cover image The Best American Magazine Writing 2006

The Best American Magazine Writing 2006

, , intro. by Graydon Carter. . Columbia Univ., $16.95 (446pp) ISBN 978-0-231-13993-9

The best magazine articles, writes Carter (editor of Vanity Fair ), offer a winning combination of access into a new world, disclosure into its secrets and a narrative that transforms information into a compelling story. It's a standard most of these finalists for the American Society of Magazine Editors' annual awards meet with ease. The most sprawling example is David Foster Wallace's profile of talk radio personality John Ziegler (loaded with Wallace's trademark footnotes), but there are also little gems, like Field & Stream columnist Bill Heavey's account of teaching his young daughter to fish. The late Marjorie Williams is represented by her prize-winning essay about learning that she had an inoperable form of liver cancer; other winners include James Banford's reporting about the image consultant who handled the Iraqi invasion for the U.S. government, Elizabeth Kolbert's investigations into global warming and a short story from Joyce Carol Oates. For many readers, though, it's the profiles and feature stories that may hold the most interest, from the prose portrait of Merle Haggard as "The Last Outlaw" to John Jeremiah Sullivan's relating his misadventures at a Christian rock festival. If this anthology were a magazine, everybody would want to subscribe. (Dec.)