The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  ELIF BATUMAN Poisoned Land

  JULIA COOKE Amigos

  JANINE DI GIOVANNI Life During Wartime

  A. A. GILL America the Marvelous

  ARNON GRUNBERG Christmas in Thessaloniki

  HARRISON SCOTT KEY Fifty Shades of Greyhound

  PETER LASALLE Au Train de Vie: That Voice You Hear When Traveling

  AMANDA LINDHOUT with SARA CORBETT 460 Days

  ANDREW McCARTHY Clear-Eyed in Calcutta

  MICHAEL PATERNITI This Must Be the Place

  STEPHANIE PEARSON Love in the Time of Coca

  TONY PERROTTET Birthplace of the American Vacation

  MATTHEW POWER Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky

  STEVEN RINELLA Dream Acres

  DAVID SEDARIS Now We Are Five

  PETER SELGIN My New York: A Romance in Eight Parts

  BOB SHACOCHIS Sun King

  ALEX SHOUMATOFF The Last of Eden

  GARY SHTEYNGART Maximum Bombay

  THOMAS SWICK A Moving Experience

  PATRICK SYMMES Born on the 9th of July

  JEFFREY TAYLER In the Abode of the Gods

  COLSON WHITEHEAD Loving Las Vegas

  SEAN WILSEY Open Water

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Travel Writing of 2013

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Paul Theroux

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Travel Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 1530-1516

  ISBN 978-0-544-33015-3

  eISBN 978-0-544-33258-4

  v1.0914

  “Poisoned Land” by Elif Batuman. First published in The New Yorker, August 12, 2013. Copyright © 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 © 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 © 2013 by Janine di Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of Janine di Giovanni.

  “America the Marvelous” by A. A. Gill. First published in Vanity Fair, July 2013. Extracted from chapter 2 of To America with Love by A. A. Gill. Copyright © 2011 by A. 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 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 © 2013 by Matthew Power. Reprinted by permission of Jessica Benko.

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

  “Sun King” by Bob Shacochis. First published in Outside, November 2013. Copyright © 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 © Vanity Fair/Alex Shoumatoff/Condé Nast. Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast.

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

  “A Moving Experience” by Thomas Swick. First published in the Morning News, December 3, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Swick. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Swick.

  “Born on the 9th of July” by Patrick Symmes. First published in Outside, May 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Patrick Symmes. Reprinted by permission of Patrick Symmes.

  “In the Abode of the Gods” by Jeffrey Tayler. First published in World Hum, July 10, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey Tayler. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey Tayler.

  “Loving Las Vegas” by Colson Whitehead. First published in Harper’s Magazine, December 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Colson Whitehead. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Open Water” by Sean Wilsey. First published in The New Yorker, April 22, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Sean Wilsey. Reprinted by permission of Sean Wilsey.

  Foreword

  TAPED TO MY DESKTOP computer monitor is a yellowing New Yorker cartoon from about a decade ago: a chic-looking man and w
oman 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 Gewürztraminer 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 ‘I’ has one specific place to appear after the reader is grounded and gives the ‘why I went’ signal for the trip’s purpose . . . 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, or—for the generation of wine books soon to be written by millennials—boxes 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.

  In reality, there was no reason my first “wine” had to be MD 20/20 Orange Jubilee. My father was of the generation that, in the late 1970s and 1980s, leapt headlong into an appreciation of Napa and Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. There were often bottles of Kendall Jackson, Robert Mondavi, Grgich Hills, or Beringer opened at dinners and parties. I occasionally had a taste, but back then I had little interest in drinking what my parents drank.

  So it wouldn’t be until the summer after my sophomore year, when I was 19, that I first truly experienced wine. I was studying abroad in Italy, living with a family in a village called Pieve San Giacomo, near the Po River in the province of Cremona. Every night, Paolo, the father, sliced a plateful of prosciutto and cut a hunk from a wheel of Grana Padano. Then he uncorked and poured a fizzy red, chilled, from an unlabeled liter bottle he’d fetched from a dark corner of the barn—the same barn I’d wandered into one morning and there saw him butchering a cow. Paolo didn’t go for fancy wineglasses, but rather used what we would have called juice glasses back home in Jersey. Beyond retrieving the sliced meat, cheese, and wine, men were otherwise forbidden in his wife’s kitchen, so while Anna busily made us dinner and the television blared a soccer game, Paolo and I would sip our cool, fizzy red wine from our juice glasses on those hot evenings.

