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 ofThe Best American Nonrequired Reading2015.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 2015includes
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH, DANIEL ALARCON, 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 ofFortune Smiles, Emporium, Parasites Likes Us, andThe 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 inEsquire, Harper s Magazine, Playboy, GQ, theParis Review, Granta, Tin House, theNew York Times, andTheBest American Short Stories.
"