mcsweeneys

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SPRING CLEANING SALE

OY, BOOK WORMS. Our garage needs a-sweepin’, plz help us clear it out. Starting today, all of our paperbacks are $10 and all of our hardcovers are $15.

IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH, if you spend $100 on our store site, you’ll receive the below-pictured tote bag for free, which is not available in any store, ever, anywhere. (Just email your receipt to custservice@mcsweeneys.net and we’ll mail it your way). Sale ends May 11.

We can't be held responsible if any of the chimpunks living behind our minivan stow away in your package.

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ALL MY PUNY SORROWS is 50% OFF until 1pm today.

Clock is ticking, readers. Get it for just $8, while we’re feeling giddy about its reprint.

These are low low LOW PRICES. Why do I sound like I’m selling mattresses?

Check out this interview with Miriam in the LA Review of Books.

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SPOTTED: White Girls in the Wild

Or, more specifically, in the Staff Picks at Alley Cat Books on San Francisco’s 24th St: “One of the best books of the past 10 years. So Fucking Good.” thx, guys

Hilton Als’ White Girls lives, for your purchasing needs, on our store site here.

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New York area! Don’t miss this one. It’s going to be an evening to remember. 

An Evening with Alejandro Zambra Next Wednesday, February 17 at 7pm / FREE

Join us as Alejandro Zambra, the acclaimed Chilean writer and 2015-2016 Cullman Center fellow at the New York Public Library, presents a bilingual evening of readings and conversation. Translator Megan McDowell and Zambra will read (in English and Spanish, respectively) excerpts from each of his books, followed by a conversation with Zambra and McDowell led by Yasmine El Rashidi, contributor to the New York Review of Books and author of the forthcoming novel Chronicle of a Last Summer.

Free and open to the public!

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Our V-Day Sale will give you something to read when you're sitting home alone Sunday night.

Lovebirds, loners, adulterers and shut-in’s alike are welcomed to our store-wide Valentine’s Day Sale. 20% OFF all books and magazines this week. Hurry over, but please try to play it cool.

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Pairs Well

Diane Williams shares her playlist inspired by her new collection, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, in her Book Notes at Largehearted Boy.

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We’re also giving away copies on our McSweeney’s Instagram! Head over there now for a chance to win a copy for yourself and a friend.

Happy Pub Date, dear Fine Fine Fine Fine Fine. Happy Pub Date, to you.

The air is thick with artificially sweetened icing as we celebrate the birth of Diane Williams’ Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, out today. Now we sleep for a million hours, or until it wakes up wailing in the middle of the night. I think we’ve over stretched this metaphor.

Read an excerpt on LitHub.

[mcsweeneys]

Happy Pub Date, dear Fine Fine Fine Fine Fine. Happy Pub Date, to you.

The air is thick with artificially sweetened icing as we celebrate the birth of Diane Williams’ Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, out today. Now we sleep for a million hours, or until it wakes up wailing in the middle of the night. I think we’ve over stretched this metaphor.

Read an excerpt on LitHub.

[mcsweeneys]

Lookin’ Fine.

Diane Williams' FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE is a Publishers Weekly Book of the Week, Dear Sweet Reader.

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Diane Williams’ “To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing” on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading! 

“To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing” by Diane Williams, recommended by Deb Olin Unferth

Issue No. 192

AN INTRODUCTION BY DEB OLIN UNFERTH

“Many times I feel the prickle of a nearby, unseen force I ought to pay attention to.”

When I read this sentence in Diane Williams’s new book Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, I recalled yet again how much I love Diane Williams. I loved her work from the first story I read back in 1998. I wasn’t cautiously interested, coming to it slowly and falling in love bit by bit; I loved it ferociously on first contact. I memorized full stories of hers (there is one I can still recite most of today). I wrote her my first real fan letter. I treasured every life detail that I learned about her. She was so important to my development as a writer that her work and her person have been fully integrated into my soul and are a part of me, part of the permanent filter I see through. The Williams lens.

I think I loved the work so passionately because as I read I could hear a murmur that I recognized faintly, one that I’d heard before but never clearly. A murmur that said: Don’t listen to them. Listen to me. Life and art are peculiar. Life and art respect and embrace the error, the asymmetrical. It is lonely to be an error, but it is yours. It is mine!

