Introduction / David Sedaris --
Best American woman comedy piece written by a woman / Wendy Molyneux --
Best American sentences on page 50 of books published in 2009 --
Best American magazine letters section / Stephen Colbert --
Best American fast-foot-related crimes --
Best American gun magazine headlines --
Best American six-word memoirs on love and heartbreak --
Best American new patents --
Best American letter to the editor --
Best American overqualified cover letters / Joey Comeau --
Best American fictional character names --
Best American 350-word story / Barry Lopez --
Best American farm names --
Best American first lines of poems published in 2009 --
Best American journal article titles published in 2009 --
Best American illustrated missed connections / Sophie Blackall --
Best American new band names --
Best American lawsuits --
Best American poems written in the last decade or so by soldiers and citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan --
War dances / Sherman Alexie --
Like I was Jesus / Rachel Aviv --
Burying Jeremy Green / Nora Bonner --
The carnival / Lilli Carré --
Capital gains / Rana Dasgupta --
The encirclement / Tamas Dobozy --
Man of steel / Bryan Furuness --
Half beat / Elizabeth Gonzalez --
Gentlemen, start your engines / Andrew Sean Greer --
The photographer / Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier --
What, of this goldfish, would you wish? / Etgar Keret --
Fed to the streets / Courtney Moreno --
The tiger's wife / Téa Obreht --
Seven months, ten days in captivity / David Rohde --
Tent City, U.S.A. / George Saunders --
The nice little people / Kurt Vonnegut --
