The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner (Editor), 826 National (Editor)

Overview

In a small but comfortable conference room, in a publishing house in San Francisco, a group of high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. They had some good times. There was a whiteboard in the conference room, and often cartoons were drawn on this whiteboard. The cartoons were of varying quality. By the end of the year, with the help of a similar committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, and their guest editor, Rachel Kushner, they selected the contents of this anthology. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 features stories about Bulgarian spaceships, psychedelic mushroom therapy, and a cyclorama in Iowa. If you don’t know what a cyclorama is, you aren’t alone. Read on to find out.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 includes N. R. KLEINFIELD,  ANNA KOVATCHEVA, DAN HOY, ANTHONY MARRA, MICHAEL POLLAN, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, DANA SPIOTTA, ADRIAN TOMINE, INARA VERZEMNIEKS and others

Rachel Kushner, guest editor, is the author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and one of the New York Times’s top five novels of 2013. Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, a winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544812185
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Series:	Best American Nonrequired Reading Series
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	896,336
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

826 NATIONAL is a family of seven nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping underserved students, ages six through eighteen, with their creative and expository writing skills. They're located in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

09/12/2016
This eclectic compilation, guest-edited by novelist Kushner (The Flamethrowers), is selected by high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and Ann Arbor, Mich., from a variety of national publications (e.g., the New Yorker, the New York Times) and literary journals (e.g., Granta, the Iowa Review). The offerings include nonfiction, short stories, a book review, poetry, and even narrative cartoons. These are clearly very discerning high school students: the majority of the choices are first-rate, though some of the poems are obscure and Marilynne Robinson's "An Interview with President Obama" is superficial. The pieces generally try to engage the reader quickly, with first sentences that are either punchy ("In the fourth week of drought... the elephant keeled over dead," from "The Miracle at Little Fork" by Rebecca Makai) or intentionally vague ("At first all the mothers were going into town," from "Shadehill" by Mark Hitz). Sometimes that opacity is intriguing, but the fiction pieces do start to show similarities, with the recurring theme of characters on the fringes of society dealing with extreme circumstances. Some of the selections will not be to everyone's taste ("Brown vs. Ferguson," from the discussion group behind the theoretical journal Endnotes, is timely but dry), but there are many engaging, beautifully written choices that will surprise and delight. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

An eclectic collection chosen by a committee of San Francisco area high school students and brimming with wonderful short stories, journalism, interviews and poetry.”—TAMPA BAY TIMES "A wealth of strong material makes The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 valuable reading."—POPMATTERS   "What they have given us is a gift.... One wonders how the world might be different if works in Best American Nonrequired Reading were indeed required."  —USA TODAY “A wide-ranging collection of civic-minded, literary, entertaining reads.” —BOOKLIST     —

From the Publisher

★ 12/01/2016
Kudos to the youth editorial board who selected the 25 unique entries for the 15th annual publication that includes an interview with the president of the United States, a book review, Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalism, as well as poetry, stories, and essays. While the chosen pieces stand on their own, the reward for readers is amplified with the understanding that high school students brandished their passion for reading and writing to comb through literary journals and magazines to identify the pieces that best illustrate modern history. Michele Scott's "How I Became a Prison Gardener" reveals how she studied, observed, and tended to plants while in a California women's correctional facility. The excerpt from Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Killing and Dying demonstrates a student's introduction to stand-up comedy. Molly Brodak's "Bandit" tells of a young girl's relationship with her father who robs banks. Rebecca Makkai's "The Miracle Years of Little Fork" details the death of a circus elephant. VERDICT This exceptional collection shines for two reasons: the quality of the selections and the insight of the students of 826 National, a nonprofit organization that helps youth ages six through 18 pursue their creative and expository writing skills.—Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

Library Journal