Name: McSweeney's 33
ISBN: 9781934781487

Dave Eggers

[This is a] one-time only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama with news and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide; it is basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan ... -- Publisher's website.

McSweeney's 33

Hans Gerwitz

I don't think McSweeney's achieved their goal, here. The included magazines were nice, and the entire thing is pretty. But none of the reporting felt deeply investigative or professional, with meandering stories and unclear conclusions the norm. The paper mill piece is probably the worst example, and the headline bridge piece probably was the strongest, though in need of more aggressive editing.

Really, it left me wishing the effort had gone towards more fiction and a "normal" issue.

[Unrelated to my overall impression, this vegetarian found the entire food section a bit disgusting.:]

Barthelme said that "The Novel of the Soil is dead, as are Expressionism, Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Regionalism, Realism, the Kitchen Sink School of Drama, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, Black Humor, and Gongorism." But he left out, pointedly, the Biji, the Nivola, the Graustarkian Romance, the Consuetudinary, the Whore's Dialogue, the Fornaldarsaga, and the eighties, which are not dead; they are all in McSweeney's 31, as rendered by Douglas Coupland, Joy Williams, John Brandon, Shelley Jackson, Mary Miller, and Will Sheff, along with other fugitive genres recaptured by our finest writers, as part of a project to bring them back alive (except for the eighties, there is actually nothing about the eighties). In an oversized format, with annotations, illustrations, and pantoums, Issue 31 aims to introduce you to all the genres you never knew you loved.

McSweeney's 33

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