Tom Lynch

Some years ago, Dave Eggers started 826 Valencia, a workshop for high-school students designed for tutoring, earning scholarships and writing. Each year Eggers and his crew of adolescents edit an anthology of what they call "nonrequired" reading--shorts of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and comics--all assembled in the same 500 pages. The legion of editors choose and discuss their selections for the collection in San Francisco, in a room hidden in the back of a pirate supplies store. Maybe that's why it's so fucked up.

Not "fucked-up" ugly, or "fucked-up" scary, mostly just disturbing and funny, and sometimes gross and nightmarish. Take Ben Ehrenreich's "What You Eat," taken from Bomb. A father insists that his boy must eat anything that he kills, accidentally or not. So the young chap, like a normal kid, kills ants, kills a lizard, kills a squirrel with a slingshot. He's forced to dine. He cries and vomits, but the father's shadow looms over him with menacing force. The sadistic tone borders on violent pornography, until the son wises up, leaps in front of his father's moving car, and crashes to the ground in an attempt to force his dad to eat him. Not only does this story prove the most memorable of the book, it's also the most deliciously absurd.

"The Best American Nonrequired Reading" anthologies of the past all have the same strange climate, mixing and matching hyper-intelligent prose with outrageous humor. That's Eggers for you. He seems to insist on shocking the reader with a Taser gun. And whether he's dead-on or badly off target, the product is usually intriguing. In this year's edition, he tosses in a vicious Mamet nonfiction short that focuses on names--the "secret" nicknames we depend on in our country. David Sedaris' "Full House," first seen in Esquire and now in his new bestselling book, doesn't seem to fit with the other tales at first, but with time blends in with the crowd. With an offbeat introduction from actor Viggo Mortensen, plus super-cool Adrian Tomine artwork, the 2004 edition makes a good addition to the "Best American" library, even if you refuse to eat the dust spider you crush when you stick it on the shelf.

"The Best American Nonrequired Reading"
Edited by Dave Eggers
Houghton Mifflin, 404 pages, $14

(2004-10-27)

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