Best American Magazine Writing

The Best American Magazine Writing 2008 is an essential guide to the year's most entertaining, politically charged, and sophisticated essays and fiction, offering a rare opportunity to experience in a single volume the top work of veteran reporters, critically acclaimed writers, and up-and-coming journalists. Only in this annual anthology will you find the best of the finalists for the 2008 National Magazine Awards, which include a critique of the Bush administration, a takedown of snark culture, personal reflections on child abuse accompanied by a profile of Hollywood's biggest villain, and an exposé of America's backbreaking coal mines, along with Alice Munro's ( Harper's Magazine) and David Foster Wallace's ( New Yorker) most recent short stories.

Other 2008 award finalists are: Peter Hessler's tour of China's instant cities ( National Geographic); Jane Mayer's peek inside the CIA's secret interrogation program ( New Yorker); William Langewiesche's account of gangland's hold on São Paolo ( Vanity Fair); Paige Williams's story of one girl's escape from Burundi ( Atlanta Magazine); Steve Oney's probing investigation into the unforeseen casualties of the Iraq War ( Los Angeles Magazine); Kurt Andersen's incisive commentary on American greed ( New York Magazine); Matt Taibbi's profile of Barack Obama ( Rolling Stone); Caitlin Flannagan's feminist perspective on the abortion debate ( The Atlantic); and Tom Carson's nostalgic lament for the leading men of old Hollywood ( GQ). Fiction finalists include Daniel Mason's "Death of the Puglist" ( Harper's Magazine); Steven Millhauser's "A Report on Our Recent Troubles" ( Harper's Magazine); Antonya Nelson's "Or Else" ( New Yorker); Uzodinma Iweala's "Speak No Evil" ( Paris Review); Alistair Morgan's "Icebergs" ( Paris Review); Andrew Malan Millward's "The Burning of Lawrence" ( Zoetrope: All-Story); and Fiona McFarlane's "Those Americans Falling from the Sky" ( Zoetrope: All-Story).