The Best American Travel Writing 2014

The Best American Series
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The Best American Travel Writing
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ISSN
1530-1516

ISBN
978-0-544-33015-3

e
ISBN
978-0-544-33258-4
v1.0914

“Poisoned Land” by Elif Batuman. First published in
The New Yorker,
August 12, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Elif Batuman. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Amigos” by Julia Cooke. First published in
Virginia Quarterly Review,
Spring 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Julia Cooke. Reprinted by permission of Julia Cooke.

“Life During Wartime” by Janine di Giovanni. First published in
Harper's Magazine,
April 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Janine di Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of Janine di Giovanni.

“America the Marvelous” by A.Â A. Gill. First published in
Vanity Fair,
July 2013. Extracted from chapter 2 of
To America with Love
by A.Â A. Gill. Copyright Â© 2011 by A.Â A. Gill. Originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Reprinted with permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

“Christmas in Thessaloniki” by Arnon Grunberg. Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. First published in
The Believer,
September 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Arnon Grunberg. Reprinted by permission of Arnon Grunberg.

“Fifty Shades of Greyhound” by Harrison Scott Key. First published in
Oxford American,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Harrison Scott Key. Reprinted by permission of
Oxford American.

“Au Train de Vie” by Peter LaSalle. First published in the
Missouri Review,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Peter LaSalle. Reprinted by permission of Peter LaSalle.

“460 Days” by Amanda Lindhout with Sara Corbett. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner Publishing Group, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc., from
A House in the Sky
by Amanda Lindhout and Sarah Corbett. Originally appeared as “460 Days” in the
New York Times Magazine,
September 1, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Amanda Lindhout and Sarah Corbett. All rights reserved.

“Clear-Eyed in Calcutta” by Andrew McCarthy. First published in
World Hum,
December 19, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Andrew McCarthy. Reprinted by permission of Andrew McCarthy.

“This Must Be the Place” by Michael Paterniti. Originally published in the
New York Times Magazine,
August 4, 2013, adapted from
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese
by Michael Paterniti, copyright Â© 2013 by Michael Paterniti. Used by permission of The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“Love in the Time of Coca” by Stephanie Pearson. First published in
Outside,
January 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Stephanie Pearson. Reprinted by permission of Stephanie Pearson.

“Birthplace of the American Vacation” by Tony Perrottet. First published in
Smithsonian,
April 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Tony Perrottet. Reprinted by permission of
Smithsonian
magazine.

“Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky” by Matthew Power. First published in
GQ,
March 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Matthew Power. Reprinted by permission of Jessica Benko.

“Dream Acres” by Steven Rinella. First published in
Outside,
January 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Steven Rinella. Reprinted by permission of Steven Rinella.

“Now We Are Five” by David Sedaris. First published in
The New Yorker,
October 28, 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by David Sedaris. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“My New York: A Romance in Eight Parts” by Peter Selgin. First published in the
Missouri Review,
Summer 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Peter Selgin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sun King” by Bob Shacochis. First published in
Outside,
November 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Bob Shacochis. Reprinted by permission of
Outside
magazine.

“The Last of Eden” by Alex Shoumatoff. First published in
Vanity Fair,
December 2013. Copyright Â©
Vanity Fair
/Alex Shoumatoff/CondÃ© Nast. Reprinted by permission of CondÃ© Nast.

“Maximum Bombay” by Gary Shteyngart. First published in
Travel + Leisure,
November 2013. Copyright Â© 2013 by Gary Shteyngart. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Foreword

T
APED TO MY DESKTOP
computer monitor is a yellowing
New Yorker
cartoon from about a decade ago: a chic-looking man and woman sit at a table and gaze at each other over glasses of wine; the woman, her hand clutching at her bosom, says to the man, “Do wine writers suffer and all that?”

I keep this cartoon at my desk because, for years, alongside my work shepherding this travel writing anthology through 15 editions, I have also been writing about wine. Wine writing should, or could, be an adjunct to travel writing: at its most basic level, wine writing takes me on amazing trips around the world. But I'm always surprised how dissimilar the two genres have become.

Part of it has to do with the lack of immediate, visceral drama that happens on my wine itineraries. When I travel to write about wine, I go to some of the most beautiful places on earth, where I drink amazing bottles from some of the world's best winemakers and dine in some of the world's finest restaurants. While all this is fantastic and a lovely way to earn money, it does not exactly offer the gripping, universal, ripped-from-experience conflict that is the linchpin of compelling narrative nonfiction. (Please, do not cry for me.)

“Hmmmmm,” says the wine writer, swirling, sipping, and spitting in the tasting room overlooking the gorgeous vineyards. “The tannins on the '06 are a little bit green and aggressive right now. How disappointing. Perhaps it needs a few more years in the cellar. What a pity.”

As the woman in the cartoon asks, “Do wine writers suffer and all that?”

Travel writing, as we've come to know, is all about travail. We've been told that travel without suffering makes for a lousy story. As Camus once wrote, “What gives value to travel is fear.” Whatever I feel about the ripeness of last autumn's GewÃ¼rztraminer in Alsace, it is far from fear.

Now, I am certainly not complaining that I do not suffer sufficiently. I can't think of anything worse than a whining wine or travel writer. But when I sat down to write my first wine book last year, I thought a lot about what made my wine writing so different from my travel writing.

All genre writing has certain generic conventions. Travel writing, for instance, has a convention called the “why I went.” I saw the “why I went” defined in L. Peat O'Neil's book
Travel Writing: A Guide to Research, Writing, and Selling:
“The writer's âI' has one specific place to appear after the reader is grounded and gives the âwhy I went' signal for the trip's purpose .Â .Â . Explaining why you are there may give readers their own motivations to travel to the same place and certainly a reason to continue reading. Share your travel motivation to heighten identification and gain reader sympathy.” The “why I went” that O'Neil describes is well established, almost strictly enforced within travel publishing: “Since I have been nomadic my whole life, I decided to go on my very own Australian walkabout.” Or: “My marriage ended, so I bought a farmhouse in Tuscany.” Most loyal readers of travel books know the drill.

Wine writing has generic conventions similar to the “why I went.” Wine books, for instance, almost always begin with a lighthearted tale of the author's initiation into the world of wine via some crappy bottle of plonk. This is where you'll normally read an anecdote of misguided youth involving, say, Thunderbird, Sutter Home white zinfandel, Boone's Farm, Lancers, Mateus, Korbel, Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, orâfor the generation of wine books soon to be written by millennialsâboxes of Franzia. It's sort of an immutable law.

I began my own book by describing a period during my senior year of high school when I was very enthusiastic about Mogen David's flavored and fortified wine MD 20/20, otherwise known as “Mad Dog.” MD 20/20's Orange Jubilee was my particular tipple of choice, and the reason had more to do with how much easier it was to hide in the woods than a six-pack of beer. I vaguely remember it tasting like a mix of chalky, watered-down SunnyD and grain alcohol, but I've mostly tried to cleanse that memory from my mind, along with numerous other suburban New Jersey public school rites of passage.

My MD 20/20 connoisseurship ended soon after I left for college in the big city. During the first week of college, I professed my enthusiasm for Mad Dog and shared some Orange Jubilee with the new friends on my floor. After gagging and spitting out the MD 20/20, they laughed and gave me the ironic nickname “Mad Dog,” which stuck until I transferred to a new school at the end of my freshman year. It was an early lesson in how fraught it can be to express a wine preference. It was also a lesson in how it feels to have one's taste disapprovingly assessed.

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