McSweeney's Issue 50

For the 50th Issue, McSweeney’s editors called on their frequent contributors over the years, with an overwhelming response, and so features 50 pieces by 50 authors or illustrators. Overall, the issue resembles a great album infested with obnoxious interludes—most of the content is great, with some fantastic singles (Alexie, Millhauser, Ball), but all the interstitials are time-wasters. In order to get to the 50 pieces by 50 authors, many tiny pieces were accepted, and while they’re sometimes pleasant, they’re never integral. In other words, the greats are great and the rest are the rest. The only regret is that even at 300+ pages, the collection reads quickly, and it’s a shame they didn’t go big, like they did with Issue 45 (450 pages), Issue 10 (800+ pages), or Issue 33 (∞ pages).Individually:Sarah Manguso: 3. The time it would take me to summarize this short-short short short would be longer than the story itself.Letters, et al: Better than usual! Patton Oswalt (who’s having a fantastic season) and John Hodgman (whose career McSweeney’s made) provide highlights to this usually skippable section, the equivalent of McSweeney’s Shouts & Murmurs. The rest stink but hey, they don’t ALL stink, like usual. Thanks, guys!Etgar Keret: 5. Perfect example of a story that would’ve benefited from being a short story instead of a short short. It reads like an abstract of a larger piece, and as such, it’s impossible to judge. The best I can say of it is “some people do some stuff, fin.”Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 3. An epistolary story between two continent-divided lovers who can’t share their love with anyone. It has potential to be rich and revealing, but limits itself by sticking to the most mundane, predictable potential of its plot.Steven Millhauser: 9. Terrific form, terrific voice, terrific story. A woman waiting on hold tells the robovoice about the crushes of her youth, growing more and more angry, sad, or tangential as she waits and waits. A brilliant twelve-page, one-paragraph stream-of-conscious for the modern world, where half of our lives are spent waiting on hold.Jonathan Lethem: 7. Lethem writes a tiny illustrated essay featuring Guy Gilchrist’s Nancy character. It’s a brief jaunt into epistemology, solipsism, and states of consciousness, a winning juxtaposition of cartoon art and philosophy-journal–level musing.Ismet Prcic: 8. A transcription of a “found” note from a Bosnian refugee who befriended an American hoarder and writes to her son. It’s the most singular piece here, recalling both Faulkner and Nabokov, constructed of broken English, wayward thought, and, buried within, an interesting story. This is the kind of story that gave McSweeney’s its reputation.Heidi Julavits: 5. A short short about the limits of flirting your way out of a ticket as age advances.Lydia Davis: –. Four tiny poems/nothing.Sophia Foster-Dimino: 7. A short comic that uses panel compression to illustrate the way great relationships can slow time, whereas complacency speeds it up.Dan Kennedy: –. Kennedy writes three satirical office notes, the kind of thing McSweeney’s features on its Internet Tendency. They’re okay.Sherman Alexie: 9. Great story featuring a narrator like which I’ve never read before, who can best be called a conscientious underachiever. He delivers pizza and navigates young love as best he’s able, meaning mostly disastrously. This story is the truest in the collection, warm and human and deeply felt. One of the best of McSweeney’s “bad jobs” subcategory of fiction.Jesse Ball: 9. Ball is hilarious, wry, and absurdist as ever as he writes a quick anthology of ridiculous deaths. There’s no one currently writing like him; his nearest peer is the Russian goofball Daniil Kharms.Corinna Vallianatos: 3. Exactly what’s wrong with short shorts: They try to be prose poetry, they try to distill the meaning of a larger story down to its most integral sentences, and what ends up is little more than non sequitur. Just a very unsatisfying, unsummarizable agglomeration of thoughtwords.Carrie Brownstein: 0. Dull, self-indulgent memoir about a damn shirt. The world does not need this.Thomas McGuane: 6. A couple on a road trip visits their friends in Montana, whose relationship is freshly ending. The ways we beat around the bush and/or directly confront the death of love. Reads like Raymond Carver.Diane Williams: –. Short short, 79 words, nut-tin.Jesse Jacobs: 7. A well-illustrated creation myth involving a game played over the course of lifetimes.Kevin Young: 4. An interesting idea—about the nature, origin, and dispersal of hoaxes—executed with academic blandness.Sheila Heti: 7. A story about a crush on a cousin that starts out curious, almost cute, and grows more and more horrifying. A genreless mindbender.Matthew Sharpe: –. See Vallianatos, Corinna.Vauhini Vara: 0. Some cutesy-cutesy megacrap.Jeff Parker: 6. A common style of story in McSweeney’s, where the not-quite-right invades the quotidian, often in silly ways. A serial butt-squeezer terrorizes the middle-aged women of a small community in a wacky, funny, and kinetic story, that unfortunately gets cut off midway. Would have been better if it would have been finished.Andrew Leland: 7. An interesting personal essay on one of the upsides of going blind: rediscovering the world as impressionistic art. Unusual, intriguing.James Folta: 8. The funniest of the humor pieces in the collection. A diary of the painter Caravaggio who is led by necessity rather than inspiration into fame. It’s really strong, unique in the best way.Kevin Moffett: 5. A father tries to force himself to cry in front of his son. Decent, inessential.Haris A. Durrani: 7. A multiethnic boy distrusts the interest a white girl has in him and thinks she must be a secret agent. It’s a good story, unexpected and well-done, topical without being overbearing or pedantic. It overrelies on its needless structure, though, and dillydallies in its first act. When it gets to the action, though, it gets good.Lucy Corin: –. See Sharpe, Matthew.Jason Polan: 1. Some bad drawings of Japan supplemented with a boring story from Japan.Kristen Iskandarian: 6. Two parents differ on how much independence to allow their young daughters. Narratively sound.Wendy Molyneux: 0, 0, 0! One of the downsides of artists having so much material to work with in the Trump era is the fact that so many artists just say the same exact thing over and over and over and over again.Benjamin Percy: 5. This piece illustrates why I think the editors REQUESTED shorter pieces from the authors they solicited (due to publishing costs, I guess), so we get a whole bunch of otherwise good to great authors writing little tiny things, cleaning out their desk drawers and unburdening themselves of pieces like this, which, sure, is good, about husbands and their secret rooms, but it’s also a piece from an author who can do so much more and who has done so much more.Keaton Patti: 7. Six-word sequels to Hemingway’s famous six-word story. Thankfully, it goes in unpredictable directions midway through.Rebecca Curtis: 7. Curtis continues her love of writing from narrators she clearly hates, to funny but limited results. She sardonically punctures the wish fulfillment of Cosmo readers and cluelessness of, uh, Clueless characters, which is fun but easy. At least she’s humorous about it—potshots only work when they’re written zestfully (i.e. “Remember when Jesus, in that book, the bibel, was about to be killed by mean Jewish people, and he said, ‘Towel, please,’ and Pompous Pilot said, ‘Do it, slay him!’”).Carson Mell: 6. See Parker, Jeff. Another half-story that would have been good if it would have been completed or at least not rushed. It seems unbelievably rushed, like it was written minutes before deadline. It has the seed of something good, about a man whose first-date cryptic comment is held against him for the rest of his life, and then it—stops.Sarah Walker: 0. Not worth describing.Valeria Luiselli: 3. And then there’s this: 50 pages of AN ART ANALYSIS ESSAY OF AN ART ANALYSIS ESSAY. Luiselli writes endnotes to an 1845 essay/story by Honoré de Balzac, which is reprinted in full. It’s okay, though longwinded in its antiquation and ultimately hard to take in its redundancy, and Luiselli’s endnotes are completely unnecessary. This may belong in an art journal somewhere, but it has zero place here. Totally baffling and unwelcome and a shame that it hogs up so much space.Eduardo Berti: 7. A metafictional Last Entry, similar in placement to Issue 45’s “Don’t Look Behind You” by Fredric Brown, that comments on McSweeney’s 50 as a whole, that openly addresses the reader and counts down to the end, trying in vain to find a uniting theme between the scattered anthology. It’s winning, funny, and unlike anything else I’ve ever read.

Losing their touch. There are so many issues that are prettier and nicer than this. A disappointment anniversary issue, especially after waiting over a year for the issue to finally come out. Also interesting to note that their subscriptions nearly doubled yet the quality is waning. Getit on Amazon: you'll get it weeks before ou would if you subscribed. They have little respect for subscribers.

Putting the stellar content of this book aside for the moment, it is worth noting that the binding is well-done and the crisp yet gently weighted pages are a readers' delight.