The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Read online

  “DONALD J TRUMP A GUARDIAN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN,” reads a poster I retrieved from the floor of the Rothschild rally. “HIS SPIRIT AND HARD WORK AS PRESIDENT WILL MAKE THE PEOPLE AND AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

  Although, to me, Trump seems the very opposite of a guardian angel, I thank him for this: I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my very lifetime, fail.

  But I imagine it that way now.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions, 2017). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and Bettering American Poetry. He is a PhD student at Texas Tech University.

  Ivan Chistyakov was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the BaikalAmur Railway, which was built by forced labor. He was killed in 1941.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me.

  Teju Cole is a writer and photographer. He is the author of four acclaimed books, each in a different genre: the novella Every Day Is for the Thief, the novel Open City, the essay collection Known and Strange Things, and the genre-crossing Blind Spot, a work of photographs and text. Raised in Nigeria and living in Brooklyn, Cole uses words and images to explore cosmopolitanism, migration, and transnational identity. His work has been translated into sixteen languages, and his honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the Windham Campbell Prize.

  Meagan Day is a freelance writer who focuses on politics, social movements, labor, law, and history. Her book Maximum Sunlight, excerpted here, is available from E. M. Wolfman Books.

  Viet Dinh was born in Vietnam and grew up in Colorado. He received his degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston and currently teaches at the University of Delaware. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, he is the author of After Disasters (Little A Books, 2016), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his short stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Fence, Threepenny Review, Five Points, and other journals. He rarely gets seasick.

  Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

  Masha Gessen is the author of several books on Russia, including The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, forthcoming from Riverhead in October 2017.

  Smith Henderson is the author of the debut novel Fourth of July Creek. His short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2016 anthology.

  Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the novel How Should a Person Be? She is the former interviews editor of the Believer magazine. She lives in Toronto.

  Casey Jarman has served as the music editor at the Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and managing editor of the Believer in San Francisco. He cofounded Party Damage Records in 2013. He has written for the Believer, Nylon, Portland Monthly, Willamette Week, Next American City, and Reed Magazine, as well as various online publications. His book, Death: An Oral History, is a collection of interviews with Americans about death and dying, and includes pieces with legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman and songwriter David Bazan, among others. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two cats.

  Kima Jones has been published at GQ Guernica, and NPR among others and in the anthologies Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and the New York Times bestseller, The Fire this Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward. She is an MFA candidate in fiction and Rodney Jack Scholar in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Jones lives in Los Angeles, where she operates Jack Jones Literary Arts, a book publicity company.

  David Kaiser is president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a family-led public charity that works to promote a sustainable and just society.

  Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was a New York Times and Amazon bestseller, and the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize. Other works include The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz), and Malinky Robot, as well as titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, First Second Books, Boom Studios, Disney Press, and Image Comics. He has been nominated for multiple Eisner Awards for his writing and art and for spearheading Liquid City, a multivolume comics anthology featuring creators from Southeast Asia.

  Lin-Manuel Miranda is an award-winning composer, lyricist, and performer, as well as a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Award recipient. His current musical, Hamilton—with book, music, and lyrics by Mr. Miranda, in addition to originating the title role—opened on Broadway in 2015. Hamilton was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and earned a record-breaking sixteen Tony nominations, winning eleven Tony Awards including two personally for Mr. Miranda for Book and Score of a Musical.

  Benjamin Nugent’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review. His first story collection, Fraternity, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  William Pannapacker has a PhD in American Civilization from Harvard University; he lives in the woods and teaches courses on American literature, opinion journalism, and comedy writing. Since 2013, Pannapacker has been inspired by the great New German Cinema director, Werner Herzog, to channel his voice in a semi-eponymous short-form genre called the “Twertzog”: To tweet (verb) or a tweet (noun) in a Bavarian accent that is erudite, existential, and that changes your life, forever. September 5 is the globally celebrated #Twertzog Day on Twitter.

  Simon Parkin is a British journalist and a contributing writer to The New Yorker online. During the past decade he has also contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, the BBC, and many others. His first book, Death by Video Game, was published in 2016.

  Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a poet originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, and cohosts the podcast Food 4 Thot.

  Mark Polanzak’s first book is the hybrid fiction/memoir POP! (Stillhouse). He is a founding editor for draft: the journal of process, and a producer at The Fail Safe podcast. He teaches at the Berklee College of Music and lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

  Melissa Ragsly is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in Joy-land, Epiphany, Green Mountains Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is an assistant editor at A Public Space and lives in the Hudson Valley. Her website is melissaragsly.com.

  Christine Rhein is the author of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press). Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals and have been selected for Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, Best New Poets, and other anthologies. A former automotive engineer, she lives in Brighton, Michigan.

  Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of the poetry collection Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary
Award. Her poems and essays appear in the Missouri Review, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow at Hendrix College and a contributing editor at the Kenyon Review.

  George Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

  Sonia Sotomayor is a United States Supreme Court justice. She holds degrees from Princeton University and Yale Law School. Prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, she served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

  Andrew Sullivan pioneered political blogging at the Daily Dish from 2000–2015, with over a million monthly readers. From 1991–1996, Sullivan was the editor of the New Republic, winning three National Magazine awards in his tenure. He is a New York Magazine contributing editor covering politics and culture.

  Arch Tait was awarded the PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010 for his translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia. To date he has translated another twenty-seven books from Russian, most recently the memoirs of Akhmed Zakayev.

  Miriam Toews’s most recent novel is All My Puny Sorrows. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

  Lee Wasserman has served as director of the Rockefeller Family Fund since 1999. Lee’s work has led to creation and implementation of initiatives to address climate change; advance women’s economic interests; and expand citizens’ ability to influence their democratic institutions.

  Anna Wiener is a writer based in San Francisco. She has written for the Atlantic, the New Republic, and The New Yorker online.

  The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

  Madison DeVry is currently a senior at Summit Shasta High School in Daly City. When she’s not at BANR she is reading, writing, procrastinating, or binge-watching Netflix. She drinks caffeine all the way until 8 p.m. but she is still able to fall asleep. Hard to believe, she knows.

  Emilia Villela Fernández is a senior at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco. She loves sleeping, reading, and spending time in Yosemite with her extended family. She has been known to fantasize about getting locked in a library, and considers it a danger to even set foot in a bookstore before she has finished all the other things she has to do that day. Last night she had a dream about swimming in pool of warm sand. She hopes this is not a bad omen.

  Asha Fletcher-Irwin has been compared to a loaf of sourdough bread, Henry the Eighth, and the caterpillar from A Bug’s Life. She graduated from Oakland School for the Arts and now attends Hollins University. She’s extremely happy to have been a part of BANR and hopes you enjoy this book.

  Marcus Gee-Lim is a freshman at Occidental College. Last June he graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco. His hobbies include listening to music, long walks on the beach, and keeping it loopy. He struggles to find adequate desktop backgrounds.

  Emma Hardison is a senior at Oakland School for the Arts and this was her second year on the BANR committee. She enjoys long walks on the beach and romantic candle-lit dinners. She doesn’t want to toot her own horn or anything, but she is pretty funny.

  Sidney Hirschman is from San Carlos, California, and they are a senior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. Sidney spent the spring semester of 2017 at The Oxbow School in Napa, California, where they learned how to cut hair, grow food, and fall in love. You can contact Sidney by manually rewinding a VHS tape of The Land Before Time under a gibbous moon (waxing and waning are both fine).

  Althea Kriney is a junior at Lowell High School in San Francisco. She turned this bio in a week late and this is all she could come up with. That’s all you need to know about her.

  Sian Laing is a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco. She has been known to cartwheel at inopportune times. Once, she was a flower girl at a wedding and she cartwheeled down the aisle. Long story short, she made a mess and the guests were covered in flowers.

  Lola Snowflake Leuterio (the middle name is her sister’s fault) is a junior at Tamalpais High School. She loves Steinbeck books, Lord of the Rings movies, Chance the Rapper, satisfying math problems, Jesse, and Whole Foods Tasters. Being on the BANR committee this year was the best and she’s excited to continue doing it!

