The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Editors’ Note

  Introduction by Rachel Kushner

  Anthony Marra. The Grozny Tourist Bureau

  Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek. An Oral History of Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar

  Dana Spiotta. Jelly and Jack

  Sharon Lerner. The Teflon Toxin

  Michele Scott. How I Became a Prison Gardener

  Jesse Ball. The Gentlest Village

  Marilynn Robinson. An Interview with President Obama

  sam sax. Buena Vista Park, 2 a.m.

  Rebecca Makkai. The Miracle Years of Little Fork

  Gary Indiana. Death-Qualified

  Michael Pollan. The Trip Treatment

  Da’Shay Portis. Strong City

  Anna Kovatcheva. Sudba 1

  Inara Verzemnieks. Homer Dill’s Undead

  Kyle Boelte. Reluctant Citizens

  Mark Hitz. Shadehill

  Ariana Reines. Dream House

  Adrian Tomine. Killing and Dying

  Yuko Sakata. On This Side

  N. R. Kleinfield. The Lonely Death of George Bell

  David Wagoner. The Death of the Sky

  Molly Brodak. Bandit

  Jason Little. Borb

  Laurel Hunt. Last Poem for OE

  Kendra Fortmeyer. Things I Know to Be True

  Dan Hoy. Five Poems

  Xuan Juliana Wang. Algorithmic Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships

  Endnotes. Brown vs. Ferguson

  Contributors’ Notes

  The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

  Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2015

  About 826 National

  About ScholarMatch

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editor

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Rachel Kushner

  Editors’ Note copyright © 2016 by Daniel Gumbiner

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016

  ISSN: 1539-316X

  ISBN: 978-0-544-81211-6

  eISBN 978-0-544-81218-5

  v1.0916

  Cover illustration © Jillian Tamaki

  “The Gentlest Village” by Jesse Ball. First published in Granta. Chapter 1 from A Cure for Suicide: A Novel by Jesse Ball. Copyright © 2015 by Jesse Ball. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “Reluctant Citizens: A Juror’s Education” by Kyle Boelte. First published in ZYZZYVA. Copyright © 2015 by Kyle Boelte. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Bandit” by Molly Brodak. First published in Granta. Copyright © 2015 by Clegg Agency. Reprinted by permission of Clegg Agency.

  “Brown vs. Ferguson” by Endnotes (John Clegg and Robert Lucas). First published in Endnotes. Copyright © 2015 by Endnotes. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  “Things I Know To Be True” by Kendra Fortmeyer. First published in One Story. Copyright © 2015 by Kendra Fortmeyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Shadehill” by Mark Hitz. First published in Glimmer Train. Copyright © 2015 by Mark Hitz. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar’s narrative edited by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek. First published in Palestine Speaks. Copyright © 2015 by Voice of Witness. Reprinted by permission of Voice of Witness.

  “Miracle,” “The Baseline,” “Life,” “Waterfront,” and “Empire” by Dan Hoy. First published by Octopus Books in The Deathbed Editions. Copyright © 2015 by Dan Hoy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Last Poem for OE” by Laurel Hunt. First published in Salt Hill. Copyright © 2015 by Laurel Hunt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Death-Qualified” by Gary Indiana. First published in the London Review of Books. Copyright © 2015 by the London Review of Books. Reprinted by permission of the London Review of Books.

  “The Lonely Death of George Bell” by N. R. Kleinfield. First published in the New York Times, October 18, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “Subda 1” by Anna Kovatcheva. First published in the Iowa Review. Copyright © 2015 by Anna Kovatcheva. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Teflon Toxin” by Sharon Lerner. First published in The Intercept as the first part of a three-part series. Copyright © 2015 by Sharon Lerner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Borb” by Jason Little. First published by Uncivilized Books of Minneapolis. Copyright © 2015 by Uncivilized Books. Reprinted by permission of Uncivilized Books.

  “The Miracle Years of Little Fork,” from Music for Wartime: Stories. Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Makkai Freeman. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “The Grozny Tourist Bureau” by Anthony Marra. First published in Zoetrope. Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Marra. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Trip Treatment” by Michael Pollan. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Pollan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Strong City” by Da’Shay Portis. First published in Fourteen Hills. Copyright © 2015 by Da’Shay Portis. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dream House” by Ariana Reines. First published in Ramayana. Copyright © 2015 by Ariana Reines. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation” by Marilynne Robinson. First published in the New York Review of Books. Copyright © 2015 by Marilynne Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Marilynne Robinson.

  “On This Side” by Yuko Sakata. First published in the Iowa Review. Copyright © 2016 by Yuko Sakata. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “Buena Vista Park, 2 a.m.” by sam sax. First published in Fourteen Hills. Copyright © 2015 by sam sax. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “How I Became a Prison Gardener” by Michele Scott. First published in The Marshall Project. Copyright © 2015 by Michele Scott. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Jelly and Jack” by Dana Spiotta. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2016 by Dana Spiotta. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. from Innocents and Others; A Novel by Dana Spiotta. All rights reserved.