  I had never tasted or witnessed a wine like this. The liquid was bright purple, with a thick pink foam that formed as it was poured. I knew enough to know that the Napa Cabs on my parents’ table back home didn’t foam. Paolo’s wine certainly tasted fruity, though it was more tangy than sweet, and what made it strange to me was the aroma. Whereas my father’s wines smelled like identifiable fruits—plums, cherries, berries—this fizzy wine was a little stinky, to be honest, but in a pleasant way. I didn’t have the language back then, but in my memory the aroma is earthy, rustic, fertile, alive, almost like the essence of the farm and the dusty streets of the village. Back then, it simply smelled and tasted like the Old World I had hoped to find.

  Of course, being young and naive, I never bothered to ask Paolo anything about his wine—the grapes, where it was made, who made it. I kept in touch with the family, but Paolo died a decade ago, and since neither Anna nor his daughter, Daniela, drink wine, I never did learn the fizzy red’s provenance. Over the years, though, as my wine knowledge grew, I hypothesized that what I’d been imbibing on those summer evenings long ago had been Lambrusco, mainly since Pieve San Giacomo is just over an hour’s drive from Modena, Lambrusco’s spiritual home.

  As I moved further into drinking and writing about wine, I occasionally told Wine People I met at trade tastings and industry events about enjoying this fizzy red wine as a 19-year-old, and it never failed to draw a chuckle. “Lambrusco!” they’d say. “Riunite!” Cheap, sweet Lambrusco had, of course, had its heyday in the 1970s, just like the leisure suit and swingers and fern bars, and I can remember seeing those cheesy “Riunite on ice. That’s nice!” commercials when the babysitter let us stay up late to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. But as Americans’ knowledge increased during the 1980s and 1990s, budding wine connoisseurs didn’t want to hear about fizzy red wine anymore.

  So even though the stuff I used to drink back in Pieve San Giacomo was neither sweet nor cheap, I just stopped talking about it, or even thinking about it. Like so many other aspirational Wine People my age, I dutifully learned to appreciate Serious Red Wines, which in the early 21st century mainly meant Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir from various pricey bottlings. I studiously pursued an education in Bordeaux and Burgundy and all those big California reds that my father appreciated. Instead of
rustic Italian wine, I delved deeply into Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino.

  I filed my old “unserious” fizzy red alongside my youthful Orange Jubilee. I was being schooled by wine educators and sommeliers and wine critics that, as a knowledgeable wine drinker, a Wine Person, I should be moving beyond things like fizzy reds. That is, after all, what usually happens next in a traditional wine education. You’re told that wine is a ladder, with the student constantly reaching upward, leaving behind so-called lesser wines and climbing toward greatness, toward the profound, toward—inevitably—the expensive.

  This is why, two decades after my summer abroad, I found myself in Italy’s Langhe region, in Piedmont, visiting a bunch of producers of Barolo, the complex, elegant wine made from Nebbiolo grapes—the epitome of a Serious Wine. I tasted dozens of amazing, and often profound and transcendent, Barolos, which convinced me, once again, that Nebbiolo grapes grown in this corner of northwestern Italy create one of the world’s greatest wines.

  My visit culminated on a sunny Sunday afternoon with an auction called the Asta del Barolo, inside the famous castle in the town of Barolo. Collectors—some from as far away as China, Singapore, and Dubai—purchased bottles from prized vintages for thousands of dollars. One acquaintance, an Austrian banker living in Hong Kong, paid 3,000 euros (about $4,100) for three magnums dating from the mid-1980s. I sat next to a charming producer, whose family’s elegant, silky Barolos annually receive high scores from critics, who call them “genius” and “breathtaking.” During lunch, we tasted about 15 examples of the 2009 vintage. Later, there was talk among the younger winemakers about Jay-Z’s recent visit to Barolo, where he supposedly dropped $50,000 on wine and truffles.

  I won’t lie: it is sexy and exciting to be part of an afternoon crowd like that. And I cannot state clearly enough how much I enjoy Barolo. Perhaps it is geeky to say, but sipping it can be like listening to a beautiful, challenging piece of music or standing before a grand, moving work of art. I love it so much that when people ask what my favorite wine is, I often exclaim, “Barolo!” And they nod and say, “Ah, yes. Barolo, of course.”