Subject
Vladimir Nabokov's relentless search for the perfect paperback
cover for Lolita (fwd)
cover for Lolita (fwd)
From
Date
Body
From: Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Guardian Unlimited
http://observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,896177,00.html
Review
Eggers v the establishment
This month marks the tenth issue of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's, the literary
magazine that has become required reading - especially among his enemies in
smart New York publishing circles
Lawrence Donegan
Sunday February 16, 2003
The Observer
The off-the-record briefing is not the public-relations technique normally
favoured by small literary magazines, but then McSweeney's Literary Quarterly
isn't exactly normal. For one thing, there isn't a writer in the United States -
from Pulitzer winners such as Michael Chabon to purveyors of airport doorstops
such as Michael Crichton - who would turn down the chance to contribute to its
pages. For a se! cond thing, unlike other literary magazines, McSweeney's
actually sells: 20,000-plus copies at the last count. And for a third thing, it
is the only literary magazine in existence edited by Dave Eggers, the Michael
Jordan of American literature.
In 2000, Eggers published a memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
which won the critics' praise for its intelligent prose, and the hip young
things' approval for its ironic tone and deconstructionist introduction, 'Rules
and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book'. Since then, he has written a
novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, (published in the UK this month by Hamish
Hamilton), edited a couple of anthologies, opened a store in San Francisco that
sells pirate gear (maps, eye patches, anti-scurvy supplies, the usual kind of
stuff), established a drop-in centre to help schoolchildren develop their
writing skills, and published half-a-dozen books by other writers.
He is what every young literary publisher in New York would love to be if only
the accountants didn't keep telling them the money is in self-improvement books.
In short, Eggers can do it all.
What he will not do is sit down and be interviewed, having learnt on the road to
literary fame that accessibility is the death of journalistic curiosity. Thus,
emails go unanswered, phone messages are not returned and colleagues at
McSweeney's become vague when the subject of the magazine's founder comes up.
Eggers is not, however, obstructive.
This month, his magazine will publish its tenth issue - a collection of 'genre'
short stories by the likes of Chabon, Crichton, Nick Hornby, Elmore Leonard and
Stephen King. It is a 'charity project', with all proceeds going to 826
Valencia, the writing centre Eggers opened last year in San Francisco. For once,
publicity is welcome, kind of, which is why a senior editor at McSweeney's has
agreed to speak to me 'off the record'.
I meet my source in a coffee shop near the magazine's office. He is young (for a
senior editor) and very friendly (for a cool, literary type). We get our coffee
and sit down. It quickly becomes obvious he would rather talk about basketball
or the surprising profitability of pirate supplies or the war in Iraq -
anything, in fact, than Eggers and McSweeney's.
Eventually, I steer the conversation round to the forthcoming issue and, after
some effort, extract the following information. It has been edited by Michael
Chabon, a friend of Eggers. There are 17 contributors, each of whom has written
in a particular genre. Nick Hornby, apparently, has written a ' Twilight Zone
kind of story'. The cover art is a classic pulp magazine illustration by H.C.
Ward. No one has been paid and, in a break with the magazine's proudly
independent tradition, the new issue will be printed and distributed by one of
the New York publishing houses, Vintage. This means, for the first time, that
McSweeney's will be available in chain bookshops such as Barnes & Noble and
Borders. 'It might even be in airports,' my source says, giggling at this
preposterous idea.
He becomes expansive only on the subject of 826 Valencia. Justifiably so. Opened
last April, the centre offers tutoring, advice and encouragement to
schoolchildren, either individually or as part of organised groups. Later that
day, for example, it was due to host a book-making class during which
schoolchildren would be writing, illustrating and binding their own homemade
book. 'The office is never just the office,' he says.
