Customer Reviews

McSweeney's Issue 31 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

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Another mind blowing issue of McSweeney's. This issue is all about story forms that aren't used anymore. Each section included a description of the style, an example and then new stories using that style done by current authors. The new stories have notes in the large margins expanding on themes in the types of stories or giving examples from the original works.

1- Pantoum

My absolute favorites were pantoums, which is a form of poetry where lines from each paragraph are repeated in the next paragraph. According to the book it used to be a game about who could most skillfully manipulate these lines in their poems. The more I read the more I liked them. I'm guessing Eggers did too as he both starts and ends the issue with pantoums while every other style only has 1 section.

Jack Davis by Tony Trigilio was amazing about the Kennedy assassination. Joel Brouwer's Direct also stood out amongst a strong group.

2- Whore Dialog

This was erotic writing in the 16th through 18th centuries that was instructional based graphic dialog between an innocent woman and a more experienced married woman. It was supposed to be instructional as well as pornographic. Mary Miller writes a funny story called A Dialogue Between Two Maids In The Twenty-First Century, One Of Whom Is Skeezer. I think you have to love a story that includes skeezy as an unwritten rule of nature.

3- Legendary Saga

These stories were from Iceland in the 13th through 15th centuries that were basically tales of war & conquest. While good they kept making me think of world of warcraft for some reason.

4- Biji

I'm a little fuzzy on how Biji truly differentiates itself from other more general storytelling but was written from 220-1912 AD, which in is a really long time to just die out. It's characterized in the book as musings, anecdotes, quotations, "believe-it-or-not" fiction, social anthropology. What I do know is that Survivor by Douglas Coupland is fantastic. It's about a camera man working on a season of Survivor when World War III breaks out. The story was one of the funnier tales I've read in a while.

5- Nivola

These were a series of books written by Miguel de Unamuno between 1914-1930 AD that according to McSweeney's were meandering, plotless & playful. I'm not sure I buy this being a genre. Joy Williams wrote a story about a woman named Snow that was certainly plotless and rambling. The best part however was a note in the margins from a book of Unamunos called Abel Sanchez where a doctor is jealous of his artist friend. The doctor laments that all he can do is delay death where the painter can capture the person on canvas and make them immortal.

6- Senryu

These are Japanese poems that are 3 lines long, no rhymed & deal with human nature. I've never read a lot of haiku and there have been so many jokes about them that I wasn't expecting much but these were great.

7- Socratic Dialogue

These are from ancient Greece and Rome and are conversational in tone revolving around philosophical issues. After Citizen Kane by David Thomson was about a conversation in present time between Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Earnest Hemmingway & Viginia Wolf. They are all drinking at a cafe but they make reference to having died. It's an interesting story.

8- Graustarkian Romance

These romantic stories are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries & are set in an imaginary old fashioned country in Europe. They are described as have this characteristics of Victorian utopianism, swashbuckling & courtly intrigue. Fun light read but not my favorite.

9- Consuetudinary

These were essentially lists of basic tasks and rituals performed in monasteries between 970-1700 AD. The sample story bored me terribly but Shelly Jackson's story was pure genius and ended up being one of my favorite stories in the issue.

On another note, while the book was a little awkward to read sometime due to its size I loved the cover art with the gold waves on white leather.

McSweeney's 31 is about bringing back old forms of storytelling by getting contemporary writers to craft stories in that form once more. And it's a success!

The best story was Douglas Coupland's "Survivor" written in the Biji style, a sort of rambling tangential tale, about a cameraman filming the reality show "Survivor" only to find the world outside of the remote island has erupted into full scale nuclear war. Suddenly the remaining humans left on the island have to survive for real. Coupland's narrator is instantly likeable, both jaded and glad of the small things in life, and utterly funny, it's almost worth getting the book for this story alone.

David Thomson's story "After Citizen Kane" written as a Socratic dialogue is a joy to read. He puts Kafka, Hemingway, Woolf, Sontag, and Chaplin into debating the merits of "Citizen Kane" and whether it deserves to constantly win polls that make it the best film of all time. It's clever, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable, it's another great story in this book.

Mary Miller's story is written in the style of the "whore dialogue" with a virgin and an experienced woman talking about sex. It's a medieval approach with 21st century sensibilities and is great fun.

Will Sheff's "Black Metal Circle Saga" is written in the style of the "legendary saga" and reads like it should, vast and epic with vikings killing one another in gruesome ways. Good stuff.

Despite a couple of misfires I won't go into, it's a very strong issue from the guys at McSweeney's. Brilliantly inventive stories presented in a well produced hardback with excellent page design and layouts, if you're thinking about whether it's worth reading or not, it definitely is.

McSweeney's 31 started off with a great idea: reviving feeble or deceased literary forms. The forms chosen are quite different, from poetry (pantoums) to prose (nivolas, Icelandic sagas). I thought the revivals worked best when they were set in contemporary settings, exploiting the form in light of present concerns. Some forms proved tough to revive. Some were funny and clever. My favorites: Mary Miller's whore dialogue, Douglas Coupland's biji, and John Brandon's Graustarkian romance.

Issue 31 is devoted to lost forms of literature, those forms and genres that have been almost or totally forgotten. The issue was conceived over a year's time; McSweeney's interns solicited authors with lost genre forms, which the authors made new instances of. Almost all of the new pieces are very strong.

For example, many authors try their hands at the poetic forms of the pantoum and senryu, with terrific results. Mary Miller writes a whore dialogue, which was a 17th-century French form wherein a whore and a virgin discussed sex to the erudition of the latter. John Brandon does an intriguing take on the Graustarkian romance, or an adventure tale to a mystical, made-up land. David Thomson writes a Socratic dialogue featuring Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, and Chaplin discussing whether Citizen Kane is really the best film of all time. It's better than that sounds and better than the tendency towards referenciality its plot may imply, and gets points for being as viably highfalutin as a Socratic philosophy session.

Okkervil River lead singer and lyricist Will Sheff writes a legendary saga, popular in premedieval Scandinavia, about generations of warring black metal bands. Best of all is Douglas Coupland's biji, which is a genre manifested today in Lonely Planets, sort of--a personal travelogue with many lessons and fragments of information. The genre seems ideal to his fragmentary, hodgepodge, multimedia style, and he writes with clear delight about a petulant British cameraman filming the TV show Survivor on the Pacific Ocean nation of Kiribati.

And while it's nice to see authors having fun, Shelley Jackson's consuetudinary (or the pedantic minutes of a monastery--not really a genre worth exhuming) is almost too loyal to its form. Which is to say that while it's very impressive as a creative work, it's also almost unreadable. The dud here is Joy Williams' nivola (plotless, aimless, "existential" story), which exists mostly to reference the source material, every bit of content winking at its footnotes.

But for the most part this is a great and exciting project done very well, and one of the strongest issues yet. McSweeney's is as usual doing something no one else is doing, and they're doing it extremely well. Always exciting to get a new issue.