The Best American Travel Writing 2004

The Best American Travel Writing 2004 anthology, which was guest edited this year by Pico Iyer, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin. Notable writers chosen for this year's main selections include John McPhee, Tim Cahill, Adam Gopnik, Joan Didion, Peter Hessler, Thomas Swick, Mark Jenkins, and Patrick Symmes (who landed two essays in the anthology this year). As is tradition for Houghton Mifflin's "Best American" anthologies, the series editor (Jason Wilson) selected 50-100 outstanding articles from hundreds of periodicals, and the guest editor (Iyer) narrowed it down to the twenty or so best selections.

In this year's introduction, Iyer writes that his counterintuitive selection criterion "was to find travel pieces that would be interesting to people who have no interest in travel." One big benefactor of Iyer's tastes was World Hum, which had two stories among the main selections this year (including a Tanzania tale by Frank Bures).

For the fifth year running, I had a story short-listed for the anthology: The Hidden Valley, a Laos adventure tale that ran in Condé Nast Traveler in January of 2003. Ever since my Salon.com story Storming 'The Beach' was chosen as a main selection by Bill Bryson in 2000, I've always been vaguely disappointed to not make the final cut -- though I can't really complain, since this year I am joined on the short-list by such great writers as David Sedaris, Peter Matthiessen, Simon Winchester, Naomi Wolf, Christopher Hitchens, Ian Frazier, Michael Kinsley, Tony Perrottet, Robert D. Kaplan, Richard Ford, and Frank McCourt. Pico Iyer also had a couple stories on the short-list, though he was too humble to choose his own work (which was a shame, since his Via story on the history of flight was stellar).

In a way, my own track record is a kind of litmus test for how the Best American Travel Writing series differs in taste from the Lowell Thomas Awards. Last year, my National Geographic Traveler story "Room With a Skew" won a Lowell Thomas Award but missed the Best American short-list entirely, while my BATW short-listed Condé Nast Traveler article about Burma didn't make the Lowell Thomas running. Similarly, this year, my above-mentioned Laos story missed out with the Lowell Thomas awards, yet my Lowell Thomas Award-winning Slate.com series, Virgin Trail, didn't make it into the BATW short-list. I'm guessing the Lowell Thomas Awards favor a journalistic approach to travel-writing, while the Best American anthology prefers a literary approach. Either way, it's been an honor to be recognized by both entities, and I look forward to reading The Best American Travel Writing 2004 as I have time this fall.

In other news from this year's "Best American" series, I was happy to see that my college classmate Gina Ochsner's Mid-American Review story was a main selection in the Dave Eggers-edited Best American Non-Required Reading 2004.