Adventures in the Book Trade

When I read about the conglomeration that is overtaking the publishing industry or the allegation that some major publishers have cut secret sales deals with chain bookstores at the expense of independents, or anything else that depresses me about the book world, I like to think about McSweeney’s Books, and then I feel better. That may seem a little like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. It may seem a little naïve to think that an organization offering the following advice to people who want to submit their writing could effect change in the publishing industry:

Submissions should be a non-negative integer in length, preferably divisible by seventeen. Proper word count should be total characters, excluding spaces, divided by five. We will not verify word counts as a matter of course; in the event we do, and find your submission to be “non-preferable,” we will not take any remedial action, but we will be very, very disappointed.

We do not publish first person memoirs involving a loss of innocence, particularly sexual or financial innocence. Otherwise, we publish anything else that makes us smile. We like to smile, within reason. That does not mean if we smile while reading your piece, it will be published. We may be smiling at something else altogether.

That gem of obfuscation is from www.mcsweeneys.net , which offers short, usually hilarious prose that is often bizarre. Writers who show up on the site aren’t paid. So far, five issues of McSweeney’s, the literary journal, have been published and sold through the Web site and at various bookstores across the nation, and the people who regularly buy McSweeney’s sense that they belong to a little club whose members are in on some of the most exciting writing being published today. In fact, McSweeney’s Books, the publishing venture that grew out of the Web site and journal, is the most exciting thing happening in publishing today. (E-books? What a snoozer. What people are reading is always more interesting than how they’re reading it.) With only two paid employees, McSweeney’s publishes talented authors, both new and established, while providing them far more control over the publishing process than major publishers allow. Most authors turn in a manuscript and then about a year later the manuscript is actually published; McSweeney’s cuts that down to three months: manuscript is finished, vetted, and edited, and then the book is published. Because the staff is so small, McSweeney’s doesn’t need to charge lots of money for their books. Their only real costs are for printing the books, and then the author gets the profits. McSweeney’s Books claims that their authors are able to make almost three times what they would under a standard publishing agreement, and although I have not asked an author like Jonathan Lethem, who has been published by both Doubleday (Motherless Brooklyn) and McSweeney’s (the recently published novella This Shape We’re In) whether this is actually true, the claim does not seem to be one of the instances when the people at McSweeney’s are amusing themselves by being wily.

A vibrant, high-quality publishing venture that is structured around giving hefty returns to its authors is rare. McSweeney’s Books is possible because of Dave Eggers, who we know from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and from his tussle a few weeks ago with The New York Times (for more, see McSweeneys.net or Slate.com). In an e-mail interview eventually published in Harper’s last fall, Eggers wrote, “People from Hollywood want to make my book into a movie, and I am probably going to let them do so, and they will likely pay me a great deal of money for the privilege. Do I care about this money? I do. Will I keep this money? Very little of it. Within the year I will have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going into publishing books through McSweeney’s.”

How long the largesse will last is anyone’s guess, but while it does, Eggers funds the kind of books major publishers would almost certainly refuse. They are humorous, usually surreal books with a healthy irreverence for traditional narrative structure. The first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, is a wonderfully satirical book about big-name journalists and writers who like to hear themselves talk. In Lemon, by Lawrence Krauser (a copy editor at Doubleday), Wendell is a man who writes interoffice memos for a “communication” company. He has recently been “ditched by a good woman,” according to his parents. He finds a neglected, bereft lemon in his apartment building, and it consumes every aspect of his life. Wendell’s boss thinks he is a “citrussexual.” Krauser drew every single cover of Lemon himself. (The print run was 10,000 copies.) This Shape We’re In, the novella by Jonathan Lethem, is about people who somehow seem to be stuck inside a body and are trying to get somewhere within it. (The following information appears in the closest thing to a press release McSweeney’s Books is likely to ever create: “This Shape We’re In involves drinking and people looking for a giant eye. This book could be some kind of allegory book, but it might not be an allegory book at all.”) The Pharmacist’s Mate, a nonfiction account by Amy Fusselman of her father’s death and how she reacts to it, is scheduled for publication later this month. Fusselman won a contest sponsored by McSweeney’s last year in which the person who could write the best book about electrical engineering on boats would get their book published by McSweeney’s. Fusselman’s father was the purser-pharmacist’s mate, essentially a medical aide, on a ship during World War II, and this book about him is blessedly not about electrical engineering. It is really about trying to have a child while learning how to let go of a parent. It is full of plainspoken, disarmingly simple passages like:

I want to talk to my dad, but my dad is dead now. I know we can’t have a regular conversation so I am trying to stay open to alternatives. I am trying to figure out other ways we can communicate.

This stripped language might be, in some other context, the signature of a fledgling writer who has spent too much time in Southern California, but Fusselman uses simplicity to create a kind of sepulchral urgency that is suspenseful and revealing all at once, which is quite similar to what Eggers achieves in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The great thing about McSweeney’s Books is that Eggers has found writers who, although they may cover the same ground he has, or have a very similar sense of humor, are inventive enough that the fame of their publisher doesn’t overshadow them.

This article appears in March 9 • 2001.