Really two volumes bound together in a cleverly elaborate trifold binding so that there are two covers. On one side is a book called "Trouble," containing the usual collection of short stories. The only one I can remember is Jonathan Ames's shaggy detective story, "Bored To Death," which he later developed into a very amusing series for HBO. A bonus booklet teases the forthcoming book, "Bowl of Cherries," a first novel by 90-year-old Millard Kaufman.

Flip it over and you get "Come Back, Donald Barthelme," a collection of remembrances of the late writer by his students and friends. It concludes with two previously uncollected stories by Donald Barthelme. ( )

An except from Millard Kaufman's Bowl of Cherries, a tribute section to Donald Barthelme and a couple of his short stories, and six forgettable short stories. Cool dos-a-dos binding, though. ( )

Most ingenious binding, ever.

Like a siamese twin, McSweeny's 24 is a volume with two spines and one back. It is a publication of short stories. The first half contains six tales of troublesome events-- crime, drugs, murder, etc:

"How to Make Millions in the Oil Market" - about an American soldier in Iraq
"Stockholm, 1973" - about a ludicrous bank robbery attempt in Sweden
"Bored to Death" - a Raymond Chandler fan pretends to be a private investigator and gets himself into a mess
"Look at Me" - bloody shooting of patrons in a restaurant for what reason I could not ascertain
"Death of Nick Carter" - a very strange, surreal portrait of an insane asylum with a violent end
"The Last Adventures of the Blue Phantom" - a man breaks into a home, tells a small boy he is a superhero, and takes him along on a criminal escapade...

Strangely enough, I liked the first of these best. And I'm not one to enjoy war stories, especially battle scenes. But the descriptive language was so precisely vivid and new that I enjoyed it for the words alone. The other two I found intriguing were "Bored to Death" and "The Last Adventures..."

If you turn the blue volume around, you find a compilation of writers' reminisces on the author Donald Barthelme, and two of his short stories. I never heard of Barthelme before. I was dubious at first; some of the essays on Barthelme were quite convincing of his brilliance and excellent writing. But, at the end I was just puzzled. "The Bed" left me unmoved, and I could not make head or tails of "Pages from the Annual Report". It felt like reading a conversation in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, or pages of Kafka.

Original review on Dog Ear Diary ( )

Issue 24 was my first foray into the realm of McSweeney's, and though it contained several works of merit, I found it not quite as awesome as I had hoped - you know what they say about high expectations! I'm sure it won't disappoint in the future, though! ( )