A selection of the best writing, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and blogs, published during 2011. Edited by Dave Eggers.

Presents literature from mainstream and alternative American periodicals, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The "fresh anthology of hip American writings" (Forth Worth Morning Star-Telegram) returns this year with a spectacular array of fiction, nonfiction, and humor, drawn from traditional and alternative magazines by Dave Eggers.

This brilliant collection highlights a bold mix of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, television writing, and more alternative comics than ever. Compiled by Dave Eggers and students from his San Francisco writing center, contributors include Judy Budnitz, "The Onion, The Daily Show, This American Life," and George Packer.

Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master's Son, works with group of high school students out of 826 San Francisco to select the year's best new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and category-defying gems aimed at readers 15 and up.

Dave Eggers and his students at the 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs compile fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics, as well as category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.

Presents selections of mainstream and alternative American literature, including both fiction and nonfiction, that discuss a broad spectrum of subjects.

'Raw, poetic and compulsively readable ... I can't wait to buy a copy for everyone I know.' Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help The summer she turned thirteen, Molly Brodak's father was arrested for robbing eleven banks. In time, the image she held of him would unravel further, as more and more unexpected facets of his personality came to light. Bandit is her attempt to discover what, exactly, is left, when the most fundamental relationship of your life turns out to have been built on falsehoods. It is also a scrupulously honest account of learning how to trust again, and to rebuild the very idea of family from scratch. Refusing to fence off the trickier sides of her father's character, Brodak tries to find, through crystalline, spellbinding prose, a version of him that does not rely on the easy answers but allows him to be: an unknowable and incomprehensible whole – who is also her father. Unforgettable, moving, and utterly relatable, Bandit is a story of the unpredictable complexity of family.

Modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy and riffing on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Iris Has Free Time is a subtle, complicated, funny, bold, lyrical and literary, sad and wise book about youth, time, and what it means to grow up. An instant classic and essential reading for anyone who has ever been young. “There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the subway tunnel. ‘Congratulations!’ ‘Congratulations!’ their parents said. And I wanted to yell, ‘Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!’” Whether passed out drunk at The New Yorker where she’s interning; assigning Cliffs Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; getting banned from a fleet of Greek Island ferries while on vacation, or trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pink-outs, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter-life crisis to the shock of turning thirty, Iris Has Free Time charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age—one’s twenties—when childhood is over, supposedly.