As Elizabeth Gilbert, the guest editor for this year's edition of The Best American Travel Writing, explains, she wasn't looking for service articles or travel tips to fill the anthology. Rather, she wanted stories that made her feel, at the conclusion, "I have now been there." Her selections are wide-ranging: from the story of a man visiting an improbable attraction called Dickens World, to a guy who didn't walk the Mexican-American border as planned, to a woman who decides to walk through the streets of Cairo in a full niqab and observe how men's reactions differ from the way she's normally treated in the Egyptian capital.
Some of these stories are mere paragraphs long, while others range closer to 20 pages. But each shares a vivid look at a different part of the world, from Papua New Guinea to Pamplona. And the combination of such vastly different authors, from the funny David Sedaris to the profane but profound Kevin Chroust and the renowned Ian Frazier, keeps the pages turning.
Perfect for armchair travelers and essay admirers, The Best American Travel Writing 2013 is a quintessential before-bed book: so interesting that you won't fall asleep, but containing short enough segments to allow reading a bit every night, luxuriously prolonging the wanderlust this collection creates. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm