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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Eggers, McSweeney's et al.

  
 
Ethan Hawke
13:14 / 25.10.02
Dave Eggers has just published his first novel, the dreadfully titled You Shall Know our Velocity* under his McSweeney's imprint. This is a little like if say, The Strokes, decided to release their second album** on their own label, with no promotion, no interviews, and making the thing mail-order only. Eggers, as you may know, shot to fame on the strength of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , which was published around the time his literary periodical Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, got going. The McSweeney's imprint has since published such bold-faced names as William Vollman, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Ben Marcus, A.M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Denis Johnson, J.T. Leroy, Rick Moody, Sarah Vowell, and I'll stop there***.

AHWoSG was a decent book, written in a style that'll seem like home to those familiar with rock/alt culture journalism of the 1990s**** Indeed, indie rock culture is a touchstone for the McSweeney's aesthetic. Issue number 6 of the magazine even came complete with a CD of songs by They Might Be Giants, M Doty of Soul Coughing, and others. The issues of the quarterly are lovely, usually hardbound books with a great sense of design. Each issue stands on its own, and buying it makes you feel like the member of an exclusive club. They take no advertising and until recently handshipped to each subscriber from their Brooklyn storefront*****. It's a publisher run like and indie record label, meaning that sometimes they put out great under-the-radar stuff, and sometimes they put out crap by their friends******.

Eggers, like a literary Kurt Cobain, has tried to withdraw from the public eye, as he, as Village Voice scribe Joy Press puts it, is "famous but desperate for everyone to know how much fame mortifies him." How you can let "everyone" know how much fame mortifies you without becoming even more famous******* , without looking like a paranoid putz is beyond me, and beyond Eggers as well it seems, if his clarification page is an indication. Rather than engage in any more public dick waving with reporters (as in the above link), Eggers has chosen to refuse all interviews from now on, unless personally vetted by him, pre-press.*********

Which leads us, ever-so-roundaboutly, to Eggers' new book. The new book's plot is apparently a round-the-world trip of two friends who suddenly come into a fair amount of money, which they feel they must charitably distribute across the globe, to those who need it more than them. Now, aside from the fact that this concept sounds lame in the first place**********, it is clearly a metaphor for the awkward position he finds himself in, and thus, at the root, seems a self-aggrandizing gesture. Because I don't support such self-conscious mythmaking*****************, I don't feel comfortable buying Eggers book - I'm afraid it will make me angry. I don't know why I feel I have the right to censure Eggers' motives so much - perhaps because he himself has made them an issue by the way he choose to go about his business ventures (McSweeneys and Related extravaganzas) and the way he conducts relationships with those who aren't in his little club. Unfortunately, those in his little club include a fair amount of the writers I find interesting and readable, so I'm sucked into Eggers' vortex.

I still haven't decided whether or not I want to buy Egger's book - on the one hand, I like to support self-produced ventures****************************; on the other hand I think I'm predisposed to hate the book. On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to talk about it, since i'm sure everybody will be; on the other hand, that would just be buying into the hype, right? The hype that Eggers has so assiduously tried to avoid, tried to downplay, is even greater than ever.

So what should I do? More importantly, what can someone like Eggers do, to maintain a business, and build credibility as a serious writer, honing his craft over a long career, while still engaging in stunts that capture the public's imagination? Is McSweeney's a good for writers, young unpublished writers especially? Is it a business model for up and comers to follow? Or is it a sham, a hype vehicle for Eggers and his friends? Whaddya think?



*This title actually amuses me greatly, because a private joke that involved calling the title character of UPN's late, unlamented "Felicity" - Velocity instead of her lucky name.

**Is still okay to call 30-60 minutes collections of songs released "albums" in this day and age, or will people increasingly not know what I'm talking about? How about LP? Or is that even more retrograde?

***Though I will mention here that the next issue (#10), is guest edited by Michael Chabon, will be mass-available (and affordable) in bookstores, and is dedicated to "genre fiction" and will feature stories by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, among others.

****It's also notable for its subject matter, of course - which is the close-together deaths of Eggers' parents (by cancer, both) while he was in his early 20s, and his subsequent raising of his younger brother. There's also a rather long section about trying to get on MTV's The Real World. It's a good snapshot of WIRED magazine-dominated San Francisco in the early 90s.

