THE BELIEVER NOVEMBER 2004
After a half decade away The Believer has returned home to McSweeney’s. To celebrate the momentous occasion, we’ve dug through our archives and found an extremely limited number of classic and timeless issues for your purchasing pleasure. Once these are gone, they’re gone forever.
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The Lost Symphony
by Paul Collins
Virginius Dabney, Confederate veteran and postmodern novelist, wrote an unreadable masterpiece in 1886.
I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say
by Luc Sante
Buddy Bolden is one the most important figures in the invention of jazz. One night in 1902, he also inadvertently invented funk.
The Topography of the Familiar
by Benjamin Lytal
On Walter Abish, the avatar of literary constraints, topographical stereotypes, and that good old-fashioned German “meaty anger.”
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Funworld
by Kevin Moffett
Locked behind a shoulder restraint and a lap bar among the smileologists and ho-clowns of America’s amusement parks.
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Rose Levy Beranbaum
interviewed by Ben Marcus
The author of The Bread Bible brings science and taste together, then bakes them—but don’t ask her husband how it tastes.
August Wilson
interviewed by Miles Marshall Lewis
The playwright discusses blues anthropology, Bill Cosby’s tirade, and growing up in a four-woman household.
David O. Russell
interviewed by Eric Spitznagel
A reformed satirist and writer and director of I Heart Huckabees investigates consciousness, watermelon, and hypothetical advice from Hitler.
Matmos
interviewed by Daniel Handler
Scoring pornography, taste-testing ice cream, and musique concrete on Leno with Björk’s sometime-backup band.
Blurbs for the Home and Workplace
by Meghan Daum
Tool: Retractable Dog Leash
by Jeff Steinbrink
Light: The Blinking 12:00
by Josh Greenberg
Lucy Corin’s Everyday Psychokillers
reviewed by Rachel Aviv
Heather Lewis’s Notice
reviewed by Stephen Elliott
Amanda Eyre Ward’s How to Be Lost
reviewed by Heather Birrell
Ray Loriga’s Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore
reviewed by J. M. Tyree
Sándor Márai’s Casanova in Bolzano
reviewed by Christopher Byrd
Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories
reviewed by John Glassie
Stuff I’ve Been Reading
by Nick Hornby
Seksopolis
by Milana Vukovi? Runji?
Hard Rain: a new poem
by Tony Hoagland
Schema: The Heaven and Hell of Specialty Magazines
by Kevin Moffett
Four-Color Comics: “Around Our Country”
by Michael Kupperman