I. Best American fake headlines (from The Onion)
Best American 'Daily Show' exchange on the anniversary of Watergate (from The Daily Show with John Stewart)
Best American ringing defeat of religion masquerading as science (from Kitzmiller v. Dover)
Best American answers to the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" (from A Soldier's Thoughts)
Best American epigraph wherein a contemporary writer quotes a great writer who died in 2005 (from Saturday, by Ian McEwan)
Best American first sentences of novels of 2005
Best American new worlds and phrases (from The Oxford Dictionary of English, revised second edition)
Best American things to know about Chuck Norris (from Chuck Norris Facts)
Best American things to know about hoboes (from The Areas of My Expertise)
II. Shipwreck / Cat Bohannon (from The Georgia Review)
Nadia / Judy Budnitz (from One Story)
Pyongyang: a journey in North Korea (excerpt) / Guy Delisle
The insurgent's tale / Tom Downey (from Rolling Stone)
The innocents / Gipi (from Wish You Were Here)
The Iraqi Constitution (from The Washington Post)
Me and you and everyone we know / Miranda July (from the original shooting script)
Wading toward home / Michael Lewis (from The New York Times Magazine)
Are Iraquis optimistic? / The Lincoln Group
Room no. 12 / Naguib Mahfouz (from Zoetrope: All-Story
Pirate station / Rick Moody (from Gargoyle)
The kidney-shaped stone that moves every day / Haruki Murakami (from The New Yorker)
False cognate / Jeff Parker (from Hobart)
Love it or leave it / David Rakoff (from Don't Get Too Comfortable
Trauma on loan / Joe Sacco (from The Guardian)
The new Mecca / George Saunders (from GQ)
Peg / Sam Shaw (from Open City)
Letting go of God? / Julia Sweeney (from This American Life)
Here is a lesson in creative writing / Kurt Vonnegut (from A Man Without a Country)
Kenyon commencement speech / David Foster Wallace.
