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 field trip to the moon, infiltrate a cult, spend seven days in Syria, and drop in on the enigmatic desert community known as Night Vale, among many other possibilities.