*****In which, although it's located mere blocks from where I now live, I've never been. I'm not sure why-times I've walked past the place they've had interesting art work in the windows, and they host events every Thursday night.

******For instance, Neal Pollack's book. Which was just plain unfunny after a paragraph or two. I wouldn't even link to Pollack, if he hadn't done an absolutely hilarious pisstake of Christopher Hitchen's decision to leave the staff of The Nation, which is worth reading.

*******And famous as well, for the wrong thing - that is, for how you lead your life, rather than the content of your work. You can hardly pity Eggers for this, however, as he chose to make his first work completely dependent on his real life.

*********Is he Tom Cruise?

**********Like, "On The Road" with Bono and Michael Stipe instead of Sal and Dean?
****************Unless it's so incredibly overblown as to be farce.
***********************And there's even a "special edition!" if you order through the web site. Ooooh, the collector in me is getting excited....
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:10 / 25.10.02
The Pollack/Hitchens thing is pricless:

"It became apparent to me over the last two or three days that the American left's grasp on reality is both untenable and unsupportable, especially after I received a $500,000 check from the National Rifle Association to appear at its annual banquet. That's more money than I could make in 12 years writing for The Nation, Mother Jones, and especially Z Magazine, which pays .001 cents a word. And let's face it. Who reads The Nation anyway outside of Brooklyn, Berkeley and Madison, three places where I already have crash pads?"
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
14:23 / 25.10.02
Last night I watched the "McSweeney's vs They Might Be Giants" live show over in St Paul, and it was something like I had never seen before. The reading Eggers did from his new book was wonderfully evokative, but reminded me about authors who's plots are just an excuse to chase down rabbit trails of good writing, while ignoring whatever is supposed to be the narrative.

And They Might Be Giants is always a joy to see.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:07 / 25.10.02
Eggers and TMBG in the same room?

Astonishing that such a concentration of punchable smugness in a small space didn't cause a rift in space/time continuum...
 
 
bjacques
16:09 / 25.10.02
Drop his lily ass in Congo, about midway
between two rival gangs of col-tan ore miners.
Let him write about that, if he survives it.

I'm surprised literary preciousness survived
the dot-com bubble. I'm sure A Heartbreaking...
is a fine book, but the title and Eggers'
public antics will forever put me off reading it.
Kavalier & Clay, on the other hand, was a fantastic
book and I recommend it unreservedly. (Comics artist Jim Steranko, who is still alive
and apparently online, was an escape artist).
 
 
Jack Fear
16:26 / 25.10.02
Drop his lily ass in Congo, about midway between two rival gangs of col-tan ore miners. Let him write about that, if he survives it.

Whereas you, BJacques, would emerge from such a rumble unscathed with bits of flesh in your teeth, no doubt?

Preciousness is no more attractive on you than on Dave Eggers, man.
 
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
17:09 / 25.10.02
I did I teensey bit on Eggers for my MFA, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I very much dig his creative politics and aesthetic. As a caveat, though, I'll admit that I was always vaguely frowned upon in workshops for proclaiming that egotism is a necessary part of any writer's toolbox (after all, if you didn't think you were some level of hot shit, why not just keep the writing in your head?), e.g. my website (and anyone else's for that matter). And I don't think his ego has anything to do with most of the stuff he's publishing nor the way he published it. I don't really get why his style honks people off so much. But he did have this to say in the paperback of AHWOSG:
"In general, not everything new is trendy; not everything that is different is gimmicky; not everything that is truthful must fall within well-known formal parameters. The goal is to have fun and push forward, no?"
And, as another aside, he's definitely commited to comics' public perception as a legit artform, including Tomine's 'Bomb Scare' in his recently edited 2002 Best American Non-Required Reading (the newest (and damn good) entry in the prestigious America's Best anthology series). And there has to be something said for the level of quality he manages to wrangle. Same with Paul Thomas Anderson. Many think he's pretentious as fuck, but look the level of talent in his little stable of usuals. They must think he's got something.
But that's neither here nor there. I think they both require a level of openness in an audience that has been beaten and deadened away by decades of pandering garbage, garbage which has congealed into a deep and penetrating layer of resentment in way too many people.
I just don't get why someone would avoid reading something they have a feeling might be good because they think the creator's a bit of a pretentious dick. Whether or not that may be true, and really none of us will know without personally sitting down and having lunch with the guy, if the book is good, the book is good.
And I think he's making them decidedly good looking as well. Most of my thesis focused on the idea of the book as object, a movement which he's definitely become a part of and which is definitely an intresting counter to this age of digiterrati that's been emerging.
More, more discussion, more.
Benjamin.
 
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
17:23 / 25.10.02
And guess I'm also all about self-conscious mythmaking. As Phife once wisely said, "If I don't say I'm the shit then tell me who the hell will?"

Benjamin.
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
18:00 / 25.10.02
Glad to see that I'm not the only one who sees the similarities between Eggars and P.T. Anderson. AHWOSG was kind of like Boogie Nights and Magnolia meshed into one film. In spirit, I mean. And in printed form, I would hope it would go w/o saying.

I like Eggars. I liked AHWOSG very much but can see why others may not have. I am looking forward to the new novel. I subscribe to McSweeney's and enjoy the stories therein for the most part.

I don't think that Eggars is Ego the Living Planet. I have no proof, just a feeling. The feeling I get is one of sincerity. He is sincere. He recognizes his faults. He is (dare I say it?) humble. Well, a humbleness of sorts. I don't know. I wasn't prepared for this and I forgot my notes.
 
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
19:57 / 25.10.02
See, sometimes I wish I could just be as succinct as you are, Deric, in making my points. I like it but can see why others don't. I get so worked up sometimes.

And it's definitely that sincerity that I identify with and that draws me to all the Eggers/McSweeneys and Anderson stuff. That's what I actually identify with in pretty much everything I like, from Cerebus to Star Wars. Someone genuinely wanting to show me something of their own. It's definitely out there if you've got your ears to the grindstone.

I am very much liking the Anderson/Eggers tangent congealing in my head. Very much so. Yes. Hmmmm

Benjamin.
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
21:01 / 25.10.02
I would also include, on a perhaps slightly colder formal level, Sir Chris Ware and Lord David Foster Wallace. Sincerity and a chuckle or two in the face of the howling abyss even whilst fully acknowledging the gravity of said abyss. "We acknowledge but we do not succumb." Toss in bits of The Onion and John Barth's first two novels (although End Of The Road takes me just a bit further into that abyss than I'm comfortable with). Probably loads more but I'm not nearly as well read as most people here...
 
 
bjacques
18:11 / 26.10.02
Precious? Sorry, just a gut reaction to an essay Eggers
contributed to Harper's--a heavily-annotated gripe about being
asked stupid questions in interviews or something like that. It was
pedantic and humorless. AHWOSG may be a great novel, but it's
still just entertainment. There's a world of great literature and
art (not to mention low distractions). Life's too short. Family tragedies
are, well, tragedies, but they're common. The world's full of it; hence
the col-tan crack. AHWOSG had better have a boatload of humor and
original insight to make Eggers more than another statistic.

Writers are generally a sorry bunch; if we judged their output by
their behavior, we'd miss out on a lot. But behavior *does* count in
the real world, and if Eggers is going out of his way to be an
asshole, it's his own loss. My first impression of him came from
that essay of his, and that *is* part of his work, and not from anything
he did in public.

But...while looking up the offending essay, I saw that Eggers had
founded Might, a really funny and biting mid-90s San Francisco magazine
that was a worthy successor to Spy. I enjoyed it a lot and miss it
very much. On that basis, maybe he's worth another look. Eggers
keeps better company than did, say, the Literary Brat Packers of 15
years ago.
 
 
Baz Auckland
00:38 / 27.10.02
AHBOSG is more than family tragedy. The tragedy bit is only the first few chapters. The rest is about MIGHT and raising his brother. A great book and worth reading.

A friend of mine met him in Seattle last summer and said that he was really nice, and seemed embarrased almost when he was reading from his new book. No ego.
 
 
bjacques
01:02 / 27.10.02
Some people here feel pretty strongly about the book. If a writer can
inspire such passion in their readers, maybe ithey're worth a look.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
14:51 / 28.10.02
So, Eggers radiates either "punchable smugness" or "sincerity and a chuckle or two in the face of the howling abyss even whilst fully acknowledging the gravity of said abyss," to quote two of the above responses. As the two are diametrically opposed, which is it?*

First, punchable smugness - or "preciousness" - Eggers can sometimes lapse into the record-reviewer disease of using a pop-culture reference as short-hand for character. While, according to reviews, his new serious work is shorn of these asides in print form, the Pitchfork review of McSweeneys vs. TMBG (linked above) indicates that in readings** Eggers manages to shoehorn them in. This is called wanting to have your cake (being perceived as "serious") and eating it too (being able to make snarky in-jokes for your hip core audience), which i suppose is a form of smugness. Is it, however, a "punchable" offense? Is it such an objectionable trait that we wish to inflict bodily harm on Eggers, or at the very least muss his coif? One hopes that Eggers can grow or evolve out of this, but hey, maybe he can be the Pavement of the indie lit world.

"Sincerity and a chuckle or two" - Eggers was lumped in with DFW, George Saunders and a few others as a proponent of something called "The New Sincerity"****. In Eggers case, the New Sincerity hasn't taken the form of the recognition yet rejection to the infinite regress meta-critique of post modernism*****, but rather a rejection of criticism, especially of the kind that's practiced in the media, on first principles. That is, he's a champion of the "those who can, do, and those who can't, critique" school of thought, if you can call it that. Coming from an avant garde figure this might have some merit; but coming from someone whose very art is as dependent on the mass media and mass culture as Eggers it sound childish and churlish.

Part of the McSweeneys aesthetic comes from doing things for their own sake; that is, embarking on projects (like the pirate supply store in San Francisco, like letting Chabon edit an issue) without regard for how people will interpret them. This is certainly an admirable trait, and indeed how most great things originate. However, if it is certainly commendable not to care about public interpretation, it is less so to actively deride public interpretation. People are going to have their own opinions (and they may be opinions that you're a charlatan, an exploiter of family, or simply not a very good writer) regardless of how you try pre-empt them by dictating the context in which your work should be judged. So I don't think Egger's sincerity is as sincere as it could be, or indeed as sincere as he thinks it is.

*or does Eggers contain multitudes (which actually is appropos, considering the scary rumor that he wrote everything that appears on the McSweeney's Web site, especially the oeuvre of Mr. Neal Pollack, the work of whom I've reassessed after visiting his blog after being prompted by Flyboy's quote excised from a passage I've referenced, and found his caricatures of personal demons Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan as being spot-on, and a tonic to usual blogging on the subject. Pollack has found his medium, I suspect, in blogging. His MO is to take the story of the day (usually of a literary bent, for example, another hilarious (though unPC) entry is prompted by the recent acquital of French poseur Michel Houllebecq (and if I've misspelled the name of this minor and soon-to-be-forgotten figure incorrectly, so much the better) on charges of racial hate) and twist it so that his authorial persona (Neal Pollack, a hard-drinking womanizing American Man of Letters) is front and center. His adoption of this persona neatly satirizes the oversaturated right wing blogosphere (also called the War Bloggers).

**The McSweeneys coterie seems to coalesce around semi-regular happenings in Brooklyn or San Francisco. While musical entertainment and slide shows may be part of the vaudevillian spectacle, the most important ingredient is authorial readings. Personally, I've got a great aversion to public reading of prose in general (the one time I was called upon to do it - god), and it particular the kind of writing the McSweeney's writers favor doesn't come off well at all - it's very text-centric, and thus more of a cognitive thing, than the tradition of Beat/Slam poetry*** that spawned the author-reading cultcha.

***McSweeneys does not publish poetry in either its print or online formats. Good/bad/indifferent thing?

****Which idiots took to mean that there was nothing ironic about eggers or DFW or whoever else.

***** See Wallace's "Octet" in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for what I see as the nadir of this style (though some, on this board even IIRC, saw it as his best story. Go figure).
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
15:19 / 28.10.02
Should be said that, after IJ, "Octet" is indeed my fave DFW work. Make of that what you will and interpret all utterances in light of it.
 
 
Pepsi Max
00:55 / 29.10.02
Neal Pollack's blog is funny. But it's a one joke site. He'll have to find some more targets or risk becoming tedious.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
15:01 / 29.10.02
Deric, I certainly don't consider you a stupid or misguided person for enjoying "Octet", and I hope you'll continue to contribute to this thread.

Two things-

Slate is running a book club on You Shall Know our Velocity this week.

