McSweeney's #16

Book #34 of 2005 was McSweeney's #16, which comes in a wonderfully packaged cloth-bound edition that does indeed include a comb (as promised) as well as a deck of cards that can be shuffled into any order and then read as a story.

I'd say the quality of the stories in this edition are pretty average fare in McSweeney's terms, although that's not necessarily a bad thing. By far my favorite was Kevin Moffett's 'The Medicine Man' which happens to be set in Flagler, Florida not very far from the rural area in which I grew up (The story even name checks Palatka!). I'm not positive, but based on a piece about Gainesville's Friends of the Library Booksale that Moffett previously published in The Believer, I think he may even have attended my beloved UF. Anyways, Moffett's story is a delcious view of southern lifestyle with an interesting cast of characters all written in the familiar voice of home.

My second favorite story this month was Roddy Doyle's 'Home to Harlem', a story about a black Irish man who comes to America to half-jokingly study the influence of the Harlem Renaissance writers on Irish Literature and ends up discovering a lot about himself (boy that sounds cheesy, but you'll have to take my word for it that it's really not). Other stories I particularly enjoyed were 'Mudder Tongue' by UW alum Brian Evenson and "Driveway" by fellow blogger Pia Z. Ehrhardt.