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What the End of The Best American Travel Writing Says About Travel Writing—And About America

Thomas swick on the uncertain future of a durable genre.

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 . 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. Being included in The Best American Travel Writing was worth half a dozen Lowell Thomas awards. Plus, it gave your story a second life between covers.

Those first anthologies were thick hardcovers that eventually devolved into thin paperbacks. 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. 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 genre is more durable than the series, which the publisher, now part of HarperCollins, has decided to discontinue after this year. 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). Series editor Jason Wilson, in an interview with Jeremy Bassetti on the podcast Travel Writing World, said that recent editions didn’t sell nearly as well as early editions had. This includes The Best American Travel Writing 2020 , which came out in the middle of a pandemic (with stories written before it)—the perfect moment, one would think, for armchair travel.

Travel writing is not the only series to fall victim to indifference— The Best American Sports Writing was discontinued after last year’s edition (prompting Triumph Books to come out this fall with The Year’s Best Sports Writing )—but this blow is particularly disheartening for a genre that has gradually and, for those of us who love it, mystifyingly lost its allure.

Granted, it has suffered its share of attacks in recent years. Critics have flagged it with the taint of neo-colonialism and accused it of cultural appropriation, but they have mostly been academics, who don’t exert great influence on the reading public. And they have been answered eloquently by people like Colin Thubron, who, in an interview in the Financial Times , noted that, far from wishing to “impose” themselves, most travel writers try to understand, and learn from, the countries they visit. “If you regard every relationship as a power relationship,” he cautioned, “you descend into paranoia.”

The genre has even received criticism from within its own ranks, as some travel writers have questioned the time-honored goal of “traveling like a local,” finding it self-delusional and, if taken literally, counterproductive—the argument being that most people, even those residing in stellar locales, lead lives of boring repetition, what the French have summarized as “ métro, boulot, dodo .” Never mind that a detailed account of subway commuting, Parisian office politics (think Call My Agent! ), and, well, not sleep, but French home life would paint a more accurate and amusing portrait of the capital than a story on museums and Michelin-starred restaurants.

A greater contributor to travel writing’s drop in popularity is of course the Internet, that infinite, ever-expanding archive of everything. Google your destination and it appears on your screen, in words and pictures. Who needs travel writers, one might ask, when hundreds of bloggers are typing their findings, thousands of tourists are posting their videos, millions of vacationers are sending their tweets?

Yet most people go to the Internet for information, not insight, or what John Cheever called “a page of good prose”—both of which fine travel writers provide. They too can be found online—it’s where I read the Thubron interview—but they’re not prominent residents there. The Internet, at least the non-pictorial part, is more about utility than it is about pleasure.

One of the main reasons readers of travel writing have faded away—in this country, anyway—is   the decades-long trend of America turning inward. The genre still does well in the UK, where one publisher, Eland Books, specializes in reprints of travel classics. But the United Kingdom is a small island (with a long travel writing tradition) at the edge of a large and influential continent; the United States is a behemoth unto itself.

That travel writing ever had a golden age here may seem a bit strange, but publishers in the 1980s—excited by the successes of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia —competed with each other over travel books; a few started imprints devoted entirely to them. Jan Morris wrote penetrating portraits of places for Rolling Stone and Banana Republic came out with a short-lived travel magazine, Trips , that was sold in its stores’ slightly longer-lived travel bookshops. For writers starting out in the ’80s, travel writing appeared as a promising career.

But soon the travel book was eclipsed by the memoir. Its reign produced its own instant classics—Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life , Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club —and suggested a growing fascination with the personal and the familial. This preoccupation grew even stronger after 9/11, an event that, instead of motivating us to become more globally aware, somehow made us even more introspective. The new century brought a slew of memoirs about common human experiences: illness, grief, dysfunction, abuse, addiction. Joan Didion, who in the ’80s wrote Salvador and Miami (focusing on the city’s Cuban exile community), published books about the deaths of her husband and daughter. It was a natural turn for an aging author, but it felt like an official confirmation of our retreat from the world into the self.

Immigrant memoirs have appeared—like Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee and Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone —giving us outsiders’ views of our home ( enough about us, what do you think about us? ), but there has been no corresponding wave of books about Americans abroad. This has at least kept at a minimum vapid accounts of idylls in Tuscany and Provence. And the number of published books that are works of translation has stayed at a dismal three percent. The general feeling among publishers is that most people would rather identify with what they read than learn about something outside their own experience. And in a country where less than half of the population owns a passport, this means concentrating on the personal and the parochial.

Yet our self-absorbed republic is producing more world travelers than ever; back in travel writing’s heyday, less than 10 percent of Americans had passports. So despite our solipsistic tendencies—or actually owing to them—travel writing theoretically should be enjoying a boom, especially when you consider that travelers and readers are often one in the same.

But like the Internet, travel’s growth has created the impression that travel writer is a superannuated profession—the Age of Overtourism’s blacksmith. Together, the two modern developments have created a world in which everything is accessible and almost nothing seems foreign. Why should people depend on some stranger’s impressions of a country when they can go out and gather their own? Unfortunately, few of them bring to their journeys the preparation and research, the knowledge and experience, the perceptive eye and the analytical mind and the inquisitive spirit of a gifted travel writer.

What’s especially frustrating about the decline in popularity of travel writing is that it has never been better, thanks in part to technology, one of the forces that seems to work against it. Seeing the increase in the number of travelers, and their easy access to the Internet, travel writers realized that it was no longer enough just to describe a place, or meet its inhabitants; they had to excavate its meanings. As a result, the work they produced became richer, deeper, and infinitely more expansive. And, in many cases, it borrowed elements from the memoir.

This approach was not new; V.S. Naipaul brought history, analysis, and introspection (three words not usually associated with blogging) to his first travel book, The Middle Passage , in 1962. Jonathan Raban used the same tools for Old Glory and Hunting Mister Heartbreak , two books that, because they’re about the U.S., show us better than most the educational and entertainment value of the canny observer. More recently, writers as diverse as Pico Iyer, Sara Wheeler, Tom Bissell, and Robert Macfarlane have quietly stretched the boundaries of the genre. The Long Field , by the American writer Pamela Petro, is a beautiful examination of her love affair with Wales that brilliantly explores the ideas of home, loss, language, sexuality, and of course love.

It’s labeled a memoir, and published in Britain.

Thomas Swick

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The End of an Era: The Last Best American Travel Writing with Jason Wilson

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Joining me again is Jason Wilson . As you know, Jason has been the series editor of the yearly The Best American Travel Writing anthology for the last 2 decades. Though, as you’ll hear us discuss today, this year’s volume (2021) is the last.  

Of course, we discuss and speculate on the reasons this is the last volume. And we also talk about what American travel writing looked like during the pandemic, about the power of email lists, newsletters, and platforms for travel writers, and much more.

Follow Jason’s work at Everyday Drinking .

Purchase The Best American Travel Writing 2021 by Jason Wilson

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Jeremy Bassetti

Jeremy is Editor of Travel Writing World and the host of the Travel Writing World podcast.

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Bonus episode: a conversation with amanda kendle, host..., thomas bird – harmony express: travels by train..., mindful travel with sarah samuel, announcement: 30 days in the andes, tony wheeler and bill colegrave, “the hill of the skull” book launch on....

Hello fellow travel writing enthusiasts! Does anyone know which edition the writer – a woman, traveling in a Muslim country – told her story about how she was staying with a family with a youngish/teenage boy (he wanted to stay in her room overnight!); I remember her talking about the night sky and the moon. Such amazing writing! I can hardly believe the Best American Travel Writing series has ended in 2021 as stated on this website.

How can I find a story I read in one of the books about a visitor taking his driving test in China? I still have a few of the books, but can’t remember what the story was called or by whom. Can anyone help, please.

That would be Peter Hessler’s “Wheels of Fortune” in the BATW that Anthony Bourdain edited, 2008.

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The Best American Travel Writing 2020

The year’s best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Robert Macfarlane.

Writing, reading, and dreaming about travel have surged, writes Robert MacFarlane in his introduction to the  Best American Travel Writing 2020 . From an existential reckoning in avalanche school, to an act of kindness at the Mexican-American border, to a moral dilemma at a Kenyan orphanage, the journeys showcased in this collection are as spiritual as they are physical. These stories provide not just remarkable entertainment, but also, as MacFarlane says, deep comfort, “carrying hope, creating connections, transporting readers to other-worlds, and imagining alternative presents and alternative futures."

