The Best of The Best American Series 2007

Another year has come and gone, and with it another crop of extraordinary writing sown to literary fruitfulness. When all is said and done, Houghton Mifflin’s Best American series, which attempts to collect the annual best and brightest in various genres of writing, reaps the ripest for your enjoyment. Kick off the semester by checking out Spec’s picks for the three finest of the 2007 anthologies.

Best American Comics 2007

If art is “a means of finding a way out of one’s self and reporting back,” as editor Chris Ware explains, the comics in 2007’s Best American series take this notion to heart. From the fictional to the downright autobiographical, these pieces attempt to convey everything from divorce to loneliness to sexuality to frustrated dreams. They have a natural advantage over their prose counterparts: when readers look at a comic, they both read it and see it. With so much to offer, it’s little wonder that the variety showcased here is astounding.

R. and Aline Crumb’s “Winta Wundaland” is a Technicolor explosion of personality notes, flashbacks, descriptions, and observations, often all crammed gloriously into one long panel. Alison Bechtel, in contrast, uses muted watercolor backgrounds and pen-and-ink drawings to convey the aftermath of her father’s suicide in “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death.” Meanwhile, “Glenn in Bed” by Kevin Huizenga uses a black backdrop to create a sense of timelessness and connection between the panels as Glenn lies pondering the random and occasionally profound musings of an insomniac.

Some comics are harder to appreciate than others. “Fritz After Dark,” Gilbert Hernandez’s tribute to the pulp style, is sometimes overbearing with its inordinately busty females and men’s men. Yet on closer inspection, Hernandez’s impossibly sculpted male makes all the more poignant the discovery of how fragile and broken his Adonis truly is. And anyone doubting the emergence of female artists in comics can rest assured—Miriam Katin, with her masterpiece “The List”, depicts the friendship between a Christian girl and a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany with evocative beauty, while Bechtel, whose feature was taken from her graphic novel Fun House, has raised the power of comic art to a new standard.

Ware writes that “in comics, all things are possible, but only some of them make sense.” There is enough in this diverse and provocative collection to create both possibility and understanding, and that is more than enough.

Best American Travel Writing 2007

“Travel... is the experience of life idealized,” writes Susan Orlean, the guest editor of Best American Travel Writing 2007. “This transformation seems more what makes it magical than any particular lonely landscape or fascinating culture you might encounter.” Don’t expect to find any notes on the best sushi in Japan or the indigenous animals of Asia Minor. The pieces in this anthology manage to do what Orleans intended: to convey that travel is “not about finding something... it is losing yourself in a place and moment.”

While you’re reading BATW, this is not too hard to do. Among many standout works is Jason Anthony’s “A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth.” A description of the remote Arctic outpost of Vostok, it captures the “immense silence” of the largely abandoned USSR station with haunting detail.

But above describing the locales themselves, the contributing writers attempt to convey their reactions to the full experience of traveling towards and finally arriving at their destinations. In the age of instant communication, in our “shrinking world,” travel writers are able to skip the necessary descriptions of local customs and flora to dive straight into the meaty essence of each location.

“High in Hell,” Kevin Fedarko’s contribution, recounts his experiences in Djibouti, where the population’s addiction to khat, a bitter indigenous leaf, is both a tool to suppress dissents and a community-based way of life. “Lost in America,” Steve Freidman’s fictional account of one man’s cross-country trek to lose weight and find his purpose, creates a story less about the American plains he crosses than about “the distance between where [a person] is and where he wants to be.”

In the end, Jonathon Stern’s “A Lonely Planet Guide to my Apartment” depicts most clearly the gap between reading facts about a location and experiencing it for yourself; his local customs (bitching) and societal notes (illegitimate dictators) provide hilarious and eye-opening insight on the simplifications guidebooks undertake. After all, each of us, upon traveling to the destinations described in BATW, would tell a different story. That, the anthology loudly claims, is the true beauty of travel.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007

Each year, editor Dave Eggers informs us, the Best American Nonrequired Reading is decided “not completely scientifically” in a basement on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. This explanation, along with Sufjan Stevens’s introduction about how he overcame illiteracy “one Snickers bar” at a time, sets the tone for a collection of witty, somewhat random anecdotes and observations guaranteed to entertain, if not always enlighten.

The first section, “Shorter Things That Belong Nowhere Else,” supports this hypothesis. It begins with “Names of Horses Expected to Have Undistinguished Careers (For The Love Of God Run Faster, Ayn Rand’s Condescending Sigh)”, followed by such gems as “Creationist Explanations for the World’s Natural Wonders” and “Failed TV Pilots” (hint: they involve lumberjacks and Stephen Hawking in sex ed). Halfway through the book, it’s hard not to feel the way you might reading the Guinness Book of World Records or Useless Facts: giddy, intrigued, and somewhat unfulfilled.

But then the second half hits you. Compiled entirely from the 150-odd quarterlies published in the United States each year, it opens with “Middle-American Gothic,” Jonathon Ames’ discovery of his inner Dark Child and his conclusion as to why the Midwest cultivates serial killers: it’s the closed-in geography. The Edge Foundation’s “Provocative Question of the Year: What is Your Dangerous Idea” is another provocative and engaging section, with perspectives on everything from parental licensure to the evolution of evil.

If nothing else, one can’t help but be awed by Jennifer Egan’s “Selling the General,” a disturbing and eye-opening look at how image shapes reality (She asks: “How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”). In all, this collection is dubbed Nonrequired Reading for its inability to be categorized—not for lack of literary value.