kawai's review
3.0
Each year, the "Best American" series puts out a collection for each of the major writing forms (short story, travel writing, mystery, sports), highlighting what it believes to be a handful of the best writing from that genre for the year. This year for the first time, "The Best American" team released a cheap ($0.99) sampler of their collections, which included two pieces from each of the collection.
Any writing collection will be a mixed bag, with some pieces alternately resonating and boring different groups of readers, and a collection OF those collections is no less likely to suffer the same result. That's definitely the case here. While the language was almost universally good, there were only a few entries that really stuck with me. A piece late in the book, from "The Best American Travel Writing", painted an intriguing, if somewhat schizophrenic, picture of a year in the life of Miami; a piece somewhere in the middle, (From GQ, a great magazine all in all), part of "The Best American Sports Writing", chronicles the touching story of a surfing prodigy among the best in the world who lives his life inside a shell of Asperger's; finally, a piece from "The Best American Short Stories" tells the story of a grieving mother's complex relationship with her grandmother, using a pet parrot and crumbling house as fulcrums.
A decent collection, all in all. With such good pieces from such disparate collections, it's almost impossible to decide which collection might be worth buying in full.
Any writing collection will be a mixed bag, with some pieces alternately resonating and boring different groups of readers, and a collection OF those collections is no less likely to suffer the same result. That's definitely the case here. While the language was almost universally good, there were only a few entries that really stuck with me. A piece late in the book, from "The Best American Travel Writing", painted an intriguing, if somewhat schizophrenic, picture of a year in the life of Miami; a piece somewhere in the middle, (From GQ, a great magazine all in all), part of "The Best American Sports Writing", chronicles the touching story of a surfing prodigy among the best in the world who lives his life inside a shell of Asperger's; finally, a piece from "The Best American Short Stories" tells the story of a grieving mother's complex relationship with her grandmother, using a pet parrot and crumbling house as fulcrums.
A decent collection, all in all. With such good pieces from such disparate collections, it's almost impossible to decide which collection might be worth buying in full.
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