The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Sheila Heti

Editors’ Note copyright © 2018 by Clara Sankey

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

ISBN: 978-1-328-46581-8 (print) ISBN: 978-1-328-46713-3 (e-book)

Cover illustration and design © Tommi Parrish

Heti photograph © Steph Martyniuk

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On Future and Working Through What Hurts by Hanif Abdurraqib. First published in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Two Dollar Radio. Copyright © 2017 by Hanif Abdurraqib. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From The Antipodes by Annie Baker. First published by Samuel French, Inc. Copyright © 2017 by Annie Baker. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Deaths of Henry King: Selected Demises by Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson. Art by Lilli Carré. First published in McSweeney’s. Copyright © 2017 by Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Six Selected Comics by Chris. First published by @chrissimpsonsartist on Instagram. Copyright © 2017 by Chris. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major by Seo-Young Chu. First published in Entropy. Copyright © 2017 by Seo-Young Chu. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Wave at the People Walking Upside Down by Tongo Eisen-Martin. First published by Open Space, collected in Heaven Is All Goodbyes. Copyright © 2017 by Tongo Eisen-Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild by Kathy Fish. First published in Jellyfish Review. Copyright © 2017 by Kathy Fish. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Love, Death & Trousers by Laura Francis and Alexander Masters. First published in the Paris Review. Copyright © 2017 by Laura Francis and Alexander Masters. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Selection excerpted from Hunger by Roxane Gay. First published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2017 by Roxane Gay. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A Fair Accusation of Sexual Harassment or a Witch Hunt? by Lucy Huber. First published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Huber. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A Love Story from The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt. Copyright © 2017 by Samantha Hunt. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Originally published in the May 22, 2017, issue of The New Yorker.

Chasing Waterfalls by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki. Published in English by Harper’s Magazine. From the story Nine Dragon Crossing, included in The World Goes On. Copyright © 2013 by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Translation copyright © 2017 by John Batki. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The David Party by David Leavitt. First published by Washington Square Review, Fall 2017. Copyright © 2017 by David Leavitt. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

A Tribute to Alvin Buenaventura by Andrew Leland, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Anders Nilsen. First published by the Believer. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Leland, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Anders Nilsen. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Eight Bites by Carmen Maria Machado from Her Body and Other Parties. First published by Gulf Coast. Copyright © 2017 by Carmen Maria Machado. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

The Reenactors by Katherine Augusta Mayfield. First published by Columbia University School of the Arts Thesis Anthology. Copyright © 2017 by Katherine Augusta Mayfield. Reprinted by permission of the author.

From Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. Published in English by The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1994 by Qiu Miaojin. Translation copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Huie. All rights reserved.

Divine Providence by Quim Monzo, translated by Peter Bush. Published in English by A Public Space.La divina providencia taken from El perque de tot plegat © 1993, 1999 by Joaquim Monzo, © 1993, 1999 by Quaderns Crema, S.A. (Acantilado), Barcelona, Spain. Translation © 2017 by Peter Bush. Reprinted by permission of Quaderns Crema, S.A.

Come and Eat the World’s Largest Shrimp Cocktail in Mexico’s Massacre Capital by Diego Enrique Osorno. First published by Freeman’s. Copyright © 2017 by Diego Enrique Osorno. Translation copyright © 2017 by Christina MacSweeney. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

Meanwhile, on Another Planet from Knots by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated by Kari Dickson. Translation copyright © 2017 by Kari Dickson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Your Black Friend by Ben Passmore. First published by Silver Sprocket. Copyright © 2017 by Ben Passmore. Reprinted by permission of the author.

This Rain by Catherine Pond. First published by Sixth Finch. Copyright © 2017 by Sixth Finch. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Cat Person from You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian. Copyright © 2019 by Kristen Roupenian. Reprinted with the permission of Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Lizard-Baby by Benjamin Schaefer. First published by Guernica. Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Schaefer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Universe Would Be So Cruel by Souvankham Thammavongsa. First published by NOON. Copyright © 2017 by NOON. Reprinted by permission of the author.

