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THE A5 BOOK REVIEWFans of travel books will absolutely love the annual Best American Travel Writing series, a showcase of the year's best stories as selected from hundreds of selections each year by a notable travel writer. This year's guest editor is Padma Lakshmi, the author of several cookbooks and famous for her career as a television presenter and as the host of the Top Chef. Many past guest editors, unsurprisingly, are also featured on A5 Travel Books including the acclaimed author Bill Bryson who was the guest editor both for the very first edition published in 2000 and again in 2016. Others include legendary travel writer Paul Theroux (2001 &2014), Frances May (2002), Ian Frazier (2003), Pico Iyer (2004), adventure travel writer Tim Cahill (2006), the legendary Anthony Bourdain (2008), Cheryl Strayed (2018), and Elizabeth Gilbert (2013). The series editor is Jason Wilson, a noted writer on drinks, food and travel.
Sadly, this travel writing series was cancelled in 2022, a symbolic bow to the power of the Internet and the unlimited information instantly and always available. Read Thomas Swick's article on what this says about the future of the travel writing genre. Click here to see reviews and prices for this book series on Amazon.
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Past Editions of The Best American Travel Writing
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2020 - Robert Macfarlane, Guest Editor“Travel has stopped, but writing, reading, and dreaming about travel have not - they've surged. Lockdown has triggered a greed for now what cannot be done as we restlessly pace our cages. People's bodies are anchored, so they journey in imagination and memory."
- Robert Macfarlane, in the introduction |
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2019 - Alexandra Fuller, Guest Editor“In other words, properly done, travel shows us who we really are without everything not needed on that necessarily lonely voyage. And, ultimately, there is a joy in the casting off, however bleak the circumstances that force our reduction, however unwilling our emptying, however much must be lost en route.”
- Alexandra Fuller, the author of Travel Light, Move Fast |
2018 - Cheryl Strayed, Guest Editor"Traveling at footspeed taught me a lot of things and one of them was about the meaning of travel itself, especially the meaning of it in my own life. It was powerful and transformative and necessary. I wanted to know the endless misery and beauty of it. That fact was a fire in me that wouldn't go out. It was one I decided to feed forevermore."
- Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail |
2017 - Lauren Collins, Guest Editor"Timelessness can be a literary virtue, but I wanted The Best American Travel Writing 2017 to address the rising isolationism and xenophobia of its moment, as well as the set of political, economic, and environmental crises that have set more than 65 million people, one-third of them refugees, in transit across the globe. I thought it would be stupid to try to talk about travel without acknowledging tightening controls, immigration raids, the refugee ban."
- Lauren Collins, author of When in French: Love in a Second Language |
2016 - Bill Bryson, Guest Editor"The central feature of modern travel, it seems to me, isn't that there are too many tourists in too many places, but rather that there are too many tourists in just a few places - quite a different matter. The world is a long way away from being ruined for travel. You have only to look at many of the pieces in this anthology - and in this regard I would mention Paul Theroux in Alabama and Dave Eggers in Hollister, California, just for starters - to realize that you don't have to seek out exotic locales or go to terribly great lengths to have memorable and touristically solitary experiences."
- Bill Bryson, in the introduction |
2015 - Andrew McCarthy, Guest Editor"As the stories here reveal, the world is still ready to receive the solitary sojourner with a hungry spirit who is willing to keep an eye out and an attentive ear to the ground in an effort to capture the telling moment, then send it back across the wire - and, perhaps, through the years."
- Andrew McCarthy, in the introduction |
2014 - Paul Theroux, Guest Editor"Travel writing today is pretty much what travel writing has always been, a maddeningly hard-to-pin-down form - one traveler boasting of luxury and great meals, another making asinine lists ("Ten Best Waterslides on Cruise Ships"), yet another breathlessly recounting an itinerary of hardships and mishaps, and a fourth (and the most valuable in my view) holding you like the wedding-guest with a skinny hand and fixing you with a glittering eye and saying, "There was a ship..."
- Paul Theroux, in the introduction |
2013 - Elizabeth Gilbert, Guest Editor"The travel stories I've selected for this anthology are the ones that I believe were told the most marvelously in 2012 - by which I mean, quite literally, told with the biggest sense of marvel by writers who took the most personal responsibility for infusing wonderment in their tales. Some of these stories find their authors flinging themselves into mad acts of danger and some do not, but every piece contains awe in strong enough doses to render the reader enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled."