Here's a quote that cuts to the heart of the Eggers cult-of-personality, written by someone who was a big fan of AHWoSG:

"I was terrified not to like it. Oh, if only I could swallow a few poisonous bugs instead of risking the Eggers hex! You know the hex, right? He spells it out in various guises in the splenetic appendix that was unfortunately appended to the paperback edition of AHWOSG. If you don't like his books, he strongly implies, you are a bad person; that is, one of those "Mean/Jaded/Skimming Readers" who are poisoning the well of American literary culture. And God help you if you don't interpret his books the way Eggers sees them! In that same appendix, he guns down every reader who dares to find anything humorous in his memoir's first chapter. ("Are there even a few funny moments in this section? Absolutely not.") And then there was that damning pronouncement he made in an interview: namely, that anyone who reviews a book without having written one first is clearly writing out of jealousy and rage."

Well, as jealousy and rage are the only two things that motivate me to write at all (aside from the outside possibility that one day, some day, it might get me laid), I've decided to dare the Eggers hex and purchase my own copy of YSKoV* today, as my neighborhood has one of the chosen few bookstores who are carrying it, bookstores which, - "thing 2"-

per this week's New York magazine (which I unfortunately don't have in front of me) are seeing sales of YSKoV that bring a new meaning to sluggish.



*Which looks like a russian last name in it's acronymic form.
 
 
casemaker
20:14 / 30.10.02
While not having any experience with Eggers’ words myself, his strategy as described in these previous posts seems similar to what some allege Jonathan Franzen did with the whole Corrections/Oprah debacle or to Vincent Gallo’s similarly crafted marketing hype. Gallo for instance won’t do interviews unless his mug is placed on the cover of the publication in question and he spends most of these interviews either patting himself on the back, slagging the majority of his peers or referencing his supposedly numerous and varied sexual encounters. If this is the same “asshole-as-genius” bit that Eggers is trying to pull, than I wouldn’t be impressed.

When I was a twelve year old boy my mother asked me how I could listen to the band Guns N’ Roses when Axl Rose was such a misogynist and general scumbag. I ignorantly responded that, look Mom I just want to listen to the music, which I thought rocked, and I don’t care what the band members do outside of that context (and also Mom, like whoah, you’re throwing terms like “misogynist” at a twelve year old here).

I suppose the same argument could be made for Eggers writing, that even if he poses as a fatuous ass but the books he writes are still good, then let us all read them in quantity. But my lesson learned with GNR , was that in fact old mum was right all along and their music was tainted by the pomposity of their members. They’re crap. Always have been. In retrospect, what made me think they rocked so well was because all of my friends thought the same. When really we just wanted to have their celebrity podium so that we too could act like total unbecoming assholes, if we so chose, and have people pay attention to us for it. Maybe then this same jealousy is what readers find so attractive and inspiring about Mr. Eggers works?

I’m inspired more by sincerity and genuine passion these days. Which is what prompts me to defend Mr. David Foster Wallace. I have to agree that “Octet” is my favorite of his stories, followed closely by “Good Old Neon” which is really a humdinger when it comes down to genuine warmth and sincerity between the author and his reader. Take a gander at one of the articles in his Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again where DFW writes:

“Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It is critical and destructive, a ground clearing,-- singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”

Wallace goes on to talk about the different forms of contempt an author has to have for his audience, whether it be contempt for the general reader and how the author can manipulate them emotionally or the contempt for other writers syndrome, where every author wants to make their peers jealous of their own writing skills. I agree that a lot of modern authors (including those in the McSweeney’s alum list above) indulge in a self-conscious irony usage, but I wouldn’t put Wallace in the same category. Does he use irony as a tool? Surely. But it’s not his entire medium.

Also, thanks for the neilpollack.com link. He is a funny writer indeed.
 
 
bjacques
11:21 / 11.11.02
Well, after this discussion I borrowed AHWOSG, and read it in 2 days. I'm impressed, especially with the scream of life and joy at the end. The story of "Might" was a bonus, and I was glad to know that Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair (of my fave unsung cyber-zine bOING bOING) stuck around when times were bad. The book gives a little more heft to the magazine, as I dimly remember it, by explaining what it was supposed to be about. It looks like Eggers still had trouble with the title even after the defensive preface, since it appears in tiny type as an acronym. Genius, well...damn good, anyway. I like it as much as I liked Kavalier & Clay.

So I was wrong on this one.
 
 
The Tower Always Falls
01:17 / 12.11.02
Hurm... don't know how serious Eggers is about patting himself on the back, personally. He actually grew up fairly close to where I live, so he tours in Chicago fairly often. He's been known to hire friends of his to heckle him during readings at book stores. If anything, he really enjoys building himself up for the sole purpose of tearing himself down again.

