By the time she was a teenager, Sara Jenkins had lived all over the Mediterranean, until her family finally settled in a small Tuscan village.

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction.

Best American Comics returns for 2008 with contributions from established and up-and-coming cartoonists, culled from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, and magazines.

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, “noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction.