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This is one of the early issues of McSweeney's, and it harks back to the cover design of the first three issues. Even at this early stage, it had already emerged as the premier place to publish, with a quite high quality standard. It features Roy Kesey's story "Pacazo," which, as I understand, later developed into an interesting novel. Jeff Greenwald's "My New Best Friend" (a trekking memoir piece) purports to be part of a longer book, although I don't believe that came to fruition. I was particularly drawn to Val Vinokurov's piece on Russian skaz literature, which is followed by an example chapter, Isaac Babel's "Salt." It serves as a useful exploration of narrative style beyond the Russian context. Examples of skaz-like work include "Sholom Aleichem's Tevye, Mark Twain's Huck, I.B. Singer's Gimpel, Anthony Burgess's Alex, Sapphire's Precious..." I especially enjoyed William T. Vollman's "Three Meditations on Death." I would also highly recommend the A.M. Homes piece and the Nathaniel Minton piece as excellent demonstrations of writing from a strong point of view. However, "Notes from a Bunker along Highway 8" contains one irritating detail on page 111, where the term "click" is used to measure distance. I assume the author meant "klick" and perhaps didn't fully understand its meaning (since the indicated distance seems too great). What completely failed to resonate with me was Denis Johnson's play, "Soul of a Whore." In my opinion, it had very little impact and was in a very low gear. I'm aware that it went on to be staged, and I do admire other works by Johnson, but this one just didn't work for me.