My Family’s Slave by Alex Tizon. Copyright © 2017 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in the Atlantic. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Stacey Tran in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao by Stacey Tran and Vi Khi Nao. First published by Cosmonauts Avenue. Copyright © 2017 by Stacey Tran and Vi Khi Nao. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Artist’s Statement by Kara Walker. First published by sikkemajenkinsco.com. Copyright © 2017 Kara Walker. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. First published by New York Magazine. Copyright © 2017 New York Media LLC. Reprinted by permission.

"An Excerpt from Blacks and the Master/Slave" by Frank B. Wilderson III and C.

S. Soong. First published by the syndicated radio program Against the Grain, which originates out of KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Republished in 2017 by Racked & Dispatched. Copyright © 2015 by Frank B. Wilderson III and C. S. Soong. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Editors’ Note

IN ONE OF MY FIRST EMAIL EXCHANGES with this year’s guest editor, Canadian author Sheila Heti, I asked her what she hoped we might achieve for this collection: I think we want to pry literature from the cracks; to see it where we didn’t see it before and look where other people aren’t looking. This sentiment became the guiding principle of our collection. Featuring writing published in the U.S. in 2017, this year’s anthology not only presents new work from little known authors—both national and international—it also exhumes lost and translated voices from the past, highlighting the longevity of words across generations and geographical borders. As always, it is idiosyncratic and contains eclectic writing of all genres, offering a view of the world through the prism of a group of fifteen Bay Area high school students, who make up BANR’s editorial committee.

The members of this committee are smart, they are savvy, and they know what they like to read. As the new managing editor, I worked with our intern Laura to ensure that everyone was comfortable and reading conditions optimal during our weekly meetings. I needn’t have worried as each one proved immensely fruitful, with conversations often taking unexpected twists and turns. Rarely did the committee like something unanimously. Instead, each piece was fiercely defended, hotly contested, and passionately debated. Ultimately the votes were cast—and as the year progressed, the yesses, nos, and maybes piled up.

Many of the stories in the anthology feel strange and otherworldly, offering glimpses into other realities that reveal unexpected things about our own lives. Sheila’s own writing style and unique perspective ensured that whatever we read was fresh, exciting, and completely new. Her influence empowered the students to bring in unusual pieces they’d discovered in the far corners of the Internet to share with the group. Sheila never underestimated the students’ ability to read unconventional and demanding writing; they always rose to meet the challenge, highlighting everything that 2018 has taught us about high schoolers: they are even smarter and more powerful than we have been giving them credit for.

For every piece included in this collection, there were three that didn’t make the cut. These have been included in the Notable Reading section on pages 288–290. Lola still thinks about Willis Plummer’s poem 10,000 Year Clock’ every day, while Max fell head over heels in love with A House Meal," and Sidney reckons that Leslie Jamison’s piece on Second Life in The Atlantic is something they’ll never forget. We hope your BANR adventure continues beyond this book.

Our committee would like to say a few final words to you, dear reader: Coco wants you to know that as strange as this collection is, no one was on drugs when we put it together. Xuan is super excited for you to dive right in, and Huckleberry says that if you don’t like one piece, move on and just keep reading! Charley suggests you keep an open mind, while Zoe recommends bringing tissues. Emilia’s advice is a little more prescriptive: take it slow, she says, read a maximum of two pieces per day, otherwise you won’t be able to appreciate them. After you read, she continues, pause and let the words sink in. Max concludes that we may have a strange collection, but reading always, always has a direct impact and positive outcomes. I can’t think of a better way to send you onto Sheila’s wonderful introduction. Thank you for reading!

—CLARA SANKEY and the BANR Committee

June 2018

Introduction

"Something that’s really big for me is: does it represent the year 2017? But I think I’m looking for a piece that is both timely and will withstand the test of time—that in twenty years, is still going to be relevant to whoever is reading it." —Emilia

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I WAS GETTING INTO when I agreed to guest edit this anthology. It was all very confusing and yet presented as very straightforward—this is typical McSweeney’s, who no longer run the project, but began it, and it still bears its stamp—you are sort of expected to understand and are given very little direction, then you realize by the end that there was no direction, you were supposed to make it up on your own.

