McSweeney's Issue 22: Three Books Held Within By Magnets

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #22

by Dave Eggers (Editor)

McSweeney's Issue 22 is a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form. In section one, poets (yes — poets!) including Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, and D. C. Berman initiate poet-chains, picking a poem of their own and one by another poet. The next poet will then do the same, and then again, and again, and so on. In section two, Fitzgerald (yes — F. Scott Fitzgerald!) provides a list of unused story premises first cataloged in The Crack-Up; his mission is completed by writers like Diane Williams and Nick Flynn. In section three, finally, the president of France's (yes — France!) legendary Oulipians offers a rare glimpse into his group's current experiments with linguistic constraint. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Poetry, Anthologies, Journal

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2007

About the author

Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three books, magnetically bound together in one hardcover (brilliant, more books should be bound this way), of varying personal interest:

1. Unwritten fragments of ideas from F. Scott Fitzgerald, given life by current writers.
Pretty mediocre. I guess most aren't given enough life beyond bland exercise, or lack life to be given. I just don't care about all these "a girl and a giraffe" bits. Oh well.

2. Poets picking poets.
Neat, except I'm a bad reader of poetry (maybe inexplicably given my love of overly-poeticized prose) so will leave this to return to if I'm ever actually reading poetry. (The parts I read were pretty okay.) There's a full book of this now, by the way.

3. The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo.
Fantastic. The OuLiPo (
Outer Limits of Podiatry
Ought Limes Pompositize?
Our Lilliputian Police
Ould Liches for Potentiation
Ouch! Litigous Pollywogs!
Ounces of Limpid Poe
Lighten Pockets
) have this amazing way of making the most esoteric premises entirely lively. These are not bland exercises. The idea is that constraints spark new creativity, new ideas, new stories, new ways of conveying, and here, this typically really does seem to be the case. Fantastic. And inspiring:

[redacted: embarassing attempt to write using only variants of the three syllables OH LEE POE]

[Kaiwern · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, I only read one part of this, the short stories based on the ideas of F. Scott Fitzgerald (I couldn’t motivate myself to read the other two). I loved the concept— authors taking random, brief notes of his ideas and fleshing them out. And some of them were interesting and humorous. Others just weren’t for me. Perhaps for a reader of greater intellect, with more passion for poetry, short stories, literary criticism, or the like?

[James Kingman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott's sketches are given new life,
French writers cut form with a knife,
Then poetry chains,
Keep tickling brains
On Romance, sex, love, and strife.

[Heather Eason · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry and short stories off Fitzgerald ideas were great. I could have been good without the oulipo experiment.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one just wasn't for me. Some of the stories in the Fitzgerald notebooks exercise worked for me but the rest of it just didn't connect. But it's an interesting collection of experiments.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern contains three entirely separate books, bound into one magnetic cover by the metal strips in their spines. Police officers may take a dim view of literary types who go out into the night looking for trouble with one of these books concealed in their sleeves; prison librarians, especially, should ensure that this McSweeney's is absent from their collections...

The idea behind From the Notebook: the Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a brilliant one: to complete the stories suggested by that author's notes. (I have a similar notebook of unused ideas, if the same writers fancy helping me out!) Not having read any Fitzgerald, apart from The Great Gatsby a long, long time ago, it's hard for me to know how far the writers have tried to emulate his style, but I know that they haven't necessarily tried to recreate the exact stories FSF would have written, since some are set in the present day. It was a very stimulating read, and many of the stories were very good indeed.

The State of Constraint: New Work from Oulipo was my favourite of these three books. Playful, silly and intellectual in a way that typifies some of my favourite French writers, the Oulipo group labour to create works of literature under self-imposed restrictions. Some of it is daft, some of it is serious, but all of it is thought-provoking. Most enjoyable is the binary story by Paul Fournel (who also provides the introduction), if only because of the pleasure of finding a choose-your-own-adventure story in the pages of McSweeney's.

The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford was an eye-opener for me. I hadn't been aware previously of the wide range of modern poetry. I've said before (in a sort-of-review of Gud #0) that I don't really get poetry, and I won't pretend that I've quite got it yet, but this book helped me make a little bit of progress. Much of this poetry resembles a short story that's been auto-summarised in Word - everything inessential boiled away, to leave a kernel of... well, on the whole, a kernel of pain. It's a pretty depressing volume, so don't read it if you're having a bad day. Of the poets here, I'm most likely to look for more work by Patrick Lawler and Sarah Lindsay, mainly because the subject matter of their poems interested me more than the relationship stuff of the rest. But there were another ten or twenty poets whose poems interested me enough to make me look them up in the contributors section. I read most of the volume while waiting to collect my daughter from school, which must have made me look terribly intellectual (or exceptionally pretentious).

Reading McSweeney's is always good for my vanity: it makes me feel that I'm much cleverer and more literary than I really am. Like buying books from the Folio Society (but at a much more reasonable price) it makes me feel to some extent that I'm becoming the person I wanted to be. And this was one of their most educational and improving issues to date. Did I mention it's magnetic?

[Craig New · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three books held together by magnets. If you're going to give credit to McSweeney's for nothing else, their design is always innovative. The collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald ideas was like the few other McSweeney's volumes I've read - hit and miss, but at least engaging. I find with many of the writers they select that I can at least appreciate why they've been selected, even if I don't really connect with their story. My favourite by far was Salvador Plascencia's Returned. The image of a bottomless ocean bathtub refuses to leave my mind and, in the same way I'm forever looking for my version of The Neverending Story in musty old bookshops, I feel sure I'll now forever be searching the bottom of the bath water for magic. That sounded better in my head than it did when I just read it back to myself.
I am more fascinated with the concept of Oulipo than by the actual final outputs in most cases. I think I've been a little obssessed with the idea of constraints in writing since I first read Dante's Divine Comedy with its terza rhymes and ten syllable restrictions. I don't admit to actually understanding all of the pieces in this second book (like Le Tellier's The Sextine Chapel for instance), but it gives me a mental kick to just wander the pages with my eyes as open as possible.
In regards to the third book of poetry chains, I must confess that I have never really gotten poetry. It kills me to say that, and I've tried, but for some reason it's like trying to ram a square peg into a round hole for me. The best I can do is to revel in the words themselves and leave most meaning wrapped in plastic for someone else to stumble upon. As a result I can find myself feeling the strangest of emotions from the words alone, without being able to tell you whether the poem in question reveals the author's life long fears about death, or a subtle stab at his or her political climate. But perhaps that can sometimes be enough.
In all, another exciting journey through the carnival side show of McSweeney's. I look forward to many more.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

McSweeney's 22 presentation is a hardcover case with a magnetic strip on the inside spine with 3 paperbacks each with magnetic strips on their spine attached. Books held together with magnets, those guys...

The first book takes the ideas F Scott Fitzgerald had for potential stories and has a different writer realise each one. Some are just a few words "Girl and Giraffe" and others more detailed but it's a great idea done so well. Miriam Toews' "The Misstep" is a small play based on an office worker who organised an after hours orgy in the office, "Finally" by Judy Budnitz tells the story of a despot who gets his comeuppance, "The Flying Machine" by Marc Bojanowski is about a gravedigger asked to do a strange favour, Tom Lombardi's "The Bear" features a talking bear, and Rachel Ingalls' "A Gift of the Gods" is about a dancing princess who is given wings by a goddess. These stories are superb and are worth getting the book for alone. Even the lesser stories are well written.

The second book features experimental work from "Oulipo" (no I hadn't heard of them either) and the stories are more stylistic than substantial.

The third and final book is a collection of 50 poets and poems. It's the biggest of the 3 books with about 200 pages.

Despite being a literature student and a big fan of McSweeney's, I'm not as inclined to like either experimental literature or poetry, both rare things to find in any issue. Maybe the poetry's good, I don't know as I don't read it often enough to judge. As for the experimental stories...

It's an interesting issue from McSweeney's as always, with a number of hidden gems with innovative design work. Good stuff.

[Cait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usually I am not a huge fan of McSweeney's - I got a subscription because I like the whole 826 idea and sometimes there's fun stuff on the website, but I invariably have found the actual writing kind of disappointing. THIS issue, however, is pretty awesome. It has 3 separate books, and each one is great (so far).
One is based on the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had pages and pages of ideas for stories that he never wrote, so they doled out the ideas to a bunch of writers and then compiled them, and most of them are good.
One is a series of poems, where a poet chooses one of their own poems and then a poem by another poet that they like, and then THAT poet chooses one of THEIR own poems and a poem by another poet, and so on, and you get these long chains of poems, and it's interesting to see the what poets like in their own poems and in other peoples'... A neat idea, and some really good poems.
And finally, most excitingly, is a compilation of new Oulipo works. Oulipo was a French literature movement in the middle of the century, meaning "the workshop of potential literature." They created a lot of really neat literary games (that book "La Disparition" (A Void, in English) that was written entirely without the letter E is an Oulipo book, for example) and were into exploring the ways that constraint opens up creativity and possibility, an idea that I find very rich. Anyhow. It's cool to see it still going strong. I had sort of thought it died out. I have to go catch a plane.

