the best american

NONREQUIRED
READING ™
2010
■

e d ite d by

DAVE EGGERS
introduction by

DAVID SEDARIS

managing editor

JESSE NATHAN

a mariner original
houghton mifflin harcourt
■
boston new york
2010
Copyright © 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2010 by David Sedaris

all rights reserved

The Best American Series is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub-
lishing Company. The Best American Nonrequired Reading is a trademark of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Per-
missions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

issn: 1539-316x
isbn: 978-0-547-24163-0

Printed in the United States of America

doc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

“This Is Just to Say” (excerpt of 4 lines) by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Po-
ems: Volume I, 1909-1939. Copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing.
“Those Winter Sundays.” Copyright © 1996 by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of
Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liv-
eright Publishing Corporation.
“I Am Sorry that I Didn’t Write a Comedy Piece” by Wendy Molyneux. First published at
www.therumpus.net as part of the “Funny Women” series. Copyright © 2009 by Wendy
Molyneux. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Note from Stephen Colbert” by Stephen Colbert. First published in Newsweek on June
15, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Newsweek, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Newsweek.
Six-Word memoirs copyright © 2009 by the authors. Reprinted by permission of Smith
Magazine.
“Best American Letter to the Editor” by Nazlee Radboy. First published in Bidoun. Copy-
right © 2009 by Nazlee Radboy. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Overqualified Cover Letters” by Joey Comeau. First published in Overqualified. Copyright
© 2009 by Joey Comeau. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Trail” by Barry Lopez. First published in Orion. Copyright © 2009 by Barry Lopez.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Best American Illustrated Missed Connections” by Sophie Blackall. First published at
www.missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com. Copyright © 2009 by Sophie Blackall. Reprinted
by permission of the artist.
“Best American Poems Written in the Last Decade by Soldiers and Citizens in Iraq and
Afghanistan” by Salam Dawai, Soheil Najm, Khadijah Queen, Brian Turner, Haider Al-
Kabi, Sadek Mohammed, Abdul-Zahra Zeki, and Sabah Khattab. Certain of these poems
first appeared in Flowers of Flame, Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to
Iraq, Phantom Noise, and the Northwest Review. Copyright © 2009, 2010 by the authors. Re-
printed by permission of the authors, Kore Press, and/or Alice James Books.
 “War Dances” from War Dances by Sherman Alexie. First published in The New Yorker.
Copyright © 2009 by Sherman Alexie. Reprinted by permission of the author and Grove/
Atlantic, Inc.
“Like I Was Jesus” by Rachel Aviv. First published in Harper’s Magazine. Copyright ©
2009 by Rachel Aviv. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Burying Jeremy Green” by Nora Bonner. First published in Shenandoah. Copyright ©
2009 by Nora Bonner. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Carnival” by Lilli Carré. First published in MOME. Copyright © 2009 by Lilli Carré.
Reprinted by permission of the artist.
“Capital Gains” by Rana Dasgupta. First published in Granta. Copyright © 2009 by Rana
Dasgupta. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Encirclement” by Tamas Dobozy. First published in Granta. Copyright © 2009 by
Tamas Dobozy. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Man of Steel” by Bryan Furuness. First published in Ninth Letter. Copyright © 2009 by
Bryan Furuness. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Half Beat” by Elizabeth Gonzalez. First published in The Greensboro Review. Copyright ©
2009 by Elizabeth Gonzalez. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Gentlemen, Start Your Engines” by Andrew Sean Greer. First published in the San Fran-
cisco Panorama. Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Sean Greer. Reprinted by permission of the
author and McSweeney’s.
Excerpt from The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemer-
cier. English language translation by Alexis Siegel. English language translation copyright
© 2009 by First Second. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
“What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” by Etgar Keret, translated by Nathan Eng-
lander. First published in Tin House. Copyright © 2009 by Etgar Keret and Nathan Eng-
lander. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.
“Fed to the Streets” by Courtney Moreno. First published in L.A. Weekly as “Help Is on the
Way.” Copyright © 2009 by Courtney Moreno. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Tiger’s Wife” by Téa Obreht. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2009 by
Téa Obreht. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Breakdown” by T. Ott. First published in MOME. Copyright © 2009 by T. Ott. Reprinted
by permission of the artist.
“Ideas” by Patricio Pron, translated by Mara Faye Lethem. First published in The Paris Re-
view. Copyright © 2009 by Patricio Pron and Mara Faye Lethem. Reprinted by permission
of the author and the translator.
“Vanish” by Evan Ratliff. First published in Wired. Copyright © 2009 by Evan Ratliff. Re-
printed by permission of the author.
“Seven Months, Ten Days in Captivity” by David Rohde. First published in the New York
Times. Copyright © 2009 by David Rohde and the New York Times. Reprinted by permission
of the author and the New York Times.
“Tent City, U.S.A.” by George Saunders. First published in GQ. Copyright © 2009 by
George Saunders. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Nice Little People” from Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Von-
negut. Published in Zoetrope: All-Story. Copyright © 2009 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Trust. Re-
printed by permission of Delacorte Press, an imprint of the Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
“Freedom” by Amy Waldman. First published in Boston Review. Copyright © 2009 by Amy
Waldman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
 contents

Editor’s Note xi
■

Introduction by David Sedaris ■

xv

I
Best American Woman Comedy Piece Written by a Woman ■
3
from www.therumpus.net, Wendy Molyneux

Best American Sentences on Page 50 of Books Published in

2009 5 ■

Best American Magazine Letters Section ■

8
from Newsweek, Stephen Colbert

Best American Fast-Food-Related Crimes ■

10
Best American Gun Magazine Headlines ■
11
Best American Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak ■
13
from Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak

Best American New Patents ■

14
from United States Patent and Trademark Office

Best American Tweets ■

16
from www.twitter.com
Contents / vii

Best American Letter to the Editor ■

17
from Bidoun

Best American Overqualified Cover Letters ■

18
from Overqualified, Joey Comeau

Best American Fictional Character Names ■

22
Best American 350-Word Story ■
23
from Orion, Barry Lopez

Best American Farm Names ■

24
Best American First Lines of Poems Published in 2009 ■
26
Best American Journal Article Titles Published in 2009 ■
28
Best American Illustrated Missed Connections ■
29
from www.missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com, Sophie Blackall

Best American New Band Names ■

37
Best American Lawsuits ■
38
Best American Poems Written in the Last Decade or So by Soldiers
and Citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan 40 ■

II
Sherman Alexie. war dances ■
49
from War Dances

Rachel Aviv. like i was jesus ■

75
from Harper’s Magazine

Nora Bonner. burying jeremy green ■

95
from Shenandoah

Lilli Carré. the carnival ■

104
from MOME

Rana Dasgupta. capital gains ■

137
from Granta
Contents / viii

Tamas Dobozy. the encirclement ■

165
from Granta

Bryan Furuness. man of steel ■

180
from Ninth Letter

Elizabeth Gonzalez. half beat ■

198
from The Greensboro Review

Andrew Sean Greer. gentlemen, start your engines ■

213
from San Francisco Panorama

Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier.

the photographer 238 ■

from The Photographer, translated from French by Alexis Siegel

Etgar Keret. what, of this goldfish, would you

wish? 262■

from Tin House, translated from Hebrew by Nathan Englander

Courtney Moreno. fed to the streets ■

268
from L.A. Weekly

Téa Obreht. the tiger’s wife ■

287
from The New Yorker

T. Ott. breakdown ■
308
from MOME

Patricio Pron. ideas ■

316
from The Paris Review, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem

Evan Ratliff. vanish ■

323
from Wired

David Rohde. seven months, ten days in captivity ■

345
from New York Times

George Saunders. tent city, u.s.a. ■

395
from GQ

Kurt Vonnegut. the nice little people ■

431
from Zoetrope: All-Story
Contents / ix

Amy Waldman. freedom ■

439
from Boston Review

Contributors’ Notes 456■

The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee ■

463
Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2009 472 ■

About 826 National 479 ■

 editor’s note

forgive me if you already know this, but this collection is

assembled every year with the assistance of two groups of high school
students — one from the San Francisco Bay Area, and one from the
Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas of mid to lower Michigan.
I run the class that meets in San Francisco, so I’ll describe what
happens there (I can’t speak for Michigan, but I expect they would
use more candles and smoke machines). Once a week, we meet in
the basement of McSweeney’s, a small publishing company in the
Mission District of San Francisco. Some of the students take the sub-
way and get off at the 16th and Mission stop. Some take the bus;
some get rides from their parents. And a few are lucky enough to
have a vehicle of their own. In any case, they travel up to an hour,
each way, to sit around and talk about contemporary literature.
In this basement, we have a bunch of couches, chairs, and even a
beanbag (which no one uses because beanbags should never have been
manufactured, as they are an affront to all that is holy). The students
feel good in this basement, in large part because the space is dingy,
ill kept, and smells of laundry that needs washing but can’t be found.
When they arrive, the students first look through the mail. Every week
we get about twenty new literary journals, magazines, self-published
zines, comics, and various other periodicals. The students read these
periodicals, looking for stories that hit them in the gut. They pick up
Editor’s Note / xii

