Anthologies

Anthologies

Title	Author	Publisher	Price
McSweeney's 21		McSweeney's	$14.40 ($16.00 list)
Read more and comment...	McSweeney's sez: "With work by Roddy Doyle, Stephen Elliott, Peter Orner, Joyce Carol Oates, Yannick Murphy, and Miranda July, as well as the triumphant return of Arthur Bradford and stories concerning fistfighting Mormons, New Zealand police malfeasance, and a man named Trang, and with all of those works interspersed with heartfelt letters to Ray Charles and storyboards by some of the finest pen-and-ink artists of our day, our twenty-first issue is sure to be one of our best assemblages yet."
McSweeney's 23		McSweeney's	$17.77 ($20.00 list)
Read more and comment...	Well, what do you know? This time around, McSweeney's is a plain old book, containing a nice and neat ten tales by writers known -- such as Chris Bachelder, Ann Beattie and Roddy Doyle -- and, at least to us, unknown -- such as Clancy Martin, Christopher Stokes and Wells Tower. Well, upon closer inspection, we notice that the cover folds out into a gigantic poster on one side, while on the other is a brain scrambling piece that involves a complicated division of two-dimensional space that is too elaborate to elaborate on here. And, oh wait, what have we here attached to the inside back cover? It's a special "trial-size edition" of Comedy by Numbers, a "new manual (that) makes the secrets of comedy accessible..." It is to laugh.
McSweeney's 24		McSweeney's	$19.95 ($24.00 list)
Read more and comment...	This issue comes in the form of a "Siamese Twin" book jacket in which two separate books share the same back cover (can't visualize it? well then, you'll have to come in and see it for yourself). Stories in the first of the "twins" include: "How to Make Millions in the Oil Market," by Chritopher Howard, "Bored to Death," by Jonathan Ames, "The Death of Nick Carter," by Philippe Soupault -- which was originally written in French in 1926 and was only translated this year by Robin Walz -- and several others. The special highlight, and the entire contents of the second twin is a symposium entitled, "Come Home, Donald Barthelme," which is edited and curated by Justin Taylor, starts off with his introduction "for the belated and immediate beatification of Donald Barthelme," includes a host of participants among whom are Ann Beattie, Robert Coover, and includes two uncollected and long out of print Barthelme stories.
McSweeney's No. 22		McSweeney's	$21.50 ($24.00 list)
Read more and comment...	This issue's design, with its slipcase containing three separate softcovers, harkens all the way back to issue No. 8; but there's a twist -- this time around the books are held together with magnets rather than the industrial strength rubber band of yore. And, you rightly ask, what is there about these books that they need magnets to keep them together? Well, our guess is that their contents are so disparate that this was the only way. The first book writes the unwritten stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Come again?" you say: Fitzgerald left notebooks at the time of his death and in these notebooks were 32 story ideas that he never realized. Michelle Orange has assembled 17 writers -- including herself -- to take upon themselves the task of writing 16 of these stories (one twice); this book bears the fruit of this undertaking. The second book is titled, The State of Constraint, and presents 17 new works from the Oulipo group. The third and fattest of the books is The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford, which assembles, "one hundred favorite works of some of the best poets writing today" selected by a novel and ingenious method too involved to relate here but which is succinctly explained in Mr. Luxford's introduction. All in all, this issue of McSweeney's looks very much like a winner.