The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 [Hardcover]

Dave Eggers (Editor), Beck (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Best American Nonrequired Reading | Publication Date: October 5, 2005

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. In the 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The fourth installment in the ubiquitous Eggers' series collecting offbeat magazine writing chosen by Bay Area teenagers underscores the continued blurring between fiction and nonfiction in contemporary American writing. Of 24 selections, 21 are written in first person, and much of the book has the feeling of memoir. Of the three exceptions, two are forgettable, but "Lost Boys," by Jeff Gordiner, is a fascinating piece of reportage (for Details) on the hundreds of young men weeded out of polygamous families along the Utah border, presumably to leave more wives for their elders. Other first-rate nonfiction pieces include Al Franken's account of his USO tour of Iraq (Mother Jones), Tish Durkin's profile of a mercenary soldier (Rolling Stone) and William T. Vollmann's gonzo search for Chinese tunnels in Mexico (Harper's). The fiction is more uneven, but varied stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Molly McNett and Douglas Trevor make vivid impressions, and two, by Stephen Elliott and Rattawutt Lapcharoensap explore the older-and-younger-brother relationship, a subject dear to Eggers. This year, Eggers puts the cartoon and "filler" material into his forward, which is skippable (except for the young editors' self-written profiles), as is the short introduction by musician Beck.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Once again, aided by an advisory board of high-school students, Eggers has selected an eclectic mix of short stories, reportage, essays, and humor--the variety so great that its inclusion into the genre-specific Best American series seems like a sly wink. It's hard to review a work that includes Al Franken's "Tearaway Burkas and Tinplate Menorahs," his account of a USO tour in Iraq, alongside George Saunders' beautiful and moving short story "Bohemians." It's also difficult to say exactly who should read this fine, provocative collection. The audience may be youngish, but it would be ridiculous to suggest their parents (or even grandparents) wouldn't enjoy pieces such as William T. Vollmann's "They Came Out like Ants!" which chronicles his fascinating and funny quest to locate Chinese tunnels in Mexicali (also included in this year's Best American Travel Writing). If there's a wrong note, it's that musician Beck was commissioned to write a three-page introduction, thereby securing his name for the cover. They don't need a rock star to sell writing that rocks. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (October 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618570470
• ISBN-13: 978-0618570478
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,128,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Nonrequired Reading So Far, December 23, 2005

By 

My Uncle Stu (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (Paperback)

I'm a fan of short stories and essays in general because I tend to finish a good 60 to 70% of the ones I start. Contrast that to novels and non-fiction monographs, where, secondary to undertreated ADHD and a busy schedule, I probably complete less than 10% of books I start. That's okay, I like accumulating books with bookmarks a third of the way in. An unfinished book is like a totem, a sacred symbol of potential wisdom, something to anticipate. But still, there is something satisfying and confidence boosting about reading something completely in one sitting.

I like this series, the adolescents we are told do the selections must have a keen eye for talent. Unlike other reviewers, I was not bothered by some of the overlap, in particular multiple stories about sibling rivalry. It's a pretty big theme in the lives of most people with siblings, and its effects resonate in multiple realms of our relationships and interactions. Perhaps it's closer to the surface for the Bay area teenagers who made these selections. That's fine. Personally, I'm glad they didn't throw out any of these stories in the name of variety and balance. Oh, by the way, have you gotten into Sudoku yet? You really should.

I particularly enjoyed Molly McNett's work, I hope we'll hear more from her, as well as the contributions by Franken, Saunders, Vollmann, Dickinson, and Boudinot. Big fan, big fan. So far, 2005 is the best edition of this series.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the best, December 24, 2005

By 

Michael A. Rogers (Fort Campbell, KY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (Paperback)

The fourth edition of David Eggers Best American Nonrequired Reading is an impressive collection of twenty four of the year's finest fiction, essays, and memoirs. Culled from a mountain of publications and assembled by a group of teenagers at Eggers' 826 Valencia; a non-profit writing lab, drop-in tutoring center and the Bay Area's only independent pirate supply shop, this collection is a refreshing approach to modern American literature.
Covering a huge spread of interests and emotions Best American has everything from William T. Vollmann's (The Came Out Like Ants!) search for subterranean Chinese casinos and opium dens hidden under the streets of Mexicali since the nineteenth century to the almost familiar lives of Douglas Trevor (Girls I Know) and Ryan Boudinot (Free Burgers For Life). Completely devoid of clichés and tired literary devices every page of the genre-less Best American will have you awaiting next year's collection.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not required -- and you should consider that a blessing, January 7, 2009

By 

Wendell Ricketts "Wendell Ricketts" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (Paperback)

Reading Dave Egger's ingratiating and irritatingly self-flattering Foreword to this volume (why is it, even when he's talking about others, that Dave Eggers is always talking about himself?), one hopes desperately that he is being ironic when he says that the pieces in the anthology were selected by a group of high-school students. Unfortunately, he appears to have been telling the truth. This is arguably the worst of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, though the competition is pretty stiff. Maybe 2005 was just a lousy year for writing. Maybe we shouldn't be expected to pay full price to read stories and essays that appealed to high-school students. Maybe Dave Eggers really can't tell decent writing from drivel. Or maybe all three.

I would save exactly two pieces from this book: Aimee Bender's "Tiger Mending" and Stephanie Dickinson's "A Lynching in Stereoscope," both of which are marvelous. The rest of the book ranges from decidedly not marvelous to aggravating, self-referential, and banal. When you get to the last four pieces (Jonathan Tel's "The Myth of the Frequent Flier," Douglas Trevor's "Girls I Know," William T. Vollman's "They Came Out Like Ants," and Lauren Weedman's "Diary of a Journal Reader"), you realize you're deep in the Swamp of Complacencies that is the province of graduate-writing programs and of writers like Eggers and the McSweeney crowd: too clever by half, damn impressed with themselves and, at base, utterly uninterested in readers. Writing, for them, is an essentially masturbatory act that precludes an other.

I'd put Beck's Introduction, as superficial and trivial a piece of writing as you'll ever find, into the same category. It is apparently included in BANR 2005 solely for the "cool factor" bona fides that someone like Beck could provide in 2005 and not because Beck has a single intelligent or interesting observation to make about writing. Plus, Beck was about to feature Eggers on his next album, so hey: One hand washes the other, high up there in the Hiposphere. And that seems to be Eggers all over: so doggone determined to be "alternative" that he becomes, numbingly, the same as everything else.