the Kenyon Review or Tin House looking to be wowed. When the wow
happens, the student gives that story or essay or whatever it is to our
managing editor, Jesse Nathan — who is, it should be said, a Jewish
Mennonite (really!) from Kansas — and he makes copies for the
whole class so we can read and discuss.
Sometimes the discussions are spirited, sometimes not so much,
sometimes too much so. Sometimes no one can understand what the
hell the student first saw in the story. Other times the class splits, lit-
erally in two. This year was especially interesting, given that we had
two very vocal members, Tenaya Nasser-Frederick and Will Gray, who
often ended up on opposite sides of the room and of opinion. They
would bark back and forth at each other — respectfully, it should be
said — and then, at the end, Will would have the final say. His final
say sounded something like, “Well, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong and
I’m right and I think this discussion is over.” This is how he got the
nickname “The Hammer.” (More about the Hammer, and all of the
students from the Bay Area and Michigan, is available in the back of
the book, starting on page 463. )
But no matter what the selection process is, it’s always astound-
ingly subjective. We have no scientific method, no spreadsheets
or checks and balances. We have only bins that say Yes and No and
Maybe. When we get close to having enough Yeses to make a book,
we put copies of all the selections on a Ping-Pong table in the base-
ment. This is not a joke. We put all the yeses on one side of the net,
and then we look at each story, and when we’re absolutely sure that
that Yes is a Yes, and should be printed in these pages, then we “move
it over” — meaning we actually move it over the net — into the Definite
Yes area. That is the most official and scientific part of the process,
that jumping of the net.
Each year we try to strike many balances simultaneously. We try to
strike a balance between fiction, nonfiction, comics, and other forms.
Most of all, we try to strike a balance between end-of-the-world sce-
narios and coming-of-age stories. These two topics, it turns out, con-
stitute about eighty percent of what we read in a given year, and we’ve
decided that a few examples of each are enough.
Next we choose a cover artist and an introducer. Every year we
start with a long list, which invariably includes Dave Chapelle and
Editor’s Note / xiii

Oprah Winfrey, neither of whom are likely to see a letter we might

write them. So we begin to think of people we might be able to get a
letter close to, and this year the students overwhelmingly chose Mau-
rice Sendak to provide the cover art. He opened up his sketchbooks,
and suggested a page of drawings that formed a narrative about a girl
who is almost eaten by her television set. We agreed that this was
perfect for the collection, and we thank him heartily for being gen-
erous, for being kind, and for having great mischievous eyes and a
mouth unable to tell lies.
We’d also like to thank David Sedaris, who is pretty much a saint
for all he’s done for the organization known as 826. As you might
know, the proceeds from this book go toward 826 National, which
helps support a network of independently operated writing and tu-
toring centers around the country. At the 826 centers, the work we
do serves kids ages six to eighteen, and runs the gamut from helping
English language learners with basic reading and writing skills to ad-
vanced publishing projects with high schoolers.
One of the ways we raise money for the programs is by asking
well-known authors like Mr. Sedaris to edit books and donate the pro-
ceeds to 826. The first such book was edited by Michael Chabon (who,
with his spouse, the writer Ayelet Waldman, has supported 826 in a
thousand ways from the start). Chabon edited a book called Thrill-
ing Tales, which extolled the virtues of so-called genre writing, and
encouraged contemporary writers to explore the western, the mys-
tery, the horror story, and sci-fi. The sales of Thrilling Tales paid the
rent on our San Francisco building for a full year. Talk about the
power of the written word!
So, after that, we embarked on a program of publishing at least
one of these “benefit books” a year. For the second “benefit book,”
we thought, Who could follow Michael Chabon? Who has that kind
of genius and generosity? And we thought of David Sedaris. And did
Sedaris hesitate? We don’t know. He was living in France at the time,
and we could not see his behavior while he was deciding. But he
didn’t seem to have hesitated. He said yes and picked his favorite short
stories for a collection that became Children Playing Before a Statue of
Hercules. That book paid the rent on the building for another year,
and our faith in the power of publishing was again renewed.
Editor’s Note / xiv

