I always appreciate the Best American series. I remember in the pre-internet days walking into the bookstore very eager to see the latest copy for the essays and short story versions. Back then it wasn't as easy to access work from a variety of magazines. Now we have the opposite problem. There is so much access that having work curated into an actual book feels like a treat.

I wanted to have a peek on the best American Series and I got it. When a book serves its purpose well, what more can you ask for? having said that, I now think if this should be global, rather than bound by geography? Just some thoughts.

You can't go wrong with any book in this series. Wonderfully curated pieces in your favorit genre. Because no one can read every great article or short story in a given year, this series makes me feel confident I'll never miss a truly great piece.

This title showed up as "Read Now" for me. I clicked the "Send to Kindle" option. However, it did not download on my Kindle though it is showing up in my NetGalley queue. And I cannot re-download it as it is now archived and not available. I am not able to review or recommend this book without reading it.

Love these anthologies of the Best American...essays, stories, etc. Despite that I have read very little in the series, and love this selection of two per title. They really are quality essays and stories from the previous year.

Just one note...although it was a different publisher, having read 3 years of "The Best Technology Writing" (2009-2011) I do wish that was still going. Can this be an added series? Loved those! It would be a great addition to the Best American series.

Thanks for the opportunity for reading some selections of these books. Enjoyed it!

I always enjoy these, they really are a great sampling of the best writing of the year. Great way to discover new authors.

This is a sampler of some of the best stories from many genres that were published last year (2017). There are some fascinating selections and the sampler encourages you to read more.

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. From the publisher -
The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction.
This special edition contains selections from the following 2017 editions:
The Best American Short Stories edited by Meg Wolitzer
The Best American Essays edited by Leslie Jamison
The Best American Mystery Stories edited by John Sandford
The Best American Nonrequired Reading edited by Sarah Vowell
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Charles Yu
The Best American Travel Writing edited by Lauren Collins
The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Hope Jahren
The Best American Sports Writing edited by Howard Bryant
Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. The special guest editor then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected – and most popular – of its kind.

This was an enjoyable book .. did I read all of the stories? No. Love all the stories? No, but it is the best of the best and is presented in a very enjoyable and likable way.

For a sampler, this was excellent, and I only wish there were more to read. It's a great selection of stories that highlighted some of the best fiction from this year.

Did not enjoyed it at all. I had expected better. I wish it was what I wanted.

5★
FICTION! - SCIENCE - SCIENCE FICTION! – SPORTS! – TRAVEL! and more.

Pardon my enthusiasm for this wonderful Noah’s Ark of articles, stories, and essays. The stories march through the book two by two, all intact and complete. two samples from each of the larger collections published for each category.

“I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now: Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization.”

This is from Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy: Rules for Survival:"from "The New York Review of Books”. (Original article: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/ )

She wrote the article just after Trump’s election and was trying to prepare the American public for life with an autocrat. She has just won the (US) National Book Award (Nov 2017) for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

This will give you an idea of the quality of the selections included in this terrific publication. There’s fiction, fun, a long article about Kaepernick’s “stand” (which is a kneel), another about how many people rely so much on GPS that they’ve lost all sense of geography and direction. That would be funny if people didn’t drive off the ends of bridges and such.

“Enough people have been led astray by their GPS in Death Valley that the area’s former wilderness coordinator called the phenomenon ‘death by GPS.’

. . . we are letting our natural wayfinding abilities languish.”

The only downside is that after reading these, you will want the entire collection of the eight books in the series. These are full-length articles and stories, not brief extracts, and I enjoyed almost everything, even those outside my usual reading choices.

This volume is still available on NetGalley, and I’d like to thank Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the review copy from which I’ve quoted. I can’t recommend this series highly enough.

The Best American Series books are perennial classics, rounding up stories and reporting and essays into wonderful yearly packages. I loved reading this sampler of selections from all of the other books (e.g. Short Stories, Science Fiction, Non-Required Reading, Essays, Travel Writing, Sports Writing, Science Writing, etc.). Some of the stories punched me in the gut or made me wow in amazement. I ate this book write up (and I enjoyed having a taste of each of the genres). These appetizers made me want to go out and buy the main courses - the larger genre-specific books - to see what other selections were picked. The judges/editors have done a great job this year! Go check it out, there has been some great writing done in 2017.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoy this annual showcase of short fiction and nonfiction, and this year's might just top the previous ones. Definitely something you're going to want to check out.

