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McSweeney's #31 (2009)

by Dave Eggers(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1934781347 (ISBN13: 9781934781340)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

McSweeney's

series

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern

review 1: I was intrigued by this issues concept: unearthing lost forms of literature and having modern writers create their own take on them. Unfortunately, the idea is stronger than the material, though much of this is borne of the constraints of the genres, not the quality of the writing itself. Oddly enough, I was more taken the by poetry than the stories. Pantoun is a type of poem made from quatrains with two lines from each stanza repeated in the next, either verbatim or slightly modified. The poets clearly had a lot of fun exploring this form, as poets do. The fiction was very hit or miss. The Whore's Dialogue was fun, as was Douglas Coupland's biji which poked fun at the show "Survivor." The nordic saga was interesting, more fun if you know the history of the band Mayh... moreem, yet altogether boring (like most Nordic sagas). My favorite story was the most conventional, the Graustarkian Romance, an adventure story of a courier on his way to a strange Canadian island-state.Ultimately, the most fun was the historical lesson of how these genres were used in the past to tell a story. As always with McSweeney's the book itself looked good.
review 2: While I appreciate what they were trying to do in this issue (to bring back forgotten literary forms), I feel that most of the entries are confined by their forms rather than inspired by them. Also, the side notes are at times enlightening, but usually they were distracting. Still, the experience of reading the old forms was worth it. My favorite form was the Malaysian pantoum, "a poem composed in quatrains, in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza reappear (with small alterations) as the first and third lines of the next stanza, and the first and third lines of the first stanza return as the last and second lines, respectively, of the final stanza." "Repetitive", but "trancelike." less

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