Only a curmudgeon would deny that McSweeney's is just as admirable in its own
way. To begin with, there is the design. Eggers, a graphic artist by training,
combines a taste for antiquity - the magazine's occasionally dense text and
quaint line drawings make it look like a nineteenth-century literary journal -
with a well-devel oped sense of the absurdly modern. Issue 4 came as a series of
booklets in a box, the cover of each booklet designed by its author. Issue 6 was
published with its own soundtrack, with songs to accompany each article. The
spine of issue 3 contained a short story by David Foster Wallace.
Then there is its openness to new writers. At a time when the fiction editor of
the New Yorker tartly has announced she would never dream of publishing an
unsolicited manuscript, McSweeney's makes a point of being open to anyone. Issue
10 is packed with literary stars, but it will be an exception. Magazine staff
make it a rule to read every one of the hundreds of submissions they receive
each month and try to include two or three in every issue, sprinkled among
starrier contributions from the likes of Zadie Smith, Rick Moody and Jonathan
Ames. 'Our tastes and themes change from month to month so its tough to define a
typical McSweeney's story,' says my man.
This policy has its drawbacks. The quality of contributions is variable. Some
are inspired - Paul Maliszewski's essay in issue 4, tracing Vladimir Nabokov's
relentless search for the perfect paperback cover for Lolita, springs to mind -
but generally, too many of the contributors write in Eggers's shadow, preferring
to ape his self-effacing prose and editorial quirks rather than think for
themselves. Occasionally, it is difficult to know what is spoof and what is
real, which is part of the fun for the folks at McSweeney's, of course, but
relentless second-guessing is a little wearing for the rest of us. Is a joke
really a joke if the reader isn't sure if it is a joke?
McSweeney's is not Eggers's first adventure in the magazine world. Before, there
was Might, published in San Francisco in the mid-1990s and marketed - in a vain
attempt to attract advertisers - as a 'humour magazine for Generation X'. Might
specialised in poking fun at the pomposity and social moralising of mainstream
American magazine culture, publishing essays with titles such as 'The Future: is
it Coming?' and 'Are Black People Cooler than White People?' Most famously, it
staged the death of a faded American television star called Adam Rich, a stunt
earnestly followed up by the supermarket tabloids.
'Might was funny and irreverent, the best thing that was going on at the time,'
recalls David Kippen, a senior editor on a rival humour magazine called Buzz and
now chief literary critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. 'Might and now, to a
greater extent, McSweeney's reinstated humour to a central place in American
letters that it hasn't occupied since the glory days of Thurber.'
Maybe so, but the mighty Might went bust in 1997. Eggers moved to New York to
work on Esquire but found corporate publishing too stultifying. 'I'm not too
good at working within someone else's machine. I get suicidal within about two
minutes,' he once said.
He left to write his first book and set up McSweeney's. Issue 1 pulled together
pieces that had been rejected by more established publications, according to the
novelist Rick Moody, a friend of Eggers and one of the magazine's original
contributors. ' McSweeney's appeared at a moment when several tremendous new
literary magazines appeared, like Tim House, Post Road and Pierogi Press.
They're all great but Dave's was even more ambitious, especially from a design
standpoint. I thought it was going to be a routine literary quarterly but I had
no idea what a design genius Dave was,' he says.
Moody has since contributed five pieces to McSweeney's. 'Usually, there's a
concept, issuing either from Dave or from some guest editor, and usually I am
interested in the concept. I have always been responsive to unusual
assignments,' he says. 'McSweeney's surprises. In the best possible way. And the
world is very very very very very short of genuine surprises, except for bad
news surprises.'
Michael Chabon is another famous literary friend of Eggers who has supported the
magazine, publishing an unused chapter from his novel, The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay. The idea of the 'genre' edition of the magazine arose from a
conversation between them.
'I had this fantasy of some day running my own magazine that would attempt to
revive the grand tradition of the epiphany-free, genre [sci-fi,crime, mystery,
thriller, romance, suspense, macabre] short story, a tradition that proudly
claims Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Robert Graves and so on. I
went on about this and finally, to shut me up, Dave said I should guest-edit
McSweeney's. I couldn't pass up this wonderful opportunity to try and revive a
rich branch of English-language literature, one that I want to see flourish
again,' Chabon says. 'Anyone who has ever wondered why the contemporary short
story, while extremely diverse in theme, subject and voice, is so limited in
form and structure and so oddly devoid of story might find something to interest
him or her in this issue.'
