McSweeney's 39 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern) [ハードカバー]

McSweeney's is back to its wonderful miscellany. Issue 39 is a sharp-looking 283-page hardcover with a varied mixture of styles, topics, and genres. It's low frills presentation-wise, featuring cover and insert photography by Tabitha Soren.

Starting with the best, there's J.T.K. Belle's terrific long story "Carlos the Impossible," about an enormous, indestructible bull and the matador who destroys himself trying to defeat him. It's a "Moby Dick" for the bullring, with an uncommon compassion found between the two warriors, an expertly crafted and beautifully written story.

Other great pieces include Jennie Erin Smith's fascinating essay of reptile smugglers and con artists in Kenya, Uganda, Mexico, New Zealand, and elsewhere, with a focus on one ex-Mormon criminal entrepreneur. It's a footnote to Smith's book "Stolen World" that could be a book in itself. Smith immerses herself perfectly, too: it would have been easy to be judgmental about these scurrilous men, but she lets them speak for themselves.

Jess Walter has a very solid story about a homeless man going about his days however he can, his wife dead, his kid taken to foster care, him not knowing what to do besides panhandle. It's earnest, affecting, and authentic without being cloying or exploitative. Elsewhere, Tom Barbash writes a very engaging essay about the Shah of Iran's PR guy, a well-connected American who traveled with the shah and his family in their luxury exile--a political "Almost Famous." Issue 39 also includes a long poem by Roberto Bolaño, about a band touring the western coast of South America, that recalls every reason why he's a legend.

The issue contains good work from Abi Maxwell, who writes in a very unique, intriguing style about two Swedish girls finding passage to America, and Benjamin Weissman, who writes a story with a terrific first-person narrator, wherein a boy's mother, dying of cancer, befriends a tarantula. It's not actually a story, but the obvious joy Weissman had writing it makes that fact overlookable.

Yannick Murphy has a subtly charming story about an American woman, her Mexican husband, and their daughter who will only eat chocolate. Because the wife does not embody the skills of a traditional Mexican woman, she feels like and is outright told she is a failure. Some very perceptive moments of alienation and familial power relationships unfortunately hindered by general dullness, scattered melodrama, and a silly ending. E.C. Osondu writes a cautionary fable about an older foreign woman being huckstered by seemingly kind strangers in Gambia. It's pleasant as fables go, though it reads too much like a Lonely Planet Gambia guide to domestic cultural practices.

Then there are the total duds, which are three in number. First off is the first piece in the collection, Julie Hecht making some broad reminiscences about Marimekko dresses and psychoanalysts. The essay fits into the genre of Extremely Dull Memoir, its blandness given away by the lack of a single active verb. Elmore Leonard writes an absolutely-nothing story where a young cop tells her cop dad about leading on then shooting a rapist, and that is all that occurs. The one actively offensive "story" is Amelia Gray's "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover," which is exactly what it sounds like, minus any humor or charm. This reminds me of the lists on McSweeney's website, and how the best of those operated under the maxim that brevity is the soul of wit. Five ways would have been more than enough for this tiny, tiny joke.

Rounding off the collection is a long political essay by Václav Havel, which is unreadable by dint of being a long political essay.

But never mind those. The Belle story (which, again, is SO good), the Smith essay, the Barbash essay, the Bolaño poem, and others make this a very strong issue.