The Boots Riley screenplay is fairly well done; the other stories are just okay. Pretty typical for the later McSweeney's volumes, seems like. ( )

I find it a little hard to rate a collection of short stories from different authors. Go with the mathematical approach, giving a rating to each story and then averaging? Close the eyes and divine a rating based on overall feeling? And how to account for the ‘cool’ factor for McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; maybe round up or add half a point? Through a combination of each of those I arrive at four stars for this latest installment of theirs, which features 19 stories, the last six of which are from Croatian authors. There is a pretty solid consistency throughout, with the standout for me being “Nimrods” by Ismet Prcic, and “The Dentist on the Ridge” by Dave Eggers.

Quotes:
On parents, from “Because Night has Fallen and the Barbarians Have Not Come”, by Valeria Luiselli:
“We never forgive our parents anything, though they almost always forgive us everything. But at the same time we admire them much more than they ever manage to admire us. Perhaps admiration is just and acknowledgment we offer to those people we find unfathomable. And for all that time passes, as we become adults and raise walls and families and acquire careers, we’re never unfathomable to them.”

On passion, from “Nimrods”, by Ismet Prcic:
“I kept my eyes closed as if love, passion, and performance depended on it. I felt stupid, and outside of myself. It was obvious that I was faking the passion, that I had no idea what it was or how to use it. I had created an aura of vehement urgency, hoping to lose myself in it, hoping that something inside me would tell me what to do next.
Halida figured out pretty quickly where I was at. She led, and I followed until we were both sodden and grimy and bushed, until my arms were not my arms and my breath was the cool of the night and my heart was dancing a tarantella.”

On trust, and the goodness in mankind, from “The Dentist on the Ridge”, by Dave Eggers:
“The whole process seemed ill-advised, even insane: such a thing should not, in theory, work. Come across the sea, internet stranger, and into my home. You will sleep here, and over here is a tree that celebrates the life of a child who died in infancy. Oh, and here is the path down to the bay where you can swim. That this worked, and we are here in Croatia, with a home and new friends cooking us a lamb, proves that for every boundary, physical or cultural, between people, for every instance of misunderstanding or suspicion, there are a thousand instances of senseless trust.”

Lastly this joke from “I Can See Right Through You”, by Kelly Link:
“So there are these four guys. A kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, um, a zoophile, and a masochist. This cat walks by and the klepto says he’d like to steal it. The pyro says he wants to set it on fire. The zoophile wants to fuck it. So the masochist, he looks at everybody, and he says, ‘Meow?’” ( )