Chabon, Moody, Hornby, Smith, Jonathan Lethem; it's Eggers's good fortune he has
so many famous friends to fill his pages. The literary world being what it is,
there are some who prefer to describe the friendship as cliquishness and
McSweeney's as a clan rather than a magazine. Running Eggers's name through
Google turns up plenty of abuse, while the magazine has even inspired its own
parodic, now defunct, website.
At the posher end of the market, the New York Times seldom misses a chance to
stick the boot in, describing various McSweeney's enterprises as 'unbearable',
'whimsical', 'mannered', 'bratty' and 'bordering on the sniggering'. And that's
only in one article. Meanwhile, the American reviews of Eggers's sometimes
inspired, sometimes dreary new novel have been gleefully - and unfairly -
poisonous. It would be simple to attribute the bile to pure envy but far more
complicated forces are at work, and they begin with the success of McSweeney's
and end with the dereliction of the New York publishing establishment.
'New York has had its tentacles around the American literary scene for too long,
and the West Coast and the South have been frozen out because of it,' says
Kippen. 'The great thing about this magazine is that it is creating a centre for
literary production outside of New York. It is capitalising on the general
oppression of writers by the big publishers. Sure, there are big names in there,
but there are also fresh voices, people who live in small towns in the middle of
nowhere.
'I don't know where McSweeney's finds them but it does and I'm glad. It just
goes to prove that, contrary to what a load of old farts have been saying, this
generation is as interested, if not more interested, in reading and literature
as any previous generation.'
For this reason alone, McSweeney's is a publication well worth supporting. And
that's on the record.
· Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby will be in conversation on 25 February at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1
Related stories
16.02.2003: Nick Hornby on Dave Eggers
_______________________________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 helps ELIMINATE E-MAIL VIRUSES. Get 2 months FREE*.
Guardian Unlimited
http://observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,896177,00.html
Review
Eggers v the establishment
This month marks the tenth issue of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's, the literary
magazine that has become required reading - especially among his enemies in
smart New York publishing circles
Lawrence Donegan
Sunday February 16, 2003
The Observer
The off-the-record briefing is not the public-relations technique normally
favoured by small literary magazines, but then McSweeney's Literary Quarterly
isn't exactly normal. For one thing, there isn't a writer in the United States -
from Pulitzer winners such as Michael Chabon to purveyors of airport doorstops
such as Michael Crichton - who would turn down the chance to contribute to its
pages. For a se! cond thing, unlike other literary magazines, McSweeney's
actually sells: 20,000-plus copies at the last count. And for a third thing, it
is the only literary magazine in existence edited by Dave Eggers, the Michael
Jordan of American literature.
In 2000, Eggers published a memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
which won the critics' praise for its intelligent prose, and the hip young
things' approval for its ironic tone and deconstructionist introduction, 'Rules
and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book'. Since then, he has written a
novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, (published in the UK this month by Hamish
Hamilton), edited a couple of anthologies, opened a store in San Francisco that
sells pirate gear (maps, eye patches, anti-scurvy supplies, the usual kind of
stuff), established a drop-in centre to help schoolchildren develop their
writing skills, and published half-a-dozen books by other writers.
He is what every young literary publisher in New York would love to be if only
the accountants didn't keep telling them the money is in self-improvement books.
In short, Eggers can do it all.
What he will not do is sit down and be interviewed, having learnt on the road to
literary fame that accessibility is the death of journalistic curiosity. Thus,
emails go unanswered, phone messages are not returned and colleagues at
McSweeney's become vague when the subject of the magazine's founder comes up.
Eggers is not, however, obstructive.
