by JULIET WATERS

Since the Best American series started out in 1915 with two annual collections of short stories and essays, it’s branched out to collect the best writing about everything from sports to travel. There’s Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Sex Writing and Best American Recipes all picked out every year by prestigious guest editors. While it’s comforting to know that you won’t be wasting your eyesight skimming through any excessively dull writing, there’s a certain complacency about having the “best” all picked out for you by the “best.”

So in 2002, the series decided to stir things up with Best American Nonrequired Reading. Edited chiefly by lit-geist guru Dave Eggers, guest editors are drawn every year from high school students at a non-profit writing, publishing and tutoring centre in San Francisco. As Eggers explains, the main criteria are that the writing be engaging, direct, about contemporary reality and “not too long or about the relationship problems of wealthy people in Manhattan.” Early editions have included work by queer teen prodigy Zoe Trope, comics by Lynda Barry, a high school memoir from David Sedaris and fake news from The Onion.

Even if the collection is aimed at readers from 15–25, it would be wrong to give the idea that the 2005 edition only includes writing that would only appeal to young readers.

There’s no way that Al Franken writing about his experience performing for the USO in Afghanistan and Iraq in “Tearaway Burkas and Tinplate Menorahs” was writing for high school students. Would many of them even know who he’s talking about when he describes a skit about Hussein as a take on Johnny Carson? At the same time, it’s easy to see why high school students would love this. He’s there essentially to diss the Bush administration, but he can’t escape the summer camp camaraderie that develops between him and some of the more right-wing country singers and mainstream TV celebrities. There’s a talent show joy to Franken’s experience, even when things gets dark. And the humour is hardly highbrow. (“Say, that Army chow isn’t sitting well with me. So far I’ve had five MREs [meals ready-to-eat] and none of them seem to have an exit strategy.”)

What distinguishes these stories are the visceral subjects or styles, even if more than a couple have characters who work in photocopying shops. A young man who was badly scared as a kid by his grandfather’s rottweiler manages to use pity as an easy way to get laid in Dan Chaon’s “Five Forgotten Instincts.” A young Bengali-American in Boston discovers that her mother almost set herself on fire over unrequited love in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven.” Stephen Elliot’s hilariously bitter piece, “My Little Brother Ruined My Life”(first published in Maisonneuve) would be worth reading just for his acidic description of young writers partying:

“Jackets are piled on the bed in the bedroom and people are lying on them or on the floor telling stories about losing their virginity. Everybody has an MFA so every story has a small inappropriate observation. ‘He put his hand between my legs at the movie theatre. I was wearing my mother’s skirt.’ ‘I was fifteen, she was nineteen. It was the day after my best friend committed suicide.’”

Jeff Gordiner’s “The Lost Boys” shows another horror of fundamentalist polygamous communities. While we hear a fair amount about adolescent girls who are forced into marriage, little is made of the life led by young boys who are often indiscriminately banished from these communities so that older men have no competition for teenage brides. With little education to begin with, and zero knowledge of popular culture, they’re thrown out in the world without a dab of the communal glue we use without thinking to bond with strangers.

Other Best American collections may include more challenging stories, or more deeply researched essays, but there’s an undeniable something about the reading material in this collection. It’s stuff that really sticks.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ed. Dave Eggers. Thomas Allen, Pb., 327. $27.50