The Best Travel Writing Series, by Travelers' Tales

James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger & Sean O'Reilly, Editors
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THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

The Best Travel Writing Series was started in 2004 by Travelers’ Tales, a California based publisher with over 100 travel book titles in print.  They also publish a similar series called The Best Women’s Travel Writing.  Each new edition features the publishers' selections on the best travel writing for that year, and the end result is always excellent.  Leading travel writers are of course often featured, but the series also does a good job identifying brand new talent.  The 2016 edition features travel stories on rural Cambodia, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, and Vietnam, and an introduction by Rolf Potts, the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.  While the books might seem dated at this point, do note that travel writing is rather timeless and all the old editions (if you can find them) are often just as nice to read.
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PAST EDITIONS OF THE BEST TRAVEL WRITING SERIES

The Best Travel Writing (volume 10, 2015)  

"Like my shoes, all the stories herein are battered, scattered, and scarred.  They're immersed in the mud of life.  And like my shoes, they've absorbed once inconceivable and now immeasurably enriching journeys."
- Don George, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing (volume 9, 2012)

"As I have said, information is an invaluable commodity, but to a writer it is the only inanimate raw material that is used to create a living breathing thing.  We call that "thing" a story.  To the degree they breathe, they are sacred, as all our stories are sacred.  Yes, even the ones that make us laugh aloud."
- Tim Cahill, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2011

"There are a hundred ways of describing good travel writing, but really they all come down to much the same thing: does the piece make you see the world anew, while offering you a place or thing you instantly recognize?"
- Pico Iyer, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2010

"It is also true that travelers tend often by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often a rejection of home and an embrace of the other: the history of travel is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures and other parts of the world in this way."
- William Dalrymple, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2009

"The jungles of Cameroon... the plains of Mongolia... the wastes of Anarctica... I like to think that Herotodus, who was the Father of Travel Writing as well as History (he schlepped all over Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor in search of new material), would have loved this riotiously energetic anthology."
- Tony Perrottet, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2008

"This sprightly new collection gives the lie to those wearily familiar mantras that all the journeys have been done, that globalization has robbed travel of meaning, that travel writing is dead.  It shows that the open road still beckons, for better or worse, just as it always did."
- Sara Wheeler, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2007

"We travel to try to understand, a country, a people, perhaps ourselves. We may fail to find what we’re searching for, but we’re many miles ahead of the stay-at-homes who’ve not embarked on that search, and way ahead of the stay-at-homes who believe they understand the world, even though they’ve not even ventured out the front door."
- Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2006

"An underappreciated benefit of travel is jet lag, which administers educational doses of melancholy, regret, night-wandering, and nostalgia; and then, when it lifts, the ardent visitor appreciates life in his or her home place or designated destination with the fresh eyes of recovery."
- Herbert Gold, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2005

"Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability, and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we’re about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what’s going on when nobody’s looking."
- Tom Miller, in the introduction

The Best Travel Writing 2004

"The essays that follow, however, have served at last—and to my great relief—to change my mind again. Here in these pages is wonder and delight writ large—and a series of affirmations of a magnificent world, written through prisms of experience that, page after page, reflect most nobly on humankind and the planet in which humanity exists."
- Simon Winchester, in the introduction