Issue 11 features contributions by many of your favorite McSweeney's writers, as well as a chorus of new voices. Contributors include: Tom Bissell, Sean Warren, Samantha Hunt, Robert Olmstead, T.C. Boyle, David Means, Doug Dorst, Joyce Carol Oates, A.G. Pasquella, Brent Hoff, Stephen Elliott, Daphne Beal, Denis Johnson, and many others.
This issue comes complete with a letters section and an interview with prominent scientists, in this case with those investigating the recently found colossal squid, the largest known to man.
Issue 11 also comes with a FREE DVD featuring readings by most of the contributors, a "Literary Cribs" episode starring Jonathan Ames, Dave Eggers interviewing Denis Johnson, Daphne Beal singing in Nepali, and an intern talking about how writers like their coffee. An instant classic of the DVDs-attached-to-literary-quarterlies genre.
Contents
Tom Bissell – God Lives in St. Petersburg
God, in time, takes everything from everyone.
A.G. Pasquella – Why Not a Spider Monkey Jesus?
Terror enters in the form of a drum-beating teddy bear.
T. Coraghessan Boyle – Blinded By the Light
So the sky is falling.
Alison Smith – The Specialist
The first one said it was incurable. The next agreed.
Brent Hoff – The Colossal Squid: An Interview
“You’d be looking at being restrained by those eight hooked arms as long as it took the squid to slice you into bite-sized pieces with its beak, then rasp the pieces small enough to fit down the esophagus, using the radula, a cartilaginous toothed tongue behind the beak. You’d probably rather drown.”
Sean Warren – What Keeler Did to His Foot in the Navy
This is about Keeler, not me, so I don’t want you thinking anywhere down the line that I ever did anything to my foot like what he did to his, even though we were both boot squids on board the USS Constellation.
Stephen Elliott – I’ll Change Completely
Sometimes when my phone rings I try to hide in my own apartment.
Doug Dorst – The Candidate in Bloom
The Candidate is so tense he cannot walk without crutches.
Lawrence Weschler – Convergences
Of course, once you see them, you start seeing them everywhere: that’s the crazy thing with these pattern convergences.
Benjamin Lytal – Weena
Post-apocalyptic story in five acts, dedicated to an imaginary friend of mine named Weena, a very odd and forthright girl who died accidentally, run over by a motorcycle on the streets of Tulsa.
David Means – Elyria Man
Thompson scrapes off the residual mud, the encrustment of years, with the blade of the shovel, with the edge of a crowbar from his truck, working carefully around my head, avoiding eyes and orifices until ultimately a face is revealed.
Daphne Beal – The Poor Thing
[Three weeks with Nepali prostitutes in Bombay]
On a hot September afternoon, on the front stoop of her home in central Bombay, a young Nepali woman named Priya pushed up her sleeve to show me a strip of mottled scars and black ink on her inner arm, explaining, “I burnt off my old name, Sonam, with cigarettes.”
Samantha Hunt – Blue
“You didn’t give birth to me, did you?”
Robert Olmstead – The Probability of Great Events Sets Life in Motion
Often I could hardly breathe. My heart felt cramped an I would lose consciousness.
Joyce Carol Oates – The Gathering Squall
She knew: her mother was terribly upset. Because her mother was asking, “Are you going to tell us who it was?” and there was no us in the Uhlmanns’ household any longer.
Denis Johnson – Soul of a Whore: Act 2
SIMON: I have kissed your prayers kissed your prayers
Roller coaster rollin’ through the rain
The oceanic shoulders of the throng
Undulating slowly breakfastward
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