The Best American Travel Writing 2011 by Sloane Crosley

The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Reviews

• 
  Natalie

  Short thoughts:
  
  My Monet Moment - awesome
  
  Southern Culture on the Skids - oddly entertaining for being about NASCAR
  
  Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead - completely hilarious and sarcastic, wanted to be Mischa's bestie...then became very sad. Awesome essay
  
  A Girls Guide to Saudi Arabia - really interesting
  
  The Last Stand of Freetown - I had no idea that such a cool social experiment/micro-nation was allowed to occur in Copenhagen. It's become its own study in humanity. (A "sovereign" town within the limits of Copenhagen, where you cannot buy or sell real estate, no violence, no guns, no cars, etc.)
  
  Famous - my least favorite, just wasn't sure where it fit in the collection
  
  Twilight of the Vampires - my favorite of the book, all about the quest for the origin of vampire legends in Serbia
  
  A Year of Birds - the second favorite of the book, serene - love Annie Proulx
  
  A Head for the Emir - typical William Vollman. = awesome
  
  Miami Party Boom - 4/5 pretty entertaining
  
  
• 
  Rachel

  As it turns out, I only want to read travel writing that is about the world that I wish existed (wine and bread in Tuscany, beautiful and interesting places, meaningful moments of connection with new people and places)... not the world as it really is (insurgence, intolerance, discomfort). So I did not finish this collection as it had more of the latter. Not the book's fault, more my own personal tastes and failings.
• 
  Phoebe

  This book was frustrating. I really liked several of the articles, particularly the ones by Andre Aciman, Maureen Dowd, and Emily Witt. However, it seems like the editor's primary criteria was not that the article was about travel but that it made a specific location a key element of the story. A good example is "A Year of Birds" by Annie Proulx, which covered a year of birdwatching at her ranch in Wyoming. How is that piece travel writing WHEN IT TAKES PLACE ENTIRELY AT HER HOUSE?
• 
  Genni Gunn

  I really enjoyed this anthology. The editor's preference for style and voice is consistent throughout, which is great if you love it, not so great if you don't. I found the essays witty, insightful, educational, and very appealing on multiple levels. Particularly delightful is an essay titled, "Aligning the Internal Compass," about the author and her father taking an orienteering course, to try to understand direction, given that both of them are hopelessly lost the moment they turn one corner. Something I really enjoyed in this anthology is the even representation of both male and female authors, versus last year's anothology that had only one woman's work included. Overall, a wonderful read. Highly recommended.
• 
  Ashley

  For me, good travel writing should either 1) make me want to go to that place you're writing about and experience what you're writing about, or 2) describe a place in such a way that I feel like I'm there and have an insider's look at the location and culture.
  
  Few of these stories accomplished both, and some -- "A Head for the Emir" and "Stuck" -- made me never want to visit those places (roadside bombs and eternal traffic, anyone?) "A Girls' Guide to Saudi Arabia" was my least favorite, and seemed to throw a very American, these-people-are-so-backwards lens on the place. As a woman, ok, I understand it's not a great place to be, but I wasn't keen on the writer essentially making fun of the people and culture she was writing about.
  
  My favorites included "The Last Stand of Free Town" which was kind of fascinating as I'd never heard of the place before, and "Twilight of the Vampires" -- but probably because I read it on Halloween and it seemed appropriate. "Miami Party Boom" was surprisingly well written, too.
  
  In all -- meh. It's what I read in bites in between reading other, longer things. Some good writing in there, but didn't really hit the spot for me or, as had been my intention in reading the anthology to begin with, teach me a whole lot about fantastic travel writing. Just, I suppose, what this editor considers is fantastic travel writing.
• 
  James

  Like any anthology, there are some hits and misses in here but on the whole they were mostly winners. I think that my favorites were "Venance Lafrance is not Dead", which is about the Haitian earthquake, "Twilight of the Vampires", about myths in Serbia, and "Stuck", about traffic in Moscow. The last one was sort of a sleeper surprise, given that the subject seems so mundane but turns out to be amazingly interesting. "Aligning the Internal Compass", about both the sport of orienteering and the science of finding your way, was also a very good story. Another surprise was Maureen Dowd's "Girl's Guide to Saudi Arabia"; I don't really care for Dowd's NY Times columns but I found this piece to be very engaging.
  
  Overall, the anthology was a fun read.
• 
  Preethi

  Pick up this book if you like to travel random oft-beat places through books!
• 
  Gretta

  Travel writing has always been one of my favorite brands of escapism. In a few pages you can travel to resplendent Himalayan heights and get into quirky scrapes in Australia. I'm always excited to read another collection of travel writing. Unfortunately, I didn't find this collection inspiring. There were a few exceptions. "Aligning the Internal Compass" by Jessica McCaughey was a hilarious insight into what it is like to be directionally challenged. "Miami Party Boom" by Emily Witt really brought me into the the Miami highlife of the early 2000s. "A Year of Birds" was a gorgeous meditation on the bird population of Wyoming. Tea Obrecht who wrote about vampires in Serbia in "Twilight of the Vampires" is always amusing. However, many of the other essays were either far out of date or un-moving. Though Sloane Crosely begins the collection, by saying that she sought a diverse set of essays, I found that they weren't diverse enough for my tastes. Many of them were somewhat political pieces (often about the Middle East), which were interesting, but not eye opening. I did think "A Girls Guide to Saudi Arabia" by Maureen Dowd was an interesting time capsule, if not that interesting a piece. There was no travel in East Asia, and I found the voices all very appropriate for literary magazines. I could have done with some additional perspectives. It may be that no collection of travel writing would be inspiring 10 years later. Still, in the end, I think there are some pieces worth reading, but the collection as a whole was only fine.
• 
  Tonya

  There were 3 stories that really said something about the places the author visited: Southern Culture on the Skids about NASCAR; Maureen Dowd in Saudi Arabia; and Gary Shteyngart eating his way through the Russian neighborhood of Tel Aviv. The rest were kind of meh.
• 
  Jen

  As alwasy with these anthologies, some of the stories I really enjoyed, some I skimmed through. And, I surprised myself with the ones that I enjoyed the most. Who would have thought a year of bird watching would have been so engrossing?
• 
  Kim

  Read "The Coconut Salesman" and "A Year of Birds"
• 
  Leeann Bergeron

  Less entertaining and more cerebral than I anticipated, with a few notable exceptions (pieces by Berlinski and McCaughey were probably my favorite).
• 
  Kirsten

  This may challenge your idea of travel writing. And it may be, as the "Best American" series editor notes, because there isn't that much good travel writing. Add to that the unfortunate absence of strong editorial direction as required in such a collection.
  
  Some essays are what you expect from a sprawling journalistic narrative from the New Yorker, Harper's, or Atlantic Monthly and are more about politics, place, or economies of scale as related to place than about actual travel.
  
  The first piece, Andre Aciman's "My Monet Moment" is a standout piece of writing. Unfortunately, the remaining are of uneven quality and few pieces come close to matching Aciman's tale of discovery.
  
  Mischa Berlinski's "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" was tragically funny.
  
  Porter Fox's "The Last Stand of Free Town" introduced me to a place I never knew existed.
  
  Jessica McCaughey's "Aligning the Internal Compass" reminded me of a befuddling Jr. High P.E. unit in orienteering. Now I think I might have a better appreciation for the sport.
  
  I was fascinated by Tea Obreht's "Twilight of the Vampires." It's not about what you think it is.
  
  Both William T. Vollmann's "A Head for the Emir" and Emily Witt's "Miami Party Boom" are very different pieces but each are worth investigation in their own right.
  
  Annie Proulx's "A Year of Birds" is better suited for the nature writing collection and I wasn't compelled to finish reading it.
  
  There are others left unmentioned. Maybe best left unread. Nothing terrible. But neither is anything special.
• 
  Danielle

  These collections are so great. They really are the best of the best. The travel writing especially seems to do what all great non-fiction should do: expand your world view, give you a new perspective, inform, and entertain.
  I was impressed with Sloane Crossley's introduction. I can't think of a single story in this collection that I didn't like. Some favorites were the one about Haiti, Kurdistan, an African Safari, NASCAR, and Miami. Oh! And the one about the traffic in Moscow was so interesting (and vicariously frustrating). "My Monet Moment" was so charming. Sometimes travel just feels like a nightmare, where everything that can go wrong does, and this author's experience was the exact opposite. And "Twilight of the Vampires" was a fascinating cultural comparison of the vampire myth, and especially what it reveals about Bulgarians' history and future.
  If you've never read anything from this series, do yourself a favor and rectify that as soon as possible. This one's a good place to start.
• 
  Gabriel