  “
Killing and Dying” by Adrian Tomine. First published in Killing and Dying. Copyright © 2015 by Adrian Tomine. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly.

  “Homer Dill’s Undead” by Inara Verzemnieks. First published in the Iowa Review. Copyright © 2015 by Inara Verzemnieks. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Death of the Sky” by David Wagoner. First published in the Harvard Review. Copyright © 2015 by David Wagoner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Algorithmic Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships” by Xuan Juliana Wang. First published in Ploughshares. Copyright © 2015 by Ploughshares. Reprinted by permission of Ploughshares.

  Editors’ Note

  THIS SPRING, the Best American Nonrequired Reading (BANR) committee was invited to watch its editor, the celebrated novelist Rachel Kushner, interview another celebrated novelist, Don DeLillo. We arrived way too early for the interview so we walked across the street, to a café called The Grove, where we ordered breakfast sandwiches, because all the normal sandwiches seemed too expensive. After this we walked over to the theater to retrieve our tickets at will call. Because our tickets were complementary, they had to be retrieved from a different pile. This made us feel sort of like celebrities and less like people who couldn’t afford a sandwich.

  The stage at the Nourse Theater was spare: just two chairs and a table with a bowl of apples. The theater itself was cavernous and full of people who like books.

  “Do you think they will eat any of the apples?” one of our committee members asked.

  “We will have to wait and see,” another committee member replied.

  They did not eat any of the apples. Mr. DeLillo discussed his latest novel, Zero K, as well as his past work. At one point, he told a story about the book Libra, his bestselling novel, which takes as its subject the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald. People often asked him, Mr. DeLillo explained, if he knew the book would be a bestseller. He always had a hard time responding honestly to this question, because he was afraid that no one would believe him if he told the truth. The truth was this:

  Throughout the whole process of writing the novel, Mr. DeLillo had kept a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald propped up on his writing desk and then, as he was typing the final sentence of the book, the picture began to slide off the shelf. Mr. DeLillo paused to catch the falling photo.

  “God damn it,” he said to himself. “It’s a bestseller.”

  For three years that photo had stayed propped up on his writing desk as he worked on the novel. It’s the type of story that is too perfect to believe, too poetic. We’re still not sure we believe it ourselves and yet, here we are, including it in our editors’ note. Why are we doing this? Because we want an opportunity to complain about the price of sandwiches at The Grove? Partially, yes. Like most sandwiches in San Francisco, they are much too expensive. Because we want to brag about the fact that we got to see Rachel Kushner interview Don DeLillo? This as well. It was a great interview. But mostly because Mr. DeLillo’s story speaks to something that our committee frequently discusses, and that is: What makes a story convincing?

  If you drew a graph that documented drama and credibility, it would show that drama increases as credibility decreases. Or at least many suspect it would. At the time of this printing, science is not yet advanced enough to produce such a graph. We have tried to draw several of these graphs ourselves and they never come out right. Somehow the lines always end up all squiggly and sideways. Once we ended up with a Venn diagram, which was useful to no one at all. The point is that things tend to be dramatic because they seem both fantastic and true, but when things become too fantastic, our brains decide that they are not credible, and then they cease to be very dramatic. Most of the time.

  The high school students on our committee come from all over the Bay Area. Some of them go to private school and some of them go to public school. Some are sophomores and others are seniors. Together, we meet on Monday nights at McSweeney’s Publishing in San Francisco to read through all of the magazines and literary journals published in a given year. During each meeting we discuss at least two texts that have been nominated for inclusion in the book. We talk about what they had to teach us and we explore their merits and deficiencies. In the end, after much deliberation, we select the work that gets published in this anthology.

  In this book you will find a modern history of the Black Lives Matter movement and a short story about Bulgaria. There will be poems and investigative journalism and an interview with our president. There will be one book review. We have selected these texts under the guidance of Rachel Kushner, our brilliant editor and a graduate of San Francisco public schools herself. Together, we have looked for texts that say something about what it means to be alive in 2016. We have tried to find work that moves us, work that is captivating and dynamic and honest. In many cases, we have asked ourselves: Is this work true to life? It’s often a difficult question to answer. Sometimes, highly fantastical things feel true to life. Other times, ostensibly realistic things don’t feel true at all. This is why the graph always gets messed up.

  Our committee in San Francisco is aided by another committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, who work out of a robot supply and repair shop. They are excellent readers and have provided us with a good deal of help, although we cannot speak to their ability to repair robots because, in the past year, we have not needed to repair any of our robots. Thank you to everyone on their committee. Thanks also to the great Ali Kucukgocmen, whose work was vital to the production of this book. We tip our caps to you, Ali. And, lastly, we would like to extend our thanks to you, amiable reader. We hope you enjoy the book and we’ll see you again next year. Same place, same time.

