McSweeney's 08

This edition of McSweeney's is themed around hoaxes, deceptions and non-truths. The pleasures in reading the more than thirty pieces comes in figuring out if and how you're being fooled. There are articles about real hoaxes, articles about people who perpetrate hoaxes, and stories about imagined hoaxes. This edition is very light on actual fiction, the best being Brian Evenson's story "Moran's Mexico" that cleverly pretends to be a translated work, with translation itself being part of the plot.
This edition was a little hard to get through, even though many of the entries are brief. It's like a box of RaisinBran; you need to get through a lot of roughage to get to the sweet stuff, which is often the case when there are so many pieces. A show more good third of it I felt was more suitable for McSweeney's humor website.
The physical format is lovely: a sturdy, thick hardbound volume decorated with a bird motif by Elizabeth Kairys. The first page of each piece has an illustration by Marcel Dzarma that doesn't ever match with the content, but they're wonderfully bizarre and ordinary at the same time. show less

A volume of mostly forgettable stories, without much of the creative element I like to see from McSweeney's.