YANNICK MURPHY'S
HERE THEY COME,
AND THE MCSWEENEY'S
READING GROUPS.
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We are very excited to announce our newest Rectangulars novel: Here They Come by Yannick Murphy. It'll be in stores next month, and is available in our store now. Frank McCourt called this "a hell of a book," and it certainly is. Splitting her time between a ramshackle apartment and a lonely hot-dog vendor, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Here They Come gives lyrical voice to an unforgettable instant—1970s New York, stifling, violent, and full of life. A.M. Homes says it's "a unique combination of rare linguistic lyricism with brutal and brilliant prose—an unrelenting portrait of family, terrifying for its honesty and its willingness to be ugly, elegant, haunting." Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, and interviewed Yannick—you can read the interview here.
To further emphasize how behind this book we are, we're offering an unheard-of Money-Back Guarantee. Any reader who purchases Here They Come
through our site and then is somehow displeased can simply send the book back to us with a terse and heavy-hearted note. We'll refund the cover price. This is for real. We support this book, and we believe you will, too.
And, in that same spirit, we're inaugurating the McSweeney's Reading Group,
which will exist on this site and as actual book klatches across the land.
In March and on into April, we'll be organizing nights in some of our
favorite bookstores, where readers can meet each other and also have a
chance to talk to Yannick, in person in some places and via some sort of
conference call in others. (Times and locations to be announced soon.) If
you'd like to start your own group for Here They Come—or invite
others into one you have already; we'd love that, too—e-mail us at
bookgroup@mcsweeneys.net and we'll announce them. The other benefit of letting us know about your book group is the excellent pizza we will quite possibly buy and have delivered to you. There's a helpful preparatory sheet for such gatherings, which can be downloaded (as a PDF) here, but really we want to hear your ideas about this book, and accounts of your experiences with it, alone or in a group; we'll feature reports from various groups on this site
each week. You can send them to that same address—bookgroup@mcsweeneys.net.
Yannick wants to hear from readers as well, and we'll be passing her
responses back to you.
"You might not be able to finish Here They Come in one sitting, but it will
haunt you until you do." Frank McCourt said that, too. Here's an excerpt.
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AN EXCERPT FROM
HERE THEY COME.
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We hear our brother violent in his room, angry, knocking over shelves and
then taking his mattress off his bed. We hear him grunting with the effort.
He is pushing his mattress through the open window, a window wide enough to
fit the mattress through. We are taking turns standing on the ladder in the
hallway looking over the wall of his room to see the last bit of the green
and white striped mattress fitting through the window and then we run to the
hallway window, my head and my two sisters' heads and our mother's head side
by side hanging out the window watching the mattress fall to the street
where cars have to swerve, horns blowing and people pointing up at us. We
step back from the window and our mother says let's go downstairs. Jesús is
already there with the freight elevator, already knowing it was our floor
the mattress came flying from.
"Don't ask," my mother says to Jesús as we get inside the elevator and Jesús
says he will not ask and Jesús stares at the peeling paint chip concrete
wall falling away from us as we descend.
In the street we are heroes. We move the mattress to the sidewalk and a few
drivers backed up the whole block long cheer and clap. The mattress, though,
is soiled with dog shit.
"Leave it here," our mother says, "some bum will sleep on it." But my
sisters and I have already turned the dog shit side down facing the sidewalk
and we have jumped on the mattress and are all three laying down on it with
our clasped hands held behind our heads and our legs crossed at the ankles.
"The clouds are cloudy," Louisa says and we see what she means, the sky
layered with gray clouds and white clouds and puffy ones and streaked ones
all at the same time. We can see no blue.
"Merde," our mother says and she sits down at the edge of the mattress and
pulls a cigarette from her breast pocket and lights it with her lighter and
smokes. Our brother comes down to the street wearing a blue silk robe that
has a Chinese dragon shooting gold thread out of its flaring nostrils. As he
walks past us, the robe's lapels gape and his smooth chest is bared.
"That's from my father," my mother says as our brother walks past. "He had
no hair there either, and his face never even needed a shave," she says.
"It's all passed down."
The traffic starts to lighten on our street as rush hour quiets down and it
gets darker. My mother says let's eat dinner outside. So she brings down the
pot of chicken and rice she has made and our plates and our forks and we set
the pot on the curb and she doles us out our portions.
When we're done we go back up to our place, bringing the plates and the pot
and leaving the mattress, now stained with grease since we have wiped our
fingers on it.
"We've left our mark," our mother says and then we all say so long to the
mattress and wish that the next person who sleeps on it has sweeter dreams
than the last person.
Days later, the mattress is gone and in the paper we read a couple was
killed while making love on a mattress in the subway tracks. "The sound of
the roaring train got my girl hot," the dying man confessed.
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To order
Here They Come,
click here.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Yannick Murphy's Here They Come, and the McSweeney's Reading Groups
When a Stranger E-Mails By Jason Roeder
Obsessive-Compulsive Valentines By Jenny Traig
A Retort to Carly Simon Regarding Her Charges of Vanity By John Moe
Klingon Recipes By Mike Richardson-Bryan
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