The McSweeney's Store

The Believer August 2004

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Jeeves in Exile
by Howard Hampton
P. G. Wodehouse’s gentleman’s gentleman is rescued from his golden-

years retirement in Jonathan Ames’s new quasi-sort-of-metafiction.

Labels Can Really Kill a Person
by Ben Ehrenreich
The “Sexually Violent Predator” classification ensures that once convicted, rehabilitation, for these men, is not part of the equation.

A Futurist Banquet
by Manuel Gonzales and Mark Binelli
A meal of manifestos concocted with the irascible help of The Futurist Cookbook.

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Invasion of the Minnesota Normals
by Annie Murphy Paul
A personality test that used Minnesotans as its benchmark for normalcy is becoming corporate America’s key to picking loyal employees.

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Thomas Frank
interviewed by Margaret Wappler
The founding editor of the Baffler recounts America’s thirty- year backslide into pop conservatism.

Robert Pollard
interviewed by Matthew Derby
The longtime indie legend on rock’s need for evil, mistakes, and stunted emotional maturity.

Francisco Goldman
in conversation with Susan Choi
On the twenty-year incubation of a novel about José Martí and the hidden history of Central American balloon pioneers.

Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World
reviewed by Chad Willenborg

Stacey D’Erasmo’s A Seahorse Year
reviewed by Sarah Stone

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
reviewed by Benjamin Strong

Michael Turner’s The Pornographer’s Poem
reviewed by Gary Lutz

Karen Shepard’s The Bad Boy’s Wife
reviewed by Ann Cummins

Scarlett Thomas’s Going Out
reviewed by Jessica Shattuck

Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby
The author overcompensates for the birth of a new baby by buying books he would not otherwise read.

Seksopolis
by Milana Vukovi? Runji?

13 Piercings & Still Not Punctured: a new poem
by Dean Young

Schema: The Afterlife in Movieland
by Brian McMullen and Steven Villereal

Four-Color Comics: “Gangway for Murder, Pt. III”
by Michael Kupperman