The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 offers a selection of outstanding journalism on timely topics, including inequalities and injustices pressuring families, especially mothers. Rozina Ali tells the story of a U.S. marine who unlawfully adopted an Afghan girl and her family’s efforts to bring her home (New York Times Magazine). A Mother Jones exposé confronts the imprisonment of women for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners. “The Landlord and the Tenant” juxtaposes the lives of a poor single mother convicted for her children’s deaths in a fire and the man who owned the fatal property (ProPublica with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Caitlin Dickerson investigates the history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy (The Atlantic). Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker commentary considers abortion in a post-Roe world. The anthology features pieces on a wide range of subjects, such as Nate Jones on the “Nepo Baby” and Allison P. Davis’s essay about a decade on Tinder (New York). Natalie So recounts how her mother’s small computer chip company became the target of a Silicon Valley crime ring (The Believer). Clint Smith asks what Holocaust memorials in Germany can teach the United States about our reckoning with slavery (The Atlantic). Esquire’s Chris Heath examines the FBI’s involvement in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Courtney Desiree Morris takes a queer psychedelic ramble through New Orleans (Stranger’s Guide). Namwali Serpell reflects on representations of sex workers (New York Review of Books). An ESPN Digital investigation uncovers Penn State’s other serial sexual predator before Jerry Sandusky. Profiles of the acclaimed actress Viola Davis (New York Times Magazine) and the self-taught artist Matthew Wong (New Yorker), as well as Michelle de Kretser’s short story “Winter Term” (Paris Review), round out the volume.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2023 will feature a selection of articles honored by this year's National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media. These awards are sponsored and administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The National Magazine Awards are one of the most prestigious journalism prizes for print and digital media in the United States. More than 300 leading journalists, including the editorial leaders of the most widely read magazines and websites in the country, read more than 1,000 entries and then choose fewer than three dozen feature stories to honor as National Magazine Awards finalists and winners. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium. Each annual anthology includes articles representing a broad range of writing, from hard-hitting investigative reporting and lyrical fiction to eloquent feature writing and incisive cultural criticism Recent anthologies of the Best American Magazine Writing have included work from publications such as The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, GQ, Harper's, Mother Jones, New York, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wired, as well as from journals and websites like Buzzfeed, Catapult, the Georgia Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, the Marshall Project, The Nation, the Paris Review, Poetry, ProPublica, Public Books, Slate, and Zoetrope: All-Story.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2022 presents a range of outstanding writing on timely topics, from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism: Kristin Canning calls for a change in how we talk about abortion (Women’s Health), and Ed Yong warns us about the next pandemic (The Atlantic). Matthieu Aikins provides a gripping eyewitness account of the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul (New York Times Magazine). Heidi Blake and Katie J. M. Baker’s “Beyond Britney” examines how people placed under legal guardianship are deprived of their autonomy (BuzzFeed News). Rachel Aviv profiles a psychologist who studies the fallibility of memory—and has testified for defendants including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby (The New Yorker). The anthology includes dispatches from the frontiers of science, exploring why Venus turned out so hellishly unlike Earth (Popular Science) and detailing the potential of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (Quanta). It features celebrated writers, including Harper’s magazine pieces by Ann Patchett, whose “These Precious Days” is a powerful story of friendship during the pandemic, and Vivian Gornick, who offers “notes on humiliation.” Carina del Valle Schorske depicts the power of public dance after pandemic isolation (New York Times Magazine). And the NBA icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lauds the Black athletes who fought for social justice (AARP the Magazine). Amid the continuing reckoning with racism, authors reconsider tarnished figures. The Black ornithologist and birder J. Drew Lanham assesses the legacy of John James Audubon in the magazine that bears his name, and Jeremy Atherton Lin questions his youthful enthusiasm for Morrissey (Yale Review). Jennifer Senior writes about memory and the lingering grief felt for a friend killed on 9/11 (The Atlantic). The collection concludes with Nishanth Injam’s story of queer first love across religious boundaries, “Come with Me” (Georgia Review).

The incomparable John Updike selects the 55 finest short stories from America's bestselling anthology, published since 1915.

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION. Finalist for the 2023 Pen/Faulkner Award and the Southern Book Award. Nominated for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the 2023 Pen/Jean Stein Open Book Award, the 2023 Pen/Bingham Prize, the 2022 Story Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. National Bestseller. IndieNext Pick. One of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2022. “If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level.” —Ann Patchett A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper, Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin Cukie looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net. Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

"Witches are gathering." When most people hear the word "witches," they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, witchcraft is a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day magic. Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon. This sprawling magical community compels Mar to confront what she believes is possible-or hopes might be. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.

The Art of Fact in the Digital Age is a showcase of the most powerful and moving journalism of the past 25 years. Selections include stories originally published in established bastions of literary journalism (The New York Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker), as well as those from specialized and online publications (Runner's World, The Atavist). It features writers of extraordinary style (including Carina del Valle Schorske, Brian Phillips, and Jia Tolentino), as well as those who have profoundly influenced public discourse on the 21st century's most urgent issues: Mitchell S. Jackson, Clint Smith, and Ta-Nehisi Coates on race; Susan Dominus and Luke Mogelson on migration; and Kathryn Schulz and David Wallace-Wells on environmental threats. It even includes one story that expanded literary journalism's repertoire into audio (This American Life). This collection, assembled for students, scholars, and practitioners alike, also charts the evolution of digital longform journalism through its greatest achievements, from transitioning readers to screens to the integration of multimedia with words in service of meaning. The art of fact in the 21st century opened new ranges of expression to address such issues, while uniquely bearing the imprint of their generation's digital cultures and technologies. Although many forces compete for attention in the digital age, story triumphs. The works in this anthology show us why.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • An emotionally rich collection of short stories, painting a fascinating portrait of contemporary India and its diaspora and a yearning rendering of the people and places we call home, from a major new literary talent. “A full-hearted, brilliant debut of necessary beauty.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars and New York Times bestseller Friday Black "Injam's stories made me want to cast all else aside and return home.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today. Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

Updated with fresh facts, examples and illustrations, along with two new chapters on digital media and blogs this third edition continues to be the authoritative and essential guide to writing engaging and marketable feature stories. Covers everything from finding original ideas and angles to locating expert sources Expanded edition with new chapters on storytelling for digital media and building a story blog Captivating style exemplifies the authors’ expert guidance, combining academic authority with professional know-how Comprehensive coverage of all the angles, including marketing written work and finding jobs in the publishing industry Essential reading for anyone wishing to become a strong feature writer Accompanied by a website with a wealth of resources including PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and Q&As that will be available upon publication: www.wiley.com/go/sumnerandmiller