WEBonBooks

The Best American Series.  Various Series Editors.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  NY.  2021.  (since 1915 for Best Short Stories, other genres since 1986; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was bought out by HarperCollins, which will be the publisher starting with the 2022 series.)

Soft Cover.  Glued.  Various page lengths.  Various weights.  Table of Contents.  Contributors’ Notes.  Other Notable Writing of 2021

Found and Purchased at Gazebo Books, Eureka Springs (no website, on Spring St.)

The Best American Series is for those who want to read a curated selection of essays, stories, and writings from the previous year’s magazine and e-zine publications.  The articles/stories are all short in length, making them perfect for fitting into to our narrow free time slots of filled-in lives.

The upcoming Best American Series 2022 has a wide range of genres to choose from, with titles including The Best American: Short Stories, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Science and Nature Writing, Food Writing, and Essays.  The first three are fiction writing, the second three are non-fiction; a nice balance.

Each book has 20-25 articles chosen by the respective year’s guest editor, selected from print and web-published periodicals or collections published in that year, written by those living in North America and published in North America.  To clarify, the 2022 series has articles that were published in the year 2021; the book itself is published in the year of the title.

I bought my first copy last year, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020.  I enjoyed most of the articles in this collection, and found myself catching up to a wide spread of science-related topics about which I would not have otherwise known.

I then promptly bought all the titles available at my local bookstore from the 2021 series.  Not every article/story in every book hits a home run for me, but most of them do.  One surprise for me is the higher satisfaction I found from the Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 compared to the lower satisfaction from the Mystery and Suspense 2021 or from the Short Stories 2021.  However, that won’t stop me from trying out all three books in the 2022 series when they become available in October or November.

I have equally enjoyed all three non-fiction 2021 editions on Food Writing, Science and Nature Writing, and Essays.  As an example of the breadth of topics they all included, the Food Writing edition had one essay on the poignant beauty and responsibility for an animal-based diet followed by a thought-provoking essay on eating vegan.

Each edition pulls from the relevant print and web-based magazines/publications for that genre.  For example, the Best Food Writing 2021 pulls from The New Yorker, Slate, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Resy, Orion, n + 1, Longreads, Grub Street, and more.  Some of these I’ve not heard of, others I can’t afford to subscribe to, and most are not available at my small local library.  Nor do I have time to read all those publications.

This curated series is my best option for reading a wide range of quality writing on food and the other genres.

Each edition lists the author, the article’s title, and the original publication source, which I have used to guide me towards reading certain publications on a more-regular basis.  For example, The New Yorker has a high concentration of reprints in the entire series, so I have gotten in the habit of looking at this magazine at my local library.

Reading where the articles/stories were first published has also opened my eyes.  At another local bookstore, Two Friends Bookstore, I noticed a recent copy of the literary publication n + 1, which I had never heard of until reading an article from that publication reprinted in the Food edition.  I bought it to see what other types of articles they publish.  I also notice that Granta is represented in some of the editions as well; I have read this publication before and might pick it up again should I come across it.

Any of the genres from The Best American Series are great to keep on hand for those moments when I want to read but don’t have the time to focus on an entire book-length idea or story.  Instead, I’ve got an entire book composed of shorter magazine-length articles, all expertly judged for inclusion by some well-experienced writer of that particular genre.  Each article or story demands just a sliver of my time, focus, and attention; each book is well worth the affordable price.