The Best American Magazine Writing 2011

Resumen del libro

The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 will be one of our richest collections to date, full of award-winning pieces covering the year's most intriguing events. Some essays for the anthology created their own controversies, such as Michael Hastings's The Runaway General, which forced the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal within days of its being published in Rolling Stone; or Jane Mayer's Covert Operations (The New Yorker), which exposed the Koch brothers' plans against a Barack Obama presidency and turned the duo into a powerful symbol of corporatized politics.

This year's award finalists winners include Scott Horton's investigation into inmate suicides at Guantanamo Bay prison (Harper's Magazine) and Robert F. Worth's indispensable account of conflict and revolt in the Middle East (The New York Times Magazine). It will feature an entertaining array of profiles, criticism, and cultural commentary, such as Christopher Hitchens's wry take on the politics of cancer (Vanity Fair); Jonathan Van Meter's eye-opening portrait of Joan Rivers and her transgressive comedic genius (New York Magazine); and Jonah Weiner's extraordinary musical biography of Kanye West, assembled from the artist's tweets and blog (Slate). John Donvan and Caren Zucker's account of the world's first autism case in The Atlantic rounds out the volume, along with a selection of fiction, such as Paul Theroux's tale in the Virginia Quarterly Review of a madman art collector who acquires only to destroy the things he loves.