The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

By Adam Johnson and 826 National

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, CLAUDIA RANKINE, PAUL SALOPEK, PAUL TOUGH, WELLS TOWER 
and others 
Adam Johnson, guest editor, teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of Fortune Smiles, Emporium, Parasites Likes Us, and The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, GQ, the Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, the New York Times, and The Best American Short Stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780544579293

Reviews for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

[paul9the9well9read · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The high school students at 826 National always do a wonderful job of compiling terrific readings for this annual collection. The 2015 collection is every bit as wonderful as the ones which preceded it and contain something for every reader. Not every story appealed to me, but all were excellently written and worthy selections for this annual anthology which I look forward to reading every year.

[jbd1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think I'm probably done with this series now. Well Tower's "Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?" is well written but pretty hard to read; other than that, the selections this time were pretty skippable.

[eowynfaramir · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I looked forward to reading this anthology, but I was somewhat disappointed. Granted, I am older than the high school students who comprise the team of editors who made the selections, and I think that was important. There is one awesome very short piece by Claudia Rankine titled "You are in the dark, in the car..." (page 139), which I am going to scan. I need to follow up on this author. Great piece. There is also a nice group of four poems by TJ Jarrett which I want to scan as well. "The world we knew favored speed or steel. Or both. We could run when they took up arms or we could square the body against the pain we each would know." That is excellent: "square the body against the pain we each would know." Other than those two pieces, I found that I stopped reading each piece after a certain point, saying to myself, "Oh, well, that's enough of that." I am going to try other years of the series just to get a broader view. I appreciate the long-term commitment that the students make to the process of reading magazines and journals over the course of a year.