The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

This year's Best American Nonrequired Reading was the first to not be edited by Dave Eggers, instead taking over was Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and despite that gentleman's prediliction for humor, this collection is kind of grim. There are moments of lightheartedness, but even those are tempered by the macabre. For example, I think I laughed the most at a story by A.T. Grant called "The Body," which is about who carries around a dead body wherever he goes.

I missed the Frontmatter section, which has gone bye-bye, which used to include all manner of short things found in all sorts of places. To be sure, this year's book is very diverse, with poems, essays, an interview, graphic novels, and a few 15-second plays. But I wonder if the term "nonrequired" has any meaning any more, because is it really appropriate to call Jeanine Di Giovanni's "Seven Days in Syria" nonrequired? It is a devastating piece by this generation's Martha Gellhorn. Or Rebecca Rukeyser's "The Chinese Barracks," about the hard life of cannery workers, or Cole Becher's "Charybdis," a short story about a soldier come home from Iraq who starts taking long walks and does, well, I'll leave it that. There's a lot of fiction about soldiers who have returned home from many wars, but this is one of the best I've read.

When I think of "nonrequired," I think offbeat. Not inconsequential, but not the meat and potatoes of a meal, but the parsley, or maybe the dessert. An essay (or is it fiction--it's not clear) like "Hugo," by Karen Maner, which has a pet store employee caring for a fish with scoliosis. We get wonderful observations like this: "Slightly underweight males aged eighteen to twenty-four demonstrated a marginally higher interest in iguanas than the average customer, whereas slightly overweight males in the same age bracked expressed more interest in bearded dragons."

Another favorite is "If He Hollers Let Him Go," a profile of comedian Dave Chappelle (done without Chappelle's participation) and the issues of race in entertainment. There's also a wonderful short story (I'm pretty sure this is fiction) by Thomas Pierce called "The Real Alan Gass," which is about a man whose girlfriend is having dreams that she's married to a man called Alan Gass, and he becomes strangely jealous, so he tracks down a man called Alan Gass.

In keeping with the grim nature of the book, though, the book has a trio of outstanding but depressing pieces. One is a story by Adam Johnson, who just won the National Book Award, with his story "Nirvana," about a man with a wife suffering paralysis from Guillain-Barre syndrome, and "The Saltwater Twin," by Maia Morgan, which starts as a nostalgic memory from childhood that suddenly veers into child abuse by a grandfather. Yikes! Nathaniel Rich has a story about a guy who infiltrates cults, which is white-knuckle stuff.

For the most "norequired" of the nonrequired, though, I'm intrigued by the 15-second plays, which would make for a very short night at the theater. Imagine an eight o'clock curtain and being out by 8:01. Here is the most intriguing, in it's entirety, "Little Thing," by Slyvan Oswald: "Loud loud Tito Puente. It's the fifties or the sixties. Happy hour. The adults are drinking V.O. on the rocks. Sexy dancing don't look. You are the kid with white hair and a purple nose, playing dead on the coffee table while they streak by during the cha cha. They must not notice you have died. The telephone rings. Answer it."