Showcases articles written by a variety of journalists judged as finalists or winners in a contest sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and addresses topics ranging from reporting to feature writing.

Chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the stories in this anthology include National Magazine Award–winning works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. This year's selections include Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly) on the agonizing, decades-long struggle by a convicted murderer to prove his innocence; Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker) on the emotional effort by an Iraq War veteran to make amends for the role he played in the deaths of innocent Iraqis; Chris Jones (Esquire) on Robert A. Caro's epic, ongoing investigation into the life and work of Lyndon Johnson; Charles C. Mann (Orion) on the odds of human beings' survival as a species; and Roger Angell (The New Yorker) on aging, dying, and loss. The former infantryman Brian Mockenhaupt (Byliner) describes modern combat in Afghanistan and its ability both to forge and challenge friendships; Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic) reflects on the complex racial terrain traversed by Barack Obama; Frank Rich (New York) assesses Mitt Romney's ambiguous candidacy; and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) looks at the current and future implications of an eventful year in Supreme Court history. The volume also includes an interview on the art of screenwriting with Terry Southern from The Paris Review and an award-winning short story by Stephen King published in Harper's magazine.

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.

A haunting debut novel that explores the fraught journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the startling limits to which we are driven by grief. Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into unbearable grief and all-consuming paranoia. As his behavior grows increasingly erratic, and tensions arise with the school principal and the parents of his students, he faces the familiar urge to flee—a choice that forces him to confront the character weaknesses that have shattered his life again and again, and to accept the wrenching truth about the past he's never been able to move beyond. A haunting debut novel, Bright Before Us explores the fraught journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the startling limits to which we are driven by grief.

Capturing the century's greatest moments in every sport from basseball to chess, these authors (Red Smith, Tom Boswell, John Updike, Jim Murray, Norman Mailer, W.C. Heinz, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, David Remnick, Ring Lardner, Gay Talese, William Nack, Frank Deford, George Plimpton, Jon Krakauer) and their subjects (including Joe DiMaggio, Secretariat, Bobby Knight, and Muhammad Ali) reflect the rising societal importance of sports in this century, showing how sports have been shaped by such monumental events as war, the civil rights movement, and the changing economyomy.