The Best American Travel Writing 2020

The year’s best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Robert Macfarlane. An eclectic compendium of the best travel writing essays published in 2019, collected by esteemed guest editor Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind and Underland. The Best American Travel Writing gathers together a satisfyingly varied medley of perspectives, all exploring what it means to travel somewhere new. For the past two decades, readers have come to recognize this annual volume as the gold standard for excellence in travel writing.

The year's best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Robert Macfarlane. Writing, reading, and dreaming about travel have surged, writes Robert MacFarlane in his introduction to the Best American Travel Writing 2020. From an existential reckoning in avalanche school, to an act of kindness at the Mexican-American border, to a moral dilemma at a Kenyan orphanage, the journeys showcased in this collection are as spiritual as they are physical. These stories provide not just remarkable entertainment, but also, as MacFarlane says, deep comfort, "carrying hope, creating connections, transporting readers to other-worlds, and imagining alternative presents and alternative futures." The Best American Travel 2020 includes HEIDI JULAVITS - YIYUN LI - PAUL SALOPEK - LACY JOHNSON - EMMANUEL IDUMA - JON MOOALLEM - EMILY RABOTEAU and others

The year's best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Alexandra Fuller.

A collection of the best travel writing published in 2017, selected by Cheryl Strayed.

A collection of the best science and nature writing published in North America in 2019, guest edited by New York Times best-selling author and ground-breaking physicist Dr. Michio Kaku. "Scientists and science writers have a monumental task: making science exciting and relevant to the average person, so that they care," writes renowned American physicist Michio Kaku. "If we fail in this endeavor, then we must face dire consequences." From the startlingly human abilities of AI, to the devastating accounts of California's forest fires, to the impending traffic jam on the moon, the selections in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing explore the latest mysteries and marvels occurring in our labs and in nature. These gripping narratives masterfully translate the work of today's brightest scientists, offering a clearer view of our world and making us care. THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2020 INCLUDES RIVKA GALCHEN - ADAM GOPNIK - FERRIS JABR - JOSHUA SOKOL - MELINDA WENNER MOYER - SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE - NATALIE WOLCHOVER and others

The year’s top food writing from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country. “These are stories about culture,” writes J. Kenji López-Alt in his introduction. “About how food shapes people, neighborhoods, and history.” This year’s Best American Food Writing captures the food industry at a critical moment in history — from the confrontation of abusive kitchen culture, to the disappearance of the supermarkets, to the rise and fall of celebrity chefs, to the revolution of baby food. Spanning from New York’s premier restaurants to the chile factories of New Mexico, this collection lifts a curtain on how food arrives on our plates, revealing extraordinary stories behind what we eat and how we live. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2020 INCLUDES BURKHARD BILGER, KAT KINSMAN, LAURA HAYES, TAMAR HASPEL, SHO SPAETH, TIM MURPHY and others

The latest addition to the acclaimed series showcasing the best sports writing from the past year. For over twenty-five years, The Best American Sports Writing has built a solid reputation by showcasing the greatest sports journalism of the previous year, culled from hundreds of national, regional, and specialty print and digital publications. Each year, the series editor and guest editor curate a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. “An essay is the child of uncertainty,” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. “The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father’s confrontation of his son’s illness, to a divorcée’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others

Presents an anthology of the best travel writing published in 2014, selected from magazines, newspapers, and web sites.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 brings together outstanding writing, from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism. The anthology features excerpts from major projects that challenge American certitudes: the Washington Post Magazine’s “Prison” issue, detailing the scope of mass incarceration, and the New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project,” which recenters the nation’s history around slavery and its legacies. It includes extraordinary globe-spanning journalism, including pieces on the genocide against the Rohingya (New York Times Magazine) and the unintended consequences of a dengue fever vaccine (Fortune). Pamela Colloff details prosecutors’ reliance on an untrustworthy jailhouse informant (New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica), and a ProPublica series investigates the disaster that befell the USS Fitzgerald. The anthology showcases the work of remarkable stylists, including Jia Tolentino’s cultural commentary (New Yorker) and Ligaya Mishan’s columns on food and culture (T: The New York Times Style Magazine). Columns by s.e. smith consider disability (Catapult), and the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark writes about art he can touch (Poetry). Jordan Kisner visits a Martha Washington–themed debutante ball in Texas near the Mexican border for The Believer, and Jacob Baynham offers a moving portrait of his father-in-law (Georgia Review). Arundhati Roy excoriates the increasing authoritarianism of Modi’s India (The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center). The anthology concludes with Jonathan Escoffery’s short story of homesickness for Jamaica, “Under the Ackee Tree” (Paris Review).

Presents an anthology of the best travel writing published in the previous year, selected from magazines, newspapers, and web sites.

This collection gathers the best travel essays from The New Yorker, Harpers, GQ and more—featuring Paul Theroux, Alice Gregory, Dave Eggers and others. Why do I travel? Why does anyone of us travel? Bill Bryson poses these questions in his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2016, and though he admits, “I wasn’t at all sure I knew the answer,” these questions start us on the path of some fascinating explorations. While the various contributors to this collection travel for different reasons, they all come back with stories. Whether traversing the Arctic by dogsled, attending a surreal film festival in North Korea, or strolling the streets of a fast-changing Havana, some of today’s best travel writers share their experiences of the world and the human condition, offering, if not answers, than illumination and insight. The Best American Travel Writing 2016 includes Michael Chabon, William T. Vollmann, Helen Macdonald, Sara Corbett, Stephanie Pearson, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Pico Iyer, and others.

Presents an anthology of the best travel writing published in the previous year, selected from magazines, newspapers, and web sites.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed: A Love Story, Elizabeth Gilbert transports readers to far-flung locales with this collection of the year’s lushest and most inspiring travel writing.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing Alone on a remote mountaintop one dark night, a woman hears a mysterious voice. Propelled by the memory and after years of dreaming about it, Jini Reddy dares to delve into the 'wanderlands' of Britain, heading off in search of the magical in the landscape. A London journalist with multicultural roots and a perennial outsider, she determinedly sets off on this unorthodox path. Serendipity and her inner compass guide her around the country in pursuit of the Other and a connection to Britain's captivating natural world. Where might this lead? And if you know what it is to be Othered yourself, how might this colour your experiences? And what if, in invoking the spirit of the land, 'it' decides to make its presence felt? Whether following a 'cult' map to a hidden well that refuses to reveal itself, attempting to persuade a labyrinth to spill its secrets, embarking on a coast-to-coast pilgrimage or searching for a mystical land temple, Jini depicts a whimsical, natural Britain. Along the way, she tracks down ephemeral wild art, encounters women who worship The Goddess, falls deeper in love with her birth land and struggles – but mostly fails – to get to grips with its lore. Throughout, she rejoices in the wildness we cannot see and celebrates the natural beauty we can, while offering glimpses of her Canadian childhood and her Indian parents' struggles in apartheid-era South Africa. Wanderland is a book in which the heart leads, all things are possible and the Other, both wild and human, comes in from the cold. It is a paean to the joy of roaming, both figuratively and imaginatively, and to the joy of finding your place in the world.

The Pulitzer–Prize winning and Guggenheim-honored Hilton Als curates the best essays from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, bringing “the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race, and gender” (New York Times) to the task. “The essay, like love, like life, is indefinable, but you know an essay when you see it, and you know a great one when you feel it, because it is concentrated life,” writes Hilton Als in his introduction. Expertly guided by Als’s instinct and intellect, The Best American Essays 2018 showcases great essays as well as irresistibly eclectic ones. Go undercover in North Korea, delve into the question of race in the novels of William Faulkner, hang out in the 1970s New York music scene, and take a family road trip cum art pilgrimage. These experiences and more immersive slices of concentrated life await.

New York Times best-selling author and James Beard Award winner Samin Nosrat collects the year’s finest writing about food and drink. Best-selling author and winner of numerous awards, Samin Nosrat, selects the year’s top food writing from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER Sy Montgomery, New York Times best-selling author and recipient of numerous awards, edits this year’s volume of the finest science and nature writing. “Science is important because this is how we seek to discover the truth about the world. And this is what makes excellent science and nature writing essential,” observes New York Times best-selling author Sy Montgomery. “Science and nature writing are how we share the truth about the universe with the people of the world.” And collected here are truths about nearly every corner of the universe. From meditations on extinction, to the search for alien life, to the prejudice that infects our medical system, the pieces in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing seek to bring to the people stories of some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, as well as moments of wonder reflecting the immense beauty our natural world offers.

In his introduction, guest editor Andrew McCarthy says that the best travel writing is “the anonymous and solitary traveler capturing a moment in time and place, giving meaning to his or her travels.” The stories in The Best American Travel Writing 2015 demonstrate just that spirit, whether it is the story of a marine returning to Iraq a decade after his deployment, a writer retracing the footsteps of humanity as it spread from Africa throughout the world, or looking for love on a physics-themed cruise down the Rhone River. No matter what the subject, the writers featured in this volume boldly call out, “Yes, this matters. Follow me!” The Best American Travel Writing 2015 includes Iris Smyles, Paul Theroux, Christopher Solomon Patricia Marx, Kevin Baker, Benjamin Busch, Maud Newton Gary Shteyngart, Paul Salopek, and others ANDREW MCCARTHY, guest editor, is the author of the New York Times best-selling travel memoir The Longest Way Home. He has served as an editor at large at National Geographic Traveler and been named travel journalist of the year by the Society of American Travel Writers. He is also an actor and director. JASON WILSON, series editor, is the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits and the digital wine series Planet of the Grapes. He has written for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Daily News, and many other publications. He is the founding editor of The Smart Set and Table Matters.

This 12th volume in the popular series presents the best travel writing by women for women that's been done in the past few years. Adventures range from a trip into a new neighborhood to expeditions to the far corners of the globe, always with the inner journey close at hand to give perspective and meaning. The voices are diverse, intimate, and engaging, as are the stories.

There are nearly 1,400 known varieties of wine grapes in the world—from altesse to zierfandler—but 80 percent of the wine we drink is made from only 20 grapes. In Godforsaken Grapes, Jason Wilson looks at how that came to be and embarks on a journey to discover what we miss. Stemming from his own growing obsession, Wilson moves far beyond the “noble grapes,” hunting down obscure and underappreciated wines from Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, France, Italy, the United States, and beyond. In the process, he looks at why these wines fell out of favor (or never gained it in the first place), what it means to be obscure, and how geopolitics, economics, and fashion have changed what we drink. A combination of travel memoir and epicurean adventure, Godforsaken Grapes is an entertaining love letter to wine.