Charles d'Ambrosio (Introduction)

Edited by the same team responsible for 2003's popular Tin House fiction anthology Bestial Noise, this selection of dazzling nonfiction encapsulates everything readers love about Tin House: the magazine's lively intelligence, wide-ranging curiosity, and sense of fun. Here is the best of the first twenty issues, including Jeffrey Eugenides on living above a Nazi bunker in Berlin, Jo Ann Beard on the life and death of one of Jack Kevorkian's last patients, Russell Banks on adapting novels to the screen, and Czeslaw Milosz on fellow poet Joseph Brodsky. Celebrating both Tin House's themed issues (Sex, Hollywood, Music, Lies) and the magazine's various regular departments–Readable Feasts, Pilgrimages, Lost and Found books–Cooking and Stealing gathers remarkable essays on diverse subjects from some of today's most compelling writers, confirming why the Village Voice has declared: "Tin House may very well represent the future of literary magazines."

"There isn't a dull story in the bunch, and about a dozen of them are truly extraordinary, the kind of literature that stays with you long after the first reading. Even readers who don't generally enjoy short stories will find themselves savoring several of the entries in this trove of recent American fiction."–San Francisco Chronicle