone was forced to have a civil discussion with someone who thought differently?" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (31).
"When you go to Disney, you want to see Mickey Mouse. When you come here, you want to see Indians," he said with a shrug"- Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (48).
"For there are three kinds of tourists who visit Cherokee: those who know nothing about Indians; those who think they know everything about Indians; and those who are aware of how little they know about Indians and want to be enlightened. What impressed me about the Eastern band was how patient they were with us. Granted, they have an economic incentive to be tolerant, but so do plenty of other tribes, and I couldn't think of another one that offered visitors half as many opportunities for connection. True, these interactions were highly contrived, but hopefully we were learning a little more about one another than if we'd all just stayed at home" - Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (51).
"I left Cherokee feeling as conflicted as ever about the ramifications of capitalizing on a culture. Yet I was reminded that, as preoccupations go, this one was mighty privileged, right up there with worrying about whether your touristic experience was authentic or not" - Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (55).
"Our hotel represented everything I hated about travel in the developing world: soulless luxury divorced from its context, profits funneled abroad. ... At twenty-three, I'd spent a summer in Nicaragua, teaching at a two-room schoolhouse outside Granada and drinking my body weight in rum. I had felt the limits of what I was doing - the fraught complexities of being a privileged do-gooder sojourning somewhere beautiful and impoverished - but at least I'd been doing something besides turning money into pleasure" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (86).
"For me, the manicured features of our resort challenged my sense of self, or angered ghosts of prior self who'd mixed concrete (terribly), the self who'd taught second-graders (with a hangover), the versions of me that slept in beds skittering with cockroaches and ate tamales by candlelight when the power went out. What was that self doing in this villa, with a daughter, trying to decide between balconies?" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (91).
"Taking care of a child made it easier to forget my privilege, or somehow justify it, because I felt selfless - attending to her needs, trying to make her world possible and pleasureable... But our obligations as parents don't displace our obligations to strangers, and the act of caring for a child doesn't obscure the inequalities that emerge with clarity whenever Westerners arrive in the developing world - hungry for it's beauty, for its difference, for its coral reefs and ancient temples" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (92).
"On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents - a collection of snowglobes on the mantel - we'll disintegrate" - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, On the Road from New York Times Magazine (150).
"The history of immigrants is, to a huge extent, the history of this nation, though so is the pernicious practice of determining that some among us do not deserve full humanity, and full citizenship. Zarif Khan was deemed insufficiently American on the basis of skin color; ninety years later, when the presence of Muslims among us had come to seem like a crisis, his descendants were deemed insufficiently American on the basis of faith" - Kathryn Schulz, Citizen Khan from The New Yorker (242).
"You hate to add your family to the burdens of America's most put-upon national park, but then it may be wise to let the boy tick Great Smoky off his list while there's still a park left to enjoy" - Wells Tower, No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers of Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness from Outside (244).
"Gaping at a ripening leafscape, one is haunted by the question: Am I getting it? Am I feeling enough? How does one consummate the beauty of the natural world? A big Nikon kills these questions. Take a picture of the mossy rock. File the photographic evidence in its mega-pixel envelope and decode it later"
"But, to be fair, the photomanical family ahead of us is having a lot of fun. They bustle along the path with all the purpose of a media gaggle, logging a snapshot every ten feet or so. The duties of model, photographer, and editor circulate among them. It appears to be good for the parents' marriage. Their favored pose is an open-mouthed makeout, reenacted with equal ardor whenever the path winds past a suitable backdrop." - Wells Tower, No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers of Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness from Outside (251).
"The hard story to tell is the story that suggests suffering is not a pebble on the road but the road itself, extending ceaselessly before us into the horizon" - Reggie Ugwu, My Father's House from Buzzfeed (275).
---
"Rather, the conservative Christian love of Israel, seems bound up in a notion of God the Father, who has two children: Israel and the United States. This Israel - not a nation but a wayward brother - lies beyond history, beyond the deaths and wars that made it, beyond the United Nations, beyond the Oslo Accords, beyond any conventional morality. Understand that and you have passed the Israel test" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (20).
"I don't know why Christians aren't going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East," Prager says. "I'm going crazy over the decimation of Christians in the Middle East." I have another explanation" those being targeted are all Middle Eastern Christians who belong to sects - Syrian Orthodox, Maronite, Chaldean - so conceptually unfamiliar to Western Christians that they may as well be Muslims" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (27).
