The Believer

Each quarterly…and every book they produce, is a celebration of paper and all the incredible things that can be done with it,” said Anthony Doerr, author of the short story collection The Shell Collector. Writers heap praise on McSweeney’s—for its originality, craftsmanship, business model. Dan Kennedy, author of Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, said, “Here are people making something beautiful and positive and refusing to subscribe to this thing that you can only do what makes the best financial sense and moves your company ahead. It’s a really powerful thing to see people doing things their own way and succeeding.”

Aside from the magazines—the sharp, witty, confounding, delightful, odd, marvelous, and challenging magazines—there are also the books they publish under the McSweeney’s name and two additional imprints, Believer Books and the Collins Library. They published Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital, about a floating hospital in a raging storm. They published Icelander by Dustin Long about, in part, adventures in an underground Icelandic kingdom. There’s The People of Paper, Salvador Plascenia’s debut novel, a crazed book, in which columns run in different directions across the page, and sections are blacked out. The story follows Frederico de la Fe, leader of a war against, amongst other things, omniscient narration. 

Under the Believer Books banner, they’ve put out Tamler Sommers’ A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, a discussion of moral psychology, Nick Hornby’s Shakespeare Wrote for Money, his reading diary, of sorts, and the compendium The Believer Book of Writers Talking about Writers. Collins Library, yet another imprint, publishes odd out-of-print titles like Geoffrey Pike’s 1916 book To Ruhleben—And Back, a memoir about Pike’s experiences in the Ruhleben prisoner-of-war camp during World War I.

So there’s also that. But what about The Believer? It’s a monthly magazine that recently celebrated its seventy-fifth issue, primarily focused on literature and how it intersects to our society. One of the editors is Eggers’ wife, Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and the screenplay Away We Go (which she co-wrote with Eggers). 

The quarterly—check. The books—check. The Believer—check. There, we’re all done…or not. Wholphin is a quarterly DVD magazine produced by Eggers’ coterie. Named for an odd false killer whale/bottlenose dolphin hybrid, the DVD has short films and documentaries within. Those who have been involved in the project? A veritable who’s who of Tinseltown: Jonathan Demme, Eric Stoltz, Werner Herzog, David Byrne, Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman, and Lauren Bacall. Them, and the one-handed, blindfolded, Rubik’s Cube world champion.

Ah, the McSweeney’s laundry list of what it does is now complete. Oh, well, there’s that website, too—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (mcsweeneys.net). Updated daily, it is chock full of humorous bits and witty columns (full disclosure: this omniscient narrator has been published there a few times with odd little musings). On the site there are open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond (“To My Self Respect”; “To the ‘Eco’ Light on the Dashboard of My Car”); lists (“College Course or Brand of Dietary Supplement?”; “Items That Are Better for Flyin’ Away on Other Than a Wing and a Prayer”); and reviews of new food (Santa Fe Ranch Corn Nut Chips: “If you want an awesome snack, buy original Corn Nuts. If you want Dorito crumbs, by all means try Corn Nut Chips”). 

Of course Eggers, who, by the way, continues to write award-winning and thought-provoking books like Zeitoun, What is the What, and a recent novelization of the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are called The Wild Things, and directs a nationwide network of non-profit writing and tutoring centers for kids, is not a one-man show. But he is a creative and dynamic thinker. Some might even say he’s a publishing messiah.

But how? How does he sense what will work in an industry that pundits love to claim is dead? How does he find writers who, if not yet well known, will be? Eggers answered, “It’s the staff. They’re great people and they do most of the heavy lifting.” The managing editor of McSweeney’s is Eli Horowitz, a guy who majored in philosophy and was a carpenter for a time. The website is run by Christopher Monks, a former third-grade teacher. The Believer editors include Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Andrew Leland. Eggers continued, “We just try to empower good young talent. When we can unleash them, and when you know that the best ideas can come from anyone on your staff, then great things can happen.”

Some of the most notable American writers are quick to concur. “They are daring,” said George Saunders, “and I think they have an intuitive understanding of how to make literature—the life of the mind—exciting and fun.” T. C. Boyle said, “What I love about McSweeney’s is that there are no limitations…It should cheer us all to know that such things are possible.” Arthur Bradford, whose short story “Mollusks” appeared in the first issue of McSweeney’s, said, “Dave is extraordinarily good at knowing what he likes and communicating that. He’s also good at recognizing passion and talent and allowing that to flourish.”

Flourish, it has. Writers now flock to them in hopes of getting published. But for the 40-year-old Eggers, a hip publishing empire was not always in the cards. The younger Dave Eggers, before winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was an aspiring cartoonist and painter. “Most of the books I read,” he remembered, “were comic books.” It was in elementary school that teachers had him and his classmates make books. “That process meant everything to me. To make a book, every aspect of it, from scratch, made it all feel possible to me.”

His literary career was born. He worked on his high school newspaper, literary magazine, and yearbook. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign intending to get a journalism degree. That was derailed by the deaths of his parents, both from cancer. These events prompted him to write A Heartbreaking Work, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He moved west to the San Francisco Bay area. “All along though,” Eggers said recently, “I still thought I’d be a painter or illustrator.” He lived in San Francisco for five years, in fact, as a cartoonist. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties when I really felt like writing might be a career for me, and it’s really strange to find myself here.”

Like all big success stories though, the McSweeney’s publishing emporium started small. It was July 1998. “Hi you people,” Eggers wrote via email to a group of writerly friends. “This is about that quarterly I’m starting later this summer. This might be the first you’ve heard of it. It might not. Does it matter? Nah, you’re hooked already!” He hoped for a publication where odd things that couldn’t be placed in mainstream media could find a home (Eggers, himself, had worked at Esquire for a time). He said he planned to create a journal in which “each issue was unique, and broke new ground formally;” that they “might be collected, might be held and cherished, and then the stories inside might live to be read another day.”

The entire McSweeney’s oeuvre has, indeed, become collectible. “That’s one of the most gratifying things about all this,” Eggers said. “When collectors started buying the books and journals, it gave us a boost of confidence, and it urges us on. It makes us want to surprise them, to make the best books we possibly can.” 

Joe Fay, manager of rare books at Heritage Auctions, has been buying McSweeney’s books and magazines for about ten years, but began collecting them in earnest about two years ago. “The whole world of McSweeney’s seemed weird and wonderful to me,” he said, reminiscing about his early days reading their work. “All these strange looking and strangely bound quarterly publications, these oddly shaped books, these intriguing authors I’d never heard of…I realized that all this cool stuff I’d been reading was published by the same people.” They have created, he added, “a brand that no one else can match in the current market…colorful, exotic, strange works of art with as much good stuff inside as out. Form and content.”

Working on the inside of an auction house, and on the outside as a collector, Fay has a unique perspective on McSweeney’s. A recent sale at Heritage Auctions offered several McSweeney’s items, including signed works by Eggers, Neal Pollack, Amy Fusselman, and Jonathan Lethem. Fay said he believes there will be an appreciation in value over the coming years. “It will probably be a small circle of collectors [who] will be…committed, competitive, and rabid about the material.” He predicted that the first eight quarterlies, all of Eggers’ books, David Byrne’s book (Arboretum), and William T. Vollman’s massive Rising Up, Rising Down will be blue chip items in the future. In fact, Vollman’s multi-volume tome already sells in the low thousands. 

“Our longevity is pretty startling to me,” Eggers said. “When we started, I thought we’d put out eight issues of the quarterly and that would be that. I never thought twelve years later we’d still be around and have a real staff, a real office, an actual database, and distributors and all this official stuff. It’s pretty hard to believe.”