McSweeney's Issue 29 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

One of the best issues of McSweeney's, a beautifully bound volume thick with stories, each page marked with a vintage Soviet matchbox label. It begins with a near-flawless rendering of the untrustworthy first person by Brian Baise, where a very socially maladroit man imagines his relationships ruined by anyone but himself, a story tragicomic in that the reader knows more than the narrator. Nathaniel Minton has a fantastic story about a pilot and a missionary crashing in the jungle and beginning civilization afresh. Laura Hendrix has a great story about a town that goes berserk and blames it on the narrator's sister, and Nelly Reifler has a very enjoyable story about a troubled couple finds some dogs (or possibly aliens) in the woods and adopts them to the improvement of their relationship. Erica Lazure has a strong, affecting story about a man who's faced with the dilemma of what to do when his best friend, whose girlfriend the man is cheating with, dies. Even old Roddy Doyle, who so frequently wastes McSweeney's pagespace, has a great, effortless story here about a Polish painter nervously wooing a saucy Irishwoman. Joyce Carol Oates has a quick experimental piece called "Labyrinth" that's written as an inward spiral on the back cover, and Yannick Murphy has a successfully executed story written as a police report. There are plenty more too, of many subjects: lorises and other invasive species, a boomerang factory and its owners, and mindfish. There are a couple duds, of course, care of Dawn Ryan and Blaze Ginsberg, which is a reference-dependent pop culture prank that exhausts its extremely minor charm and then just keeps on going. But there's so much here it's hard to hold much against the editors. Much like the massive Issue 10, with such quantity you're sure to have a few misses, but the whole collection isn't much affected. A solid volume.