It's that time of year: The Best American Series 2005 are out.
"The Best American Nonrequired Reading" is the lesser-known selection in the series, which also includes "The Best American Short Stories," "The Best American Travel Writing" and "The Best American Essays."
Since it's conception in 2002, "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" has been compiled by Dave Eggers, author of the best-selling memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and founder of McSweeny's, an independent publishing house that publishes books, a quarterly literary journal and a website, and a group of 12 high school students who are a part of 826 Valencia, a writing center for students in the San Francisco Bay Area. This year's guest introducer and writer of the introduction is Grammy Award-winning artist Beck, who wrote, "When I came upon this series a few years back, it immediately made sense to me. It was what I was always doing: reading things here and there in airports, in waiting rooms ... there are always those bits from some articles - a weird fact, an anecdote, an image even - you pick up somewhere that become lodged in your brain, just as deeply as anything would from a great novel or film. Sometimes those things crop up outside of the great canon of literature and only breathe into our awareness for a minute."
The students, along with Eggers, spend each year poring over hundreds of essays, articles and short stories from lesser-known publications like Monkeybicycle to mainstream outlets like The New Yorker, and compile the year's best nonrequired reading, or what USA Today calls "anything that defies categorization."
From Monkeybicylce, an alternative literary magazine, Ryan Boudinot writes "Free Burgers for Life," a short story about a man whose life is falling apart while he buys alcohol for his high school "friends" and tries to get back with his girlfriend, a grocery store clerk who won't talk to him. Boudinot writes with such honesty of the pain of loneliness and loss people feel when they're holding on to something seemingly insignificant just to make their lives seem meaningful.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri wrote a short story for The New Yorker that was selected for the compilation, as did Al Franken, whose story originally appeared in Mother Jones.
The pieces are contemporary and unexpected, with stories touching topics from painfully fractured families and relationships to the war in Iraq. Most stories are unforgettable, and readers will want to read each tale to the finish in this exciting collection of today's best literature.
