McSweeney's Generation Biblio.com Feature
Who is Timothy McSweeney? Well, according to Dave Eggers, author of independent hits such as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and What is the What: "[My family] would always get letters from someone named Timothy McSweeney ... He claimed to be my mother's long-lost brother...[Letters] would always include flight plans, like he was planning on coming to visit. I don't know if he's real or not. My relatives deny it, but who knows?" (Flak Magazine, 2000)
Eggers founded the small American publishing house, McSweeney's, shortly after launching the literary journal of the same name in 1998. Since then, the publishing house has developed four imprints, three quarterly publications and one "Internet tendency." Jordan Bass is the current managing editor of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the widely-popular quarterly journal that features art and fiction from both new and established artists and writers. "I'm pretty sure younger writers send their work all over the place, as they should; big publishers can pay much more than we can for books, and offer more exposure, which is certainly a draw, but ideally we're creating well-made, carefully edited books with writers who are doing things that don't have as much of a shot at that higher level," Bass says. "So we attract more offbeat projects, I think, books that might be too unorthodox to fit into a bigger publisher's program."
McSweeney's has helped launch the careers of many young writers; it has also published the works of well-established authors such as Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Joyce Carol Oates. Recent books and journals have appeared on bestseller lists around the country and have won multiple literary awards, including stories selected for the Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, the O. Henry Awards, and the Best American Short Stories. Two of McSweeney's published books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
The majority of McSweeney's audience are twenty- and thirty-something readers dedicated to creating a new kind of intellectual dialogue, one that stretches out toward the world beyond U.S. borders. In 2006, with the publication of What is the What, the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation was created to donate proceeds from book sales to education regarding the political crisis in Sudan and relief projects there.
The staff at McSweeney's is small, consisting mostly of volunteers and interns who work hard and love it. When asked about how the declining state of the book market and retail has affected McSweeney's, Bass replies: "In terms of the book market, certainly the Internet has been a great help--our online store is really good for us. And I think in a lot of ways we just tell ourselves that the book market hasn't changed all that much--people still want to read interesting, distinctive stories, and they want books to be designed like things worth preserving and admiring, and that's what we try to do. Production costs have led us to do a lot of our weirder printing in Singapore, where it's more affordable, but that's had a bright side, too, as the company we work with over there, TWP, does amazing stuff for us."
And the results have paid off. Design awards include AIGA 50 Books Award, AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award. McSweeney’s books have even appeared in design exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum.
McSweeney's continues to publish several novels a year, sometimes available exclusively through their site and independent bookstores first before widely releasing the book to the retail chains. Readers have the option to sign up for their "book release club" to receive future books at a discounted rate. For more information regarding McSweeney's books, events, nonprofit work, or to simply enjoy a dialogue between Popeye and Bluto on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, please visit their website.
