A selection of the best writing, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics, published in American periodicals during during 2012 aimed at readers fifteen and up.

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 of published poems, stories, comics, and essays. With the help of guest editor Edan Lepucki, they selected the contents of this anthology, a collection of work they feel looks a lot like 2019. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 features comics about war and butts and stories about pizza-delivery women, family, dolls giving birth, anthropomorphic lakes, and more. It was a successful year. Read on to see for yourself. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 includes Viet Thanh...

Sheila Heti, author of the acclaimed How a Person Should Be? and coeditor of the best-selling anthology Women in Clothes, along with the students of 826 Valencia writing lab will edit this year's anthology. Their compilation includes new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and the 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 writing in this book is very essential, if not required, like visiting the Louvre if you're in Paris. In any case, nothing in this book takes place in Paris, as far as we can recall, but it does feature an elephant hunt, the fall of a reality-TV star, a walk through Ethiopia, and much more of what Johnson calls "the most important examinations in life." The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 includes LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH, DANIEL ALARCÓN, BOX BROWN, REBECCA CURTIS, VICTOR LODATO,...

In a small but comfortable conference room, in a publishing house in San Francisco, a group of high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. They had some good times. There was a whiteboard in the conference room, and often cartoons were drawn on this whiteboard. The cartoons were of varying quality. By the end of the year, with the help of a similar committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, and their guest editor, Rachel Kushner, they selected the contents of this anthology. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 features stories about Bulgarian spaceships, psychedelic mushroom therapy, and a cyclorama in Iowa. If you don't know what a cyclorama is, you aren't alone. Read on to find out.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 includes N. R. KLEINFIELD, ANNA KOVATCHEVA, DAN HOY, ANTHONY MARRA, MICHAEL POLLAN, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, DANA SPIOTTA, ADRIAN TOMINE, INARA...

"A gift . . . One wonders how the world might be different if works in The Best American Nonrequired Reading were indeed required." —USA Today Sarah Vowell, author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States and other best-selling titles "gilded with snark, buoyant on charm" (NPR), worked with the students of the 826 Valencia writing lab to edit this year's anthology. They compiled new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and the category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.

An eclectic volume introduced by Guillermo del Toro and compiled by Dave Eggers and students of his San Francisco writing center, who don't leave a stone unturned in their search for nonrequired gems.

"Lively, eclectic and surprising." — Minneapolis Star Tribune Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the enormously popular young adult series A Series of Unfortunate Events, takes over as editor for this volume. He will work with the students of 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs to compile new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and other category-defying gems, ensuring that "if you need to fall in love with reading again — or just want a reminder that high school students deserve a lot more than their reading lists give them — then this is the book for you" (Bust).