The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Editors’ Note

  Introduction

  TEJU COLE ■ Fable

  ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS ■ One Person Means Alone

  LOUISE ERDRICH ■ How to Stop a Black Snake

  SMITH HENDERSON ■ The Trouble

  MEAGAN DAY ■ Excerpt from Maximum Sunlight

  SIMON PARKIN ■ So Subtle a Catch

  ANNA WIENER ■ Uncanny Valley

  ANDREW SULLIVAN ■ I Used to Be a Human Being

  VIET DINH ■ Lucky Dragon

  KIMA JONES ■ Homegoing, AD

  MASHA GESSEN ■ Autocracy: Rules for Survival

  TA-NEHISI COATES ■ My President Was Black

  TOMMY PICO ■ Excerpt from Nature Poem

  BENJAMIN NUGENT ■ Hell

  SONNY LIEW ■ The Most Terrible Time of My Life

  IVAN CHISTYAKOV ■ The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

  SHEILA HETI ■ A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante

  MARK POLANZAK ■ Giant

  MELISSA RAGSLY ■ Tattoo

  MIRIAM TOEWS ■ Peace Shall Destroy Many

  DAVID KAISER AND LEE WASSERMAN ■ The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil

  WILLIAM PANNAPACKER ■ Selected Tweets from @WernerTwertzog

  LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA ■ You’ll Be Back

  JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR ■ Excerpt from Utah, Petitioner v. Edward Joseph Strieff Jr.

  CHRISTINE RHEIN ■ “Woman Fries and Eats Pet Goldfish After Fight With Husband”

  CASEY JARMAN ■ An Oral History of Gabriel DePiero

  CHEN CHEN ■ I am reminded via email to submit my preferences for the schedule

  GEORGE SAUNDERS ■ Who Are All These Trump Supporters?

  Contributor’s Notes

  The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

  The Nonrequired 2016 Election Appendix

  Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2016

  About 826 National

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Sarah Vowell

  Editors’ Note copyright © 2017 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 make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 1539-316X (print) ISSN 2573-3923 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-1-328-66380-1 (print) ISBN 978-1-328-66407-5 (e-book)

  Cover illustration and design © Kenard Pak

  v1.0817

  “I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule” by Chen Chen. First published by Poets.org. Copyright © 2016 by Chen Chen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard” by Ivan Chistyakov. First published by Granta. Copyright © 2016 by Granta and Pegasus Books. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

  “My President Was Black” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Copyright © the Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by the Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

  “Fable” by Teju Cole. First published in The New Inquiry. Copyright © 2016 by Teju Cole. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “Maximum Sunlight” by Meagan Day. First published by Wolfman Books. Copyright © 2016 by Meagan Day. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lucky Dragon” by Viet Dinh. First published in Ploughshares. Copyright © 2016 by Viet Dinh. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “How to Stop a Black Snake” by Louise Erdrich. First published in the New York Times. Copyright © 2016 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” by Masha Gessen. First published in the New York Review of Books Daily. Copyright © 2016 by Masha Gessen. Reprinted by permission of the New York Review of Books.

  “The Trouble” by Smith Henderson. First published in American Short Fiction. Copyright © 2016 by Smith Henderson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante” by Sheila Heti. First published in Brick. Copyright © 2016 by Sheila Heti Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “An Oral History of Gabriel DePiero” by Casey Jarman. First published in Death: An Oral History. Copyright © 2016 by Zest Books. Reprinted by permission of Zest Books.

  “Homegoing, AD” by Kima Jones. First published in The Fire This Time. Copyright © 2016 by Kima Jones. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil” by David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman. First published in the New York Review of Books Daily. Copyright © 2016 by David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman. Reprinted by permission of the New York Review of Books.