  Zoe Olson is a senior at Mission High School and this is her second year on the BANR committee. She likes cookies, cats, and arts and crafts. You can’t see, because the image is zoomed in, but she’s waving at you from the little picture. Hi!

  Isaac Schott-Rosenfield is a freshman at Columbia University. He reads, writes, etc. For reasons that are not entirely clear to him, there is a life-size cardboard cutout of Tom Hanks in the BANR meeting room. It has been there for much of the year, staring impassively at the committee as it goes about its work. The cut-out is facing away from Isaac as he writes this, and yet, he has the sense that it is watching him.

  Annette Vergara-Tucker is a junior at Lick-Wilmerding High School. This is the second BANR book she has been involved in, and it’s been very interesting for her to get to see the contrast between the 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 literature being published. It goes without saying, but it was a big year for politics. She hopes that the readers of this year’s anthology learn as much as she has from these fascinating pieces.

  Very special thanks to Dave Eggers, Nicole Angeloro, Mark Robinson, and Kenard Pak. Thanks also to Rachel Kushner, Adam Johnson, Daniel Handler, Rebecca Marcyes, Mikayla McVey, Angela Hui, Kristin Gore, Fred Armisen, Bill Heinzen, Andi Winnette, Ruby Perez, Sunra Thompson, Claire Boyle, Kristina Kearns, Chris Monks, Mimi Lok, Gerald Richards, Kait Steele, Lauren Broder, Maggie Andrews, Daniel Cesca, Yusuke Wada, Lindy Caldwell, Cecilia Juan, Jonathan Hsieh, Okailey Okai, Alyssa Aninag, Dana Belott, Elaina Bruna, Bianca Catalan, Lizzie Jean Coyle, Ricardo Cruz Chong, Lauren Hall, Allyson Halpern, Caroline Kangas, Kona Lai, Kiley McLaughlin, Molly Parent, Christina Villasenor Perry, Amy Popovich, Meghan Ryan, Susan de Saint Salvy, Ashley Smith, Anton Timms, Jillian Wasick, Byron Weiss, Ryan Young, Diana Adamson, Juliana Sloane, Zebunissa Bradley, Kate Bueler, Rita Bullwinkel, Nirvana Felix, Marisela Garcia, Cristian King, Courtney Lee, Jessica Li, Monica Mendez, Oliver Pascua, Veronica Ponce-Navarrete, Francisco Prado, Piper Sutherland, Timothy Tu Huynh, Nick Watson, and Alma Lucia Zaragoza-Petty.

  The Nonrequired 2016

  Election Appendix

  KENYA BARRIS, “Lemons,” Black-ish, ABC, January 11, 2016. Anthony Anderson as Andre:

  “Do I understand what anybody in their right mind could have seen in Trump? No! But maybe that’s why we lost. Over fifty million people felt something. And I’m not saying that they were right. But I don’t think it’s possible that all, half, or even most of them were nuts. Or racists. Or hated women . . . It’s time to stop calling each other names. And we start trying to have those conversations. If we don’t, we’ll end up being in a country that’s even more divided for a long time.”

  VINCENT BEVINS, Facebook post, June 24, 2016. Reporter pinpoints the reasonable concerns underlying the rise of Trump and Britons’ vote to leave the European Union:

  “Both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very, wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for thirty years. Questions such as: Who are the losers of globalization, and how can we spread the benefits to them and ease the transition? Is it fair that the rich can capture almost all the gains of open borders and trade, or should the process be more equitable? Can we really sustainably create a media structure that only hires kids from top universities (and, moreover, those prick graduates that can basically afford to work for free for the fir
st 5–10 years) who are totally ignorant of regular people, if not outright disdainful of them? Do we actually have democracy, or do banks just decide? Immigration is good for the vast majority, but for the very small minority who see pressure on their wages, should we help them, or do they just get ignored?”

  KEN BURNS, “2016 Stanford Commencement Address,” delivered June 12, 2016:

  “For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and character of candidates who were clearly qualified. That is not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified. So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment . . .”