The Best American Travel Writing 2007

The latest volume in Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Travel Writing series came out this month, and as always it makes for great armchair travel reading. New Yorker writer Susan Orlean edited this year, and the anthology features stories from Peter Hessler, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Gilbert, David Halberstam, George Saunders, and Gary Shteyngart. A World Hum story, Jason Anthony’s “A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth,” leads off the collection, and I could have predicted the inclusion of Kevin Fedarko’s “High in Hell” and Ian Parker’s “Birth of a Nation?“, which I recall enjoying in Esquire and The New Yorker in 2006. Orlean seems to have favored stories from The New Yorker, Gourmet, GQ, and Outside — which account for over half of the selections.

The “Notable Travel Writing of 2006” in the back of the tome reminds readers how deep the selections were this year, as stories by Tim Cahill, Pico Iyer, Sebastian Junger, David Sedaris, Alma Guillermoprieto, Anthony Lane, Michael Paterniti, Jeffrey Tayler, Patrick Symmes, and Mark Jenkins all made the list. Also on this short-list were stories by friends and colleagues like Jim Benning, Elisabeth Eaves, Tom Haines, Ayun Halliday, Wendy Knight, Matthew Polly, and Thomas Swick. My sister, Kristin Van Tassel, also landed a “notable” story with her New Orleans tale from World Hum, “The Places We Find Ourselves.”

I was honored to have a couple of stories on the “Notable Travel Writing” list this year: “India’s Isle of Ghosts,” from the San Francisco Chronicle, and “Cycladian Rhythm,” from Outside Traveler. This honor, combined with my Lowell Thomas Award earlier this month (a Bronze Award in Personal Comment for “The Living Museum of Nowhere and Everywhere,” from Lonely Planet’s Tales From Nowhere), has made it a gratifying month for me.

More information on The Best American Travel Writing 2007 here.