Product Details
McSweeney's Issue 26 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) Three Part Book Set

McSweeney's Issue 26 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) Three Part Book Set
From McSweeney's

List Price: $24.00
Price: $16.32 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

32 new or used available from $1.48

Average customer review:

Product Description

McSweeney's 26 comes in three parts: two small, oblong books of stories by writers large and small (John Brandon, Amanda Davis, Uzodinma Iweala, and eight more), set in regions near and far (Kazakhstan, Bosnia, Spain, Arkansas), and a third book, Where to Invade Next, edited by Stephen Elliott and inspired by actual Pentagon documents, which seeks to give a picture of just how our government could create a rationale for its next round of wars. Read them one at a time, or all at once, but know that this one’s got it all--whirlwind visions of the world of today, and dead-serious essays about which parts of it the United States might soon be confronting.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #704730 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-01-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 228 pages

Customer Reviews

Take It and Leave It3
Certainly not the strongest of the McSweeney's, Issue 26 comes in three parts, featuring two minibooks with stories "from our shores" and "from overseas." The third part is Where To Invade Next, and it's dead serious indeed, a humorless and unreadable collection of countries the U.S. could invade next, given the Pentagon has anywhere near as much time on their hands as did the editor of this useless dud. Unbearable topicality, anyone?

But the real problem with Where To Invade Next is that it takes away from the stories. You just don't get that much reading after you slough WTIN.

Call it ethnocentric, but most of the better stories are from the Our Shores minibook. There is a goodly portion of John Brandon's novel Arkansas, which is terrific as that entire book is, a story about educated and aimless drug runners in the deep South. Amanda Davis has a nice flash fiction piece about being haunted by a dead girl's couch, and Wayne Harrison has a great story about a mechanic who gives a rehab refugee a pity job. It's a unique, perceptive story about the hazards of charity, of being swindled by the obligation to be too nice. Michael Gills has a short 'n' good piece about high-school athletes waiting out a tornado as well.

There are two stories spread across both minibooks, of very different quality. Ismet Prcic's two stories form a very nice juxtaposition, both about Bosnians, the first part set in Bosnia and filled with war, squalor, and loss, the second set in L.A. and focused on the seemingly trifling but enormous mistaking of a Bosnian for a Serbian. The other double-story, by Uzodimna Iweala, is a facelessly typical foreign-woman-out-of-her-element story taken from The New Yorker template. Nothing new or interesting there.

The overseas stories are more of a minefield. They run the gamut of bewilderingly terrible (Dana Mazur's story, about a Kazakh shaman) to downright charming (Frank Lentricchia's story of a disenfranchised Italian filmmaker). Stephen Smith writes a compelling story about a seven-year-old journalist phenom receiving his first hate mail, and Garry Powell has a goofy story about an Emirati man desperate to cheat who gets tricked by his wife.

Overall, though, there's just not enough fiction, the more maddening because the space that could have been used for stories (or something else compelling) was robbed by that book of Invadables.