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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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[We are excited and pleased to announce that the newest title from McSweeney's Books, This Shape We're In by Jonathan Lethem, has been released and is already available in many bookstores. As has been discussed previously, this book is not expensive. For a list of stores where you are most likely to find it, very soon if not already, please consult the new McSweeney's 100 page. The stores participating in this new program are independent bookstores that carry McSweeney's products, and with whom we will be working closely. The book will also be available through this site, via a new and much-improved online ordering system that will be available, if all goes well, within a week. We have recently made some significant improvements to our fulfillment operation that will make our order-processing and shipping, for this book and for all future McSweeney's material, much more efficient and accurate than they have been previously. Jonathan Lethem will be reading from his novel Motherless Brooklyn this Wednesday, Feb. 28th, at the Children's School (PS 372), 512 Carroll Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues, in Brooklyn. Time: 7 pm. Admission: $10. Call 718-624-5271 for further information. Mr. Lethem will also be joining Dave Eggers for a reading at Housing Works in Manhattan this Thursday, March 1st. Details are here. Further reading dates will be posted on this site. Moreover, there is an unofficial website cataloguing Mr. Lethem's comings and goings. And now, for your perusal, we present the opening pages of This Shape We're In.] - - - - It began when Balkan came into our burrow during cocktail hour and told us he had been in the eye. Earl and Lorna were sitting around sipping gin and tonics and watching me grill a hunk of proteinous rind which I'd marinated pretty nicely and was basting like a real pro and my immediate response was to tell Balkan to go to hell. Marianne offered him a drink and he took it with both hands like it was hot chocolate and went back to boasting about his extraordinary meander and the culture of the forelimbs and the things he'd witnessed peering through the eye: the inky depths of interstellar space (his words: inky depths, interstellar space). Balkan believed he dwelt in the liver or seat of the soul and I happened to know he was wrong, that in fact Balkan and his bunker of weirdos were dwelling in the rump — merely the seat. Balkan was the same age as my son Dennis, was an old pal of Dennis's, in fact. He wouldn't have known the liver from an amphitheater or an orgy and I could be pretty sure he'd been deceived about the eye as well: it wouldn't be the first time some priestly collective mounted a bogus eye and started preaching to deluded seekers and gullible militia types like Balkan about the wonders to be seen, the answers to be had. But all I said was, "Which eye?" "Which?" That's right, kid, I thought, bring this mystical shit into my burrow and drink up my liquor. "Right, left, or third?" "I don't know," said Balkan, hemming. "I just know it was an eye, Mr. F. Don't try to tell me it wasn't." Then: "There's a third?" "Oh yeah," I said. "The visionary eye, looks into the face of God — and God's got his finger in his nostril, to the knuckle. In fact we're a booger, Balkan, hadn't word reached you?" In truth I'd only heard faint legends of a third eye myself — when Dennis was in kindergarten in the pizzle and he came home having played some children's game, chanting under his breath: third eye third eye watching me/third eye third eye it can see/third eye third eye set me free/my mother says to pick the very next one! I yanked Dennis out of that school the next day and that was right about when Marianne and I decided to find our way out to the Subburrows. And I knew fuckall about what any such alleged third eye looked out on. Such ignorance is what passed for bliss, those days. "Don't be mean," said Marianne to me. "I'm sure it was an eye, Balkan, and probably a very important one. You know, we're just not that interested in space around here." Her words were a condescending veneer of charm stretched over a yawning gulf of boredom. Then she asked: "Can I refresh anyone's drink?" It wasn't so much a question as a gesture in the barbecue Kabuki, signaling we should get off the topic and back to some more general jabber along the way to getting potted. There came various murmurs of satisfaction, a bowl of chips was passed around, and Earl asked Balkan a few polite questions about the stripes of rank on his shoulder and what they meant, though I knew he didn't give two hoots on a rusty trumpet. I slivered off chunks of that marinated rind and put in it buns loaded up with onions and Balkan took one from me and wolfed it like a hunted thing. Poor bastard was malnourished physically and in other ways and I thought for the hundredth time God Bless marriage, grilling, distilled spirits, and all else that distracts from wayward sons and wayward theories, and it was while I was in the thick of this coarse, gratifying epiphany, I swear, that Balkan said, "I saw Dennis up there. He's a beggar in the eye." Marianne, suddenly attentive, said: "What did you say?" Balkan knew he had her attention now. "Dennis, your son, sure. He sits in the back of the eye and chants and says prayers for money." Of course, this was what Balkan had come to say in the first place. It was absolutely like him to bury the lead. "Oh, Balkan, why didn't you bring him back?" said Marianne. "Don't listen to him," I said to Marianne. "He didn't see anyone. Balkan, get screwed." I stood from my chair as though to make a grab or throw a punch, but in fact I still had my drink in my hand, and only lurched. "Maybe we ought to get going, folks," said Earl, though Lorna was still only halfway through her plate. Lorna nibbled nervously on her sandwich, eyes wide like a ferret. "He's your son," said Marianne to me. She stepped up and plucked at my glass, which I fought for, causing half my lovely gin to slosh over my wrist and trickle onto my leg and into the astroturf. "Christ, woman." I said it in my John Wayne voice, a joke which general mush-mouthedness caused to be completely lost if it had stood a snowball's chance in the first place. Still, I thought it pretty good-humored, given the waste of a cocktail. "Henry," said Marianne. "Dennis needs you. He's your son." "You ought to listen to Balkan," said Earl, thumping me on the shoulder. "You ought to go with him and bring him back." "Ha! I ought to send Balkan back with a bill for services rendered. I gave that kid fourteen non-refundable years of reasonably adequate parenthood, under damned strained conditions. But we'd be assuming Balkan here could even blunder his way back to this so-called eye." "Right with you, Captain," said Balkan, saluting me. "Don't call me Captain!" I said. "Don't call me dad or captain or capsized or late for dinner!" Okay — so I was engaged in a lot of nervous riffing but nevertheless striking a jocular note, if they could hear it. They couldn't. Marianne in the relevant particular. She tore off her apron and flung it, straight upwards, where it weirdly hooked on our burrow's fluorescent ceiling fixture. Then she began to cry. "You drove him aw-aw-away —" were the words I heard in the teary, gasping mix. "Oh, no," protested Balkan, out of his depth. "Dennis isn't mad at you and Mr. F —" "No, he's just turned into a broken, abject beggar," sniffled Marianne. "Dennis couldn't stay mad at a fly —" The oddness of this thought seemed to slow her down, and she left it unfinished. "It's okay, honey," said Lorna, who was over consoling Marianne with an arm draped around her shoulders in a blink, making me look like a jerk for what I'd begun doing instead: fixing another cocktail. I took it to Marianne once it was poured, figuring better late than etc., but paused behind the curtain of the hanging apron to level off the top with a sip which turned out to be half the glass, somewhat damaging my already-thin point. Marianne glared at me, then took it anyway and had a healthy slurp herself. Which seemed to right her ship rather quickly. "You go find Dennis and bring him back," she said, eyes red and squinky like a mole's, but voice fiberglass-tough. "No can do," I said. "Dennis is his own, um —" I lost a word here, and aggressively wrong ones pushed forward to take its place: his own can-of-worms? Commanding Officer? Best-case-scenario? Then in place of any word I substituted a pratfall: losing my balance I grabbed for the apron and tugged down the fluorescent light fixture, bulb shattering against the grill and powdering the remaining cuts of rind with crystalline white dust. The women and Balkan shrieked and danced backwards and Earl, in some sort of sketchy volunteer-fireman impulse, doused the grill and the shattered fixture with his drink. It flared like Baked Alaska, then sizzled greasily and died. "Wow," I said, gesturing at the strange scene on the grill. "What's for dinner? Looks like smoker's lung!" This came out more aggressive, less self-deprecating than I'd hoped. Balkan scraped at the wreckage on the floor of the burrow with the toe of his boot, and I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a spur. I wondered if he even knew what it was for. "Get out!" screamed Marianne. "Don't come back without Dennis!"
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