(B) The Best American Non-Required Reading 2009 (Ed. by Dave Eggers, 2009) Grade: B
The Non-Required Reading series usually introduces me to some new writers whom I have not heard of before (i.e. Jhumpa Lahiri), and the collections are a diverse mix of fiction and non-fiction. One of my favorite pieces was "The Chameleon," which was originally published in the New Yorker and discusses a real-life Frenchman who pretended to be all sorts of different people, mostly orphaned children. There were a lot of standout non-fiction pieces, including Jonathan Franzen's farewell to David Foster Wallace and "A Product of This Town," about the Jena Six.