So when the Best American Nonrequired Reading group chooses

an introducer, every year — in addition to Oprah Winfrey and Dave
Chapelle — the students invariably suggest David Sedaris. But be-
cause he’d done that above-named collection, we’ve always given him
a break. But this time, after five or so years of giving him a break,
I allowed the students to go ahead and ask Mr. Sedaris to write the
intro, and they did so by sending him this photo:

How could anyone say no to a photo like that? The answer is that
no one can. And Sedaris did not say no. He wrote a very edifying
intro, different from virtually anything he’s written before, and for
this we’re endlessly thankful. We’re also thankful that you picked
up this book, and we hope you like the selections. This year, maybe
more than ever before, we really went eclectic, and we think we have
a fantastically diverse and challenging group of stories that some-
how, improbably, cohere around what it’s like to be alive right now, in
2010 — as opposed to 1822, which would have been far dustier.

— D. E.
 introduction
Who Ate the Plums?

the year after my mother died, I was presented with a box.

In it were letters I’d sent from summer camp (“I’ll pay you to come
and get me”) and from my first year at college (“I swear I’ll pay you
to come and get me”). There were other things in there as well, and
though I thought I would plow right through them, the task proved
too depressing. The box went into storage in New York, and when
my boyfriend, Hugh, and I moved to France, I had it shipped to Nor-
mandy, where it sat on a shelf in the room I use as an office. It was
only recently that I reopened it. The letters were there, and, beneath
them, a mildewed envelope with my name on it. The handwriting
was my mother’s, and inside, amongst the report cards and vaccina-
tion certificates, I found two poems I had written in the fifth grade.
You, I thought.
Like most children, I wrote a lot in elementary school: articles on
whales, essays praising presidents and Thanksgiving, all of them for-
gotten, and for good reason. These poems, however, had stuck with
me, haunted me for over forty years. The first one is titled, “Will We
Ever Find Peace?”

If man will ever find peace is a question to behold

Will we ever stop finding soldier’s bodies dead and cold?
I think that I would rather die while sleeping in my bed
Than die in Vietnam, a bullet through my head
Introduction / xvi

The men who come out of war I think can surely tell
That General Sherman was right when he said that war is hell.

Because I was only twelve, I think I can forgive myself the sloppy me-
ter. What I can’t forgive, regardless of my age, is the self righteous
tone, and the demand to be taken seriously. “I think that I would
rather die while sleeping in my bed / Than die in Vietnam, a bullet
through my head.”
Oh, really. How perfectly odd of you. Because the rest of us would love
to spend our last few hours in an unforgiving jungle, far from friends and
family, being stabbed and shot at by people in pointed sun hats who put
peanut butter on chicken.
And quoting General Sherman?
I got an A-minus on my first poem, and a note from the
teacher — “Good Work!” — written in the margins of my second,
which was titled, simply, “War.”
You find some bit of creative writing you did in the fifth grade,
and hope it will tell you something about your life: Here is a fight I
had with my best friend. This is what it smells like when you lay your
mother’s pocketbook on the grill. For a while I thought that these po-
ems told me nothing. Then I realized that they did — it just wasn’t
something I wanted to be reminded of. Behind their clumsiness,
they tell me who I wanted to be — not my petty, self-absorbed self,
but society’s conscience, the justice seeker who opens your eyes to
the suffering that’s all around you.
I don’t know what drove my mother to hang on to those poems.
Perhaps she saw them as evidence of a change, seeds of the person
I would hopefully grow up to become. When I found them in her
dresser drawer the summer after the sixth grade, and tried to throw
them away, she grabbed them out of my hands.
“But they’re awful,” I told her.
“Maybe so, but they’re mine,” she said.
I figured she’d put them in one of three hiding places, spots my
parents thought of as safe, but that my sisters and I had been raiding
since we were old enough to walk: the crawl space above the car port,
for instance. That was like the hidden tomb in a mummy movie, the
Introduction / xvii

sort of place that should have been marked with carvings: the head of
a bird, a cane with thorns on it, three laughing skulls turned toward
the wind, symbols that, when translated, spelled “Do not enter here
unless you wish to be changed forever.”
We found unspeakable things in that crawl space. Things that took
our childlike innocence, and, in the time it took to focus a flashlight,
obliterated it. There were the lesser hiding places as well, lockups for
confiscated machetes and homemade battle axes. My mother must
have carried the poems upon her person, secured, maybe, in some
sort of girdle as I looked everywhere, and I mean everywhere for them,
with no success.

