The Best American Series In the basement of a small publishing house in San Francisco, fourteen high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and many other things. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together these high schoolers selected the contents of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, a collection in which you can take a field trip to the moon, infiltrate a cult, spend seven days in Syria, and drop in on the enigmatic desert community known as Night Vale, among many other possibilities. In his introduction, Lemony Snicket calls the collection "so ferociously entertaining and veeringly diversified that we could no more make it mandatory than we could fashion it out of fish!" The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 includes Andrew Foster Altschul, Kathryn Davis, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Andrew Johnson, Luke Mogelson, Anders Nilsen, Nathaniel Rich, Yumi Sakugawa, and others [INSERT AUTHOR PHOTO] DANIEL HANDLER, editor, is the author of the novels Why We Broke Up, Adverbs, The Basic Eight, and Watch Your Mouth, and under the pen name Lemony Snicket, best-selling children's and young adult novels. He lives in San Francisco. LEMONY SNICKET, guest introducer, is the author of the thirteen-book sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-book series All the Wrong Questions, among (too) many others.