Salon.com > McSweeney's

Salon.com > McSweeney's http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 15:05:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 McSweeney’s mix CD for the Obama era http://www.salon.com/2010/07/31/believer_music_issue/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/31/believer_music_issue/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/07/30/believer_music_issue My uncle Steve hates Barack Obama. There, I’ve said it: I’ve relayed in public the secret that we hush at family gatherings, the reason our family cannot openly celebrate and discuss the Obamas at Christmastime the way other black families do. Let me be explicit about what I am saying. When I use the word "hate," I mean that my uncle — an African American man in his 50s who grew up in the segregated South, in Arkansas, a hundred miles from the National Guard’s 1957 standoff with nine black students outside an all-white school — this man, who ate at segregated diners, played in all-black athletic leagues, and went to all-black schools — despises the first black president of the United States.

The reasons are varied: Sometimes he seems simply jealous, envious that a brother has come around in his lifetime who is — how can I put it? — superbadder than he will ever be. But my uncle, who works in Springfield, Ill., believes that Obama is just another politician with questionable ethics. He claims if the walls could talk about the real goings-on behind closed doors, Barack Obama would be in jail, and not in the White House.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/31/believer_music_issue/feed/ 6 Short story: “The Glory of Keys” http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/patrick_crerand_short_story/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/patrick_crerand_short_story/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/07/14/patrick_crerand_short_story ON MONDAY BRIAN SULLIVAN did not sleep well, so he sent his Pontiac Sunfire to take his plane-geometry exam for him and never returned to Brookhaven High School. After lunch, Brian’s math teacher, Ms. Florida, had to find a new desk for the Sunfire and sharpen its pencil. She opened a window to air out the exhaust, but the kids warmed to the smell of gasoline and oil and overall enjoyed the steady hum of its 2.2-liter Ecotec I4 engine. When Principal Dillard stopped by the classroom at two-fifteen for his daily check -- he and Ms. Florida had been caught canoodling during the Sadie Hawkins dance earlier in the semester -- the car was in the back row, with one headlight shining on the purple ink of the dittoed exam.

"Could I have a word, Ms. Florida?" he said.

Ms. Florida stepped out to the hall. The students started to shout the way they would if they were riding a roller coaster. Brian Sullivan’s Sunfire honked and flashed its lights so as not to be left out of the hullabaloo.

"How long has there been a car parked in your classroom?" Mr. Dillard asked.

"Just this period," Ms. Florida replied. "But I heard from Mademoiselle Jeanne that it sat in during French class as well."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/15/patrick_crerand_short_story/feed/ 7 New fiction from McSweeney’s: “Citrus County” http://www.salon.com/2010/07/07/citrus_county_excerpt/ http://www.salon.com/2010/07/07/citrus_county_excerpt/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/07/06/citrus_county_excerpt Mr. Hibma had given one of the kiss-asses a stopwatch and deemed her the umpire. Some days Mr. Hibma lectured. Some he allowed his classes to play trivia games. These were the two ways he could stomach teaching: losing himself in a lecture or daydreaming while the kids were absorbed in guessing.

"Mr. Hibma," the kiss-ass called. "Steven keeps saying 'retarded.' He said 'Australia's retarded nephew' for New Zealand."

"It should be noted," said Mr. Hibma. "One could as easily say Australia is the big retarded uncle of New Zealand."

Mr. Hibma knew he could teach for all eternity and it still wouldn't feel natural. He was a geography teacher but he didn't teach the subject of geography. He lectured about whatever he felt like and left the memorizing of topographical terms and state capitals to the kids. They had books. They had exercise manuals. If they were smart and curious they'd end up knowing a lot, and if they were dumb they wouldn't.

"Semifinal round," the kiss-ass announced.

Mr. Hibma listened as a boy named Vince who was known for giving out bubble gum tried to differentiate Asian countries.

"There are a lot of people crammed together," Vince said. "Short people?" He drummed his fingers, searching. "Not the one with the hanging ducks."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/07/07/citrus_county_excerpt/feed/ 4 Nick Hornby: Stuff I’ve been reading http://www.salon.com/2010/06/04/nick_hornby_reading/ http://www.salon.com/2010/06/04/nick_hornby_reading/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/06/04/nick_hornby_reading Books bought:

" Austerity Britain, 1945–51" -- David Kynaston

"American Rust" -- Philipp Meyer

 "Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics, Progress and Politics in a London Borough, Prepared for the Ethical Union" -- Mass Observation

"The British Worker" -- Ferdynand Zweig

Books read:

 "One third of Austerity Britain, 1945–51" -- David Kynaston

"Red Plenty" -- Francis Spufford

"American Rust" -- Philipp Meyer

It’s never easy, returning home after failing to make one’s way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of "Good-bye, nerdy losers! I’m not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see!" Ah, well. What can you do, if the people don’t want to be seen? I have now become that pathetic modern phenomenon you might have read about, the boomerang child -- the kid who struts off (typically and unwisely with middle finger raised), spends a couple of years screwing up some lowly job on a magazine or in a bank, and then comes back, tail between his legs, to reclaim his old bedroom and wonder how come his parents have more fun than he on a Saturday night.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/06/04/nick_hornby_reading/feed/ 6 20 fascinating self-portraits http://www.salon.com/2010/05/25/self_portraits_slide_show/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/25/self_portraits_slide_show/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 12:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/05/25/self_portraits_slide_show When I met the author Jonathan Ames in his office at Indiana University in late 2000, the only objects on his desk were a telephone and a stack of portrait doodles -- some of them self-portraits. Ames had just begun his year in Bloomington as a visiting professor, and I'd dropped by to introduce myself and to ask if he'd contribute a story to my dorm-funded student literary magazine.

I never got around to asking for a story. Instead, after we'd talked awhile -- Ames was very generous with his time -- I asked about the doodles. Did he think of himself an artist? Not really. He compared the doodles to boogers. It can be fun to extract and admire a good one, he said (I paraphrase), before discarding it. When I asked if he'd let me publish some of them, he gamely handed me the whole stack, and we printed them all. It was fun.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/25/self_portraits_slide_show/feed/ 22 “Southern Exposure” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/14/wholphin_most_dangerous_jog/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/14/wholphin_most_dangerous_jog/#comments Fri, 14 May 2010 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/05/14/wholphin_most_dangerous_jog

Directed by Chris Sheehy (with Kyle Story, Justus Brevik and Randol Aikin)

A brief interview with the director

McSweeney's: You shot this on location at the South Pole. What in the world brought you there?

Chris Sheehy: The South Pole is the best site on earth for microwave astronomy. We were down there installing a telescope we built in the United States for looking at the early universe. Everyone in the video is a Ph.D. student in either physics or astrophysics, myself included. There are three different microwave telescopes represented by myself and the people in the video.

Tell us about the 300 Degree Club run.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/14/wholphin_most_dangerous_jog/feed/ 6 “My dad did the same thing” http://www.salon.com/2010/05/06/end_of_combat_operations_excerpt_ext2010/ http://www.salon.com/2010/05/06/end_of_combat_operations_excerpt_ext2010/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/05/06/end_of_combat_operations_excerpt_ext2010 In late winter of 2009, novelist and Time correspondent Nick McDonell was embedded in Iraq with the 3rd Brigade of the United States Army's 1st Cavalry Division. This spring, McSweeney's is publishing McDonell's engrossing, sharp-eyed reports from the front lines in "The End of Major Combat Operations." The following excerpt centers on Nick's interviews with several soldiers about what brought them to Iraq. For reference, "terp" is short for interpreter.

-----------------

Everyone you met could explain why he was there.

"It is a sign of faith that we're here now," specialist Ryan Dunne told me as he stood watch over a line of detainees facing a wall in an abandoned school. "It's faith that they can do the job."

Usually the reason was simpler. Because I'm a soldier and I follow orders. Sometimes it was more complicated, especially for Iraqis. And they were the ones who really needed an answer, because the Americans were always asking them what they were doing here. As they walked to school, to the market, hand in hand to the mosque, on their way to weddings and funerals. The wrong answer got you facing a wall under the watchful eye of Specialist Dunne.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/05/06/end_of_combat_operations_excerpt_ext2010/feed/ 12 A real-life treasure hunt takes off http://www.salon.com/2010/04/29/treasure_hunt_mcsweeney_s_ext2010/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/29/treasure_hunt_mcsweeney_s_ext2010/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/29/treasure_hunt_mcsweeney_s_ext2010 That’s right; throughout this fine land, twelve handcrafted, one-of-a-kind, gem-encrusted numbers lie buried in the soil. If you can find them, they’re yours to keep. But where are they? The only path lies in solving the riddles in McSweeney’s newest title, "The Clock Without a Face." Get a head start on the hunt. Pick up an advance copy of "Clock" here or at your local bookstore starting May 14.

Last Wednesday, Aaron Holmes woke up early and packed a lunchbox with candy, bananas, and PB&J sandwiches, "because they make excellent adventure food." He grabbed an emergency kit containing a bit of string, a hammer, and a flashlight, a five-dollar Wal-Mart shovel, and a copy of "The Clock Without A Face" -- his field guide for the journey ahead of him.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/29/treasure_hunt_mcsweeney_s_ext2010/feed/ 2 Millard Kaufman: The 90-year-old boy novelist http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2010/04/21/kaufman

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/21/kaufman_6/feed/ 3 7 unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/14/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays Every March, the Believer magazine publishes its annual Film Issue. This year’s number features -- among other things -- the complete budget, line by line, of a $15,000 feature film; Brian T. Edwards on watching "Shrek" in Tehran; specious life advice from comedian Julie Klausner; and a DVD of rare, beautiful and funny short films from the Yugoslavian Black Wave. In the excerpt below, Elif Batuman (whose wonderful new book, "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them," was recently published by FSG) unearths seven never-produced screenplays penned by famous intellectuals.

Vladimir Nabokov

As a struggling young writer in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov once wrote a phenomenally depressing screenplay titled "The Love of a Dwarf" (1924). The protagonist, a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, has a one-night stand with the depressed, childless wife of a circus magician. The dwarf quits the circus and retires to a small northern town, waiting vainly for the magician’s wife to join him. Eight years later, she turns up on his doorstep, announces that he has a son, and rushes away. The dwarf pursues her, but dies of a heart attack at her feet. To the gathering onlookers, the magician’s wife announces that her son died a few days ago. In 1939, Esquire printed a short-story version of "The Love of a Dwarf," titled "The Potato Elf": it was Nabokov’s first American publication.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays/feed/ 12 Our new partnership with McSweeney’s http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_2/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_2/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/about/inside_salon/2010/04/14/mcsweeneys Today, Salon is proud to launch a new content partnership with McSweeney's, the little San Francisco publishing outfit with a very big cultural footprint. We'll be frequently running pieces and excerpts from the various McSweeney's divisions -- McSweeney's Quarterly Journal, the Believer, Wholphin and McSweeney's Books -- exclusively on Salon.com. The first piece is Elif Batuman's fascinating "Missed Encounters With the Movies," an excerpt from the Believer's Film Issue.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_2/feed/ 11 The struggle for independents http://www.salon.com/2007/06/21/independent_press/ http://www.salon.com/2007/06/21/independent_press/#comments Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/06/21/independent_press McSweeney's is holding a garage sale of sorts. An e-mail sent out last week announced that, "for the next week or so," the publishing house founded by Dave Eggers would be selling its new books at 30 percent off and its backlist at 50 percent off. It is also, by way of eBay, auctioning off donations from its more well-known contributors: One could bid on an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of "The Daily Show" guided by John Hodgman, or a "one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July."