Perhaps some of the fifteen students knew this already—the ones who had been on The Best American Nonrequired Reading committee before. There was a chaotic sense of direction from the beginning, and that an anthology was made, and that it’s as good as I think it is, perhaps has something to do with what happens when the task is no less pure than let’s get together and read and talk about what we’re reading and somehow that will turn into an anthology.

I only met with the BANR committee twice, when they flew me out to San Francisco from Toronto. The first time, in November, I entered from Valencia Street into the McSweeney’s offices (crammed with books and journals and computers and people) and went into the low-ceilinged basement where a long table was piled with granola bars and chips and candy and photocopied sheets. The students welcomed me warmly, casually. They had been meeting every Monday night from 6 to 8 p.m., starting in September, and would meet until the end of May. Clara Sankey, the managing editor, led the sessions, with the assistance of this year’s intern, Laura Van Slyke.

The evenings proceeded like this: For the first hour, the committee read silently, sitting around the long table. After the reading was done, one person began the discussion by giving a summary of the piece, then gave their opinion. Then another person gave their opinion, then another person did the same. Sometimes all of them did. Discussion ping-ponged back and forth. Sometimes a piece would be discussed for a half hour or more. Then there was a vote to determine whether the piece should be included: yes, no, or maybe. Then on to the next piece.

As evidenced in the notes Laura took during each session, there wasn’t an atmosphere of tidy agreement:

HUCKLEBERRY: I love this so much—it’s like a rollercoaster (Everything is a rollercoaster, haha, interjects Max). It’s very fast and you can’t immediately understand what’s around you, but you’re enjoying it. And it builds to a very satisfying ending about death that I’ve never read before!

MADI: It’s a very BANR read. You get lost in him! His flow is intriguing.

EMILIA: I couldn’t read this. It felt like drowning. As soon as I got air, I didn’t want to go back under the water.

I came into this process with a fair amount of skepticism about the value of anthologies: Who would rather read an anthology than a book that is one thing, with one tone, and point of view? Aren’t magazines the place for a collection of things by different authors, rather than a book? But now I can see that this anthology is something different—not just because of the quality of the material (many anthologies are quality) but because of the process it represents.

Most concisely, as Annette put it when I returned to interview the students in the spring, "For me, the point of BANR has always been much more about what happens in this room than what we do with the book outside of the room. I’ll see it in a bookstore sometimes, and be like Hey! And that’s fun. But for me, it’s like a breath out when I come to BANR. It’s one of the safest spaces in my life. I don’t have to bring my reservations into this space; I don’t have to put a caveat on everything. I can just be okay with listening to everybody, because I know that everyone here respects everyone else." I think everyone felt this grateful—especially in a year so dominated by fears about how polarized America had become. Here at least was one environment where disagreement could be had; where people changed their minds.

Emma understands this anthology as being in conversation with social media: "I feel like one of the problems with how people read nowadays is they get a lot of their reading through social media and through friends. It turns into these feedback loops, and it’s this preaching to the choir. BANR is a nice process, because I didn’t get these readings from my friends. A lot of it is just random stuff from a random anthology that we have downstairs." If BANR interrupts their loops, maybe it will interrupt yours.

Perhaps there is also some activism in an anthology like this one. As Sophia said, "I think a lot of the older generation doesn’t think of kids as people who want to think. So I think it’s cool when people who don’t necessarily take us seriously, they read what we put together and they’re like, Oh, yeah, I didn’t really recognize that these are things they care about."

It’s perhaps strange, looking at the collection, that there is no mention of the man who acted as president in 2017, but there wasn’t a conscious decision to leave his name out. The pieces we read were nominated by the committee, Clara, Laura, myself, and the volunteer readers who came into the offices to go through the many literary journals that had been sent our way. Every Sunday, Clara and I would discuss and decide what the committee would read the next day. All told, eighty-five pieces were considered by the group.

The anthology was constantly changing. In late 2017, we were going to feature snippets from the very many excellent pieces that were being written in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and as the #MeToo consciousness swelled, but as we moved into 2018, these were abandoned in favor of Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major, a piece which we felt spoke to these same concerns even more powerfully, and also excited us formally.

