McSweeney's 36

Those lovable diehards at McSweeney's have done it again.  They've sent me yet another quarterly gem almost as challenging to fit on my bookshelf (though not quite as challenging as last year's Sunday newspaper format) as it is fun to explore and read.  This is—by all outward appearances—a square cardboard box with a human head drawn on all six sides (including the severed bit of neck on the bottom) that opens up to reveal 11 different "pieces" inside, including:

• An unfinished novella (?) by Michael Chabon
• A play about a Muslim-American family (ironically [?] called The Domestic Crusaders)
• A short screen-play for a new Mike Meyers/Dana Carvey movie, wrapped in a brown envelope with a cover letter inside introducing the piece to prospective movie producers
• A series of postcards depicting one larger piece of artwork
• The longest fortune cookie "slip" I've ever seen, rolled and rubber-banded into a tight cylinder
• The first chapter of Adam Levin's (so far) great debut novel The Instructions which I've started reading but got pushed aside because I'm currently tackling another great/large novel (oh, I haven't mentioned in here that I'm currently reading DFW's Infinite Jest... well, there you go, maybe I'll expound on that another time)
• Among other things also thrilling to discover in this box/head.

Never sure exactly how to proceed with any McSweeney's offering, this one sort of demands that you keep the box close-by and, like a magician's hat, simply put your hand in from time to time to see what you pull out.  $26 at your local independent bookstore (or about $15 at Amazon—I note with amusement the usual "Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on a Kindle" link below the image... as if) is a good deal for this level of ingenuity.  Not trying to peddle someone else's wares on you.  Just saying.

Finally, if you'd like to make your own box head, print out the below and fold along the lines (scissors and tape not included).

Now, as usual, here's the blurb from the credits page, always fun to read:

I'd love nothing more than a chance to crack your forehead open along a tidy seam and give the contents of your mind a nice gore-free sift. This McSweeney's issue was conceived as an approximation of what that experience might feel like for the sifter (without, admittedly, any regard at all for the feelings or the rights of our mustachioed fantasy siftee). What would your head look like inside? Mine, I think, would look like a disorganized yellow filing cabinet. There's some fun stuff in there; some serious stuff; some fragments. There's an unexplainable but functional partial order to things. (I like my indefensible mind fine, it works for me, and so forth.) These kinds of thoughts—p1us the old TV commercial for Reach toothbrushes starring the cartoon man with the "Hip-top head," plus the gruesome old monster-faced Madballs toys—are what sparked issue 36.

It seemed like a good idea to include at least one abandoned or unfinished text in the issue. Michael Chabon answered the call, and the result—the enclosed Fountain City mini-book—laughably outclasses our original big dream of plundering someones hard drive for a disused Word document.

Not knowing about the box, Jack Pendarvis sent us Fancy Times—a suite of adventure stories that are written like crass 1961 abridgments of pulpy, meandering WWI-era yarns. We selected one of our many favorites, and Michael Kupperman gamely fleshed it out with the right kind of art. The result is tucked away here in the way that the 114 things I've bought on eBay since 1999 are tucked away in perfect places.

Wajahat Ali's play and Sophia Cara Frydman's illustrated story are the kind of writing projects that could be enjoyed by countless readers—but how do you get them into people's hands? How do you publish a brilliant play, or a handwritten mini-story with seven drawings, so that a reader will think to seek it out, so that they might be attracted to it, so that they might read it? A human-head box (drawn by the amazing Matt Furie) is an ideal delivery system for work like this, we hope.

We at McSweeney's continue to love mail, and the institution of mail, and all the surprises it can bring. Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington's script for an imaginary Mike Myers/Dana Carvey movie hit our inbox less than a week before presstime, and it instantly felt essential. Ian Huebert's "installment postcards" revive a delightful idea originated by the postcard publisher Franz Huld in 1905: send an artwork through the mail, one teasing piece at a time, until the full image is finally revealed to the recipient.

We've left some space in the box so that you can introduce your own ideas into it, Inception-style. If you email us a picture of yourself holding your box in your home, we'll mail you something extra to put in the box. What can you fit into it?

If a man were to approach me at my desk right now and tell me he could get me into your head for fifteen minutes for $200 without you knowing about it, I'd run to the ATM. If the price were $500, I'd put it on my credit card. I would pay no more than $600. In that spirit, I hope you agree that twenty-six dollars was a steal of a price for McSweeney’s 36, which you can presumably keep now until you're dead.

—Brian McMullen, managing editor & art director, McSweeney's

© 2010 McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the contributors, San Francisco, California.