Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 by . Beck (Introduction), Dave Eggers (Editor)

From the Publisher

The Best American Series First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected by a leading writer in the field, making the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 includes

Daniel Alarcón • Aimee Bender • Dan Chaon • Daniel Clowes • Tish Durkin • Stephen Elliott • Al Franken • Jhumpa Lahiri • Rattawut Lapcharoensap • Anders Nilsen • Georges Saunders • William T. Vollmann • and others

And perhaps you even know that in the storefront of the San Francisco tutoring center, we sell supplies to buccaneers. Yes, you know this. We sell eyepatches, peg legs, lard, planks (by the foot), hand replacements, puffy shirts, and red and white striped socks. This is true. We run the Bay Area’s only independent pirate-supply store, but this is not easy. As you know, we have competition. There is a chain pirate-supply store, and every week, it seems, they open a new franchise, encroaching ever more closely on our territory, such as it is. Can we survive the tidal wave that is known as Captain Rick’s Booty Cove? We are not sure, but we intend to fight to the end.

Who is Captain Rick? you ask. That is what many people want to know. He claims to be a seafarer of some renown, who, after many decades on the ocean, decided to hang up his parrot and perpetual tan and open a few humble supply shops. Sounds like a nice story — if it were true. Inthe interest of informing you, the buying public, about Captain Rick, we’re enclosing in these pages six of our ongoing informational posters about Captain Rick. Once a week or so, 826 Valencia publishes its newest findings about our competitor, and though this may not be the most appropriate venue, the truth must be heard. One thing not mentioned in these announcements is that Captain Rick’s planks are made of balsa. Balsa is no good for planks.
(From the foreword by Dave Eggers)

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, and How We Are Hungry, and the editor of McSweeney's. He is the founder of 826 Valencia, a San Francisco writing lab for young people.

Beck, whose single "Loser" was instantly labeled an anthem for the slacker generation, is also known for his Grammy Award-winning albums Odelay and Mutations.

Tony Millionaire (cover art) is the creator of Maakies, one of the most popular alternative newspaper comic strips in the world, and of the award-winning comic book Sock Monkey.

Library Journal

Short stories are not meant for short attention spans; the best are as dense and nuanced as a good chocolate truffle. Selected by writer Eggers and his 826 Valencia workshop students, many of the 24 stories in this fourth volume of the "Best American Nonrequired Reading" series are delights. In the best short story tradition, they provoke interest quickly and linger in the memory long after. Cartoon, nonfiction, and quirky short pieces are included among the predominantly traditional short stories, and there's a nice mix of established and lesser-known writers whose offerings range from the mordant wit of Douglas Trevor's "Girls I Know" to Jhumpa Lahiri's beautifully crafted "Hell-Heaven" to Amber Dermont's moving and funny "Lyndon." George Saunders's and Molly McNett's pieces also stand out. Noteworthy among the nonfiction pieces is William Vollmann's "They Came Out Like Ants," about Chinese immigrants living in Mexacali tunnels. The eclectic mix in this anthology shares some recurring motifs: troubled childhoods, a feeling for the woes of American outsiders, and a sort of melancholic irony about the world. A representative and worthwhile holding for public and academic libraries.-Laurie Sullivan, Sage Group Int'l., Nashville Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Fiction and nonfiction pulled from the main- and side-stream by McSweeney's editor Eggers, founder of a San Francisco writing lab for city youth, is the latest in Houghton Mifflin's Great American Series. Even with forewords from inaugural guest editor Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000) and series editor Michael Cart, a well-known YA author, the new category "nonrequired" is less than clear. Even so, there are pieces from old standbys Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and, yes, the New Yorker, cheek by jowl with bits from the Onion, Optic Nerve, Spin, and ZYZZYVA. Though aimed at younger-than-boomer readers, the pieces are not necessarily by or about the less-than-middle-aged. Eric Schlosser's "Why McDonald's French Fries Taste So Good" is a fascinating but almost geekily well-researched piece about the flavor enhancement biz; it educates even though it was probably chosen to appeal to vegan terrorists and their supporters. Adrian Tomine's "Bomb Scare," from Optic Nerve, is a gloomy and graphic high-school-life-sucks-so-bad piece that goes on nearly as long as high school. Karl Taro Greenfield's "Speed Demons," from Time, clearly explains the appeal of meth and other uppers. While a number of pieces have been included as comic relief, only David Sedaris (unsurprisingly) and the Onion bits ("Local Hipster Overexplaining Why He Was At The Mall" and "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door To Door Trying To Shock People") are likely to crack anybody up. Perhaps the truly cool don't want to be caught guffawing. Rodney Rothman's almost-nonfiction "My Fake Job," disowned by the New Yorker, is amusing but so dryly that there's no danger of snorting or snotflying. The sentimental favorite is a long, wonderful piece from Sports Illustrated, of all places, by Gary Smith, about a black coach who brings magic to an Amish community in Ohio. Readers who aren't reduced to blubbering should seek medical attention. An alternative to the Banana Republic gift certificate for that difficult nephew with a birthday.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Burly tomes bulge from shelves and barely know I’m there.
Someday I plan to read the classics. Someday I plan to traverse their pages and see for myself what raw weight they wield. Actually, I have read a handful of them — Dickens, Dostoevsky, Twain, Fitzgerald, Voltaire — but in a haphazard, zigzagging fashion. No chronology, historical context, or classroom guidance.
I dropped out of school early and started work at a young age, but I spent a lot of time hanging around LACC, an inner-city community college a few miles from my mother’s house. I made friends with some of the professors. One of them lived with the poet Wanda Coleman, and I was invited to hang out at their place behind the campus. I got to sit in and hear their discussions on writers and writing. That was where I first realized that there were myriad subtexts to a given piece of writing, and that writers seemed to be able to tap into the profundities of daily existence.
I kind of knew these themes and patterns were always there in books and stories, but these people seemed to have some key, some tool to unlock the densest texts or find some illuminating insight into a mundane occurrence. It was mysterious to me how they pulled these observations out of their hats. Was it education, experience, divination — an innate sense of the world?
I started picking up books from thrift stores and spent a lot of time hanging out at the library. The books I came upon were pretty random, a patchwork more than a definitive list. James Baldwin, H. G. Wells’s history of the world, Sam Shepard’s plays. The library became my other home. I didn’t have abedroom in my mom’s house, so the library was one of the only places I could go and be alone. When that downtown library burned down, it was a big blow to me. I remember watching the five o’clock news — big black plumes billowing out of the windows, and all those books burning.
Later, I tried some of the smaller neighborhood libraries, but they were disappointing. A bunch of romance novels, ancient how-to intructionals, and some worn-out kids’ books.