I was constantly surprised to learn what the BANR committee liked and didn’t like. Their taste was unpredictable. Often I would submit something to be read, certain it would be loved, only to learn that they didn’t want it for a reason I would never have considered myself. Most shocking, for me, was their response to Rachel Aviv’s article in The New Yorker, The Trauma of Facing Deportation, which reported on the mysterious phenomena of teenagers falling into deep comas, in response to the news that their families would be deported from their country. I thought the piece was topical, exquisitely written, and just overall fascinating. Plus, it was about teenagers—how could they resist? But they objected to the scenes where Aviv described the comatose bodies of the teenagers, because these teenagers hadn’t been able to give their consent. This reservation would never have occurred to me in a million years, so it’s a good thing that people are born twenty years after you are, so you don’t have to wait more than a million years.

* * *

The Committee . . .

HUCKLEBERRY: We’ve been reading a lot of very important political nonfiction—and it’s been interesting thinking about straddling the line between representing 2017, and being sufficiently nonrequired. We read some pieces where I felt like this is good, and this is important, but this feels required. This feels like something that everybody should be reading, and as such, doesn’t really fit the label of our book.

SIDNEY: Earlier in the year we read My Family’s Slave, and I thought, This piece is so important that we have to put it in. Then I was like, Wait a second: nonrequired. But then I thought: I’m not forcing anyone to read this. So in that way, everything I pick is nonrequired. Because it’s not like anybody really takes me that seriously anyway.

SHEILA: So ultimately you’re making a distinction between being required by you, and being required by—?

SIDNEY: School. Or college. Or your job.

SHEILA: But it’s required by a seventeen-year-old sitting in the basement.

MADI: When I’m reading a piece, and I immediately think, I want to send this to a friend of mine, I know that it’s a BANR piece. It’s that urge to share it with people. It’s that I want the people around me, and as many people as possible, to be reading this piece.

CHARLEY: I remember one piece that we read really early on at BANR about a middle-aged woman, and I personally have not read a lot of pieces about middle-aged women. They’re either in their early twenties or sixties or something. And I remember going home and telling my whole family about it, and telling my mom that she needed to read it.

SIDNEY: BANR is very different from English class, in that we’re not worried about analyzing the pieces—we’re not worried about picking apart every motif because we’ll have to write an essay on it. We’re thinking about, What do we like about this piece? What works? What doesn’t? What do we want to expose our readership to? So that’s a very different experience from what I have in school.

EMMA: We have conversations, like: Okay, we really like what this piece is about, but do we like how it’s done? Do we think that the voice is strong enough? Is this compelling as a piece of literature, for someone who doesn’t care about the subject? Walking that line is the most challenging thing about this, because we want to do justice to our morals, but also produce a really quality, mature book.

MADI: I think we have this really unique perspective, even though we live in the Silicon Valley, and we live in a world of technology. But this is a very concrete way that we can put all of these perspectives into something that we know is going to last, and that is really interesting.

SHEILA: As opposed to something online that they can take down?

MADI: Yeah.

SOPHIA: I don’t read outside of school like I used to. A lot of things take up a lot of time in my life, and the down time that I have, I’m exhausted, so I don’t read. I wish I did. I don’t know when the last time it was that I just read a book in three days, but I used to do that once a week. So BANR has been nice as a way to see the things that I’m missing, and read pieces that have affected me so much—pieces where it becomes part of you.

EMILIA: We don’t know each other that well, so it’s really cool to get to know each other as readers, because something we all share, I think, is that we’re really passionate readers, and some of us are writers. We’re high schoolers, and I think a lot of us are pretty well supported by our families, and a lot of us are minors, and we get to come in and truly just pick not based on what our paycheck is going to be, but based on what we think is quality, and what we want people to read, and what we think is new. We also have really fresh eyes, and it’s really fun to adventure through and read writers that aren’t from our background, and it’s a new experience for us. We’re like little fresh pieces of dough that have just been thrown in the oven.

ANNETTE: A lot of the change you’ve seen in students in the United States recently is that kids our age—a lot of us have had to make a decision about what part of our lives we are willing to interrupt to forward the change we want to see in the world. What I’ve loved about BANR is that we’ve reflected that. Like, if I’m willing to leave class to talk about this issue, am I willing to rearrange what BANR is to talk about this issue?