In time I lost my ability to quote from “Will We Ever Find Peace,” but
never was it or “War” forgotten. The disdain I felt toward my own
poems affected the whole genre, the only exception being limericks,
which are basically dirty jokes that rhyme. The other kinds of poetry,
the kind written entirely in lower case letters, or the kind where a sin-
gle sentence is broken into eight different lines, I find confounding. I
think I was out sick the day we learned to read them, and it never oc-
curred to me that I could catch up, or, heaven forbid, teach myself.
In William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say,” for instance, do
you begin with “I have eaten” and then wait a while before moving
onto “the plums”?
Should an equal amount of time pass before “that were in” and
“the icebox”?
If not, why not just put it all on the same line? I have eaten the
plums that were in the icebox.
I get the idea that poets are paid, not by the word, but by how
much space they take up.

How
else
to
explain
it
?
Introduction / xviii

It’s easy to believe when looking at such things that parts of them
are missing, that words and commas got erased or were blown away,
like one of those church signs after a strong wind. The bits that are
left function as clues, the poem itself not a story, but a problem,
something to be sweated over and solved. Why not make things eas-
ier and just say what you mean? Why be all, well, poetical about it?
It’s the way a lot of people view contemporary art — as if it’s be-
yond them, as if, without the references and countless inside jokes,
they can’t possibly get a foothold. I’ve found, though, that if you relax,
you can pretty much tell what, say, a Robert Gober sculpture is about.
This is something I learned in art school. A slide would be shown of
a crazy looking installation and after feeling stupid and intimidated,
I’d actually look at the thing. A few minutes later the teacher would
offer an interpretation, and I’d find that I had gotten it after all, that a
piece of art, much like a short story, could be read. The key was to not
be uptight about it, to enjoy the attempt. To surrender.
I only recently realized that the same approach could be applied to
poetry. What enlightened me was a podcast in which the host and a
guest listen to a poem, and then proceed to talk about it. Before going
further, I need to identify myself as an audiophile. There are those
who dismiss the idea of listening to literature, who feel that it doesn’t
count the way that reading does. And it’s true that they’re different
sensations.
When sitting on the sofa and reading with my eyes, I enter the
world of the book. When listening, on the other hand, the book comes
into my world, the place where I iron clothes, defrost the freezer, and
break up firewood with an ax. I started with audio in the early nine-
ties, back when the titles were recorded onto cassettes. Then I moved
on to CDs and, eventually, to the MP3 player, which lead me, in turn,
to podcasts, and one in particular called Poetry Off the Shelf.
I originally downloaded it thinking, not of myself, but of Hugh’s
mother, who likes serious things. I was going to force her to sit in a
chair with my iPod on, but then I ran out of books to listen to. Com-
pany was coming, I had a day’s worth of house work ahead of me, so
I thought, What the hell.
The first podcast that I listened to featured the late James Schuyler
reading “Korean Mums.” I don’t know when he recorded it, but his
Introduction / xix

voice was old-sounding, and he read the way one might read an item
from the paper. This is to say that he was steady but not overly dra-
matic. After listening to him twice, I listened to a short analysis of-
fered by the podcast’s host, and the week’s special guest. A few small
references went over my head, but otherwise, I seem to have gotten
everything. Equally surprising is that it never felt like work, that it
was, in every sense of the word, a pleasure.
In the next podcast, I discovered Robert Hayden, who died in
1980, and who wore glasses with superthick lenses. This might seem
beside the point, but I liked the fact that he was not in any way fash-
ionable-looking — was, in fact, quite nerdy. The poem they featured
was about his father, who’d busted his ass to get up early and warm
the house while everyone else was in bed. The poet never thanked
him for it — treated him, from the sounds of it, pretty poorly. Now he
looks back, and ends with the following lines:

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The poem says eloquently in five cut-up lines what I have been try-
ing to say my whole life.
Why don’t poets just come out with it?
Uh, actually, I think they do.
From Robert Hayden I moved to Philip Larkin, then to Fanny
Howe and Robert Lowell. The more I’m exposed to, the more en-
raptured I become, the world feeling both bigger and smaller at the
same time. Poetry, I think. Where has it been all my life! I said to Hugh,
“I feel like I’ve discovered a whole new variety of meat.

And
it’s
free!”

David Sedaris