The Best American Travel 2020 includes: HEIDI JULAVITS • YIYUN LI • PAUL SALOPEK • LACY JOHNSON • EMMANUEL IDUMA • JON MOOALLEM • EMILY RABOTEAU and others

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It’s the relationships I develop through engagement at SATW events that truly bears fruit. With my journalist friends, sometimes the fruit is a listening ear for a story idea I’m pondering and sometimes its an actual media placement. With my associate friends – sometimes the fruit is the brainstormed solution to a business challenge or learning about a best practice. Dollar for dollar– I have yet to find another organization that provides such a strong ROI.

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On the recommendation of a fellow member, I joined SATW 24 years ago. I have learned so much from attending SATW events and being involved with the organization. The many wonderful friendships and connections made through the years have greatly benefited me professionally and personally.

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A huge benefit of SATW membership: Street cred. To editors and the travel industry, you will never be mistaken for one of the army of amateur/ bogus travel writers out there.

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Since joining SATW nine years ago I have had the opportunity to meet many interesting journalists and destination representatives. One of the benefits of an SATW membership for me includes access to membership lists. The lists are helpful because the specialties of each member is displayed. This is important when offering story ideas. I have had the pleasure of hosting numerous SATW members who produced beautiful stories about Birmingham.

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Learn How to Build a Travel Writing Career

Join me live for a one-hour discussion with travel writer and editor nikki vargas.

Dear Writers,

Want to learn what it takes to build a thriving career as a travel writer?

You’re invited to attend a live one-hour discussion with travel writer, memoirist, and editor Nikki Vargas.

During this discussion, we’ll talk about:

How to build a travel writing career from scratch (which is very much what Nikki has done)

How Nikki landed publication of her travel memoir with HarperCollins

The right way to pitch a travel editor, so you can maximize your chances of success (Nikki is a senior editor at Fodor’s travel, so she knows quite a lot about this)

And much more (we’ll be taking your questions!)

This is going to be a fun, insightful, and educational event. I hope you can make it!

The event will be happening live on April 19th at 1pm ET. It will be recorded for those who can’t make it.

To attend the event, make sure you’re a paid subscriber to Litworth. You can get a free trial here . (So you can attend without paying a penny.)

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Travel writer Mike Oswald's discusses America's national park system

From glaciers to sand dunes, from snowy mountains to sunny beaches, America’s national parks hold many of our country’s most iconic landscapes.

The very first national park, Yellowstone, was created for "the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Travel writer Mike Oswald has hiked, biked and paddled through them all.

He’s trekked thousands of miles during hundreds of visits and distilled what he’s learned into his book Y our Guide to the National Parks. 

He’s also put together the book Park Maps: An Atlas of the United States National Parks.

Support 89.7 NPR News and receive special thank you gifts, including Oswald's book Y our Guide to the National Parks.

• Mike Oswald,  travel writer and author of Your Guide to the National Parks and National Park Maps: An Atlas of the United States National Parks

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The Best American Travel Writing 2020 Kindle Edition

• Part of series The Best American: Travel Writing
• Print length 338 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date November 3, 2020
• File size 9495 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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• Next 2 for you in this series $23.69
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About the author.

JASON WILSON,  series editor, is the author of Godforsaken Grapes, Boozehound, and The Cider Revival. He is the creator of the newsletter and podcast Everyday Drinking. Wilson has been the series editor of The Best American Travel Writing since its inception in 2000. His work can be found at jasonwilson.com.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B081TTRX1M
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (November 3, 2020)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 3, 2020
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 9495 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
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• Print length ‏ : ‎ 338 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0358362032
• #518 in American Literature Anthologies
• #888 in Travel Writing
• #905 in Essays (Kindle Store)

About the author

Robert macfarlane.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Claudia Looi

Touring the Top 10 Moscow Metro Stations

By Claudia Looi 2 Comments

Komsomolskaya metro station looks like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and baroque decor.

Hidden underground, in the heart of Moscow, are historical and architectural treasures of Russia. These are Soviet-era creations – the metro stations of Moscow.

Our guide Maria introduced these elaborate metro stations as “the palaces for the people.” Built between 1937 and 1955, each station holds its own history and stories. Stalin had the idea of building beautiful underground spaces that the masses could enjoy. They would look like museums, art centers, concert halls, palaces and churches. Each would have a different theme. None would be alike.

The two-hour private tour was with a former Intourist tour guide named Maria. Maria lived in Moscow all her life and through the communist era of 60s to 90s. She has been a tour guide for more than 30 years. Being in her 60s, she moved rather quickly for her age. We traveled and crammed with Maria and other Muscovites on the metro to visit 10 different metro stations.

Arrow showing the direction of metro line 1 and 2

Moscow subways are very clean

To Maria, every street, metro and building told a story. I couldn’t keep up with her stories. I don’t remember most of what she said because I was just thrilled being in Moscow.   Added to that, she spilled out so many Russian words and names, which to one who can’t read Cyrillic, sounded so foreign and could be easily forgotten.

The metro tour was the first part of our all day tour of Moscow with Maria. Here are the stations we visited:

1. Komsomolskaya Metro Station  is the most beautiful of them all. Painted yellow and decorated with chandeliers, gold leaves and semi precious stones, the station looks like a stately museum. And possibly decorated like a palace. I saw Komsomolskaya first, before the rest of the stations upon arrival in Moscow by train from St. Petersburg.

2. Revolution Square Metro Station (Ploshchad Revolyutsii) has marble arches and 72 bronze sculptures designed by Alexey Dushkin. The marble arches are flanked by the bronze sculptures. If you look closely you will see passersby touching the bronze dog's nose. Legend has it that good luck comes to those who touch the dog's nose.

Touch the dog's nose for good luck. At the Revolution Square station

Revolution Square Metro Station

3. Arbatskaya Metro Station served as a shelter during the Soviet-era. It is one of the largest and the deepest metro stations in Moscow.

Arbatskaya Metro Station

4. Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station was built in 1935 and named after the Russian State Library. It is located near the library and has a big mosaic portrait of Lenin and yellow ceramic tiles on the track walls.

Lenin's portrait at the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina Metro Station

5. Kievskaya Metro Station was one of the first to be completed in Moscow. Named after the capital city of Ukraine by Kiev-born, Nikita Khruschev, Stalin's successor.

Kievskaya Metro Station

6. Novoslobodskaya Metro Station  was built in 1952. It has 32 stained glass murals with brass borders.

Novoslobodskaya metro station

7. Kurskaya Metro Station was one of the first few to be built in Moscow in 1938. It has ceiling panels and artwork showing Soviet leadership, Soviet lifestyle and political power. It has a dome with patriotic slogans decorated with red stars representing the Soviet's World War II Hall of Fame. Kurskaya Metro Station is a must-visit station in Moscow.

Ceiling panel and artworks at Kurskaya Metro Station

8. Mayakovskaya Metro Station built in 1938. It was named after Russian poet Vladmir Mayakovsky. This is one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world with 34 mosaics painted by Alexander Deyneka.

Mayakovskaya station

One of the over 30 ceiling mosaics in Mayakovskaya metro station

9. Belorusskaya Metro Station is named after the people of Belarus. In the picture below, there are statues of 3 members of the Partisan Resistance in Belarus during World War II. The statues were sculpted by Sergei Orlov, S. Rabinovich and I. Slonim.

10. Teatralnaya Metro Station (Theatre Metro Station) is located near the Bolshoi Theatre.

Teatralnaya Metro Station decorated with porcelain figures .

Taking the metro's escalator at the end of the tour with Maria the tour guide.

Have you visited the Moscow Metro? Leave your comment below.

January 15, 2017 at 8:17 am

An excellent read! Thanks for much for sharing the Russian metro system with us. We're heading to Moscow in April and exploring the metro stations were on our list and after reading your post, I'm even more excited to go visit them. Thanks again 🙂

December 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm

Hi, do you remember which tour company you contacted for this tour?

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Elektrostal, visit elektrostal, check elektrostal hotel availability, popular places to visit.

• Electrostal History and Art Museum

You can spend time exploring the galleries in Electrostal History and Art Museum in Elektrostal. Take in the museums while you're in the area.

• Cities near Elektrostal

• Places of interest
• Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center
• Peter the Great Military Academy
• Central Museum of the Air Forces at Monino
• History of Russian Scarfs and Shawls Museum
• Balashikha Arena
• Balashikha Museum of History and Local Lore
• Bykovo Manor
• Pekhorka Park
• Drama Theatre BOOM
• Ramenskii History and Art Museum
• Malenky Puppet Theater
• Noginsk Museum and Exhibition Center
• Pavlovsky Posad Museum of Art and History
• Saturn Stadium
• Fairy Tale Children's Model Puppet Theater
• Fifth House Gallery
• Church of Vladimir
• Likino Dulevo Museum of Local Lore
• Malakhovka Museum of History and Culture
• Orekhovo Zuevsky City Exhibition Hall

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Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

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Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia