Red Room Where the Writers Are

A couple of days ago, as I was quietly working away to make this the best online community in creation, my phone beeped. Text message! While I try to keep texting to a minimum while working away to make this the best online community in creation, I decided to take a look.

It was The Housemate. He's generally fairly laconic with the texts, unlike me. I like to get the most out of my 160-character limit. Him? If he can't text it in five words or less, he doesn't text it. This message was true to form:

MCSWEENEY'S!

OK, a good start. Rather than get into a time-consuming back-and-forth trying to get the Housemate to make his point, I went back to work, making this the best online community in creation. Another couple of minutes go by, and another beep:

MAJOR SALE AT MCSWEENEY'S! 

Wow, Housemate, don't get all garrulous there. Intrigued, I went to the online storeof McSweeney's, certainly one of the best things to come out of San Francisco in the last dozen or so years. A couple of years ago, my brother-in-law and sister thought to give me a year's subscription to the quarterly journal for Christmas, and it was easily one of the best gifts I ever got. (Yes, I make sure I mention what a GREAT GIFT this was every time the holidays roll around. It would be tacky to say right out that I'd love a repeat, right?) I'm still working my way through the stories, reading one or two in a row, then putting it away for another few months.

The Housemate wasn't lying when he said "sale." I mean Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, with illustrations by Lisa Brown, for $5.00? Brown's incredibly popular Baby, Do My... books, for $3.50 each? Titles by Art Spiegelman, Michael Chabon, Stephen Elliott, and Nick Hornby for dirt cheap? Intriguing looking, absurdly priced collections of poets picked by poets, or stories told by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Back issues of the journal for as little as $5.00 each?!!

This is one of those truly rare opportunities to get the best writing of the last few years, presented in stylish, endlessly innovative packages that make you feel like you're part of the coolest book club on the planet. McSweeney's About pagegives it in a nutshell: then, McSweeney’s has attracted works from some of the finest writers in the country, including Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Ben Marcus, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T.C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Gabe Hudson, Robert Coover, Ann Beattie, and many others.

Click,don't linger. The sale ends within a day or two. If The Housemate blows rent by going back and spending more because you didn't snap up the deals instead, you'll have to hear about it from me.