The Best American Series® First, Best, and Best-Selling The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. 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 2011 includes Daniel Alarcón, Clare Beams, Sloane Crosley, Anthony Doerr,...

Dave Eggers and his students at the 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs compile fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics, as well as category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.

For the past year, a group of high school students met at a publishing house in San Francisco every Monday night to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together, and under the guidance of guest editor Adam Johnson, these high schoolers selected the contents of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. The...

"Turning the pages of The Best American Nonrequired Reading to find Tweets or sheet music creates the kind of unexpected surprise that's often encountered in digital space, but seldom in print…The eclecticism of the sources can be an awakening for the reader who seeks the best writing in books and literary journals…[and] the variety of genres is an apt reflection of contemporary reading culture: not just paragraphs and chapters but expressions...

An eclectic collection of fiction, essays, poetry, and graphic work selected by high school students with the help of New York Times best-selling author Edan Lepucki.  Over the past year, a group of high school students have held weekly discussions in the basement conference room of a publishing house in San Francisco. Tasked with finding the best, most revealing, honest, and astonishing writing of the last twelve months, they pored over hundreds...