Though the social content of blackness appears increasingly contradictory, it is equally clear that it retains a capacity to induce dynamic mobilizations in the American population. And in its tensions there still lies an unstable if unaffirmable moment, at the social root of racializing logics, where capitalist social relations are rotting into nothing, and where the most pressing problems of surplus humanity lie. If race could present itself as the solution to one compositional riddle, conjuring a new unity, that unity itself now issues in another compositional impasse: could black elites really identify with Baltimore’s marginalized poor once their rioting had set the city aflame? But now the ghetto has rediscovered its capacity to riot, and to force change by doing so, will other, larger components of America’s poor—white and latino—stand idly by?
Contributors’ Notes
Jesse Ball is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel How to Set a Fire and Why. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Kyle Boelte is the author of The Beautiful Unseen, a book about fading memory, his brother’s suicide, and San Francisco’s fog. His writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Orion Magazine, Full Stop, Adventure Journal, and High Country News. He lives on the West Coast.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night, winner of the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize, and three chapbooks of poetry. She held the 2011-2013 Poetry Fellowship at Emory University and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Endnotes is a journal of communist theory published by a discussion group of the same name based in Germany, the U.K., and the US.
Kendra Fortmeyer is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, a teen librarian, and the prose editor for Broad!, an all-women’s and trans writers’ literary magazine. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in One Story, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. She is the author of the chapbook The Girl Who Could Only Say sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2017.
Mark Hitz was born and raised in Idaho. He spent ten years recording sound for documentary and reality television, and was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, where he won the 2014 Keene Prize for Literature. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek began working together in 2001, while studying journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Their interest in human rights journalism began on a project in which they spent eight months interviewing undocumented Mexican immigrants about their daily lives. From 2009 until 2015, Cate lived in the West Bank, where she worked as an editor and taught English at Bethlehem University. She previously worked as a newspaper reporter, receiving multiple Colorado Press Association awards. Mateo holds a master’s degree from the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to his work in the Middle East, he has reported from the Amazon jungle and the Seychelles. His writing has received awards from the Overseas Press Club Foundation and the Knight Foundation, among others.
Dan Hoy is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including Omegachurch (Solar Luxuriance, 2010) and Glory Hole (Mal-O- Mar Editions, 2009). His work has been featured in Triple Canopy, Action Yes, Novembre Magazine, Jubilat, and other magazines and anthologies.
Laurel Hunt is an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Salt Hill; Diagram; and elsewhere.
Gary Indiana is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. He is the author of seven novels, including Do Everything in the Dark and The Shanghai Gesture, as well as several plays, collections of poetry and nonfiction, and essays in publications from Art in America to Vice. His most recent publication is the memoir I Can Give You Anything But Love.
N. R. “Sonny” Kleinfield is a reporter at the New York Times, where he is a member of the Metro department’s investigations and projects team. His story on the death of George Bell was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He has also received the Polk Award, the Meyer Berger Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, and has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine.
Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. Her novella, The White Swallow, was selected by Aimee Bender as the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Her stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review and the Iowa Review. She lives in New York City.
Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment for The Intercept. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and the Washington Post, among other publications, and has received awards from The Society for Environmental Journalists, The American Public Health Association, the Women and Politics Institute, and The Newswomen’s Club of New York.
Jason Little is the author of Borb, Shutterbug Follies, and Motel Art Improvement Service. His work-in-progess, The Vagina, is currently being serialized in the French magazine Aaarg! Jason teaches cartooning at the School of Visual Arts.
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the story collection Music for Wartime, as well as the novels The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. Her short fiction was featured in The Best American Short Stories anthology in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, and appears regularly in publications such as Harper’s, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers’ Conference, Northwestern University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. “The Grozny Tourist Bureau first appeared in Zoetrope, where it received the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Michael Pollan is author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, Food Rules, and, mostly recently, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. In 2010 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Bel-zer, and their son, Isaac.
Da’Shay Portis is completing her MFA at San Francisco State University.
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow, Coeur de Lion, Mercury, and the Obie-wining play Telephone. Her translations include Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun and The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal by Jean-Luc Hennig. Her artworks, performances, and collaborations appear internationally, including Mortal Kombat at the Whitney Museum and Pubic Space at Modern Art, London.
Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She is the author of Lila, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa Writers
’ Workshop for twenty-five years.
Yuko Sakata’s stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Zoetrope, the Iowa Review, and Vice. Born in New York, she grew up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and she has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently lives in Queens with her husband and young daughter.
sam sax is a 2015 NEA Fellow and finalist for The Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He’s a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where he serves as the editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and author of the chapbooks A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button Poetry, 2014), sad boy / detective (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and All The Rage (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). His poems are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award.
Michele Scott is a writer who gardens passionately, and is involved in many peer education, restorative justice, victim impact, and spiritual groups at the Central California Women’s Facility, where she is serving a life sentence without eligibility for parole.
Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Innocents and Others (2016), from which “Jelly and Jack" was excerpted; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; Eat the Document (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Lightning Field (2001). She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He is the writer/artist of the comic book series Optic Nerve, as well as the books Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Summer Blonde, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Shortcomings, and New York Drawings. His comics and illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review, and he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His most recent book, published by Drawn & Quarterly, is Killing and Dying.
Inara Verzemnieks teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, the Iowa Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Tin House. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and in her previous life as a daily newspaper reporter, she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Her first book, a memoir, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.
David Wagoner was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana. Before moving to Washington in 1954, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University, where he was a member of the Naval ROTC, and received an MA in English from Indiana University. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and he served as the editor of Poetry Northwest until its last issue in 2002. Known for his dedication to teaching, he was named a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
Xuan Juliana Wang was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her short stories been published by the Altantic, Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Gigantic, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Born in Jiamusi, China, she resides in New York City.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee
They say editing by committee never works, but they’ve never seen a committee like this. Below you will find the bios of the Best American Nonrequired Reading (BANR) committee. These students met on a weekly basis at McSweeney’s Publishing in San Francisco, California, to select the work that ended up in this book. They were aided by a group of students in Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose bios you will also find herewith.
Laura Burns is a freshman at Huron High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As the first bio, she would like to welcome you to the student bios section. Her favorite color is irrelevant, favorite place in the world is Austin, Texas, favorite beverage is a banana shake. Chai lattes come in as a close second.
Samantha Cho is 15 years old and a sophomore at Huron High School. She is on the field hockey team and plays violin in her school orchestra. In her free time, she enjoys writing and reading historical fiction, and walking her dog, whom she finds historically cute.
Emilia Fernández is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, who likes to read and sleep. In 20 years she sees herself writing novels in a cabin somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness, with several cats. And perhaps a domesticated wolf. She has not ruled out the possibility of wolf ownership.
Marcus Gee-Lim is a senior at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He almost got into a bike accident with a squirrel once. Now he looks both ways before crossing the street and avoids squirrels at all costs. They are utterly reckless creatures, in his estimation.
Emma Hardison is a junior at Oakland School of the Arts who took very long BART rides all year to help make this book. It was worth it. At strange times, she finds herself picturing the flying baby, the Rebecca Makkai story that is featured in this anthology. She is not sure why.
Sidney Hirschman is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. They enjoy singing songs, reading books, making miniatures, pining over robots, and wearing vogue night looks to the Sunday morning farmers’ market. This is their first year on the BANR committee.
Niki King Fredel is a freshman at New York University. She likes to take photos, read books, and listen to music. She wants to be taken seriously by other people but does not want to take herself seriously. She was formerly a student at Urban High School in San Francisco.
Sian Laing is a junior at Mission High School in San Francisco. If you need to summon Sian, simply mention the words “gymnastics” or “tea.” On occasion, someone says one of these words without realizing it will automatically summon Sian. This has resulted in several uncomfortable situations.
Zoe Olson is a junior at Mission High School and this was her first year on the committee. She lives in a house full of books with her family and her cat. One day she hopes to live in a house with even more books and twice the amount of cats and a similar amount of family.
Marco Ponce graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco this past spring. This was his fourth and final year on the committee. His motto is, and always has been: “In order to feel good you have to dress good.”
A junior at Jewish Community High School in San Francisco, Zola Rosenfeld enjoys musical theater and rock climbing. She has been known to leave a trail of broken hearts wherever she goes, but she has also been known to pick up their pieces. She is notably tidy.
Ben Schaedig is a freshman at Huron High School. In his free time, Ben enjoys reading, listening to music, and eating. Sometimes, when his time is extra free, he does all three of these things at the same time.
Isaac Schott-Rosenfield is a senior at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. Among other things, Isaac has forgotten where he wrote down the joke he was going to use for this bio. But he did write one down, he did. It’s bound to turn up sometime. These things always do.
Cynthia Van is a freshman at UC San Diego. She spent three years on the BANR committee, while she was a student at George Washington High School. Her interests include writing, engineering, and deer antlers, among other things. The antlers of a deer are actually considered to be more of a handicap than an advantage because of their nutritional demand. Is it just a style thing, in that case? Cynthia has wondered. This is all she can do: wonder.
Grace VanRenterghem graduated from Huron High School this past year. She was a member of the BANR committee for three years. The person below her is her identical twin. She enjoys having an identical twin.
Hadley VanRenterghem graduated from Ann Arbor Huron High School this past year. Like her sister, she worked on the BANR committee for three years. As far as she knows, she and Grace are the only identical twins in the history of BANR.
Annette Vergara-Tucker is a sophomore at Lick-Wilmerding High School. Most days, you will find her reading a book or spending way too much time with her best fri
end, Anna. As the last bio, she would like to thank you for taking the time to get to know the editors of this book. It makes her happy.
Very special thanks to Dave Eggers, Nicole Angeloro, Clara Sankey, Mark Robinson, and Jillian Tamaki. Thanks also to Adam Johnson, Daniel Handler, Mikayla McVey, Maura Reilly-Ulmanek, Elliott Eglash, Daniel Cesca, Belle Baxley, Helena Smith, Andi Winnette, Jordan Bass, Ruby Perez, Dan McKinley, Sunra Thompson, Elizabeth Hanley, Claire Boyle, Ted Gioia, Kristina Kearns, Chris Monks, Mimi Lok, Gerald Richards, Christina Perry, Kona Lai, Ashley Varady, Bita Nazarian, Jorge Garcia, María Inés Montes, Amy Popovitch, Ricardo Cruz, Kavitha Lotun, Jillian Wasick, Caroline Kangas, Molly Parent, Emma Peoples, Lauren Hall, Allyson Halpern, Amanda Loo, Alyssa Aninag, Olivia White Lopez, Jenesha de Rivera Diana Adamson, Selina Weiss, Monica Mendez, Piper Sutherland, Kate Bueler, Juliana Sloane, Rachael Reiley, Noel Ramírez, and Phyllis DeBlanche.
Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2015
FATIN ABBAS
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 Page 41