"From Syria to Egypt, northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, ancient communities that were the birthplaces of prophets and saints are losing any living connection to Christianity, the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives. In The Vanishing, journalist Janine di Giovanni writes about the last traces of small, hardy Christian communities that have become fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly...

In the basement of a small publishing house in San Francisco, fourteen high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and many other things. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together these high schoolers selected the contents of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, a collection in which you can take a...