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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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M c S W E E N E Y ' S N E W S . This page will be updated occasionally, notifying readers of developments, special offers, etc. from McSweeney's. All offers are real, unless they are obviously not real. - - - - FEBRUARY 22 Amazon review of A.H.W.O.S.G contest update. As you may remember, last week we asked contest entrants to submit reviews to Amazon.com, so long as they met the following criteria: - The review rates the book with five stars
Thus far, the front-runner is this one: - - - - A lesson in creative thinking Reviewer: Bryce Newhart from Moscow, Russia February 18, 2000 This is a delightful tale that brings together the concept of problem solving and helps educate youngsters about the Irish community and countryside. Follow in Molly's footsteps as she saves the Holly family from a fire by leading their cat Paws on a wild chase through the house and awakening the family. Illustrated with soft watercolors of Irish country life, the tale is amusing and features fun facts about World War II kitchens and cooking. Full menus, recipes, and tips for a 1940s-style slumber party are included. You can whip up vitality meat loaf, jelly flags, and other foods with easy to follow recipes, full color photo-graphs, and tips for planning your own 1940s parties. An afterword encourages parents and teachers to use the book as a lesson in creative thinking instead of simply allowing children to enjoy the tale. Bravo! - - - - We look forward to watching the contest's progress. Again, a winner will be named in March, and will receive a free subscription. - - - - FEBRUARY 18 Hmm. So. Given the without-a-hitch-ness of Tuesday night, last night was, for balance, to be expected. Um. Not everything went as planned. To wit: - As you may or may not know, we had contracted a bus to take a good deal of the reading party from the Brookyn reading venue to New York's SoHo district, where we all would enjoy the elephant-made paintings being exhibited and talked about by Komar & Melamid, with art historian Mia Fineman. - The problem was, when we all left the reading and waited outside for the bus, that bus did not arrive. Ever. Oddly, it was supposed to be the same bus, with the same driver, as the bus and driver we worked with on Tuesday, with whom we had worked without any problem at all. But this time we all waited and waited, on Seventh Avenue and Union Street in Park Slope, to no avail. - So we took a series of cabs and cars. Which was okay, but prevented us from hearing Brent Hoff, who was employed at the reading as a musical accompanist, from playing guitar and singing camp songs -- which is what he had planned to do. On the bus. In the end, we were late for the elephant show, and had missed most of the festivities, but there were still many peanuts to be eaten, and the paintings looked perfect. For more information about the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Elephant Project, please see www.elephantart.com. - One strange and unfortunate thing: At this particular reading, there was in attendance a reporter from a small weekly newspaper in New York read by advertising and real estate professionals, and some who work in the media. This reporter had been for a week or so poking around, calling people with some association to me, by all accounts -- and true to the nature of this particular news source -- in an effort to pen a piece to balance whatever nice things have previously been said about McSweeney's and my book. - This reporter's presence was upsetting, to me and to many of the attendees. You see, when people come to these readings, and stand in line to have their book signed, many of them have experienced things very similar or worse to the events described in the book. For example, at a reading in San Francisco, a man in his early thirties related how he had raised his young brother for ten years, from the time when they were 24 and 10, respectively. Another young woman had, just a year before, lost her parents in a plane crash.The stories are incredible and wrenching, but are welcome. That's much of the point of a book tour -- meeting people who have been in whatever way affected by a book, and talking to them about why and how. And essential to this transaction is the privacy of the attendee/sharer of similar experience. - The problem was, on this particular night, this reporter was hovering, just behind the signing table, busily scribbling into her notebook much of what she could glean from the conversations between reader and writer. It made things extremely uncomfortable. At one point, while a woman was relating her own familial loss, and the parts of the book which moved or informed her, the reporter was so close, and writing so feverishly, that all I could do was stare at her, hoping she would take in the message implied and allow some privacy. She did not. She was subsequently asked by bookstore personnel to leave, or at the very least allow more room. She did not. It became a very icky scene, and carried on until well after the signings were done. - It's very hard to express how unsettling it all was. Such a contrast, between these kind and open people, talking about the sorts of things they were talking about, and this reporter person, without good intentions, preying upon them. It was very creepy. Wow was it creepy. - Still, I want to thank all those who attended. It was the first time we tried musical accompaniment, and that worked more often than it didn't. Brent Hoff, both the McSweeney's science correspondent and an exemplary guitarist, played requests, while I read requests, which brought a very modern, interactive angle to the evening. Everyone was very forgiving and warm, even when the bus didn't arrive. To summarize, I'd like to quote one attendee who wrote this morning to the McSweeney's email address to say this: - "To the best of my knowledge, that was the first time I'd heard someone read a book accompanied by a guy playing The Cure on an acoustic guitar. (Or did John Barth once do that? With the Kingston Trio?) Anyway, I never knew what what I was missing." - Thanks are also due to Sarah Vowell and Lawrence Weschler, both of whom were kind enough to play parts in the show. (Note: If anyone got a picture of Mr. Weschler, in costume, wearing a much-too-small baseball cap backwards, please send it to us. We'll send you something nice in return.) - - - - FEBRUARY 17 So. A few details from a reading the other night: - On Tuesday, at Barnes and Noble in downtown New York, we invited a representative from the American Automobile Association to speak to the captive audience about winter car safety and maintenance. AAA sent Robin Augustson, who has been with the organization for two and a half years. However, Ms. Augustson did not want to talk about winter car safety and maintenance. Instead, she wanted to talk about what is known as "Road Rage." She spoke for about ten minutes and passed out literature. - Unfortunately, many audience members assumed Ms. Augustson was an actress, and not an actual AAA representative. But consider this: what would be the more difficult task: hiring and training and paying for an actress to provide a ten-minute monologue about Road Rage, or to simply call AAA for the real thing, for free? Yes. See. - The night also marked the debut of the Lucy Thomas Dancers, two professional "go-go" dancers who danced, on top of the book-signing table, during the reading of Ms. Thomas's "People Should Not Laugh at Savings." They were loved by everyone, the dancers were. - The best part is that after the reading, we had hired a bus to take about 50 audience members to Terminal One, a bar off the highway near the Newark airport -- and we did do this, take a bus to Terminal One, a bar off the highway near the Newark airport -- and Ms. Augustson, who we assumed might be angry for having been put in an odd situation at the bookstore, not only did not mind, but she was on the bus, too. - She was charming and cheerful. - At Terminal One, we had been told that Tuesday night would feature the musical stylings of Victor and Roland, who perform their versions of hits from the '70s, '80s and '90s. When we arrived, there indeed were two men performing such hits -- a Peter Frampton number was underway -- but we soon enough discovered that it was not Victor and Roland this particular night, but Ray and Roland. Victor had to be up early for a construction job, and Ray was filling in. - The catch was that Ray did not know the words to the vast majority of the songs on the Victor and Roland playlist, so had to read from a messy sheaf of loose papers bearing the lyrics, using the light available from the streetlamps outside. It seemed very difficult, but Ray pulled it off. - Ray was also very helpful, apparently, in programming the machine that provided the percussion for each song, as Victor was the only live instrumentalist on stage. He played the guitar, and was good at that. - In the end, the 45 or so bus-riders -- an eclectic group, few of whom knew each other or any McSweeney's staff -- stayed until almost 2 a.m. Fun was had by all, especially soon-to-be-a-writer-of-a-McSweeney's-book Lawrence Krauser, who spent a good deal of time on the dance floor, a good deal of it by himself. Which is an okay thing to do. - - - - On a related note: If you look at the Amazon page for the book that spawned the reading and
this tour in general, you will notice a few Tim Church-like reviews
posted -- his is the one that begins "Eggers scores again!" and then
talks about completely unrelated things. We are now holding a smallish
contest, the winner of which will receive a free subscription to
McSweeney's. The contest asks the entrants to write the most
entertaining review of the book in question, so long as:
The winner will be contacted via email in early March. - - - - Read McSweeney's News:
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