In eight illustrated books, elegantly held together in a single beribboned case, McSweeney's Issue 28 explores the state of the fable. For the next two days, it's $5 off. - - - - |
- - - - A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead are stranded on a desert island. The brunette writes a message in a bottle. The redhead hunts for food. The blonde swims a kilometer offshore, and remembers musty wine drunk during a Parisian dawn. A duck walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender asks how he'd like to pay. "You know that I'm running a tab. Sometimes it feels so long, written on the inner edges of my spirit, an itemized list of each moral failing, each successive regression." The bartender snickers, "You mean your bill?" The duck refrains from weeping. Napoleon, Gandhi, and Winston Churchill knock on the gates of heaven. St. Peter emerges, list in hand. He looks at each of them and clears his throat. "This is all merely a construct of the living, to mitigate their dread of the unknown. Excuse me. I've got a tape of Gilmore Girls that I'd really like to watch now." A man requires surgery for a broken arm. As the doctor is fitting his cast, the man asks, "Doctor, when this thing c omes off, will I be able to play the violin?" The doctor responds, "Why is it that a man's sexuality is inextricably linked to his fortunes? That's a lot of pressure, you know." How many nymphomaniacs does it take to change a lightbulb? Three: One to hold it, one to flirt with it, and one to scrub the floor, corner to corner. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy go to the welfare office. They wait in the lobby for hours before the case worker calls them each in turn. When asked for a Social Security number, each fills in "000-00-0000." The case worker goes home and sighs to her husband about her aching joints, the dreary commute, and the grinding uniformity of imaginary characters with shamelessly real hunger.
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