<p>So I got to read an assortment of fiction, essays, mystery stories (also fiction), nonrequired reading (also some fiction - GODZILLA!), science fiction and fantasy (also fiction), travel pieces, science pieces, and sports writing -- two of each! Like a Forrest Gump sampler box of chocolates, except none with cherries in them or that time I had a chocolate the chocolatier put turmeric in and it was just weird. Even the sports writing, and I'm pretty much the least sports-interested person you could ever meet, was good. </p>

<p><i>Uh, Meghan</i> as I am sure you are thinking, <i>it's called the <b>best</b> series and you're surprised that it was actually good.</i></p>

<p>Yes. Shut up.</p>

<p>So here's the info, i.e. I copy and pasted the table of contents and put my thoughts in parentheses. </p>

<p>The Best American Short Stories 2017: <br />
FIONA MAAZEL: Let’s Go to the Videotape (jerk dad story) <br />
JESS WALTER: Famous Actor (jerk people have jerk sex with each other's jerk selves)
</p>

<p>The Best American Essays 2017: <br />
EMILY MALONEY: Cost of Living (yeah, Americans, I know that like 49% of you or whatever despise Obamacare, but seriously, your multi-payer system is ridiculous, seriously ridiculous); <br />
ALIA VOLZ: Snakebit (ophidiophobia)
</p>

<p>The Best American Mystery Stories 2017: <br />
TRINA COREY: Flight (murder mystery in a nursing home) <br />
BRENDAN DUBOIS: The Man from Away (revenge fantasy)
</p>

<p>The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017: <br />
VIET DINH: Lucky Dragon (atomic bomb fallout, fiction) <br />
MASHA GESSEN: Autocracy: Rules for Survival (Trump sucks)
</p>

<p>The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017: <br />
JOSEPH ALLEN HILL: The Venus Effect (like Margaret Atwood's <a href="http://occonline.occ.cccd.edu/online/swells/Happy%20Endings.pdf">Happy Endings</a>, but about race and brutal) <br />
N. K. JEMISIN: The City Born Great (Cities live, didn't really grab me)
</p>

<p> The Best American Travel Writing 2017: <br />
STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST: Chiefing in Cherokee (one of the three that left me with a meh, the others being "Rules for Survival" and "The City Born Great".) <br />
DAVID KUSHNER: Land of the Lost (he went to Iceland. I went to Iceland. Hooray!)
</p>

<p>The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017: <br />
SONIA SMITH: Unfriendly Climate (Texas is weird) <br />
DAVID EPSTEIN: The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene (some people are much better researchers than I am)
</p>

<p>The Best American Sports Writing 2017: <br />
BOMANI JONES: Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace (I can't remember reading this one, so I guess that might say something about it)<br />
LUKE CYPHERS AND TERI THOMPSON: Lost in America (it was sad, but then it got better, but then I realised there were all these other people not profiled in the story for whom it didn't get better and so I was sad again :( And, either "Lost in America" was the best one in the set or I'm a victim of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect">recency effect</a>, but "Lost in America" is the piece that stuck with me. That and "The Venus Effect", which is in the middle, so I guess that one is truly, not only brain-trick, memorable.)
</p>


<p><A href="https://www.librarything.com/work/20309929/book/147079789">The Best American Series 2017</a> by assorted (like a Quality Street Tin!) went on sale October 3, 2017.</p>

<p><small>I received a copy free from <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> in exchange for an honest review.</small></p>

This series gives great writing a broad audience and makes a great gift for the reader or writer in your life

The Best American series is one of my favorite series of books, especially the travel and essay collections. This book provides an assortment of stories from each series. Although collections may be uneven, it's a great way to get introduced to new authors.

This is a wide-ranging collection of fiction and nonfiction included in titles within the Best American Series. I enjoyed reading this because it collected so many different areas, from travel essays to science fiction short stories. Although I didn't like all of the sixteen titles (sports stories really aren't my thing), it was a solid collection of good writing. If you like not having to commit to a full novel, and you like to mix fiction and nonfiction, it's a good title to pick up.

This collection went beyond those that I usually look forward to reading, namely the Best American Short Stories and Mystery Stories and exposed me to six other volumes. The selections were well written and I enjoyed each one. I always look to expand my reading horizon and this was a great way to accomplish that goal. This volume to me was a great appetizer and I have all the volumes on my TBR list as I love a memorable entree too!

The Best American Series is an excellent anthology collection, if it's not already on your radar. An editor curates selections from the year's best previously published works across websites, journals, and magazines. Plenty are fiction, like Mytery and Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Short Stories, but I find their nonfiction selections to usually be pretty wonderful.

And I love essay anthologies, I think they're great for curing reader's block, when you're not motivated to find something new to read, or are facing a dearth of exciting reading material, or you've read or abandoned too many not good enough titles. Not to mention airplane or other stop-and-go, pick back up where you left off type of reading.