  I really enjoyed reading most of the stories in this collection of travel writing. There's an interesting mix of places (Saudi Arabia, Haiti, a NASCAR race) as well as types of stories, and in general the authors' takes on them are original and humorous. In my opinion, there are some truly standout pieces, such as "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" by Mischa Berlinski, and Ben Austen's "Southern Culture on the Skids", stories which I will definitely be coming back to as examples of the very best kind of journalism. But there are also a couple of excessively specific pieces which clash with the overall tone of the collection and were frankly hard to read, such as "A Year of Birds". Overall a good book for anyone interested in travel writing or any student of journalism.
• 
  Mycala

  I think the editor might be confused about what constitutes "travel writing". Half of this book is not so much the writers' personal experiences while traveling, but more like reading a newspaper of events. One woman even wrote about her experiences when she was living in various places -- not travel.
  
  My favorite "My Monet Moment" -- was the first one in the book, and as far as I'm concerned you can stop after that. It was a delightful story of how the writer sought out and serendipitously found several buildings that Monet painted. Aside from that, I found this book extremely disappointing.
• 
  Kelly Lynn Thomas

  Read for my Travel Writing class. As the title so aptly states, this book contains the best American travel writing from 2010 (although the collection is released in 2011, if that makes sense). I really appreciate the format of this book and that they include the titles and authors of all the selections series editor Jason Wilson sent on to this year's editor, kind of like an honorable mention for those works. Every piece in this collection was excellent, but I don't think I'll ever give an anthology five stars for a number of reasons.
• 
  Karen

  The editors have a different idea about what travel writing is than I do. I wanted to read more stories about people going to places where they did not live, primarily for their own recreation and enjoyment and edification. Some of the articles included here are well written but read more like news stories. One essay involves no travel at all, unless you count the author's walks around her neighborhood, which I don't. I did quite enjoy several of the pieces, including ones about NASCAR, Saudi Arabia, and Italy.
• 
  Tuck

  Wide ranging and fun, or gruesome, as case my be, and also pretty mainstream, no really edgy or alternative views here. Although david baez in Nicaragua and mscha berlinski in Haiti and vollmann and Kurdistan are looking at hard truths and sticky situations! Yeah Kurdistan, bet you didn’t even know it existed.
  Fun stuff by tea obreht looking for vampires in Serbia, Justin nobel looking for authenticity in nunavik, annie proulx looking for cougars in Wyoming, gary shteyngart looking nightlife in tel aviv etc
  Good edition for a mix of super-decadent and super miserable.
  
• 
  Geoff

  Not as inspiring as the collection edited by William T. Vollman. His piece "A Head for the Emir" here is very good. Andre Aciman's "My Monet Moment" starts the collection off on the right tone, but the collection starts wobbling. It rarely finds its way back. "A Year of Birds" by Annie Proulx sketched in wonders about a life in Wyoming. Perhaps it was not a good year from travel essays. Perhaps Sloane Crosley really did not spend the time finding the gems. There are a few here, but again, it just did not inspire or hang together like Vollman's volume in 2012.
• 
  Lani

  A bunch of the 'Best American' books were on sale for the Kindle for a few bucks each, and I feel like I got almost exactly my money's worth for this one. I really enjoyed a previous edition of this book, but of course, like any anthology, it's hit or miss. I'm getting better at giving up and just skimming the ones that don't hold my interest, but I felt like I did more of that with this one that I would have liked.
  
  
• 
  Laura Jordan

  My favorite pieces from this volume:
  
  Mischa Berlinski, "Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead" (Haiti)
  Maureen Dowd, "A Girls' Guide to Saudi Arabia" (Saudi Arabia)
  Porter Fox, "The Last Stand of Free Town" (Copenhagen)
  Tom Ireland, "Famous" (India)
  Jessica McCaughey, "Aligning the Internal Compass" (not really about travel, but more about navigating and orienting oneself)
  Tea Obreht, "Twilight of the Vampires" (Serbia)
• 
  Heather Buchanan

  Overall, great writing that gives a feel for new worlds. I enjoyed that they were not sentimental essays and covered a lot of different vibes. It was a bit frustrating at times because the title of "Travel Writing" gave me a different idea of what this book would be rather than what it is. It focuses most on location rather than travel itself. Not every essay was to my liking, but overall it is a solid collection.
• 
  Erica

  I always love being introduced to new and relevant essays. This collection reminds me that the travel essay is alive and well. My favorite was Tea Obreht's "Twilight of the Vampires," so if you have time to read just one, I would recommend it before any of the others. (I promise, it has nothing to do with the Stephanie Meyer kind of vampires...)