"When was the last time that anyone was forced to have a civil discussion with someone who thought differently?" - Tom Bissell, My Hold Land Vacation from Harper's Magazine (31).
"When you go to Disney, you want to see Mickey Mouse. When you come here, you want to see Indians," he said with a shrug"- Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (48).
"For there are three kinds of tourists who visit Cherokee: those who know nothing about Indians; those who think they know everything about Indians; and those who are aware of how little they know about Indians and want to be enlightened. What impressed me about the Eastern band was how patient they were with us. Granted, they have an economic incentive to be tolerant, but so do plenty of other tribes, and I couldn't think of another one that offered visitors half as many opportunities for connection. True, these interactions were highly contrived, but hopefully we were learning a little more about one another than if we'd all just stayed at home" - Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (51).
"I left Cherokee feeling as conflicted as ever about the ramifications of capitalizing on a culture. Yet I was reminded that, as preoccupations go, this one was mighty privileged, right up there with worrying about whether your touristic experience was authentic or not" - Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chiefing in Cherokee, from Virginia Quarterly Review (55).
"Our hotel represented everything I hated about travel in the developing world: soulless luxury divorced from its context, profits funneled abroad. ... At twenty-three, I'd spent a summer in Nicaragua, teaching at a two-room schoolhouse outside Granada and drinking my body weight in rum. I had felt the limits of what I was doing - the fraught complexities of being a privileged do-gooder sojourning somewhere beautiful and impoverished - but at least I'd been doing something besides turning money into pleasure" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (86).
"For me, the manicured features of our resort challenged my sense of self, or angered ghosts of prior self who'd mixed concrete (terribly), the self who'd taught second-graders (with a hangover), the versions of me that slept in beds skittering with cockroaches and ate tamales by candlelight when the power went out. What was that self doing in this villa, with a daughter, trying to decide between balconies?" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (91).
"Taking care of a child made it easier to forget my privilege, or somehow justify it, because I felt selfless - attending to her needs, trying to make her world possible and pleasureable... But our obligations as parents don't displace our obligations to strangers, and the act of caring for a child doesn't obscure the inequalities that emerge with clarity whenever Westerners arrive in the developing world - hungry for it's beauty, for its difference, for its coral reefs and ancient temples" - Leslie Jamison, The Big Leap from AFAR (92).
"On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents - a collection of snowglobes on the mantel - we'll disintegrate" - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, On the Road from New York Times Magazine (150).
"The history of immigrants is, to a huge extent, the history of this nation, though so is the pernicious practice of determining that some among us do not deserve full humanity, and full citizenship. Zarif Khan was deemed insufficiently American on the basis of skin color; ninety years later, when the presence of Muslims among us had come to seem like a crisis, his descendants were deemed insufficiently American on the basis of faith" - Kathryn Schulz, Citizen Khan from The New Yorker (242).
"You hate to add your family to the burdens of America's most put-upon national park, but then it may be wise to let the boy tick Great Smoky off his list while there's still a park left to enjoy" - Wells Tower, No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers of Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness from Outside (244).
"Gaping at a ripening leafscape, one is haunted by the question: Am I getting it? Am I feeling enough? How does one consummate the beauty of the natural world? A big Nikon kills these questions. Take a picture of the mossy rock. File the photographic evidence in its mega-pixel envelope and decode it later"
"But, to be fair, the photomanical family ahead of us is having a lot of fun. They bustle along the path with all the purpose of a media gaggle, logging a snapshot every ten feet or so. The duties of model, photographer, and editor circulate among them. It appears to be good for the parents' marriage. Their favored pose is an open-mouthed makeout, reenacted with equal ardor whenever the path winds past a suitable backdrop." - Wells Tower, No Amount of Traffic or Instagrammers of Drunks Can Take the Magic Out of (Semi-) Wilderness from Outside (251).
"The hard story to tell is the story that suggests suffering is not a pebble on the road but the road itself, extending ceaselessly before us into the horizon" - Reggie Ugwu, My Father's House from Buzzfeed (275).
October 12, 2017
Standard 3-star anthology. I read these every year, and every year they at least inspire more travel writing and entertain for a bit, if nothing else.
Pretty typical of this series, selections in the 2017 edition range from funny travelogue ("No amount of traffic or instagrammers or drunks can take the magic out of (semi-) wilderness" and, in parts, "Plum crazy" and "My Holy Land vacation") to personal journeys ("My father's house") and the almost obligatory Alaska (in other years, sub Greenland or Canadian Arctic) wow-it's-tough-here-but-folks-still-live-here-doing-native-stuff kind of outdoorsy piece ("Waiting on a whale at the end of the world").
It also includes entries that I wouldn't really categorize as traditional travel writing per se, but were still interesting ("The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web" in particular, stood out as not really belonging here.)
Most memorable entries: "My Holy Land Vacation," "The Away Team", "Citizen Khan" and "Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome".
Pretty typical of this series, selections in the 2017 edition range from funny travelogue ("No amount of traffic or instagrammers or drunks can take the magic out of (semi-) wilderness" and, in parts, "Plum crazy" and "My Holy Land vacation") to personal journeys ("My father's house") and the almost obligatory Alaska (in other years, sub Greenland or Canadian Arctic) wow-it's-tough-here-but-folks-still-live-here-doing-native-stuff kind of outdoorsy piece ("Waiting on a whale at the end of the world").
It also includes entries that I wouldn't really categorize as traditional travel writing per se, but were still interesting ("The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web" in particular, stood out as not really belonging here.)
Most memorable entries: "My Holy Land Vacation," "The Away Team", "Citizen Khan" and "Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome".
March 19, 2019
Like all of the Best American Travel Writing collections, a wide-ranging group of pieces well worth reading not just for fans of 'travel' but science, history, and just plain people-watching, too. Whale-hunting in Alaska, searching for the black box after a plane crash in South America, or attending a conference of plumeria afficianados in a Florida tourist town, it's all here.
I'm not sure who reads these collections or whether I am the target demographic, but I love them. If you are old enough to remember a time when random magazines were the only entertainment option in doctor's waiting rooms, you may recall the thrill of finding something really good where you least expected it as you held boredom at bay sifting through the pages of magazines you normally would never pick up or perhaps be caught dead reading: Golf Digest, Garden and Gun, Outside, The New Yorker, whatever wasn't your usual thing. And finding that something good, the happy feeling of a new world opening up.
That's the feeling I get from each one of these collections, and even when I slog through a piece that I just do not get (like Shelley Puhak's "Eva, she kill her one daughter" in this book) I find so many more that lead me to new writers or interests, I'm never sorry I picked it up.
I'm not sure who reads these collections or whether I am the target demographic, but I love them. If you are old enough to remember a time when random magazines were the only entertainment option in doctor's waiting rooms, you may recall the thrill of finding something really good where you least expected it as you held boredom at bay sifting through the pages of magazines you normally would never pick up or perhaps be caught dead reading: Golf Digest, Garden and Gun, Outside, The New Yorker, whatever wasn't your usual thing. And finding that something good, the happy feeling of a new world opening up.
That's the feeling I get from each one of these collections, and even when I slog through a piece that I just do not get (like Shelley Puhak's "Eva, she kill her one daughter" in this book) I find so many more that lead me to new writers or interests, I'm never sorry I picked it up.
August 15, 2020
Pretty good selection, some very good but nothing too amazing, a few slightly irritating. At least half the writers are based in NYC and it shows, liberal white guilt insinuating itself in various ways. Though one of the better articles was by a NY-based son of Nigerian immigrants, not so much about travel per se, as traveling through life with all of it's inherent tragedy. But there is the requisite diversity here--travels to Turkey, Israel, Cherokee, NC, Bolivia, Holland, Alaska, Iceland, Eritrea, New Zealand and more. It's still a big planet even while getting smaller A point made in the intro that when travel occurs is every bit as important as where, something that will likely be more than evident when the 2020 version comes out, if it does.
April 19, 2018
I always look forward to reading this annual anthology. This year's collection of travel writing was particularly fresh, alive, and relevant. This is not a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" book, with tales of upper-middle-class Americans visiting exotic locales. One piece recounted the journey of a man from Afghanistan who traveled to Wyoming in the early 1900s. Other pieces documented the recent journey of refugees to Canada, the struggle of a Turkish woman returning to her homeland and dealing with headscarves, and the reflections of a mother taking her adopted daughter on their first family trip.
