The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 Edited by Dave Eggers and Michael Cart.

A fine collection of short fiction and essays, and some combinations.

There’s a piece titled My Fake Job about a guy who just goes into startup company and pretends to work there. It’s funny, but I read in the introduction to the collection that it is partially fictionalized. The piece originally ran in the New Yorker, but once the fictional parts were uncovered, they disowned the article.

Both of the collections (2002 and 2003) have a few Onion articles in them, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the particular articles in question were chosen. Sure they’re good, but in 2001, they had that prizewinning post-9/11 edition with fantastic pieces in it. Perhaps they’d already gone to print by then. Or perhaps they’re trying to dig up unheralded pieces.

Hard to say. I’m out of the targeted demographic for this series (15-25 years old), but I still like it just as much as the Best American Essays series.