Their master’s voice: the rise and rise of brand McSweeney’s

Timesonline.co.uk ^ | February 3, 2008 | Stephen Amidon

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Is Dave Eggers now the most influential man in literary circles?

What to read in 2008? Everybody’s looking for a trusted authority to help them decide, but advice can be self-serving and contradictory. For almost four decades, one tried-and-true method for choosing new writing has been to look to Granta magazine, an unrivalled bellwether for leading hungry readers to emerging authors. In 1996, for instance, it famously devoted an entire issue to naming the 20 best American novelists under 40. Although a few on the list have not exactly set the world alight, the magazine proved to be remarkably prophetic in shouting out authors who were to step to the fore-front of their generation: talents such as Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and Sherman Alexie.

Recently, however, Granta’s primacy as talent-spotter of new American fiction has been challenged by a newcomer, McSweeney’s, which, in less than a decade, has gone from an idiosyncratic literary magazine to a new-look publishing empire. It was founded in 1998 by a then little-known San Francisco writer named Dave Eggers, who decided to call his magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, after a mysterious stranger who claimed to be his mother’s long-lost brother. Despite its whimsical name and modest beginnings – Eggers distributed the first issue by hand – the publication has come to eclipse Granta as the American literary scene’s most astute soothsayer. Although the first issue featured only work that had been rejected by others, it soon started to attract contributions by writers such as David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody.

But it was the publication in 2000 of Eggers’s debut book, the international bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that transformed McSweeney’s into something more than just another interesting literary journal. Suddenly, the magazine, whose masthead claims that it is “created by nervous people in relative obscurity and published four times a year”, started to gain an influence so widespread that by the time Granta published Best of Young American Novelists 2 in the spring of 2007, it had taken a back seat to McSweeney’s as the arbiter of what was novel in the American novel. Among Granta’s latest 20 writers, only Jonathan Safran Foer, a mainstay of McSweeney’s, is already certain to be remembered a decade from now.

So, what is it that makes Eggers’s empire so influential? The most obvious driving force behind its dramatic rise is the charismatic and indefatigable founder himself, who is not only a beloved author and literary style guru, but has also proved to be a crafty entrepreneur, busily creating a very modern publishing empire. His book-publishing wing features works by Nick Hornby, Lemony Snicket and Robert Coover, a key figure in the American experimental-fiction movement. There is also McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a frequently visited website that offers a wide range of satirical content – some of its better entries include Some Relatively Recent College Grads Discuss Their Maids and the wonderfully satirical Jenna Bush’s Book-Tour Diary of Hope. In 2003, McSweeney’s launched The Believer magazine, a monthly that includes a variety of cultural essays, interviews and profiles, though its main distinction is its long book reviews, which share a decidedly positive tenor. “We will focus on writers and books we like,” the magazine’s mission statement claims. “We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.” Its editor, the talented novelist Heidi Julavits, wrote that the magazine was launched to combat “wit for wit’s sake – or, hostility for hostility’s sake”, and saw as its particular target the “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt” that she famously dubbed “snark”. More recently, McSweeney’s launched Wholphin, a quarterly DVD magazine “lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learnt that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it”. (Which, evidently, they actually do.)

What really sets Eggers’s empire apart, though, is that it possesses that most elusive and valued of modern attributes: a brand. To understand the essence of this brand, one need look no further than A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with its beguiling mixture of hip self-consciousness, sarcastic humour, unabashed sentimentality and profound optimism. The ideal McSweeney’s reader (or writer) lives in Brooklyn, wears interesting T-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalisation but uncool to go on too much about it. And while grouping together such distinctive authors as Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Joyce Carol Oates, Roddy Doyle and David Foster Wallace is about as easy as herding cats, most of the writers allied with McSweeney’s do share an occasional interest in mixing reportage and fiction, as well as in buffing the surfaces of their prose with italics, unusual fonts and antiquated typography. One need look no further than the covers of Eggers’s quarterly, which is beautifully, often expensively produced (one issue came in its own cigar box), to understand that the McSweeney’s ethos is radically different from the scruffy realism Granta championed through the 1980s.

The McSweeney’s author is not above playing language games or creating work that is aware of its artificiality, although he is also careful not to let this playfulness detract from the work’s emotional impact. There is by no means a house style, but there is something that might be called the McSweeney’s tone: a buzzing, mischievous hipness, wrapped around a core of sentiment and hopefulness. This tone can be found in books by contributors such as Benjamin Kunkel, whose debut novel, Indecision, is populated by young New Yorkers who seem to have sprung from between McSweeney’s covers, or Nicole Krauss, whose second novel, The History of Love, is about a lost novel called The History of Love.

McSweeney’s also strives to be socially relevant. It wants to make the world a better place – or at least more like the cooler parts of Brooklyn. One thing the consumer immediately notices when entering McSweeney’s is that he is not really a consumer after all: there is no advertising. It is still a lot easier to find McSweeney’s publications in vanishing independent bookstores than in the mega-chains, which reflects Eggers’s determination not to be subsumed by the corporatism ravaging publishing. Nor does McSweeney’s shy away from overt political activism. It runs 826 National, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centres that provides language-teaching assistance for students aged 8-18 in American cities. In America, the proceeds from My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, and released in the UK last week, went to 826 Chicago. In his introduction, Eugenides thanks Eggers as “the Bono of lit”.

The McSweeney’s website also features a Things You Can Do for Sudan guide. Perhaps most strikingly, Eggers’s most recent book, What Is the What, is a “novelised autobiography” of Valentino Achak Deng, a “lost boy” of the Sudanese civil war whom Eggers befriended at a charity event in Atlanta.

All proceeds from the book go to aiding Sudanese refugees in America and Sudan. It’s hard to imagine Granta superstars such as Richard Ford or Tobias Wolff following suit.

Of course, such an idiosyncratic and self-assured publishing enterprise is sure to ruffle plenty of feathers. The novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet, writing recently in The American Scholar magazine, claims McSweeney’s champions a kind of writing he terms “Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness... the basic wondrousness that has since come to permeate the McSweeney’s circle of loveliness. In fact, the magazine has published many excellent writers... but its specialty remains the perception and implicit self-congratulation of wonder”.

True, a decade on, McSweeney’s still has a tendency to indulge in cartoonish self-congratulation and wry in-jokes that is more appropriate to a cheeky start-up than the market leader. For instance, Eggers edits, with pop icons such as the musician Beck and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, a yearly volume called The Best American Nonrequired Reading, whose slackerly, aw-shucks title is his way of saying that the book’s contents are actually very required reading.

Even if you think McSweeney’s can be too clever for its own good, it’s hard to stay mad at it for very long. Anyone familiar with the publishing world understands that it is in the process of being irrevocably damaged by corporate owners who are crowding out the merely excellent in favour of the readily saleable; who are glad to put respected “mid-list” authors out to pasture so they can focus on publishing meretricious, photogenic newcomers. In this environment, it’s heartening to see that an independent publisher that raucously defines itself in opposition to the corporate model has taken charge of defining the literary vanguard, many of whose members the corporate giants will now be forced to publish. The inmates might have taken over the asylum, but you’d have to be crazy not to see this as a good thing.

Granta vs McSweeney’s

Favourite Guy Richard Ford vs Dave Eggers

Favourite Gal Martha Gellhorn vs Joyce Carol Oates

Favourite Lad Tobias Wolff vs Nick Hornby

Favourite Style Dirty Realism vs Clean Metafiction

Favourite Continent Europe vs Brooklyn

Favourite Jonathan Raban vs Lethem

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I'm a sucker for anything McSweeney's.