  “The Most Terrible Time of My Life” by Sonny Liew. First published in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Pantheon. Copyright © 2016 by Sonny Liew. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton. Words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Copyright © 2015 by 5000 Broadway Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  “Hell” by Benjamin Nugent. First published in Vice. Copyright © 2016 by Benjamin Nugent. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Selected tweets from @WernerTwertzog” by William Pannapacker. First published on Twitter.com. Copyright © 2016 by William Pannapacker. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “So Subtle a Catch” by Simon Parkin. First published in Harper’s Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Simon Parkin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Nature Poem” by Tommy Pico. First published in Tin House. Copyright © 2016 by Tommy Pico. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Giant” by Marc Polanzak. First published by the Southern Review. Copyright © 2016 by Marc Polanzak. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Tattoo” by Melissa Ragsly. First published in Epiphany. Copyright © 2016 by Melissa Ragsly. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “‘Woman Fries and Eats Pet Goldfish After Fight with Husband’” by Christine Rhein. First published in the Southern Review. Copyright © 2016 by Christine Rhein. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “One Person Means Alone” by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. First published in the Missouri Review. Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. Reprinted by permission of the author.
r />   “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” by George Saunders. First published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2016 by George Saunders. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Utah, Petitioner v. Edward Joseph Strieff, Jr.” by Sonia Sotomayor. First published on supremecourt.gov.

  “I Used to Be a Human Being” by Andrew Sullivan. First published in New York Magazine. Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Sullivan. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “Peace Shall Destroy Many” by Miriam Toews. First published in Granta. Copyright © 2016 by Miriam Toews. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener. First published in n+1. Copyright © 2016 by Anna Wiener. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Editors’ Note

  AS AMERICANS ALIVE IN 2017, we have more access to information than any people in the history of humankind and yet, it seems more difficult than ever for us to arrive at a consensus about what is true. It is even more difficult to determine what is right and ethical. This year has been one of confusion, disorder, and disagreement. Our good ship appears to be drifting somewhere, but we are not looking at the same maps, cannot agree on the direction of the prevailing winds, and several of us claim to have scurvy while others dispute the existence of scurvy and believe it is a hoax invented by the Chinese. How did we get here? And how do we chart our course forward?

  This book is, and always has been, edited by a committee of high school students. They come from all over the Bay Area and range in age and they meet every Monday in the basement of McSweeney’s Publishing, where they read and discuss contemporary literature. They are aided by a guest editor—this year, the inimitable Sarah Vowell—who visits the class several times a year and, in the interim, recommends many of the pieces that the students read in class. As managing editor of the collection, I help guide our conversations on a week-to-week basis, but my guidance is light and our conversations are largely unstructured and unplanned. The point is to have the students converse and debate, to create a space where they are allowed to explore a piece of writing on their own terms.

  At the end of the year, after reading through hundreds of pieces, we must select the two dozen or so works that end up in this collection. This is not easy. The students, myself, and Sarah all have differing opinions about what deserves to be included. But we must find common ground, or the book will never get finished. So we huddle around our oblong editorial table and we hash it out. Imagine the Iowa caucuses but with even more shouting. Like all democratic processes, it is messy and imperfect, but in the end, we find a satisfactory common ground. I can think of no better training for the work of citizenship, and at a time when the adults of the world seem incapable of compromising, it is refreshing to watch these brilliant teenagers negotiate, confer, advocate, and ultimately arrive at a consensus.

  The resulting product is, I think, much richer and more diverse for having passed through this process of deliberation. In the ensuing pages, you will read a dissent from a Supreme Court justice, a story about a Japanese mermaid, and an exploration of carp theft. There will be modern fables and oral histories and an excerpt from the diary of a man who worked in a gulag in Siberia. We have also included, for reasons that are too lengthy and complex to discuss in this Editors’ Note, a poem about a woman frying and eating her husband’s pet goldfish. All of the work here inspired our committee in some way, and we hope you find it equally rewarding.

  In closing, I’d like to thank Sarah Vowell for her help putting together this anthology. She is just as brilliant and funny as one would expect, and it was our distinct honor to work with her. I’d also like to thank the fearless Stephanie Steinbrecher, who helped with myriad, far-flung tasks, and without whom this volume would not exist. And now, without further ado, I will send you on to Sarah’s introduction.

  Daniel Gumbiner and the BANR Committee,

  June 2017

  Introduction

  READS LIKE FICTION. When I was starting out as a journalist in the twentieth century, that was the sort of bigoted, back-handed compliment bestowed upon well-written true stories by people who never chucked Finnegans Wake at the floor in an exasperated huff.

  For reasons having nothing to do with prose style, “reads like fiction” currently applies to pretty much every flabbergasted article mentioning the president of the United States. Which lately is every article.

  Throughout the 2016–17 school year, Daniel Gumbiner and I edited this roundup of writing alongside twelve formidable Bay Area high school students who I call, behind their backs, “the Teen Politburo.” Let’s just say you don’t want to run into any of them in a dark alley and try to talk them out of including two pieces from The Southern Review.

  During our third month of bickering in a basement in San Francisco, Donald J. Trump, the nontraditional Republican candidate for president of the United States, beat the front-runner, the former senator and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. By nontraditional I mean unacceptable. His batty antics included being caught on tape bragging that when a man as famous as he is happens upon women, it’s acceptable to “grab them by the” slang word for female genitalia inappropriate to use in conjunction with a literary after-school program. Or accusing the father of one of his Republican primary rivals of meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinated President Kennedy based on a photo published in the National Enquirer, “a magazine that frankly, in many respects, should be very respected.” Or badmouthing the Gold Star parents of a fallen Muslim U.S. Army captain who died saving the lives of his subordinates in Iraq. Or doing a heartless impression of a disabled reporter suffering from a disease of the joints. Or saying of Senator John McCain, a former POW in North Vietnam who remained imprisoned with his fellow soldiers even after his captors offered him—the son of Pacific Command’s Commander-in-Chief—early release, “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Or referring to Mexicans as “rapists.” Or, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, denouncing the Obama administration’s landmark nuclear agreement with Iran this way:

  Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my, like, credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?) . . .

  During the Teen Politburo’s fifth month in the basement, our new president moved to Washington. As former President George W. Bush reportedly said as he left the Capitol dais after Trump’s unnerving inaugural rant about “American carnage” and whatnot, “That was some weird shit.”

  From the Oval Office, Mr. Trump repeatedly talked up the unparalleled turnout for his inauguration (despite all empirical evidence to the contrary) and dismissed any bulletin or broadcast that questioned him, his appointees, or his policies as “fake news,” calling the press “enemies of the people.” Meanwhile, a White House official with a straight face coined the phrase “alternative facts.” Such developments make me nervous about the Republic our student editors will inherit. On the other hand, hooray for publishing, because George Orwell’s book sales are through the roof.

  Sidebar. To the people and/or cyborgs of the future (assuming there is one): if, decades from now,
you’ve picked up this volume off the shelf of some library or used book store (assuming those still exist), and you’re wondering what living in 2016 was like for a sighing subculture of Americans that, no joke, came to refer to themselves as “reality-based,” touch your pinky to your earlobe or however one accesses archival footage and take a look at one of the year’s most interesting television series, The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

  While depicting an infamous court case from 1995, the look on actor Sarah Paulson’s face was pure 2016. Portraying Marcia Clark, the capable and experienced prosecutor in O. J. Simpson’s double murder trial, Paulson reacts to a colleague’s disclosure that even though she and the city’s investigators were lining up a “bulletproof” case against the accused, the Los Angeles black community, hardened by decades of police brutality and institutional racism, believed this defendant, a beloved black football hero turned movie star, to be innocent. So even though Clark and the rest of The People were working long hours to accumulate enough damning evidence to get a conviction, a big chunk of the actual people rooted for Simpson’s acquittal.

  “A lot of black people think O. J. didn’t do it,” says Sterling K. Brown as Clark’s fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden.

  Paulson blinks, flinches ever so slightly, and murmurs, “What?” Pause. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he replies. “I guess they just don’t want it to be true. Good looking, charming, talented black kid from the street makes it all the way to the top, then gets pushed off his pedestal and thrown in jail like black men do.”

  “Oh, come on,” she counters, shaking her head, suddenly staring across the fault line separating the ground of verified evidence from the tectonic plate of obstinate belief.

  Back in 2011, when President Trump was busy hosting a reality TV show pitting the policy wonk Gary Busey against the national security expert Meat Loaf, the Associated Press published a poll purporting nearly eight out of ten Americans believe angels to be real. So we can’t blame the all-American tendency toward magical thinking entirely on Trump. And yet his insistence on dismissing news he doesn’t like as fake news is still, I think, news.