You can’t help what you love. So in advance I’d like to make no apologies for the stories I’ve picked for my dream anthology. I claim no exhaustive review or attempts at even-handedness in my choices, if such claims are even worth making. I didn’t consider who wrote these stories—in about half the cases I couldn’t remember who wrote them, or I couldn’t remember the title, or both.

But I did remember a moment, an image, an ache. I closed my eyes and these things came to me and then I wrote down, “That one I think it’s called bird about this crazy pilot” and “the girl whose father is in prison and one of his former cronies gets her out of town and there’s something about a fire.”

Even if I couldn’t remember the story’s title or author, I was pretty sure I could find it, because I’d probably first read it in an anthology like New Stories from the South or O. Henry Prize Stories or Best American Short Stories. In a few cases I’d found favorites in an author’s story collection. In all cases, tripping across a story I loved led me to seek out more of the author’s work.

While I drew from contemporary sources, only four out of the eleven stories I chose were published after 2000. The most recent was originally published in 2004, and the earliest one appeared first in 1989, the year I graduated from high school. I guess I needed at least a couple of years to realize that a story had stayed with me.

So here is my love letter to these eleven stories, which I listed in alphabetical order by the author’s last name (though it’s nice to see the list arbitrarily sandwiched by pieces first published more than a decade apart in The Greensboro Review, where I was an assistant editor for a year while working on my MFA). I won’t try to write with any authority about their literary quality or what I think the writer was trying to do or whatever. I’m just going to talk about what they did to me.

I wouldn’t give a work of fiction to anyone I didn’t know well. Since I don’t know your friends and family, I’ll suggest two great non-fiction books, both recently out in paperback that should satisfy all sorts of folks. The first is The Bedside Book of Birds, edited by Graeme Gibson. Even non bird-lovers will find much to remark upon in this varied and lavishly illustrated collection. Poems, stories, myths, lore, old engravings, paintings, photos, all are gathered edifyingly under such headings as “Then the Birds Attacked—Avian Defense and Flying Nightmares” and “A Bird in the House—Sinister Auspices.” In fact, even avid bird haters will find much to mull upon in this sometimes humorous, sometimes sad and touching, always fascinating volume. Put this old-fashioned miscellany by the bed and drift away to dreams of flight and feathers.

My second choice, for all your friends and relatives who think they should have been, might be, want to be, or are writers (and that, I’ve no doubt, is most of them), is Gay Talese’s brilliant A Writer’s Life. With care and narrative cunning Talese tells the story of a writer (himself) who sets out to investigate three very different stories and never finishes even one of them. Cheerfully Talese recollects how he got to these projects and how they finally got to him. Anyone who has ever struggled with an unwieldy sentence will find this book both a joy and a terror; a witty, exhaustive, and deeply cautionary tale for us all.