McSweeney's 30

For anyone not acquainted with the weird and and crazily wonderful world of Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s publications, issue 30 might be a good (ie not too zany) place to start.

Taking the form of a mere book (other issues have arrived in very un-book-like form), issue 30 contains some very fine writing by a clutch of short story writers many of whom will be unknown to a UK readership. In fact, the best known of them – Wells Tower – has only recently come to our attention with his much-reviewed debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. In this issue of McSweeney’s, Tower rewrites one of his earlier stories about two brothers – from the other’s point of view. Even if you’ve not read the original (I hadn’t), it’s a bravura piece about how vast chasms can yawn between brothers who have little in common, but somehow and in some way still love each other. As Matty, the narrator of this version, puts it: ‘But I love Stephen. Or I think I do. We’ve had some intervals of mutual regard.’ Ouch.

Etgar Keret’s name should also be familiar to short story lovers – several volumes of his slight but funny and insightful snapshots of life in Israel have been translated and published in the UK. ‘Bad Karma’, Keret’s contribution to this collection, is about an insurance agent who reminisces about how calm he felt for the six weeks he spent in a trauma-induced coma.

In other stories: a couple of inmates escape from the ‘Reflection Area’ of the state hospital (‘in which the aggressive, hypermanic, disobedient, suicidal, and just plain ornery folk were stabled to cool their heels, and to reflect’); a woman buys a dilapidated house in a rough part of town and spends months renovating it in the face of blatant and ocassionally violent hostility; a film actor on the skids is unfairly rude to a fan in a burger joint.

The oddest story in the book is Matei Visniec’s short nightmare about a series of plagues that strike a town: carnivorous butterflies are chased away by pestilential snails, which in turn are despatched by ‘a gigantic and diffuse animal in the form of an odorless rain’. This is a terrifying concept that wouldn’t be out of place in a mid-twentieth-century European novel – ‘The animal rain has saturated everything. It is now the living matter of the city.’

It’s hard to pin down a common thread or theme running through these stories, but many of them are narrated in that dry but distinctively ironic way common to much contemporary American writing. They are easy to read – their vocabulary, for example, is simple – but they burrow into the brain where they take up residence, thrumming away like another of Visniec’s persistent plagues.