The fall is the season for great little anthologies of essays, research, short stories, and poems culled from magazines and excerpted from longer literary works and popular non-fiction. The most successful line, both in sales and in selection, is Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Series, which is published yearly and has just arrived, in large quantities, in our stores.

Part of the genius of the success of the Best American Series is their ability to assemble editorial boards that are Guest Edited each year by a different famous author or essayist who lends his or her credibility, notoriety, and (usually) discriminating taste to the publication. This 2007 crop of books is no exception, as follows:

• Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King


• Best American Non-Required Reading 2007, edited by Dave Eggers


• Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware


• Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace


• Best American Mystery Stories 2007, edited by Carl Hiaasen


• Best American Sports Writing 2007, edited by David Maraniss


• Best American Travel Writing 2007, edited by Susan Orlean


• Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007, edited by Richard Preston


• Best American Spiritual Writing 2007, edited by Philip Zaleski

As I said the Guest Editor usually helps to sell the books if not ability to choose well, at least for the name recognition; however, the other part of the genius of the Best American series is that they KNOW they are playing this game. As David Foster Wallace (Guest Editor of The Best American Essays 2007) writes in his introduction:

[I]t’s a bit odd that Houghton Mifflin and the Best American series tend to pick professional writers to be their guest editors. There are, after all, highly expert professional readers among the industry’s editors, critics, scholars, etc., and the guest editor’s job here is really 95 percent readerly. Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be one or both of the following: (a) the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader — which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me); or (b) the fact that the writers the series pick tend to have comparatively high name recognition, which the publisher figures will translate into wider attention and better sales. Premise (b) involves marketing and revenue and is thus probably backed up by hard data and thought in a way that (a) is not.

I know that this self-knowledge makes the editors work a little bit harder in their choices. They have a standard to uphold, so they are self-aware in meeting that standard.

And Foster Wallace’s introduction is not just an example of the perspective that goes into the books, but also the writing itself - insightful, clever, accessibly conversational, and intelligent. This is true across the board. I’ll highlight another, The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007, which gives the reader a range of the American experience. The funny thing about these essays is that you don’t really know what they’re about even as you read them, the subjects are so all-encompassing, moving in so many different directions, the authors capture the crazy ways people think, making connections to ideas that seem to have no connections at all, and taking the reader on fantastic journeys through everyday, ordinary, . . . even boring events, that come out sounding extraordinary under their pens. The third aspect to the genius of this series.

And this happens in such articles as: David J. Morris’ article about walking with Marines in Fallujjah, first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground”; Patrick Somerville’s bizarre, but personal reminiscence/obituary for Dr. Fenton, his childhood dentist, in “So Long, Away”; and a story about a Puerto Rican family and the secrets a son uncovers about his parents in Kevin A. González’ “Lotería.” They all are reflective of this new breed of journalism (that I plan to write more about next week) in which the author is self-aware and inserts himself into the story as the narrator, conscious that he has an identity and a voice that keeps him from being entirely objective, yet without trying to actually influence or change the events. It’s an important recent development in non-fiction.

So flip through the books, see if you agree and choose a few to take home with you, they are great for a casual read, a vacation, or traveling to and from work on public transportation or reading aloud to each other in your carpool. They are all $14 in paperback, except the Comics 2007, which has a larger hardcover format at $22, but they are a bargain for the quality of the writing and the selection. You will find items you enjoyed before and gems that even the most voracious reader will have missed. Don’t miss out, we have dedicated displays in all of the Olsson’s locations.

-Andrew