September 15, 2018
3.5 stars. I am a big fan of travel writing, and certainly enjoyed the set of tales and adventures offered by the authors who contributed to the 2017 edition. I do read a lot of this type of book, and have to admit that these are some of the best written. However, they are not necessarily the ones I enjoy the most, or find the most interesting. One complaint - the publishers have cheaped out on type set and print, so the font is very small and closely spaced. This makes it difficult to read and detracts from the enjoyment of the book. Last words: Its a good read for the armchair and actual traveller alike..
March 15, 2020
I don't think I've ever actually read a collection of travel writing quite like this. I've read several novel length memoirs and shorter articles but these fell somewhat in between. Some of the stories were longer than I might have preferred, taking quite awhile to reach their point. For some, however, I was completely entranced from first page to last word. I especially liked "My Holy Land Vacation", "Refugees Hear a Foreign Word: Welcome"and "My Father's House". Most of these were very serious topically rather than the vacation and more review-like styles than I anticipated but I enjoyed it and I learned a few things and that's really all I can ask of a book.
August 17, 2023
This anthology was a bit hit-or-miss. Mostly because a great many of the stories weren't true travel writing. In travel writing, I expect the destination to be a character in its own right. About half of the selections here were pure memoir, personal essay or human interest. I enjoyed some of these stories regardless, but found myself questioning what they were doing in The Best American Travel Writing series. Stand outs include My Holy Land Vacation in which Tom Bissell tours Israel with a group of American right-wingers and One Person Means Alone in which Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers recounts her experiences as an American living in Shanxi province of China.
January 27, 2018
Another great edition: there is a large proportion of "heavy" subjects, so not exactly cozy armchair travel, but several of the heavy pieces are pretty profound, such as Elif Batuman's piece on the conflicting feelings she has donning a headscarf in rural (i.e. religious, conservative) Turkey, and Reggie Ugwu on the difficult family trip to take his now-disabled father to Nigeria where a family house has been under remote, frustrated construction for many years.
September 25, 2025
I’m working my way through these anthologies, and generally love the format of a book comprised of individual pieces of writing connected by a broader theme.
However, whilst the articles/ essays within the collection were well-written and thoughtful, many of the pieces chosen for this collection felt disconnected from its title- “travel writing”. Sometimes it felt like I was just reading a random non-fiction piece of writing about a topic unrelated to what I believe travel writing to be.
However, whilst the articles/ essays within the collection were well-written and thoughtful, many of the pieces chosen for this collection felt disconnected from its title- “travel writing”. Sometimes it felt like I was just reading a random non-fiction piece of writing about a topic unrelated to what I believe travel writing to be.
November 7, 2017
This anthology always has something for me. This year, it had several very interesting topics: a plane crash (Cliffhanger), the far north (Waiting on a Whale; Land of the Lost), tropical flowers (Plum Crazy), and refugees and immigrants (Refugees Hear a Foreign Word; the Away Team; Citizen Khan; the Ones Who Left).
December 28, 2017
As usual with collection of essays, some were great, some not so much. The piece I enjoyed the most was Stephanie Elizondo Griest's "Chiefing in Cherokee" - very thought-provoking about deliberately phony vs. authentic cultural heritage. Also of note was David Kushner's "Land of the Lost" about the perils of relying solely on GPS.
December 29, 2017
I teach travel writing and each year I adopt the new edition of this collection. I’m torn about this one and it is going to force me to change some of my commentary to the students. So many of these essays seem like person profiles or event profiles rather than travel essays to me. The focus is very often on something other than place.
June 13, 2018
More political than other years I've read. But a good collection, good variety, and all give a different perspective on the world, which is the whole reason for reading travel writing.
I especially liked the piece on the American woman living in China. I enjoyed the message that sticking out abroad might not be for the reason you first think.
I especially liked the piece on the American woman living in China. I enjoyed the message that sticking out abroad might not be for the reason you first think.
January 30, 2022
The writing is excellent, but be aware — the intro warns you that this stretches the boundary of what a travel story is, and it does not lie. If you’re looking for a book full of old school travel stories, as in previous editions, this may disappoint.
April 16, 2018
This book a gift and I really enjoyed it. Very different from what I usually read.
August 18, 2018
"The forest is dark. belichened, wetly ticking."
October 3, 2018
I think a lot about “travel writing”; I liked that this collection fit my questioning of travel writing.
March 20, 2020
I always enjoy stories of other places. These are well-written and thought-provoking.
February 23, 2025
The first article about Cherokee was extremely fascinating. A lot of the rest of these are very good stories of course, but I'm not always interested in the topics.
September 12, 2025
I have this one
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