The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

In a small but comfortable conference room, in a publishing house in San Francisco, a group of high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. They had some good times. There was a whiteboard in the conference room, and often cartoons were drawn on this whiteboard. The cartoons were of varying quality. By the end of the year, with the help of a similar committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, and their guest editor, Rachel Kushner, they selected the contents of this anthology. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016features stories about Bulgarian spaceships, psychedelic mushroom therapy, and a cyclorama in Iowa. If you don't know what a cyclorama is, you aren't alone. Read on to find out.