EMMA: We’ve been given this unusual position of being able to publish what we want, when so many other people are just consumers. Commonly, my friends are just consumers. But I get to take part in the production of media, which is really special.

MADI: When I’m explaining what BANR is to my friends, I tell them that we put together an anthology of all of these different pieces, and that we’re allowed to submit pieces. I always catch myself saying my pieces, and my friends are like, Oh, you wrote things and they get published? That’s so cool! No, I don’t get to write pieces, but these pieces I get to talk about are equally my pieces, because even though they’re not pieces that I wrote, they are pieces that I see part of myself in.

HUCKLEBERRY: I also feel like there is something to be said for including stuff that not everybody can connect with.

MAX: I like to think that any piece we have will have about the same percentage of people who will like it in the real world as have liked it here.

HUCKLEBERRY: I definitely have found myself getting particularly attached to pieces and feeling the need to speak up for them, or fight for them. There was one piece we read, maybe in the second week, and I remember there was overall not as positive a reaction in the room as the one that I was having, and I remember feeling like, I’m going to make sure that this piece gets in.

ALTHEA: Each of these stories means something very specific to each of us, and sometimes it gets political, and sometimes it gets personal, and I just think that BANR gives us a way to find out how to respectfully disagree before it’s too late for us to learn that. Because the arguments get really intense. People really like their stories. But this gives us an easy way to learn how to have a heated conversation, and then still end it and respect each other as people, and even as friends.

XUAN: I don’t talk that much during BANR; I think it’s because it’s my first year. I’m getting to know what happens around here, but I don’t think that I’ve heard people express how much they love literature in any school setting, or really any setting besides here. We listen to each other, and everybody does have an individual idea and opinion, but that idea can really be affected by what other people say.

* * *

Every student is required to sign a contract before joining the committee. They agree to attend meetings every week unless there is some crazy emergency, e.g., someone has gotten their arm stuck in a thresher back on the farm in Iowa. They agree that if I miss more than one meeting a month, my membership will be reviewed/reconsidered, and might be revoked. And they agree to turn off their phones when they enter the building. They sign on the dotted line, confirming they will speak and offer ideas and opinions, do a good job, be kind to my fellow members . . . listen to what they have to say, and offer support whenever I can.

Not a big deal, the contract concludes, I am smart and I work hard. It’s true: they are, and they do. In the online folder where we keep the material for this anthology are their fifteen contracts, each one signed and dated September 11, 2017.

I like to think of this anthology not as a portrait of this past year, but as a portrait of the collective taste of these specific, fifteen Bay Area teenagers, in the year 2017, who were born just after the turn of the millennium; for whom Obama was the first president of their politically conscious lives; who started the year by telling each other what pronouns they prefer; who snap their fingers in agreement when another person talks; who are readers, and self-define as such.

This book was made by the bright, single mind that is made up of all their minds; and the following pages are what it wants you to read.

SHEILA HETI

QUIM MONZÓ

■

Divine Providence

Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush

FROM A Public Space

ONE MORNING, the scholar who in patient, disciplined manner has dedicated fifty of his sixty-eight years to writing the Great Work (of which he has currently completed seventy-two volumes) notices that the ink of the letters on the first pages of the first volume is beginning to fade. The black is no longer so sharp and is turning grayish. As he has become used to frequently revisiting all the volumes he has written to date, when he notices the deterioration, only the first two pages have been affected, the first that he wrote fifty years ago. And, into the bargain, the letters on the bottom lines of the second page are also rather illegible. He painstakingly restores the erased letters one by one. He diligently follows their traces until he has restored words, lines and paragraphs with India ink. But just as he is finishing, he notices that the words on the last lines of page 2 and the whole of page 3 (when he began the restoration process, some were in a good state and the others were in a relatively good state) have also faded: confirmation that the disease is degenerative.

Fifty years ago, when the scholar decided to devote his life to writing the Great Work, he was already well aware that he would have to dispense with any activity that might consume even a tiny fraction of his time, and remain celibate and live without a television. The Great Work would be really so Great he couldn’t waste a moment on anything else. Indeed there could be nothing else but the Great Work. That was why he decided not to waste precious minutes looking for a publisher. The future would find one. He was so