This is a sampler of two of the best pieces each from this year's volumes. I read half of it, the nonfiction selections. These were from The Best American volumes of Essays, Nonrequired Reading, Travel Writing, Science and Nature Writing, and Sports Writing (I even surprised myself with that one.)

A rundown of the nonfiction offerings in this one:

In "Cost of Living", Emily Maloney writes about the personal debt she accrued after a suicide attempt, which led to her working in medical billing and saddled for years with the ocean of debt. She draws back a curtain on what goes on in hospital billing, and it's alarming and wrong. But the hospital where she worked was itself in debt, and the endless cycle ping pongs responsibility for bills back and forth between providers and patients.

In "Snakebit", Alia Volz explores, in richly descriptive prose, one of humanity's most common phobias - that of snakes - and what she remembers from her childhood of the beginnings of this fear, and how it has dogged her into adulthood. Her writing is lush and lovely, even on such an inherently scary topic. Here she describes being served a rattlesnake pot sticker at a fancy hotel restaurant:

Being terrified of an appetizer is embarrassing.
The standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. Eating this snake - digesting it, absorbing it - could be a step in the right direction. Using the side of my fork, I slice the pot sticker open, releasing a ghost of steam, and lift the morsel to my lips.
It's hot and bland on my tongue. I taste nothing, not even the chutney. But when I blink, I see the meat regenerating into a diamondback that will live enveloped in my intestines, eating what I eat, dreaming what I dream.

In Masha Gessen's "Autocracy: Rules for Survival", she applies what she learned living in the Soviet Union and under Vladimir Putin to our current democracy under Trump, distilling some crucial lessons and why they must be heeded into six simple but powerful rules. It's a slick, smart, straightforward, absolute must-read of a piece. Here, rule #6 in its entirety:

Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump's persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump's all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform - like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance - stubborn, uncompromising, outraged - should be.

In Stephanie Elizondo Griest's "Chiefing in Cherokee", she travels to Cherokee, North Carolina to explore and interview within the Native American community earning livings from cultural tourism. She has to confront her indignation at what initially appears to be exploitation and perpetuating common public misconceptions of tribal life and culture, especially of those buskers who pose for tourist photographs and are known as "chiefs". But this form of busking is defended by the chiefs, it's been done by generations before them, and she also has to consider her own relationship to her Chicana heritage. The essay goes much deeper into aspects of modern Native American and European-American cultural relations and economics, but suffice to say it's excellently done.

In David Kushner's "Land of the Lost", he relates the story of a tourist lost thanks to faulty GPS in Iceland, and ties it into the fascinating fact that our brains depend on this kind of location-tracking, mapmaking ability in order to keep the hippocampus strong and better developed. There are scary ramifications of depending on computer navigation instead of our brains' inherent systems for sensing and remembering locations and paths.

In "Unfriendly Climate", Sonia Smith profiles what must be the only Christian Evangelical scientist who believes in climate change and works aggressively to educate and change minds. That's Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist from Texas Tech University. Hayhoe's well-worded and easy to understand arguments for climate change-denying idiots are good to record and pull out anytime you encounter someone who actually wants to argue that scientific facts are opinions.

David Epstein's "The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene" details his experience of being contacted by a woman suffering from a form of muscular dystrophy that she had to fight and advocate on her own behalf to even be diagnosed with. She also identified similar elements in an Olympic sprinter, which was mighty odd and made Epstein initially skeptical, since the woman, Jill Viles, had sticklike arms and legs thanks to her failed muscles, and the Olympian, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep has such enormous muscles that she'd faced down accusations of using performance-enhancing steroids. I can't stress enough how fascinating this story is, and what far-reaching implications it has for patients being educated, informed, and able to advocate for themselves. And despite containing a wealth of potentially complex or dense scientific information, it's page-turningly readable.

Bomani Jones' "Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace" is another smart, important must-read, even amidst the wealth of recent think pieces about his choice of peaceful protest and Trump's asinine war against anyone who dares "take a knee" for justice.

I read and reviewed the 2016 Best American Series sampler last year, and it also covered many interesting topics, but I have to say that at least from the nonfiction side, this year's is simply excellent.

As a long time fan of the Best American Series, I have seen good years and not so good, and so I choose which of the collections to read each year carefully. I've already read the Travel and Short Story volumes for 2017, and the selections in this sampler are among the very best essays and stories of those collections, in my opinion. And now I can see that I am going to have to pick up the Non-Required Reading and Sports volumes, based on the impressive quality of those essays. I had been planning on skipping the Non-Required Reading (after all, it IS Non-Required) but the Masha Gessen piece was too important to ignore. If the other writing in the collection is anywhere near that quality, it will be well worth the time.