Having said that, AHWoSG is a very good book, with some flaws. Eggers is terribly postmodern in that he can't seem to have ANY feeling or make a decision without dissecting it in excrutiating detail or relating it to something else (either in pop culture or something else). Hell, McSweeny's is rife with that in it's indicia heavy texts. I think it's pretty brilliant actually. But I noticed the latest McSweeny's is woefully sparse with the tiny print, which is the reason most people I know buy it for... Perhaps due to his touring for Velocity. I'm still bitter for missing the concert with them and TMBG, PLUS Ira Glass...
 
 
Baz Auckland
11:25 / 12.02.03
I just finished You shall know our Velocity, and although there were some disturbing bits about it along the lines of "Is this a satire or is Eggers really like this?" overall it was fantastic. There were so many small bits that I identified with.

The ending as well really left me reeling in a good way. A few bookstores have it, it's not just mail order, and worth reading. Go read it!
 
 
Ethan Hawke
18:38 / 24.02.03
McSweeney's related event that sounds weird enough to go to

HOW TO GENERATE A WINNING CHARACTER

(more specifically: Dungeons, Dragons, and other Role Playing Games)

by

RHIAN ELLIS (female 6th-level magic-using novelist) discussing her Player-Character crushes;

J. ROBERT LENNON (male novelist-illusionist, Master Trickster-level) reading "Four Thousand," the story of one woman's plight in the house of gamers;

FRED H. NICOLAUS (human paladin game master), inviting America's children to the planet known as Abantey;

JOHN SELLERS (lawful neutral freelance writer, armor class -2) recounting the historical rise and tumble of the 20-sided die; and

JOEL STEIN (half-elven magazine columnist andknower of the Thieves' Cant) searching for traps in a Los Angeles hotel room with Elijah Wood.

With appearances by:

David GUION & Michael HANDELMAN, experienced campaigners,

The Dungeon Master known as CHUNG,

And GABE SORIA and STEVE BURNS performing the original song "D&D Woman."

TANKARDS of ale available from a full bar, if by "tankard" you mean "glass" and by "ale" you mean "whiskey."

Please note: dressing as a wizard or thief is not required.This is not a Renaissance Faire, but merely:

Little Gray Book Lecture No. 17: HOW TO GENERATE A WINNING CHARACTER

Wednesday, March 5, 2002, 8 PM
Galapagos Art Space (Back Room)
70 North Sixth Street, between Kent and Wythe
L Train to Bedford Avenue
(718) 782-5188

Any New Yorkers up for this? I might be able to be coaxed out of my lair, (and will even buy tankards) if some 'lither is interested. I do possess low Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength scores, but they're offset by my lordly Intelligence and Charisma. Or not.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
17:58 / 25.02.03
It seems to be McSweeney's week for me...today I received my copy of McSweeney's #10, otherwise known as "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales", featuring stories by Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, and Eggers himself.

While reading a New York Observer story about the White Stripes , I came across this -

Even Mr. Eggers is interested. Mr. White was also scheduled to be interviewed by the McSweeney’s founder for a magazine that Mr. Eggers is launching called The Balloonista sort of younger, hipper Harper’s for the winsome set.

Anyone know anything about this? This might actually be kind of cool, for an aging fucker like me, who was listening to the Stripes new album on his mp3 player and reading the new issue of Harpers on the Subway this morning...
 
 
nedrichards is confused
11:35 / 26.02.03
You can certainly tell (as Eggers himself acknowledged somewhere) that he's been reading W.G. Sebald and that's no bad thing. In fact that's a great thing!
 
 
Sax
11:47 / 21.04.04
I've just bought the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, with shorts by Eggers, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman etc.

Anyone else read this?
 
 
Squirmelia
11:24 / 22.04.04
I have, and like most story collections, the quality of the stories seemed to vary. Some I didn't even finish and some I really liked. Some were spooky, but some seemed almost ordinary.

Eggers' story was in a similar vein to YSKOV, Gaiman's was a typical Gaiman old pub type tale, Hornby's was kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Don't think I finished Moorcock's, since it wasn't really my kind of thing.

There's extracts from the stories here.
 
