- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd (26 Aug 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241142342
- ISBN-13: 978-0241142349
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.6 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 200,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
From literary outsider to most talked-about literary magazine in five years, McSweeney's has earned its right to be called a literary phenomenon. Founded and edited by Dave Eggers, this is the magazine that has made its mark with a line-up of authors that includes David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, and Rick Moody all of whom are represented in this brilliant selection of stories from the first ten issues. The name McSweeney's is now synonymous with talent and originality, and Best of McSweeney's Volume 1 presents a taste of the quality of writing that makes every issue of McSweeney's an eagerly anticipated event.
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney's and the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity. He lives in California.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
A collection of eighteen works make up this first volume from McSweeney's Magazine, which was originally created to print those stories and essays that other, more conventional magazines had rejected. There are few signs that this is a recipe for weaker work - one or two stories are slight, very few are unfettered exercises in creative writing, but, perhaps surprisingly, there are two outstanding essays which should by rights have graced something like the New York Review of Books, so well are the arguments marshalled and expounded, and, in one case, so beautiful is the prose.
The first of these is William T Vollman's Three Meditations on Death. These are the most profoundly moving works on this subject that I have ever read. I have not heard of Vollman before but will now look up and obtain anything else that he has written.
The second of these non-fiction pieces that I want to recommend is Gary Greenberg's In the Kingdom of the Unabomber. He covers much of the same kind of dilemma that Janet Malcolm does in her excellent book on the individual journalist's relation to the media, The Journalist and the Murderer. Greenberg tells of his experience of corresponding with Theodore J Kaczynski, christened by the press The Unabomber. The American justice system conspired to have Kaczynski declared insane, but Greenberg felt this to be doubtful - and he outlines very convincingly the reasons why - made up of varying amounts of fear, contempt for its audiences, self-interest and venality - the media and the justice system conspired to silence Kaczynski. Essentially an intelligent luddite as well as a cold and calculated killer of random individuals, Kaczynski has a point insofar as technology now controls us, rather than us it, and it is not acknowledged that this control is meaningless if all we do is submit to it. There is no way out of the labyrinth of technological imperative, unless we recognise that most of what it does for us is unnecessary and probably now obsolete. No we don't want to go back to living in a shack in the woods, but we do need to recognise exactly where technology is taking us - and why we are allowing it to take us there. Even if we do, by some miracle, escape global warming, Kaczynski's warning against social industrialisation seems to make sense. If ever there was a warning against the easy verdict that anyone who kills is a madman, then this is it.
The two best pieces of fiction in this collection are Dave Eggers' story about a woman trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro with a party of similar tourists, which is very well put together and brilliantly characterised; and a finely calibrated and funny/sad story by Rick Moody, Double Zero.
The first of these is William T Vollman's Three Meditations on Death. These are the most profoundly moving works on this subject that I have ever read. I have not heard of Vollman before but will now look up and obtain anything else that he has written.
The second of these non-fiction pieces that I want to recommend is Gary Greenberg's In the Kingdom of the Unabomber. He covers much of the same kind of dilemma that Janet Malcolm does in her excellent book on the individual journalist's relation to the media, The Journalist and the Murderer. Greenberg tells of his experience of corresponding with Theodore J Kaczynski, christened by the press The Unabomber. The American justice system conspired to have Kaczynski declared insane, but Greenberg felt this to be doubtful - and he outlines very convincingly the reasons why - made up of varying amounts of fear, contempt for its audiences, self-interest and venality - the media and the justice system conspired to silence Kaczynski. Essentially an intelligent luddite as well as a cold and calculated killer of random individuals, Kaczynski has a point insofar as technology now controls us, rather than us it, and it is not acknowledged that this control is meaningless if all we do is submit to it. There is no way out of the labyrinth of technological imperative, unless we recognise that most of what it does for us is unnecessary and probably now obsolete. No we don't want to go back to living in a shack in the woods, but we do need to recognise exactly where technology is taking us - and why we are allowing it to take us there. Even if we do, by some miracle, escape global warming, Kaczynski's warning against social industrialisation seems to make sense. If ever there was a warning against the easy verdict that anyone who kills is a madman, then this is it.
The two best pieces of fiction in this collection are Dave Eggers' story about a woman trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro with a party of similar tourists, which is very well put together and brilliantly characterised; and a finely calibrated and funny/sad story by Rick Moody, Double Zero.
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