  DANIEL GUMBINER and the BANR Committee

  San Francisco, June 2016

  Introduction

  THEY SAID do you want to be the guest editor and I said what does it entail and they said not much because high school students actually pick the work. The student editors of the Best American Nonrequired Reading are mostly from San Francisco, and I immediately wanted to know where they go to school, which was a loaded question, because what I really wanted to know was if any attend public schools, as I did. “They are a mix,” Daniel Gumbiner, a former student-editor and now the grown up and very talented managing editor of the anthology, told me, “and so partly yes.”

  Two of BANR’s student editors, it turned out, were even enrolled at my own alma mater, George Washington, a large high school in the Richmond District that a reporter for Pacific News Service, in 1981, the year before I began attending, described as looking “like it has been hit by a series of bombs and nobody ever bothered to clean up the mess.” That is not how I remember it, though this reporter goes on to savor her descriptions of our trashed and garbage-strewn school, where she says the windows are all broken and the lockers graffitied and smashed. Maybe it was like that and I didn’t know any better, or maybe this reporter was sheltered and had never been to a big city high school and had to compensate for her fears with hyperbole. She conveniently didn’t mention the beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge, and she portrayed our race and ethnic diversity as a violent mish-mash of warring groups, rather than as something positive. “Almost as if out of the rubble,” she wrote, groups of teenagers emerged, “each with its own style of dressing, its music, drugs, cars, militant rhetoric—and weapons.” This, I’ll admit, was basically true (except for the militant rhetoric, unless she simply meant the puffed-up talk of teenagers who want to seem tough). Washington had a fully outfitted auto shop. Customizing cars was a major activity and indeed, the aesthetics hewed to race affiliation. She said we had race conflicts. Also true. It was a school of three thousand, a world where people of different racializations and ethnicities were forced to actually mix, to deal with one another, and the effect of that on the students was incredibly complicated, and also lasting.

  In the early 1980s, when I went there, Washington High School was about 10 perce
nt white, very few of whom were middle class. Now, Washington is almost 8 percent white. Middle class and more affluent whites in the city still send their kids to private school. When I went there, the school had twice the number of African-American students it does now, the drop mapping the decline in population of African-Americans in San Francisco, itself mapping the lack of affordable housing, and the skyrocketing cost of living there. San Francisco has changed a lot, as everyone knows: tech boom, rich people, housing crunch, Google bus—you’ve heard about it. One thing that hasn’t changed is a dramatic wealth disparity, which overlaps and interlinks with a race divide. Almost 80 percent of white students in San Francisco go to private school, while a higher overall percentage of students in San Francisco are enrolled in private school than in any other major city in America. The public school system has changed from the time when I was a student. Since 2001, when the city was legally mandated to no longer use race and ethnicity in efforts to desegregate, there is a “choice” lottery, instead of district schools. White students typically try for the same few schools, where they concentrate. And regardless of race, middle class kids have parents with time and resources to navigate the lottery. Students end up cordoned by class and race, just as they have all through the city’s various efforts at integration, starting in 1971, with mandatory busing. Despite several desegregation decrees over the last forty years, San Francisco is as far now, or possibly farther, from the objectives of Brown vs. the Board of Education as it was when the ruling was made, in 1954.

  You might say the situation I depict is similar everywhere in America, but I’m not from everywhere, I am from San Francisco, where the differences have always seemed extreme. I did not even realize how extreme until I went to college, across the Bay (in an era when a UC education was almost free). In college I met people who were from my city, but from worlds I had not known existed. My brother and one other friend were the only people I knew in high school who went to four-year colleges upon graduating, but I’ll confess that may have had something to do with my choice in friends, many of whom had already dropped out by the time I graduated. Those who didn’t, eventually transferred to schools like John O’Connell, where they could learn trades, or Independent Learning Center, where less than half graduated, or Downtown High, which was the last stop in the school district for students with disciplinary problems. What propelled me, unlike them, toward college is obvious: I had educated parents. We were living on their modest salaries as post-doctoral researchers in biology laboratories. They could never have afforded private school tuition, but class in this country is not determined merely by income. It reproduces itself in deeper and more insidious ways, and education is one of them. But also, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful English teacher at Washington, Mr. Williams, whose lectures on Moby Dick, on Hamlet, on The Great Gatsby I still remember in vivid detail. When my first novel came out, my mother tracked down Mr. Williams, by then retired, and invited him to a reading I gave. He was impressed I’d become a published novelist, said I was the only one, so far as he knew, of all his students over the thirty-something years he taught at Washington. But he also confessed that he had no recollection of me whatsoever, though he remembered my older brother quite well. This seems appropriate and fine: His purpose was to form and mold the students, and not the other way around. From what I hear, Washington is now a better school than it used to be. According to city data, 57 percent of its graduates go on to four-year colleges. I feel confident the English teachers there will have students who become published authors. And this year alone, they have two who have already become published editors.