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 tweets -- 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 -- Breakdown / T. Ott -- Ideas / Patricio Pron -- Vanish / Evan Ratliff -- Seven months, ten days in captivity / David Rohde -- Tent City, U.S.A. / George Saunders -- The nice little people / Kurt Vonnegut -- Freedom / Amy Waldman.