The first thing you notice when you pick up a piece of work published by McSweeney's is how handsome it is. One of the hallmarks of the upstart publisher founded by wunderkind memoirist Dave Eggers is its loving attention to the look of print media, a touching gesture to a supposedly dying form. Cracking an issue of McSweeney's is like opening a Fabergé egg, each new installment (one came in a cigar box) more obsessively crafted than the last. The underlying message: Literature matters, and whatever these volumes contain must be special.
- A Golden Eggers by Jennifer Rose, Entertainment Weekly, 02.15.08
I've purchased several copies of The Believer -- nearly subscribing at it's ridiculous price after one particularly good music issue -- but never McSweeney's. I'm not sure why. Probably because while I first heard of Eggers the writer because of A Heartbreaking Work..., I first read McSweeney's online and so online it stays in my mind. The author of the article is right, I generally find the writing there very hit or miss with an awful lot of misses. People often too busy trying to be cutesy to remember to be at least a little bit substantive.
But, I do love the live events and activism and Eggers' books.
And, now, I'm thinking I should get McSweeney's just so I could get the awesome cigar box or something of equal stature.
Damn you, Eggers!
Written as a series of alternating sections or flashbacks, What Is the What—bad title, terrible cover—calls itself a novel but was created closely out of the story told to Eggers by Valentino Achak Deng, who reached Atlanta, after 14 years in refugee camps, in 2001. Achak survived the government helicopter gunship obliteration of his village in southern Sudan and a frightening and painful trudge to safety in Ethiopia. His personal experiences, as he says in a preface, are in essence no different from those depicted: Every event in the book could, and indeed did, take place, but not all to him, nor in the order presented. As such, the narrative reads very much like reporting, which accounts perhaps for its power—but also poses a number of interesting questions.
- True Grit by Caroline Moorehead, Slate Magazine, 12.05.06