- Elizabeth Gilbert, best selling author of Eat, Pray, Love |
2012 - William T. Vollman, Guest Editor"And every day it gets easier to reach out and connect with people of different cultures. But even with the advent of new technologies, it's important to remember that it's still possible to miscommunicate, to get confused, and to become lost. That's the thing about travel - perhaps the essential thing, the thing that reaches us the most - that never changes. And that thing is what this anthology delivers once again this year."
- Jason Wilson, Series Editor |
2011 - Sloane Crosley, Guest Editor"I've noticed that the best travel writing doesn't have real resolutions. Instead of providing a sense of closure, which normally comes when the last word is typed and the writer and reader agree to part ways, the most memorable essays here feel like a beautiful mess at the end. This is because it is impossible to tie them up neatly. The places and the people who inhabit them still exist. Their stories go on."
- Sloane Crosley, best selling author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, in the introduction |
2009 - Simon Winchester, Guest Editor"I found by reading all these pieces I wanted to go and see and feel for myself - I was drawn, I was seduced, I was fascinated. And even though some might argue it is because I am older, and I'm British, and therefore wanderlust runs in my veins, I'm not so sure that it is only to the likes of me that these pieces will appeal. The articles I have chosen are just so vivid, so powerful, so plaintive in their siren song, that I venture to say that anyone - even my fifteen-year-old in Manhattan - might say on reading them. My word, how cool. If that is, if they are encourage do to so."
- Simon Winchester, in the introduction |
2008 - Anthony Bourdain, Guest Editor"Traditional travel writing follows the author on a voyage with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In between, there are meals, encounters, amusing setbacks, misunderstandings, and helpful suggestions for affordable lodging. I like to think that the stories in this collection have aggressively avoided that formula."
- Anthony Bourdain, travel television personality and best selling author of Kitchen Confidential, A Cook's Tour, and No Reservations, in the introduction |
2007 - Susan Orlean, Guest Editor"Travel is not about finding something. It’s about getting lost -- that is, it is about losing yourself in a place and a moment. The little things that tether you to what’s familiar are gone, and you become a conduit through which the sensation of the place is felt.”
- Susan Orlean, in the introduction |
2006 - Tim Cahill, Guest Editor"Story' is the essence of the travel essay. Stories are the way we organize the chaos in our lives, orchestrate voluminous factual material, and -- if we are very good -- shed some light on the human condition."
- Tim Cahill, in the introduction |
2005 - Jamaica Kincaid, Guest Editor"The Travel Writer doesn't get up one morning and throw a dart at a map of the world, a map that is just lying at the floor at her feet, and decide to journey to the place exactly where the dart lands. Not so at all. These journeys that the Travel Writer makes begin with a broken heart sometimes, a tender heart fractured, its sweet matter bejeweled with the sharp slivers of a special pain."
- Jamaica Kincaid, in the introduction |
2004 - Pico Iyer, Guest Editor"So my criterion, in a simple way, was to find travel pieces that would be interesting to those who have no interest in travel - and to find accounts of Kabul or a Jersey truck stop that would to people that hadn't known they'd want to read about those places."
- Pico Iyer, in the introduction |
2003 - Ian Frazier, Guest Editor"As I read through some of the selections I was at first alarmed; travel writing isa bout the world, and the world is in worse shape than I'd thought. But then I was amazed at how bizarre and fulsome and endlessly various it is, too. A few of the writers herein accomplished travel sagas of such bravery that I couldn't believe they weren't ten times louder about making it known."
- Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and Travels in Siberia, in the introduction |
2002 - Frances Mayes, Guest Editor"Monarch butterflies are camping in the eucalyptus trees around my house, a California pause in their long yearly migration. Sitting at the kitchen table reading essays for this book, I look up and see them flickering among the leaves, showing their orange wings to the sun. I wonder - is travel a natural instinct?"
- Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, in the introduction |
2001 - Paul Theroux, Guest Editor"Any serious traveler can attest that horror journeys are the most memorable, the most valuable, the most instructive, and the most pleasurable to write about because invariably the horror is recollected in tranquility. The traveler makes notes in route but writes the finished piece at home, in comfort: finishes the crossworld puzzle over toast and marmalade and a lightly boiled egg in the bosom of the family, and then nips upstairs to resume that episode about hunger and foul weather and hostile locals."
- Paul Theroux, in the introduction |
2000 - Bill Bryson, Guest Editor"To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted."
- Bill Bryson, in the introduction |