[Sally]

This issue of McSweeneys is much too clever for the likes of me! Delightfully bound in Readers Digest like leather are three magnetic spined books. The first being a tribute of sorts to F Scott Fitzgerald whose work I have not read and therefore am unable to fully appreciate the tribute. The second is a collection of writing that demonstrates different methods of applying mathematical principles to literature (very interesting but much of it made my head spin) and the third book is poetry which I don't like (probably because I have never been able to understand most of it). So all in all, this issue of McSweeneys is rather high-brow and made me feel like a bit of a dunce!! Fodder for intellectuals.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say much about the rest of McSweeney's as this is the only copy I read (really read), but I must say it is a well edited and made selection of materials. This particular issue had three volumes. I focused on the volumes on the poets and the Oulipo school of writing, which had many distinguished writers--primarily French--who 'composed' compositions according to various rules they would establish.
I tend to rate any anthology lower than the work of an individual author because it's a bit like a mutual fund--the writing doesn't have the peaks and valleys because some writers you will enjoy and some not. At least McSweeney's has the good sense to find interesting thematic approaches to the material at hand.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

only completed 2/3 of this 3 book set. the last one was all poems which i have a hard time sitting down and reading.
one supposedly used a notebook of F. Scott Fitzgerald's which included many stories ideas, prompts, that were never realized. Authors took those phrases and expanded them into real stories. Disturbing, sad, serious, mildly humorous...most made me think and all made me a little confused (in a good way!).
the second book was experimental writings whose concepts took precedence over content. The book proclaimed a math meets literature approach to writing where there was a formula and rules of execution for each story. Interesting.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am constantly battling with the idea of having a subscription to McSweeney's because they always take so long to get through (ahem, I, uh, just started this one about...6 months ago). However, they always offer something engaging and enlightening, and when you finally get to finishing them, you have discovered a few new writers who you may have never run across. So, I have to say I am glad McSweeney's exists (though I'm not sure I can say the same for Dave Eggers' most recent undertakings. Is that harsh?) They are always thinking of creative ideas and formattign for their collections, choosing innovative and thought-provoking material, and of course the packaging is always sublime.

[A Rye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I havent finished this entire ordeal yet; however, I've found it so far - while possessing a wonderful anesthetic - a bit bizarre in content.
I dig the whole "three books-in-one" thing...I guess sometimes, Mcsweeneys is a little too strange, even for me.
I tried reading the book of Oulipo works, and while entertaining, the effect wore off after twenty or so pages.
The poetry ordeal, I dig.
Haven't picked up the Unwritten Fitzgerald piece yet.
I'll give it this: it looks really cool on your shelf.
I'll update this later.

[brain · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Fitzgerald prompts were just fine (and I think an old Fiction teacher I had wrote one of the stories, but her name's kinda common, so), but Oulipo generally only interests me in concept and not so much in execution. And, not to be "that guy," but if I wanted to read poetry, I probably wouldn't have subscribed to McSwy's.
The magnets, however, were pretty cool. Five stars to the magnets, f'sh'.

[Jaina]

Since the goodreads listing doesn't give very much information, read more about the issue here http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm...

The first book of three features story premises from F. Scott Fitzgerald as fleshed out by various authors. There's a contribution from Salvador Plascencia that's just wonderful.

[Perez Malone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I originally gave this four stars. I downgraded it after I read "The State of Constraint". I loved the poetry and the Fitzgerald stories. Hell, I even liked the choose your own adventure story. The rest of "The State of Constraint" was sorta boring. The prisoner story was neat. Other than that I didn't see much point. They were all cute in their own way.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I originally gave this four stars. I downgraded it after I read "The State of Constraint". I loved the poetry and the Fitzgerald stories. Hell, I even liked the choose your own adventure story. The rest of "The State of Constraint" was sorta boring. The prisoner story was neat. Other than that I didn't see much point. They were all cute in their own way.

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to put this one back on the shelf. McSweeney's books tend to be good for a couple of good moments, but don't really sustain me enough to finish, much less finish three books. The design is so nice though, it only makes me wish that the content was a little more interesting. I'll try it again later.

[Grant · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one had sat on my shelf for ~5 years and for good reason. I'm not a poetry fan, and now I'm not a fan of Oulipo either. French experimental literature held by mathematical constraints? No thank you sir. The Fitzgerald portion was ok, but the other two books in this three book set were not my cup of tea.

[Wade]

A decent compendium of work from present-day OuLiPo-ians, but nothing phenomenal. Some works I'd swear I'd seen before, and some were just 'nothing much' in terms of the constraint (such as the 'choose your own adventure' story). Perhaps because the entire works weren't always present? I'm not sure. I'd recommend the OuLiPo Compendium or OuLiPo Primer over this.

[Adrianne Mathiowetz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the Fitzgerald-inspired stories. Have always been frustrated and generally concerned about most of the Oulipo writers.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the Fitzgerald story ideas and some of the Oulipo stuff, but wasn't overwhelmed by the poetry section of this issue. Then again, I'm not the biggest poetry fan.

[Will]

doot doot doot

[Patrick Healy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories the best. The Oulipo part wasn't as good as I thought it would be. The poem chains were the part that was really difficult to read. Pretty good overall.

[Tiah Keever]

well, I haven't read ALL of it yet, but I read some of it and I liked it.

[Tom Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I would like Oulipo.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent bumper-packed issue showcasing new work from the Oulipo, consistently excellent short stories, and poetry that doesn't make me want to self-harm. Excellent.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a nerd for well packaged books and McSweeney's never fails to impress!