This month, his magazine will publish its tenth issue - a collection of 'genre'
short stories by the likes of Chabon, Crichton, Nick Hornby, Elmore Leonard and
Stephen King. It is a 'charity project', with all proceeds going to 826
Valencia, the writing centre Eggers opened last year in San Francisco. For once,
publicity is welcome, kind of, which is why a senior editor at McSweeney's has
agreed to speak to me 'off the record'.
I meet my source in a coffee shop near the magazine's office. He is young (for a
senior editor) and very friendly (for a cool, literary type). We get our coffee
and sit down. It quickly becomes obvious he would rather talk about basketball
or the surprising profitability of pirate supplies or the war in Iraq -
anything, in fact, than Eggers and McSweeney's.
Eventually, I steer the conversation round to the forthcoming issue and, after
some effort, extract the following information. It has been edited by Michael
Chabon, a friend of Eggers. There are 17 contributors, each of whom has written
in a particular genre. Nick Hornby, apparently, has written a ' Twilight Zone
kind of story'. The cover art is a classic pulp magazine illustration by H.C.
Ward. No one has been paid and, in a break with the magazine's proudly
independent tradition, the new issue will be printed and distributed by one of
the New York publishing houses, Vintage. This means, for the first time, that
McSweeney's will be available in chain bookshops such as Barnes & Noble and
Borders. 'It might even be in airports,' my source says, giggling at this
preposterous idea.
He becomes expansive only on the subject of 826 Valencia. Justifiably so. Opened
last April, the centre offers tutoring, advice and encouragement to
schoolchildren, either individually or as part of organised groups. Later that
day, for example, it was due to host a book-making class during which
schoolchildren would be writing, illustrating and binding their own homemade
book. 'The office is never just the office,' he says.
Only a curmudgeon would deny that McSweeney's is just as admirable in its own
way. To begin with, there is the design. Eggers, a graphic artist by training,
combines a taste for antiquity - the magazine's occasionally dense text and
quaint line drawings make it look like a nineteenth-century literary journal -
with a well-devel oped sense of the absurdly modern. Issue 4 came as a series of
booklets in a box, the cover of each booklet designed by its author. Issue 6 was
published with its own soundtrack, with songs to accompany each article. The
spine of issue 3 contained a short story by David Foster Wallace.
Then there is its openness to new writers. At a time when the fiction editor of
the New Yorker tartly has announced she would never dream of publishing an
unsolicited manuscript, McSweeney's makes a point of being open to anyone. Issue
10 is packed with literary stars, but it will be an exception. Magazine staff
make it a rule to read every one of the hundreds of submissions they receive
each month and try to include two or three in every issue, sprinkled among
starrier contributions from the likes of Zadie Smith, Rick Moody and Jonathan
Ames. 'Our tastes and themes change from month to month so its tough to define a
typical McSweeney's story,' says my man.
This policy has its drawbacks. The quality of contributions is variable. Some
are inspired - Paul Maliszewski's essay in issue 4, tracing Vladimir Nabokov's
relentless search for the perfect paperback cover for Lolita, springs to mind -
but generally, too many of the contributors write in Eggers's shadow, preferring
to ape his self-effacing prose and editorial quirks rather than think for
themselves. Occasionally, it is difficult to know what is spoof and what is
real, which is part of the fun for the folks at McSweeney's, of course, but
relentless second-guessing is a little wearing for the rest of us. Is a joke
really a joke if the reader isn't sure if it is a joke?
McSweeney's is not Eggers's first adventure in the magazine world. Before, there
was Might, published in San Francisco in the mid-1990s and marketed - in a vain
attempt to attract advertisers - as a 'humour magazine for Generation X'. Might
specialised in poking fun at the pomposity and social moralising of mainstream
American magazine culture, publishing essays with titles such as 'The Future: is
it Coming?' and 'Are Black People Cooler than White People?' Most famously, it
staged the death of a faded American television star called Adam Rich, a stunt
earnestly followed up by the supermarket tabloids.
