A storied decade

Ben East

• Last Updated: November 15. 2009 5:05PM UAE / November 15. 2009 1:05PM GMT

“Reading a literary journal is not like eating your vegetables. We’re not doing this so it can be preserved in a museum while people actually enjoy movies, television and video games. This stuff – and by that I mean reading stories – can be exciting, too.”

Eli Horowitz is defiantly stating his case for his quarterly literary magazine – and of course, you’d expect him to. He is the managing editor and publisher of one of the most influential literary magazines of this decade, McSweeney’s. 

Set up by the now ubiquitous author Dave Eggers in late 1998, two years before his best-selling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the quarterly magazine is rarely a magazine at all. In its 10 years, it has come as a box with pamphlets in it, a package resembling a pile of forwarded junk mail, and pages that opened like origami. McSweeney’s No 28 was an assortment of eight tiny books that when put together made two beautifully drawn pictures.

If that sounds like a triumph of style over substance, it’s not. It is the content that has made McSweeney’s a success. Aleksandar Hemon, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Stephen King and Roddy Doyle have all contributed original work, but just as important to the endeavour has been the reams of unpublished writers who have been spotted by McSweeney’s, published for the first time, and been encouraged to spread their wings and write novels.

It’s why McSweeney’s is one of the most exciting places to find new fiction writing. It’s also why the new book, The United States of McSweeney’s: Ten Years of Accidental Classics, is so intriguing: edited by Horowitz and Hornby, it’s a greatest hits of McSweeney’s over the years, and as much about Philipp Meyer, a fledgling writer who sent in his story, as it is Doyle, whose I Understand beautifully kicks off the compilation.

“These new writers were writers regardless of who we were. We didn’t make their stories good,” says Horowitz. “But we gave them the audience, which is sometimes all they need. People say that in these 10 years we’ve really impacted upon American literature, and perhaps that’s true. But at the same time, that’s something we really avoid thinking about if we can. There’s no mission statement, no ideology about finding new voices beyond reading a story and being excited about it. Basically, there’s just a couple of us reading all these things, and we hope that readers will be as enthused by the same stuff we are.”

Yet there remains a cliché surrounding McSweeney’s: that it’s far too cool for school, far too knowing and cliquey. There’s a reference to it in the film Juno and a Facebook group called “I Am Less Impressed Than You Think I Am That You Read McSweeney’s”. 

One author who has gained significantly from the publication is Meyer, who sent in One Day This Will All Be Yours more than five years ago. The short story is one of the stand-outs of The United States of McSweeney’s, exploring a son trying to prevent his father from committing suicide. It’s poignant, real, and just a little bit funny – as most of the McSweeney’s entries are. It was also the first thing Meyer ever got published, the first step along the road that led to his 2009 novel American Rust.

“They actually had to track me down,” says Meyer. “In the time between me sending it in and them reading it, I had moved twice, the e-mail addresses were no longer valid, I’d changed my phone number...”

“He was the elusive one,” says Horowitz. “It took quite a lot of detective work to hunt him down for permission to publish it, but it was a pleasure to do so. Philipp’s story kind of sums us up too: we don’t mind what we publish as long as it’s great. I mean, if someone was to try and characterise a McSweeney’s story, I doubt whether it would be the kind of gritty Raymond Carver-esque thing Philipp wrote.”

And it’s true that, when it comes to McSweeney’s, most forms of literature are here. Everything from the modernist work of Meyer to Amanda Davis’s touchingly metaphysical Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons (and yes, they do just that). K Kvashay-Boyle’s St Chola is written in the style of a breathless, confused teenager, and there’s even a quasi-disaster thriller from Kevin Brockmeier. 

“It’s without doubt a big deal to be published by them, a life-changing thing,” says Meyer. “I have to admit it’s something I pick up occasionally rather than without fail, but in terms of literary magazines it’s top of the heap. I have no doubts about that. And it does this incredible thing for people like me, or people like me five years ago if that makes sense. Because a lot of publishers, for reasons of legitimacy, feel the need to include big writers. Or maybe it’s not even for legitimacy, maybe it’s just to put names on the front cover that will sell. And usually, to be honest, it’s the crummier work from those writers. They rarely, if ever, take risks on folk who they’ve never heard of. You might not have heard of them as the reader, but it’s almost always someone on the magazine who knew someone, someone’s old professor makes a call and gets the story in.

“I’m not sure how, but McSweeney’s has avoided all that. And it’s almost a miracle when you think about it, that they could publish such consistently good work from complete unknowns over a 10-year period.”

Perhaps it’s the way the magazine operates that encourages people to write better stories for it. McSweeney’s, it transpires, does very little to actively pursue new writing; its editors don’t hang around campuses that have the best creative writing programmes, or go to the right New York publishing parties. Instead, McSweeney’s is the very thing that so many start-up literary magazines of this ilk always say they’ll be and never actually are: a publication for the less well connected. “It’s not really that hard to find these great new authors. You just have to be willing to sit down and read a whole bunch of stories,” Horowitz says.

Of course, Granta (perhaps the McSweeney’s equivalent in the UK) would say it does most of this too. But what makes McSweeney’s immediately different is that it’s not constricted by the A5 book format. The packaging is frequently lovely and, occasionally, off-putting. As Hornby admits in the introduction: “I hadn’t actually read many of the actual, you know, stories themselves. I had merely oohed and aahed at the extraordinary and elaborate constructions which illuminated and, on occasions, imprisoned them.”

“We always want to create a context for these stories that enhances and elevates them,” explains Horowitz. “If we’re asking people to buy this object, why not make it an object worth owning or remembering?”

And frequently, people remember the stories and authors. Meyer thinks it’s a nice marker for what writers can achieve later in their careers. “You can write a perfectly executed short story way before you’re technically able to write a perfectly executed novel,” he says. “But the stepping stone of McSweeney’s certainly helps. When they took my story, I basically knew it was good, that I’d perhaps gone from an apprentice level to someone who was, or could be, a functioning writer.

“And in the same way later on, I knew that American Rust was good too. Does that sound arrogant? I hope not. Because there’s a massive difference between knowing something is good and having that correlate with commercial success, with it actually being read. There’s no question that without an audience, you’re useless. You’re producing work that will never be seen. So places like McSweeney’s, well, they’re like a cool record label, aren’t they. They have a legitimacy that says that perhaps not everything inside will be brilliant, but it will at least be interesting.”

How much influence does Horowitz believe his publication has had upon American writing in the past 10 years? “Well, what I do know is that there have been other literary magazines that have started up since which have definitely been energised by what we have been able to do. And that’s great. I think that’s the biggest contribution we can make anyway – to get communities excited about literature and stories and cross boundaries, while always having a fun-loving approach to it all.

“Every now and then you see bigger publishing houses do something that has been clearly influenced by us without really taking the best aspects of what we do. And sometimes, I get sent caricatures of what people think a McSweeney’s story should be.

“But there’s still so much more we get that is totally innovative, totally unlike anything we’ve ever published. I suppose what you’ve been trying to get out of me the whole time is whether American writing has changed because of McSweeney’s. And it’s just so hard to say without generalising massively.

“I can’t, and I tell you why I can’t. Because trying to spot trends or be ahead of them is not what McSweeney’s is about. I’ll say it again, we’re about exciting stories. And that’s all.”

The United States of McSweeney’s: Ten Years of Accidental Classics is out now.