ditor’s Note from Dave Eggers

Introduction by Ray Bradbury

Best American Sonnet with Vengeance
from Zone 3, Sherman Alexie

Best American Very Short Memoir
from The New Yorker, Junot Diaz

Best American Manifesto
from The Occupied Wall Street Journal

Best American Minutes from the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street
from www.nycga.net

Best American Observations at a Modern Protest Movement
from McSweeney’s, Said Sayrafi ezadeh

Best American Reflection on Historic Protest Movements
from The Occupied Wall Street Journal, Adam Hochschild

Best American Reflection on a Modern Protest Movement
from The New York Times, Robert Hass

Best American Letters in the Mail
from The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott, Rick Moody, Padma Viswanathan, Claire Bidwell Smith

Best American Palindrome
from The Believer, Barry Duncan

Best American Tweets Responding to the Death of Osama bin Laden
from www.twitter.com

Best American Lonely Guy
from Jeff, One Lonely Guy, Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields, Michael Logan

Kevin Brockmeier. A Fable For the Living
from Electric Literature

Judy Budnitz. Tin Man
from This American Life

Louise Erdrich. The Years of My Birth
from The New Yorker

Olivia Hamilton. An Oral History of Olivia Hamilton
from Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons

Phil Klay. Redeployment
from Granta

Nora Krug. Kamikaze
from A Public Space

Anthony Marra. The Palace of the People
from Narrative Magazine

Julie Otsuka. The Children
from Granta

Michael Poore. The street of the House of the Sun
from The Pinch

Eric Puchner. Beautiful Monsters
from Tin House

Mark Robert Rapacz. Bellwether
from Water~Stone Review

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo. The Love Act
from Raritan

Jon Ronson. The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones
from GQ

Ryan Rivas. South Beach
from Annalemma

George Saunders. The Tenth of December
from The New Yorker

Mona Simpson. Transcription of a Eulogy
John Jeremiah Sullivan. Peyton’s Place
from GQ

Adrian Tomine. A Brief History of the Art Form Known as “Hortisculpture”
from Optic Nerve

Jose Antonio Vargas. Outlaw
from The New York Times Magazine

Jess Walter. Don’t Eat Cat
from Byliner

Wesley Yang. Paper Tigers
from New York Magazine

Contributors’ Notes

The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee

Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2011

About 826 National