The Best American Magazine Writing 2011

The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 contains award-winning features, exposes, and profiles along with extraordinary commentary, fiction, and poetry from America´s leading magazines. This year´s selections include stories that not only covered the news but also made news, including Michael Hastings´s "The Runaway General," which forced the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, days after being published in Rolling Stone. Readers will also find Jane Mayer´s "Covert Operations" ( The New Yorker), which exposed the Koch brothers´ campaign against the Barack Obama presidency, turning the duo into a powerful symbol of modern, corporatized politics.
The anthology contains Scott Horton´s investigation into inmate suicides at Guantánamo Bay prison ( Harper´s Magazine); Christopher Hitchens´s wryly moving 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 posts ( Slate). John Donvan and Caren Zucker describe the world´s first autism case in The Atlantic; Atul Gawande shares the modern medical profession´s poignant struggle with death and dying in The New Yorker; and Paul Theroux spins a thrilling tale in the Virginia Quarterly Review of a mad collector who acquires works of art only to destroy them. Read together or one at a time, these pieces exemplify the wholly immersive experience of well-crafted magazine writing.