Word: mcsweeney
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...really? Spy's rarefied, Manhattan-centric humor wouldn't be likely to find a mass audience online, but the cheap, egalitarian Web has long been a haven for wisenheimers: the cutting commentary of Suck www.suck.com) the deadpan fake-newspaper Onion www.theonion.com and the esoteric wit of McSweeney's www.mcsweeneys.net) More recently, old media have tried to get Blair Witch-y with sites like Time Warner's Entertaindom www.entertaindom.com) whose flashy but lame Hollywood spoofs prove the rule that online humor is funny in inverse proportion to its budget. And even in the Web's grownup days of corporate sites...
This is a story about boxes. In the world headquarters of the unorthodox literary journal McSweeney's--a Brooklyn, N.Y., duplex apartment strewn with printouts, antique books and sporting goods--Dave Eggers is considering the structural integrity of a Dunkin' Donuts box. There's been a snag with issue No. 4, consisting of 14 exquisitely designed miniature books. It's supposed to come in a sturdy custom box, but the prototype won't close, and the printer--which is, no kidding, in Iceland--is scrambling for a replacement. Now, say editor Eggers and editor at large Sean Wilsey, munching...
Formatted like a 19th century journal, with dense text and quaint line drawings, McSweeney's (whose print run is now up to 12,000) selects pieces too esoteric, untimely or otherwise uncommercial to make the glossies--experimental fiction, absurdist humor and erudite essays, like a piece on a War of 1812 veteran who believed the earth was hollow and contained habitable worlds within. Like the New Yorker before it became topical and buzz crazy, McSweeney's gives writers the time and space to indulge their interests...
...author's son.) Because of the box and other doodads--heavy paper, color foldouts--the issue costs $22, but Eggers, who has worked as a designer (and insisted on designing his memoir), argues, "People don't go to a bookstore looking for a cheap and ugly thing." McSweeney's contributor Sarah Vowell says Eggers' art background shows in both the physical journal and its self-aware marginalia (for example, its website, mcsweeneys.net offers reviewers a list of phrases--"precious, inconsequential, pointless"--to describe the journal). "Twentieth-century art was concerned with the thingness of things, how a painting is paint...
...died of stomach cancer when he was 21--five weeks after his father died of lung cancer. Eggers thus became the guardian of his eight-year-old brother Toph (short for Christopher) and moved from suburban Chicago to California. It's a hilarious book, despite the subject, that applies McSweeney's textual slyness full-force. The acknowledgments contain a guide to themes and symbols (and a chart of his advance and expenses), and his subjects frequently break out of character to note how Eggers has altered events...