The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 [Hardcover]

Starred Review. The Best American Nonrequired Reading Series marks its fifth year by expanding the scope of the collection, to include shorter pieces, fragments of stories, transcripts, screenplays, and lists. Brilliantly, Eggers opens with a Best American roundup of notable words and sentences, including "Best American Fake Headlines" from The Onion, "Best American Excerpt from a Military Blog," and "Best American First Sentences of Novels of 2005" (from Bret Easton Ellis's semi-autobiographical Lunar Park: "You do an awfully good impression of yourself"). Contributors of more substantial pieces include Judy Budnitz, Joe Sacco, Cat Bohannon, Kurt Vonnegut, Julia Sweeney and Haruki Murakami, to name a few, and draw from such wide-ranging sources as The Georgia Review, The Washington Post, This American Life and GQ. The result is a collection that's both uproarious and illuminating. In the introduction, comic strip artist and The Simpsons creator Groening provides a list of books that "will keep you up late at night when you're supposed to be sleeping or making love." This is one such book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Starred Review. The Best American Nonrequired Reading Series marks its fifth year by expanding the scope of the collection, to include shorter pieces, fragments of stories, transcripts, screenplays, and lists. Brilliantly, Eggers opens with a Best American roundup of notable words and sentences, including "Best American Fake Headlines" from The Onion, "Best American Excerpt from a Military Blog," and "Best American First Sentences of Novels of 2005" (from Bret Easton Ellis's semi-autobiographical Lunar Park: "You do an awfully good impression of yourself"). Contributors of more substantial pieces include Judy Budnitz, Joe Sacco, Cat Bohannon, Kurt Vonnegut, Julia Sweeney and Haruki Murakami, to name a few, and draw from such wide-ranging sources as The Georgia Review, The Washington Post, This American Life and GQ. The result is a collection that's both uproarious and illuminating. In the introduction, comic strip artist and The Simpsons creator Groening provides a list of books that "will keep you up late at night when you're supposed to be sleeping or making love." This is one such book.
(Publishers Weekly )

From Dave Eggers: For this years edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading, we wanted to expand the scope of the book to include shorter pieces, and fragments of stories, and transcripts, screenplays, television scripts -- lots of things that we hadnt included before. Our publisher readily agreed, and so youll see that this years edition is far more eclectic in form than previous editions. Along the way to making the book, we also came across a variety of things that didnt fit neatly anywhere, but which we felt should be included, so we conceived the front section, which is a loose Best American roundup of notable words and sentences from 2005. It is, like this book in general, obviously and completely incomplete, but might be interesting nevertheless.

Dave Eggers is the author of four books, including How We Are Hungry and What Is the What. He is the editor of McSweeneys and the founder of 826 Valencia, a San Francisco writing lab for young people.

Matt Groening is a cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons and Futurama and of the strip Life in Hell.

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel memoir, Maus.

He is married to and frequently collaborates with artist and art editor Françoise Mouly.

NTRODUCTION Late at night, when all sober people are asleep, Im probably slouching in bed, all Tivod out, reading something like The Insanity of Normality, by Arno Gruen. Or a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Or another Isaac Bashevis Singer short story in the three-volume Library of America edition. Or maybe Im squinting at the latest Acme Novelty Library comic book by Chris Ware. Whatever it is, the next morning Im another bleary guy with dark circles under his eyes muttering about being late for work in the back of the line at Starbucks. Im also the guy not dancing at the happening party on Saturday night. Instead, Ive scuttled over to the corner of the den with my head tilted, running my eyes down each shelf of books, looking for titles Ive never heard of. Back at home, my dining room table is so stacked with books and magazines and newspapers and scripts and storyboards and comics and mail-order catalogs that Im forced to tap out this little introduction on my kitchen table, which right now has on it - lemme count - four books, two daily papers, and the latest issue of the New York Times Book Review. My bathroom has a couple dozen books next to the toilet, and my bedroom is piled so high with books that I fear its erotic only to me. Sometimes I think I have a slight problem. Then I remember most of my friends are also readingly obsessed. Its a struggle for our kind to send flowers on Valentines Day instead of a book. We think all librarians are hot. When we read one of those newspaper articles about some mad old coot found dead in his apartment, crushed by thousands of books, we think to ourselves, How romantic. We not only slow down at every used-book store, we slam on the brakes and make illegal U-turns. We haunt those musty old stores so often that sometimes we run into actual copies of books we once owned, and greet them like long-lost pets. A few years back, in a sleazy used-book store in Hollywood, I found one of my favorite books, G. Legmans demented Rationale of the Dirty Joke, and discovered that the very copy I had grabbed was one I had given as a gift a few years before. I bought the book, crossed out "Merry Xmas 1997" in my dedication, wrote in the current year, and gave it to the same ex- girlfriend that Valentines Day. My obsessive love of reading began before I could read at all. As a wee tyke I remember being entranced by my older brother Marks 1950s-era Little Lulu, Donald Duck, and Mad comic books. "You know how much you like looking at those pictures?" Mark asked me. "Well, when you can read the words in the balloons, its a zillion times funnier." In the first grade, my eager smile faded when I was handed my preliminary reading book. That first primer had no words in it, just pictures, and kindly Mrs. Hoover sat with us and cruelly went through the whole thing, illustration by illustration, acquainting us with the utterly lame Dick and Jane and baby Sally and dog Spot and kitten Puff. Finally we go