The move is based not on a drop in travel writing’s quality, or even quantity, but rather its increasing inability to attract a large audience (which explains the marquee guest editor this year). The genre is more durable than the series, which the publisher, now part of HarperCollins, has decided to discontinue after this year.
Admittedly, 2020 was not a good year for travel writing, but the very existence of The Best American Travel Writing 2021 is a testament to the resilience and adaptability of the genre. The 2001 edition, guest edited by Paul Theroux, had 418 pages this year’s, with Padma Lakshmi in the guest editor’s chair, had 265. Those first anthologies were thick hardcovers that eventually devolved into thin paperbacks. Plus, it gave your story a second life between covers.
Being included in The Best American Travel Writing was worth half a dozen Lowell Thomas awards. The inaugural edition in 2000 was inexplicably late-coming a good decade after the close of travel writing’s heyday-but nevertheless welcome in a genre that, unlike food writing, never had a widely recognized prize.
#JASON WILSON TRAVEL WRITER SERIES#
Every fall for the last 22 years has seen the arrival of The Best American Travel Writing, part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s series of anthologies that include, among others, The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories.
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