Customer Reviews

McSweeney's Issue 26 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) Three Part Book Set

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McSweeney's 26 comes in 3 books - two paperbacks (if you cut a normal book in two horizontally that's the size of the paperbacks) and a hardback. The hardback is the least interesting here as it's called "Where to Invade Next" and is a non-fiction look at countries in the Middle East and North Korea and profiles the despots and regimes, giving statistics of how brutal life in their societies is and haunting statistics like how many die from starvation, etc.

The way the paperbacks are designed is to mirror the Armed Service Editions from WW2 where servicemen were given pocket paperbacks to take with them so they'd always have something to read. The militaristic theme continues with each story separated by a painting done by a former soldier after WW2.

So onto the fiction. There were only 2 of the 11 stories here that really caught my attention. Ismet Prcic's "Porcus Omnivorus" tells the story of a Slav who, after escaping his war torn homeland, settles into a life in the United States. Making his way home from a party one morning he encounters another Slav who takes him to his house for a party. When there the man realises that these people, whom he thought were fellow comrades, turn out to be the enemies he fought against. Prcic builds the tension nicely as he has his protagonist slowly realise this and then tries to escape. Great story, well told.

The other stand out was John Brandon's "Arkansas", an excerpt from his novel of the same name. Two drug runners in the South meet their new boss, their new lodgings, and go on a drug deal, unexpectedly bringing back an unwelcome visitor. Brandon's two main characters are well realised and the dialogue is very believable. The fast moving story taking in all aspects of low-income living in modern America is fascinating and I loved it so much I ordered a copy of Brandon's book.

McSweeney's 26 looks nice and is well designed but overall most of the fiction here is average to crap besides the two gems found here. Probably give this a miss, there are better McSweeney's out there.

Certainly not the strongest of the McSweeney's, Issue 26 comes in three parts, featuring two minibooks with stories "from our shores" and "from overseas." The third part is Where To Invade Next, and it's dead serious indeed, a humorless and unreadable collection of countries the U.S. could invade next, given the Pentagon has anywhere near as much time on their hands as did the editor of this useless dud. Unbearable topicality, anyone?

But the real problem with Where To Invade Next is that it takes away from the stories. You just don't get that much reading after you slough WTIN.

Call it ethnocentric, but most of the better stories are from the Our Shores minibook. There is a goodly portion of John Brandon's novel Arkansas, which is terrific as that entire book is, a story about educated and aimless drug runners in the deep South. Amanda Davis has a nice flash fiction piece about being haunted by a dead girl's couch, and Wayne Harrison has a great story about a mechanic who gives a rehab refugee a pity job. It's a unique, perceptive story about the hazards of charity, of being swindled by the obligation to be too nice. Michael Gills has a short 'n' good piece about high-school athletes waiting out a tornado as well.

There are two stories spread across both minibooks, of very different quality. Ismet Prcic's two stories form a very nice juxtaposition, both about Bosnians, the first part set in Bosnia and filled with war, squalor, and loss, the second set in L.A. and focused on the seemingly trifling but enormous mistaking of a Bosnian for a Serbian. The other double-story, by Uzodimna Iweala, is a facelessly typical foreign-woman-out-of-her-element story taken from The New Yorker template. Nothing new or interesting there.

The overseas stories are more of a minefield. They run the gamut of bewilderingly terrible (Dana Mazur's story, about a Kazakh shaman) to downright charming (Frank Lentricchia's story of a disenfranchised Italian filmmaker). Stephen Smith writes a compelling story about a seven-year-old journalist phenom receiving his first hate mail, and Garry Powell has a goofy story about an Emirati man desperate to cheat who gets tricked by his wife.

Overall, though, there's just not enough fiction, the more maddening because the space that could have been used for stories (or something else compelling) was robbed by that book of Invadables.