McSweeney's 12: Unpublished, Unknown, and/or Unbelievable
by Dave Eggers (Editor)
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (12)
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Issue 12 is made up of three parts. The first and largest section consists entirely of new writers -- new to us, probably new to you, and not even well-known by their own families.Part two is a new story from Roddy Doyle, featuring Jimmy Rabbitte of The Commitments.Part three is a collection of twenty-minute stories, by which we mean stories written in twenty minutes, from all sorts of people that you know and do not know.Tags
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Issue 12 features 12 stories by 12 new writers, a story by McSweeney regular Roddy Doyle and a selection of 20-minute flash fiction curated by Dave Eggers. As always with McSweeney's, it's a mixed bag and your enjoyment of it is going to depend to some extent on your tolerance for hipster literary showboating. Highlights for me were the Doyle story and the piece about growing up in Ceausescu's Romania by Andrea Dezso that reads like dystopian Elena Ferrante.
Interestingly done, but another volume in which there just wasn't much that held my attention very well. The design is great, though, and I love the idea of the twenty-minute stories.
This issue has a striking, cartoon cover that folds out to create a 3D optical illusion, although I could never get it to work. The contents are divided into three sections, each delineated by different colored paper. There's a new authors section (great excerpt here from Salvador Plascencia's 2005 novel, "The People of Paper"), a Roddy Doyle story (a similar story to his novel, "The Commitments"), and a section of 29 very brief stories by various authors each written in twenty minutes.
The 20 minute stories are pretty good. Roddy Doyle's piece is excellent.
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Dave Eggers was born on March 12th, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts. His family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was a child. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, until his parents' deaths in 1991 and 1992. The loss left him responsible for his eight-year-old brother and later became the inspiration for his highly show more acclaimed memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Published in 2000, the memoir was nominated for a nonfiction Pulitzer the following year. Eggers edits the popular "The Best American Nonrequired Reading" published annually. In 1998, he founded the independent publishing house, McSweeney's which publishes a variety of magazines and literary journals. Eggers has also opened several nonprofit writing centers for high school students across the United States. Eggers has written several novels and his title, A Hologram for the King, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. His most recent work of fiction, entitled The Circle, was published in 2013. His recent nonfiction books are The Monk of Mokha (January 2018) and What Can a Citizen Do? (Illustrated by Shawn Harris)(September 2018). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- McSweeney's 12: Unpublished, Unknown, and/or Unbelievable
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- 290
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- Reviews
- 4
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- (3.75)
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- English
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