The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  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 t
hink 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 convinced of the value of what he was setting out to do, that, of necessity, when somebody discovered the volumes of the Great Work, unpublished, side by side, on the bookcase in the passage in his house, the first publisher to discover it (whoever he might be) would immediately recognize the importance of what was before him. But, if letters are now fading, whatever will remain of the Great Work?

  The degeneration is relentless. Just when he has reworked the first three pages, he finds that the letters on pages 4, 5, and 6 are also fading. When he has reworked the letters on pages 4, 5, and 6, he discovers that those on 7, 8, 9, and 10 have been erased completely. When he has reworked 7, 8, 9, and 10, he finds those on page 11 to 27 have vanished.

  He can’t waste time trying to deduce why the letters are being erased. He concentrates on reworking the first volume (the first volumes: he soon sees the second and third volumes are also deteriorating) and realizes that the time spent doing that won’t allow him to finish the concluding volumes. Without the colophon that should give the volumes he has already written their true sense, his fifty years of dedication will have been for naught. The initial volumes are simply the necessary, though not essential, groundwork to situate things in the space where he has to set out his genuinely innovative findings: namely, the final volumes. Without the latter, the Great Work will never be that. Hence his doubt: Shouldn’t he perhaps let the early volumes continue to fade and not waste time restoring them? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on his struggle against time to finish once and for all the final volumes (exactly how many are there: six, or seven?) so he can bring the Work to its climax, even at the risk of the first volumes fading away forever? Of the seventy-two he has written so far, he can certainly afford to lose the first seven or eight, even though they enabled him to gather a head of steam, they don’t contribute anything substantially new. However, then another doubt strikes him: When he has written the final full stop, will only the first seven or eight volumes have faded? Determined not to waste one minute more, he buckles down to work. He immediately stops. How come he hasn’t realized until now that, if he dies, and that person who is fated to discover the Great Work and take it to a publisher dillydallies making the discovery, the afflicted volumes won’t be seven or eight, but the whole lot? What should he do: stop writing and start seeking out a publisher right now, to avoid that risk, even though, without those concluding volumes, it will be impossible to demonstrate that his project is genuinely groundbreaking? However, if he devotes time and effort to looking for a publisher, he won’t be able to dedicate the necessary time to reworking the volumes as they keep wasting away, nor will he be able to write the final volumes. What should he do? He becomes a nervous wreck. Could a life of endless toil have been in vain? Yes, it could. What was the point of so much effort, single-minded devotion, celibacy and sacrifice? He thinks it has been one huge practical joke. He feels hatred growing within himself: hatred towards himself for a life misspent. And his inability to recover the time he has wasted doesn’t panic him as much as being certain that, at this juncture, it will be too late to decide how to make the most of the time left to him.

  QIU MIAOJIN

  ■

  An Excerpt from Notes of a Crocodile

  Translated from Chinese by Bonnie Huie

  FROM The New York Review of Books

  THERE ARE THREE PEOPLE I have to write about in this journal. These three are from my final year in college—a stage of my life I call the eruptive phase—and all of them profoundly shaped who I am today. Each had distinguishing qualities that influenced my life’s direction, and I saw in each of them a certain majesty. During that time of intense bonding, it was their influence which made me realize that romantic love was not the only thing that brought an individual closer to others, nor was it a matter decided by fate. There are other, essential experiences that ought to come first, for one must be capable of being touched, of embodying the innocence that forms the basis of compassion . . . and of showing a heart that cries out in pain that genuine suffering deserves no less than the dignity to go on living.

  Meng Sheng. Half born of malice, half of goodwill. Half sincere, half put-on. This freewheeling lunatic became a close friend of mine after Shui Ling
and I went our separate ways for the second time. To this day, I’ve never understood what his true motive was—because while he saved me from my self-destructiveness, he also pushed me toward total depravity.

  I was determined to transform myself into a real girl. At Tun Tun’s encouragement, I made a big decision: I wasn’t going to fall in love with another woman. This time, I was going to make a clean break with the past and pursue a normal happiness.

  For my entire life, I had been inherently attracted to women. That desire, regardless of whether it was realized, had long tormented me. Desire and torment were two opposing forces constantly chafing me, inside and out. I knew full well that my change of diet was futile. I was a prisoner of my own nature, and one with no recourse. This time, however, I was determined to liberate myself. Convinced that it was possible to change, I went about it all rather nonchalantly, and during that phase, I basically behaved as if I had sold my soul. I felt no personal attachment to anyone. Nothing fazed me. Once I shed the overwhelming burden of my sadness, I felt as light as a feather. In my mind, I had been given a mandate: I would live as I pleased and let myself do whatever I wanted.

  And so I became dissolute. In my total hedonism, I explored all possibilities, however transitory. I went out every night and hung out at restaurants, clubs, bars, a new friend’s place. At the same time, I invited the advances of men, resorting to the most blatant and dubious means to lure them.