Dave Eggers Makes Futile Gesture

Do you fear that Print Is Dead? Allow America's most venerable human, Dave Eggers, to assure you—via email—that it is not: More »

David Foster Wallace Suffered From The Greatest Depression

The author David Foster Wallace has been memorialized by scores of people since he hanged himself two weeks ago. The vast majority of these people barely knew him at all, so the online trade fair of grief, initially dominated by the McSweeney's website until Elizabeth Wurtzel's silver lame leotard threw its own shadow shiva session over at New York, has struck more than a few saddish literary men as more than a little vulgar. Oh well. Today a few people who actually did know him, including his parents, share the details of his last miserable days with Salon's Robert Ito. More »

Whistling Dixie

What is the twee-est contribution that literary twee boy, McSweeney's Dave Eggers, could make to the world of music? Oh—he whistles on the new Aimee Mann track. Of course. [via Daily Intel, who has the audio clip!]

Grand Theft Auto Dating Advice

The latest list up at McSweeney's: "Good Advice From a Grand Theft Auto Dating FAQ." I'd tell you if it was funny or not, but I haven't played the game! [McSweeney's]

(Almost) Inside the "Dave Eggers Art Show"

As we told you before, author and McSweeney's founder Dave Eggers is curating an art show! A very important, very humorous art show. Paddy from Art Fag City went to the opening! Well, she stood in line at the opening... More »

Dave Eggers's Art Show: There Will Be Captions

Dave Eggers, author and founder of exhaustingly clever literary mag McSweeney's, is curating an art show! It opens next Wednesday at apexart. (We'll be there with bells on; we hear there will be a Basquiat.) UnBeige says, "according Eggers, the show ended up consisting of 'usually very basic or crude' drawings that are accompanied by hand-drawn text that functions like a funny caption." Muses Eggers in the press release, "Is humor allowed in art, and in what forms? Are captions allowed in art, and why?" Captions! If that's not art, we don't know what is. Click to see this work by David Shrigley, writ large. [ More »

Is There One Funny Joke in McSweeney's Joke Book?

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes landed on our desk today, and damned it we couldn't use a laugh right now! But are there any to be had? The first bad sign is the book's design: the back of the book, with bar code, etc., is actually on the front. Ha-ha. Get it? And then, on the other side, there is a raw chicken (turkey?) leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette through the hole left by its decapitated head. Uh... We'll excerpt a few jokes, and you may decide if they're funny, or just funny-heh. More »

McSweeney's Un-Humor Is Invading The World

Remember how the Nothing invaded the fantasy land in The Neverending Story? It's happening to comedy. Un-comedy is in the show "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job" (and much else on Adult Swim); it's in the New Yorker; and McSweeney's, the writhing heart of the Nothing, has infected Esquire with it. In a piece titled "Joke" McSweeney's writer Deb Olin Unferth tells an intentionally stupid story. Am I too dumb to get whatever clever point Unferth is making, or is this really the worst "so unfunny it's funny" story ever to appear in a publication not edited by Dave Eggers? (Don't worry, there's a plain text version of the "joke" under the napkin-scribble version shown here, although I bet Unferth wanted to make everyone decipher her handwriting.)

McSweeney's Is Looking for Senryu and Pantoums Only

Dave Eggers's semi-precious literary magazine, McSweeney's, seek senryu and pantoums submissions for their next issue; "no other forms of poetry will be considered that this time." Now you're all wondering what those are, right? More »

Can Anyone Actually Understand McSweeney's Newsletter?

We, like you perhaps, received this message in our "e-mail" inbox, from the twee literary magazine of one Dave Eggers: "It's a month of major things—a new quarterly, a new novel, and a new Wholphin are all bursting forth, via our website , yearning to be sent your way by the brave men and women of our warehouse, who right now are emerging from their cryogenic chambers and taking in nutrient-rich fluids in order to prepare for this fabled late-February triple-delivery. The major news networks are, inexplicably, not covering any of this, but here is what we can tell you: McSweeney's 26, first of all, is itself three separate objects, two books of short fiction featuring tornadoes, child reporters, Amanda Davis, and someone called the Black Shaman, and one volume of dead-serious dossiers, based on actual Pentagon documents, outlining how the United States might justify its next round of wars." DIAL DOWN THE CUTENESS OVERLOAD, m'kay, guys?

Granta Vs. McSweeney's

Is Granta still the best place to look for new, excellent novelists, asks the Times of London? Apparently not, even though Granta published their 100th issue this month. The incredibly precious McSweeney's, published by Dave Eggers, is the new heavyweight contender. It's gone from "an idiosyncratic literary magazine to a new-look publishing empire." More »

The five sites you must stop reading (and five to replace them)

Is the Onion still funny, or have you just gotten used to reading it so you haven't seen it decline from its '90s heyday to the pool of mediocrity it is today? How about Boing Boing, McSweeney's, CNN.com, or Perez Hilton? It's time to feel bad about what you like, for that is the path to enlightenment, or at least to not being that dink who IMs me month-old jokes about Bush. More »

The Vagina Casuals

"The loss of my school-related stuff was huge, but a lot of my personal life was also archived on that laptop. I had all my photos, calendars and contact lists on that computer as well as a bunch of more quirky and obsessive things that helped me feel like I had a life and an existence (a record of every menstrual cycle for the last seven years, every love letter I'd ever written, an outline for a cheesy romance novel, an ongoing list of essay ideas I could use when I was finally done with graduate school hell and could pursue my passion, writing humor). More »

The Pledge to Not Suck at the Internet

The Internet is not an excuse to be boring, stupid, or cruel. Well, cruel's fine. So join me in taking the Pledge to Not Suck at the Internet. Those who pledge get no actual privilege or prize, and the false sense of superiority is a redundant prize for you, but you can maybe make a newsletter for yourselves. More »

McSweeney's Publicist Inadvertently Provides Metaphor For Entire Company's Foibles

Publisher's Weekly editor Jonathan Segura was flattered and charmed to receive a handwritten note from McSweeney's publicist Angela Petrella. Until he opened the second galley of the book he'd received from that precious indie publisher to find an identical handwritten note—well, identical aside from its being handwritten in different handwriting. And yeah, that's what's wrong with McSweeney's in a nutshell, innit? More »

McSweeney's publisher Eli Horowitz on their save-our-asses Ebay auction: "I'm sure if we keep this going, we'll get more and more misguided. We're never sure how far to expand into ridiculousness." [NYM]

Spike Jonze's Doodles To Save McSweeney's

When distributor Publisher's Group West declared bankruptcy last winter, it set off a chain of events that have caused big shakeups in independent publishing. The latest potential casualty is McSweeney's, which announced via its "internet tendency" that they've "lost about $130,000—actual earnings that were simply erased," a loss they've just begun to feel particularly keenly. They've got a solution in mind, but being ultra-relatable lovably bumbling English majors, they're not certain it'll work: "We are not business masterminds," they admit. We'll say: their "groundbreaking business-saving plan" includes an Ebay auction of "rare" items like 8 issues of DVD-journal Wholphin "signed/doodled on" by catalog-heir director Spike Jonze. Snap 'em up, kids, or else maybe we won't have McSweeney's to kick around anymore. You'll not only be helping a great and important literary enterprise, you'll be keeping Daniel Handler from having another crisis of conscience.

Dave Eggers Desperate To Welsh On Bad Bet

The offer at right (click to enlarge) recently went out to lifetime subscribers of Dave Eggers' whimsical quarterly McSweeney's. Written in that publication's oh-so-precious house style (which was funny seven years ago but now just makes you want to punch someone) the note starts off as a standard change of address form. But wait, there's more! They want to renege on that whole "lifetime subscriber" thing. More »

Link Dump: Because It's Friday and We Feel Like It

• Morgan Stanley boots 4 employees after they accompanied clients to a strip club. Apparently this touches on Morgan Stanley's touchy gender discrimination issues, but we find it just as offensive to assume a female staffer wouldn't want to take the high rollers to Scores. [Wall Street Folly] More »

The Believer, Dave Eggers, etc.

YankTheChain's Eric Rosenfield reviews Heidi Julavits' literary criticism mag, The Believer, and makes a case for Why Dave Eggers Isn't So Bad and Why The Believer Isn't All Crap. [My description; not his.] His argument sounds familiar: Eggers/Julavits/McSweeney's have their faults, but at least they're trying to stir things up. The less polite version usually goes something like this: "Dave Eggers sucks. McSweeney's sucks. But, hey, indie publishing is cool. (Very small, nearly insignificant) kudos to Eggers on that one!" A friend of Rosenfield's disagrees: "Our own JF Quackenbush has trouble discussing Eggers without using phrases like 'subliterate postmodern flippancy.' I told him I was going down the McSweeney's Store in Brooklyn for research and asked him if he wanted me to ask anything; he said, 'please ask them to knock it off.'" More »

The Believer

As previously reported, Dave Eggers of McSweeney's is distributing a new magazine called The Believer (the brainchild of Heidi Julavits). The "indie" publication features pieces by up-and-coming "indie" writers like Salman Rushdie, Robert Olmstead, and Anne Carson. (Oh wait, it's "Be Nice to Celebrities Day." Sorry. This is very painful for me.) Actually a friend of mine subscribed and says it's very good and it even "smells nice"—always the mark of high-quality literature. I haven't seen it yet, so it's probably quite lovely. I'd probably even like it—and hate myself for liking it. (See? That was nice...ish.) More »

The Balloonist is The Believer

It has been pointed out that McSweeney's is selling subscriptions to a new monthly publication called The Believer that's co-edited by Heidi Julavits, which perhaps means that The Balloonist was never The Balloonist, but The Believer. More »

Gawker Exclusive: The Neal Pollack Interview

This is the first in a series of interviews with Random People The Editor Feels Like Emailing. Today's interviewee: Neal Pollack—McSweeney's writer, author of More »