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/06/21/independent_press/feed/ 18 “Icelander” http://www.salon.com/2006/08/11/long/ http://www.salon.com/2006/08/11/long/#comments Fri, 11 Aug 2006 10:34:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/11/long At one point in Dustin Long's endearingly wacky puzzle novel, "Icelander," two "metaphysical detectives" discover a copy of "The Case of the Consternated Cossacks" on a bookshelf between Herman Melville's "The Confidence Man" and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Valley of Fear." Since this bumbling pair, a kind of existential Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, see everything as a clue, they have no doubt that the book's placement is significant, but as usual they just can't figure out what the significance is. At this juncture, the novel's "editor" intrudes. In a cranky footnote he observes that there would be equal meaning embedded in the fact that the books placed just above and under "The Case of the Consternated Cossacks" are by, say, Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Peters (who, to the uninitiated, writes mystery novels about a sleuthing female Egyptologist). You see, the books have been shelved by "the most ingenious library scientist of modern times," whose plan for a nonlinear "rhizomatic replacement of the Dewey Decimal System" entails sorting books without hierarchy, according to an "infinite skein of interconnections."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/08/11/long/feed/ 5 Be very afraid http://www.salon.com/2005/12/13/davis_23/ http://www.salon.com/2005/12/13/davis_23/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/12/13/davis It's kind of difficult to identify Mike Davis' precise profession. A Google search turns up many descriptions: public intellectual, iconoclast, American social commentator, sociographer, scientist historian, old-time Commie, one-time big-rig driver. Whatever it may be, the defining characteristic of Davis is that he stays in no single discipline, preferring to combine them all, from urban theory to economic history to paleoseismology, to build a fresh perspective on whatever subject he has chosen for scrutiny. His first book, "City of Quartz" -- originally rejected as his history thesis -- lifted the veil on the Los Angeles power structure to reveal that racism, elitism and class struggle were embedded into the social architecture for preserving the ruling-class status quo, which is perhaps an overly simplistic way of describing a very complex book. The book, which came out in 1990, was well timed. "City of Quartz" also presaged the social unrest that erupted in 1992, earning Davis a strange status of modern-day prophet and making the book required reading in classrooms nationwide.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/12/13/davis_23/feed/ 6 The believer http://www.salon.com/2005/03/09/eggers_37/ http://www.salon.com/2005/03/09/eggers_37/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/03/09/eggers Ever since publishing his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in 2000, Dave Eggers has been deconstructed as much for who he is as for what he writes. This, of course, is something of an inevitability when you find fame through exposing yourself through writing, through demanding readers to stare, to crawl inside and look around, no matter how awkward it ends up feeling. The book's extraordinary success allowed Eggers to turn his literary magazine McSweeney's -- once slapstick and satirical, now decidedly more serious and mainstream -- into what's often referred to as an indie publishing empire: There's a publishing house, a monthly magazine about books (the Believer), a bicoastal tutoring center for kids. Bring up Eggers today and you're supposed to have something to say about all this. You're supposed to have an opinion, a stance, a theory.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/03/09/eggers_37/feed/ 0 Writing in the Margins http://www.salon.com/2004/12/23/margins_6/ http://www.salon.com/2004/12/23/margins_6/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/col/2004/12/23/margins OK, it's holiday time, which means that most of you probably are too busy creeping through the malls of America to read this column -- or anything else, for that matter. But dig in below for some stellar stocking-stuffers, because I've got a phat list of graphic novels that's got something for your friends, your 'rents, your S.O., your kids, your cat and your parakeet. Call it a best-of-2004 compilation or call it a shopping list. Because this is America, and you can say whatever the hell you want.

Unless it's about Texas, where fragile egos bruise -- a tad hypocritically, I would argue, considering all the trash they talk -- at the slightest joke. That's an angular jab at those who didn't approve too much of my disappointment -- OK, outright disbelief -- over Don DeLillo's archival papers getting shipped to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Katherine Pelletier, the archivist who worked hard to get the "White Noise" author's goods to Austin, even wrote politely to inform me that no one in New York, DeLillo's hometown, stepped forward to claim the author's miscellany as its own, letting me know along the way that I unfairly "obliterate[d] the difference between those who treasure the lessons of history through art and literature and those who may wreak havoc on our culture." And I thought no one read my column!

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/12/23/margins_6/feed/ 0 The Believer http://www.salon.com/2003/04/03/believer_2/ http://www.salon.com/2003/04/03/believer_2/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/04/03/believer As soon as I was spotted with the Believer on a Brooklyn subway platform, I was promptly accosted by a dark-eyed woman in her 20s wondering where she could find the debut issue. It didn't take long for word to get out that the new literary/cultural magazine published by the McSweeney's collective in San Francisco had hit the bookstores.

Already, the power of the Believer is strong.

The magazine, as has been reported elsewhere, is the brainchild of novelist Heidi Julavits, author of "The Mineral Palace," and Vendela Vida, who wrote the female rites-of-passage investigation "Girls on the Verge," and is, not incidentally, Dave Eggers' fiancée.

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