I made friends with this kid from Laos who worked in a cool little bookshop in the then-uncool East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Feliz. Books were not always available and became somewhat of a commodity, so I’d go up there and we’d hang around, talk about writers, and he’d show me the new books they’d gotten in. He was into obscure stuff, like a German poet named Georg Trakl or St.- John Perse. We’d sit around on long summer afternoons reading magazines and bits from various books. In a way, it was kind of our own nonrequired reading. We were picking up various writings and mashing them up into some kind of piecemeal perspective. Not having any academic structure about us, everything we gravitated to probably had the weight of something discovered on one’s own, like we’d uncovered some secret thing nobody else knew. Which is kind of an adolescent thrill, or pomposity, but I’m still guilty of it.
There was an old art house movie theater next door. We were friendly with the assistant manager, and he would let us in for free. The Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire played for six or seven months and we must have seen it thirty times. We’d hang out in the projection booth sometimes, already having memorized all the scenes. I remember that it started out in a library, with an angel listening in on people’s thoughts. We knew there was something going on in this movie and we’d learned what that was from reading.
We were also listening to Sonic Youth’s Evol, Einstürzende Neubauten, and old Delta blues. It seemed like we’d found what was relevant to us. The required world seemed a little gray and uninspired maybe. We were digging into the nonrequired past (which I think was the thing to do at the time). I remember Georges Bataille being very cool at the time. Also an old hobo account from the 1930s by Jack Black (the hobo, not the movie star) called You Can’t Win had recently been rediscovered and reissued. Even quasi-sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick were being reassessed and held in high regard. There wasn’t much talk of the classics. It was more about the stuff that had gotten missed in between the major “important” works. It was like there was a questioning and a mistrust that were manifested in this stream of curiosities forming a new forgotten canon. But trends change and perspective shifts. Works sometimes speak to a moment or fill a need at the time. And the classics still stand unmoved.

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, and on tour busess. There are always those bits from some article — a weird fact, an anecdote, an image even — you pick up somewhere that become lodged in youuuuur 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. If literature moves slow and we live in dog years, this book may come in handy. I’ve found the mix-tape aesthetic works for me. The humor and the humane, the hugeness and the miniature. It coheres into some other kind of implied story or novel that we’re still living out. This is something we’re figuring out together and apart, like it or not.
And if you want some advice you’ll get only in this book: don’t fall asleep riding a bicycle like my friend Brian did. You might wake up bleeding in a rent-a-cop car.

Beck

Los Angeles, 2005

Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Introduction copyright © 2005 by Beck. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.