 
Cosmo!!
13:36 / 14.06.07
McSweeney's has found itself in a bit of bother, financially. On the plus side, that means LOADS of discount books and for the devoted/loaded among you, auctions of artwork! Regardez:

As you may know, it's been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney's included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000 -- actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn't hit right away, but it's hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there's really no way to absorb a loss that big.

We are committed to getting through and past this difficult time, and we're hoping you, the readers who have from the start made McSweeney's possible, will help us.

Over the next week or so, we'll be holding an inventory sell-off and rare-item auction, which we hope will make a dent in the losses we sustained. A few years ago, the indispensible comics publisher Fantagraphics, in similarly dire straits, held a similar sale, and it helped them greatly. We're hoping to do the same.

So if you've had your eye on anything we've produced, now would be a great time to take the plunge. For the next week or so, subscriptions are $5 off, new books are 30 percent off, and all backlist is 50 percent off. Please check out the store and enjoy the astounding savings, while knowing every purchase will help dig us out of a big hole.

Many of our contributors have stepped up and given us original artwork and limited editions to auction off. We've got original artwork from Chris Ware, Marcel Dzama, David Byrne, and Tony Millionaire; a limited-edition music mix from Nick Hornby; rare early issues of the quarterly, direct from Sean Wilsey's closet; and more. We're even auctioning off Dave Eggers's painting of George Bush as a double-amputee, from the cover of Issue 14.

This is the bulk of our groundbreaking business-saving plan: to continue to sell the things we've made, albeit at a greatly accelerated pace for a brief period of time. We are not business masterminds, but we are optimistic that this will work. If you've liked what we've done up to now, this is the time to ensure we'll be able to keep on doing more.

Plenty of excellent presses are in similar straits these days; two top-notch peers of ours, Soft Skull and Counterpoint, were just acquired by Winton, Shoemaker & Co. in the last few weeks. It's an unsteady time for everybody, and we know we don't have any special claim to your book-buying budget. We owe all of you a lot for everything you've allowed us to do over the last nine years, for all the time and freedom we've been given.

Once this calamity is averted, we'll get back to our bread and butter -- the now-legendary Believer music issue is already creeping into mailboxes everywhere; Issue 24 of our quarterly is in the midst of a really pretty silkscreening process; and in July the fourth issue of Wholphin, our DVD magazine, will slip over the border from Canada, bringing with it some very good footage of Maggie Gyllenhaal and a Moroccan drummer who messes up a wedding in an entertaining way. And then a couple of months after that, we'll publish a debut novel from a writer named Millard Kaufman. This book is exactly the kind of thing McSweeney's was created to do: The novel came through the mail, without an agent's imprimatur, and it was written by a first-time novelist. This first-time novelist is ninety years old. It was pulled from the submissions pile and it knocked the socks off of everyone who read it. Millard may well be the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation, and he stands at equal height with the best of several generations since.

Whatever you can do to help in the coming days, we thank you a thousand times. We'll keep updating everybody on how this is going over the next few weeks; for now, pick up a few things for yourself, your friends, for Barack Obama. More news soon -- thanks for reading.

Yours warmly,
The folks at McSweeney's
 
 
Dusto
14:59 / 14.06.07
Of particular interest, the hardcover of Icelander, by your fellow 'lither, me, is only $11.00 right now.

And on the original subject of this thread, I just wanted to toss in that from the very few times that I've hung out with him, Eggers seems like one of the most genuinely decent human beings I've met. But anyway, McSweeney's is a great publisher, and I urge everyone to take a look at what's for sale to help them out.
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
15:53 / 14.06.07
Harrumph.

I subscribed to Might Magazine the issue before it folded, a two-year sub, and nobody at the magazine bothered to inform me it'd been shut down. After four months and no issues, I managed (after some several long-distance phone calls to non-toll-free numbers) to find out the magazine was defunct, and no, my money wouldn't be refunded, but could only be used to buy back issues at a 300 to 1000% mark-up on the cover price. Because they were now "rare."

I'm sure that Eggers wasn't sitting by the phone rubbing his hands and chortling as all this went on, but I can't say I feel obliged to help him out with his new financial problems.

Just ordered Icelander from an online bookstore to make sure my Eggers ire doesn't have any effect on you, Dusto. I've been meaning to read it and I'm glad for the prodding.
 
 
Dusto
17:43 / 14.06.07
Thanks, man, I hope you like it. I can certainly see how something like that would rub you the wrong way, though.
 
  
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