Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 - by Daniel Handler (Paperback)

About the Book

Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket compile the year's best new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and category-defying gems aimed at readers 15 and up.

Book Synopsis

"Lively, eclectic and surprising." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the enormously popular young adult series A Series of Unfortunate Events, takes over as editor for this volume. He will work with the students of 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs to compile new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and other category-defying gems, ensuring that "if you need to fall in love with reading again -- or just want a reminder that high school students deserve a lot more than their reading lists give them -- then this is the book for you" (Bust).

From the Back Cover

The Best American Series
In the basement of a small publishing house in San Francisco, fourteen high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and many other things. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together these high schoolers selected the contents of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, a collection in which you can take a field trip to the moon, infiltrate a cult, spend seven days in Syria, and drop in on the enigmatic desert community known as Night Vale, among many other possibilities. In his introduction, Lemony Snicket calls the collection so ferociously entertaining and veeringly diversified that we could no more make it mandatory than we could fashion it out of fish!
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 includes Andrew Foster Altschul, Kathryn Davis, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Andrew Johnson, Luke Mogelson, Anders Nilsen, Nathaniel Rich, Yumi Sakugawa, and others
[INSERT AUTHOR PHOTO] DANIEL HANDLER, editor, is the author of the novels Why We Broke Up, Adverbs, The Basic Eight, and Watch Your Mouth, and under the pen name Lemony Snicket, best-selling children s and young adult novels. He lives in San Francisco.
LEMONY SNICKET, guest introducer, is the author of the thirteen-book sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-book series All the Wrong Questions, among (too) many others.
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Review Quotes

"A collection that simply shouldn't be missed." --Miami Herald "Full of delights...a joy to read." --The Stranger "Consistently impressive, with nary a dud in the 32 previously published selections...This book provides a fantastic compendium of "'In Case You Missed It.'" --Publishers Weekly, starred review "A highly eclectic collection...The quality of the material included is uniformly high...Consider this a sumptuous feast for free (nonrequired, that is) reading." --Booklist