'Might was funny and irreverent, the best thing that was going on at the time,'
recalls David Kippen, a senior editor on a rival humour magazine called Buzz and
now chief literary critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. 'Might and now, to a
greater extent, McSweeney's reinstated humour to a central place in American
letters that it hasn't occupied since the glory days of Thurber.'
Maybe so, but the mighty Might went bust in 1997. Eggers moved to New York to
work on Esquire but found corporate publishing too stultifying. 'I'm not too
good at working within someone else's machine. I get suicidal within about two
minutes,' he once said.
He left to write his first book and set up McSweeney's. Issue 1 pulled together
pieces that had been rejected by more established publications, according to the
novelist Rick Moody, a friend of Eggers and one of the magazine's original
contributors. ' McSweeney's appeared at a moment when several tremendous new
literary magazines appeared, like Tim House, Post Road and Pierogi Press.
They're all great but Dave's was even more ambitious, especially from a design
standpoint. I thought it was going to be a routine literary quarterly but I had
no idea what a design genius Dave was,' he says.
Moody has since contributed five pieces to McSweeney's. 'Usually, there's a
concept, issuing either from Dave or from some guest editor, and usually I am
interested in the concept. I have always been responsive to unusual
assignments,' he says. 'McSweeney's surprises. In the best possible way. And the
world is very very very very very short of genuine surprises, except for bad
news surprises.'
Michael Chabon is another famous literary friend of Eggers who has supported the
magazine, publishing an unused chapter from his novel, The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay. The idea of the 'genre' edition of the magazine arose from a
conversation between them.
'I had this fantasy of some day running my own magazine that would attempt to
revive the grand tradition of the epiphany-free, genre [sci-fi,crime, mystery,
thriller, romance, suspense, macabre] short story, a tradition that proudly
claims Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Robert Graves and so on. I
went on about this and finally, to shut me up, Dave said I should guest-edit
McSweeney's. I couldn't pass up this wonderful opportunity to try and revive a
rich branch of English-language literature, one that I want to see flourish
again,' Chabon says. 'Anyone who has ever wondered why the contemporary short
story, while extremely diverse in theme, subject and voice, is so limited in
form and structure and so oddly devoid of story might find something to interest
him or her in this issue.'
Chabon, Moody, Hornby, Smith, Jonathan Lethem; it's Eggers's good fortune he has
so many famous friends to fill his pages. The literary world being what it is,
there are some who prefer to describe the friendship as cliquishness and
McSweeney's as a clan rather than a magazine. Running Eggers's name through
Google turns up plenty of abuse, while the magazine has even inspired its own
parodic, now defunct, website.
At the posher end of the market, the New York Times seldom misses a chance to
stick the boot in, describing various McSweeney's enterprises as 'unbearable',
'whimsical', 'mannered', 'bratty' and 'bordering on the sniggering'. And that's
only in one article. Meanwhile, the American reviews of Eggers's sometimes
inspired, sometimes dreary new novel have been gleefully - and unfairly -
poisonous. It would be simple to attribute the bile to pure envy but far more
complicated forces are at work, and they begin with the success of McSweeney's
and end with the dereliction of the New York publishing establishment.
'New York has had its tentacles around the American literary scene for too long,
and the West Coast and the South have been frozen out because of it,' says
Kippen. 'The great thing about this magazine is that it is creating a centre for
literary production outside of New York. It is capitalising on the general
oppression of writers by the big publishers. Sure, there are big names in there,
but there are also fresh voices, people who live in small towns in the middle of
nowhere.
'I don't know where McSweeney's finds them but it does and I'm glad. It just
goes to prove that, contrary to what a load of old farts have been saying, this
generation is as interested, if not more interested, in reading and literature
as any previous generation.'
For this reason alone, McSweeney's is a publication well worth supporting. And
that's on the record.
· Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby will be in conversation on 25 February at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1
Related stories
16.02.2003: Nick Hornby on Dave Eggers
_______________________________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 helps ELIMINATE E-MAIL VIRUSES. Get 2 months FREE*.