The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

The Best American Nonrequired Reading series is edited by Dave Eggers, though this is his last one. The items are selected by literary-minded high school students, and boy have they done a terrific job here, as this collection was a joy from beginning to end, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, with an assortment of odds and ends.

The front section, titled The Best American Front Section, is kind of a catch-all appetizer, with poems, stories, and other short bits that defy categorization, such as comic strip by Lynda Barry, a term-paper assignment by Kurt Vonnegut when he taught writing at the University of Iowa (he ends it by writing, "Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know"), Yelp reviews of chain restaurants as if written by Cormac McCarthy (really written by EDW Lynch), and my favorite, Tweets from @seinfeldtoday--plots of Seinfeld episodes if the show were still around now, such as: "Elaine pretends to live in Brooklyn to date a cute, younger guy. Kramer becomes addicted to 5-Hour Energy. George's parents get Skype." Or, "George's boss fires him after misconstruing 'sympathy like' on a Facebook post about his divorce. 'I liked it but I didn't LIKE it.'"

The book's second part settles into short stories and essays, all of them excellent. Particularly intriguing was a story about espionage, "Black Box," by Jennifer Egan, that is written in a series of how-to paragraphs. Other fiction worth noting is Jim Gavin's wonderfully loopy "Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror," about two cousins, one successful and one not. Here is a sample: "Nora was tall and pale, and because of her stylish pixie haircut and listless expression men often asked her if she was a model. She had actually paid her way through college doing catalogue work, posing in cardigans next to duck ponds, but she liked to tell men that she was dying of consumption." I wish I had written that sentence.

Other fiction highlights are a tale of romance from Bulgaria, "East of the West," by Miroslav Penkov; Alexander Maksik's "Snake River Gorge," about a sinister sales group that recruits young kids into a cult; Madhuri Vijay's "Lorry Raja," about child labor at Indian iron mine; and my favorite, "Human Snowball," about one magic night in Buffalo.

On the nonfiction front, there's Karen Russell on "The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador," which is about exactly what the title suggests; "All Due Respect," by Peter Hessler, about an American journalist covering organized crime in Japan; Pamela Colloff's gripping "Hannah and Andrew," which concerns a woman convicted of murdering her foster son, and the fierce "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance," by Kiese Laymon, which should be read every time one eases into thinking that we are in a post-racial society: "We're fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the king's English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students and most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, white folks will do anything to get you."

I highly recommend this collection to anyone who loves great writing, in whatever form.