Still today I read her work and hear this message. They give me shivers of recognition. “To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing” is no exception. This small quiet story is of a woman putting together an average dinner and eating with her husband. But Williams is expert at turning the calm and ordinary into the classical: the private surprise that one has found oneself in a fresh life, sitting with a “new spouse” (a phrase that implies both newness and familiarity). I read this and I feel the drums thrumming, the effort of revival, of coming back to life, after God-knows-what. Not in a dramatic way—not snakes and tongues, roll away the rock—but in the simplest, smallest, most beautiful manner: “How unlikely it was that our home was alight and that the dinner meal was served.”

Deb Olin Unferth Author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

Support Recommended Reading

All Donations are tax-deductible

Collect Them All

To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing

by Diane Williams

Recommended by Deb Olin Unferth

People often wait a long time and then, like me, suddenly, they’re back in the news with a changed appearance.

Now I have fuzzy gray hair. I am pointing at it. It’s like baby hair I am told.

Two people once said I had pretty feet.

I ripped off some leaves and clipped stem ends, with my new spouse, from a spray of fluorescent daisies he’d bought for me, and I asserted something unpleasant just then.

Yes, the flowers were cheerful with aggressive petals, but in a few days I’d hate them when they were spent.

The wrapping paper and a weedy mess had to be discarded, but first off thrust together. My job.

Who knows why the dog thought to follow me up the stairs.

Tufts of the dog’s fur, all around his head, serve to distinguish him. It’s as if he wears a military cap. He is dour sometimes and I have been deeply moved by what I take to be the dog’s deep concerns.

Often I pick him up—stop him mid-swagger. He didn’t like it today and he pitched himself out of my arms.

Drawers were open in the bedroom.

Many times I feel the prickle of a nearby, unseen force I ought to pay attention to.

I turned and saw my husband standing naked, with his clothes folded in his hands.

Unbudgeable—but finally springing into massive brightness—is how I prefer to think of him.

Actually, he said in these exact words: “I don’t like you very much and I don’t think you’re fascinating.” He put his clothes on, stepped out of the room.

I walked out, too, out onto the rim of our neighborhood—into the park where I saw a lifeless rabbit—ears askew. As if prompted, it became a small waste bag with its tied-up loose ends in the air.

A girl made a spectacle of herself, also, by stabbing at her front teeth with the tines of a plastic fork. Perhaps she was prodding dental wires and brackets, while an emaciated man at her side fed rice into his mouth from a white-foam square container, at top speed, crouched—swallowing at infrequent intervals.

In came my husband to say, “Diane?” when I went home.

“I am trying,” I said, “to think of you in a new way. I’m not sure what—how that is.”

A fire had been lighted, drinks had been set out. Raw fish had been dipped into egg and bread crumbs and then sautéed. A small can of shoe polish was still out on the kitchen counter. We both like to keep our shoes shiny.

How unlikely it was that our home was alight and that the dinner meal was served. I served it—our desideratum. The bread was dehydrated.

I planned my future—that is, what to eat first—but not yet next and last—tap, tapping.

My fork struck again lightly at several mounds of yellow vegetables.

The dog was upright, slowly turning in place, and then he settled down into the shape of a wreath—something, of course, he’d thought of himself, but the decision was never extraordinary.

And there is never any telling how long it will take my husband, if he will not hurry, to complete his dinner fare or to smooth out left-behind layers of it on the plate.

“Are you all right?” he asked me—“Finished?”

He loves spicy food, not this. My legs were stiff and my knees ached.

I gave him a nod, made no apologies. Where were his?

I didn’t cry some.

I must say that our behavior is continually under review and any one error alters our prestige, but there’ll be none of that lifting up mine eyes unto the hills.

End

About the Author

Diane Williams is the author of eight books, including a collection of her selected stories. She is also the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON, the archive of which, as well as Williams’s personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library at Indiana University. She lives in New York City.

About the Guest Editor

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of three books. Her fourth is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

About Electric Literature

Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Stay connected with us through our eNewsletter, Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.

“To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing” by Diane Williams is excerpted from Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by permission of Mcsweeney’s. Copyright © 2016 Diane Williams.

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New issue, out next week! | @believermag | Fall 2015 | Art Directors: @iamdanmckinley, Sunra Thompson | Illustrator: Michael Kirkham | Editors: Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, Karolina Waclawiak http://ift.tt/1PCDzwn

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Kind words from Austin Kleon! Thanks Austin!

Dave Eggers and Tucker Nichols, This Bridge Will Not Be Gray

I loved this. Simple cut-out paper art by Tucker (one of my favorites) and witty writing by Eggers. In a way, it’s a book about design, and how designers (and engineers and artists, etc.) juggle opinions and make choices, but it’s also just a cool story about why the Golden Gate Bridge is orange. My 3-year-old seemed to dig it, too.

Recommended.

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ALPHABETICALLY ORGANIZED STRANGERS: A CONTEST FROM AMY KROUSE ROSENTHAL AND McSWEENEY’S.

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"Surprising, funny, and evocative, the narratives in Williams’s newest collection mine small instances for larger meanings… Once again, Williams’s askew, precise prose demonstrates tremendous compassion and skill.”

STARRED REVIEW OF DIANE WILLIAMS’ FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE

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It’s wonderful to see advance copies of Diane Williams’ Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine landing. Writers: If you’s like to see a review advance copy email press@mcsweeneys.net

Afternoon reading: the forthcoming Diane Williams short story collection (from @mcswys) paired with a @bruce_cost ginger ale. #books

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The Spooky Half-Life of Test Card F

When Brits of a certain age imagine snapping on the telly, they find Test Card F burned into their retinas. An irregular grid of gray-and-white squares, each corner bisected at the diagonal with bold stripes. In the center floats a circle that, fish-eye-like, reveals a scene begging for explanation: a little girl in an Alice hairband plays tic-tac-toe (or, to use the game’s British name, “noughts and crosses”) with a hideous clown doll. Transmitted late nights and during the workday, Test Card F ruled off-hours BBC television from 1967 to 1998, dwindled rapidly into non-existence with the rise of 24-hour programming. The girl and clown have been locked in a “never-ending game… reminiscent of the feudal knight taking on Death at chess in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal” for over 70,000 hours, making Test Card F the longest-running TV broadcast in British history.

I stumbled on this enigmatic image while writing my latest book Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns. It fell outside my research focus—the book decodes the cultural histories of graphic patterns across the globe—but grabbed firmly onto my lapels and held. Patternalia started with an irrational, but persistent observation I had: why do we imbue individual patterns with a sense of personality? Why should polka dots seem demure and female, or Hawaiian-prints obnoxious and boorish, or stripes speedy and decisive? Writing this book was all about taking that nutso question seriously, and tracking down some definitive answers. 

While Test Card F isn’t, strictly speaking, a graphic pattern in the tradition of plaid or fleur de lis, it’s absolutely earned its place in the pantheon of repeated imagery in daily life that’s too often ignored. “The ephemeral is not the opposite of the eternal,” art critic John Berger wrote in his 2008 book From A to X: A Story in Letters. “The opposite of the eternal is the forgotten.” For millions of Britons in the heart of the previous century, Test Card F papered hours and days and years with the same inscrutable picture. I conjure it up in my mind’s eye: a square of cracklingly live wallpaper you could switch on and off, the telly’s default image, the ghostly underside of all programming. Its intermittent visiblity probably wouldn’t have diminished how enveloping and endless it felt—just like any fascinating wallpaper.

This mesmerizing image rewards parsing. Created by former BBC engineer George Hersee, his 2001 BBC obituary explains the technological moment that gave rise to Test Card F: Prior to color televisions, TV installers made do with scientifically abstracted testcards to refine reception.  But “colour TV presented new problems,” writes the BBC obituary writer. “It was deemed necessary to include a picture of a person on the new test card so adjustments could be made for flesh tones.” Hersee dashed off a few mockups featuring his daughters Carole and Gillian, never dreaming Carole’s face would eventually rival the Queen’s for totalizing ubiquity. The BBC preferred using a child in Test Card F versus an adult, as children’s fashions tended to age less rapidly.

The apparently haphazard details depicted in Test Card F are no accident. The chalk X on the blackboard was carefully positioned to help engineers center the TV picture. While the BBC briefly toyed with using an Asian child wearing a bindi for this purpose, the cross proved more useful. Color images in TV are made of overlapping red, green and blue layers; any “fringing” or color bleed into the cross revealed poor convergence in the TV signal. Similarly, the evil clown Bubbles’ buttons should appear yellow, not white. If the yellow “jumps” to the right and the buttons look white, that signals a chrominance/ luminance delay error.

Keep reading

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In what year did you abandon your dreams?

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/nihilistic-password-security-questions