eMusic Loves McSweeney’s

On a McSweeney's audiobook, it's totally fine if a narrator takes a moment to grab a glass of water or pauses mid-reading to be sure that no children are in the vicinity before he lets loose a torrent of naughty words. These idiosyncrasies lend personality, like the sighs and throat-clears that pepper this excellent collection created specifically for eMusic. Creativity and intimacy rightly outweigh professional polish, the traditional rules of mainstream publishing... disregarded with a distinctively McSweeney's attitude. Appropriately enough for an audacious first-time audio foray, danger pervades this collection - gruesome, bloody deaths narrated via adventure, sci-fi and noir tales. McSweeney's is known for championing emerging literary voices, so it's thrilling to actually hear what these voices sound like. For nearly a decade, the publisher has embraced a scrappy, renegade spirit that has translated into the creation of a highly influential indie publishing empire encompassing an incredible literary journal, books, magazines and DVDs. McSweeney's has come to represent a very specific outsider literary voice - one that's witty, knowingly ironic and, yes, hip. Most important for you, however, is that the five stories that comprise Notes From the Field are excellent, varied and, above all, entertaining. In "The Death of Mustango Salvaje," Jessica Anthony deftly takes on the persona of a female bullfighting sensation. The beleaguered matadora must decide which are more hazardous to her health: angry 800-kilo bulls, or the exploitative people around her. Claire Light's "Pigs in Space" is your typical girl-meets-evil-swine story, set on a spaceship in an alternate universe. Light's narration imbues her piece with an undeniably creepy tone, whereas Jack Pendarvis's mellow drawl belies the hijinks to come in his story, "The Big Dud." Dud is an Alabaman widow whose misguided intellectual aspirations are on par with Ignatius Reilly's, the bumbling hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. Dud's self-described fatal flaw is that he has too many brilliant ideas; his decision to accompany an aspiring P.I. on a stakeout is definitely not one of them. Interspersed throughout the collection are segments of Keith Pille's hilarious journal of an eager young COBRA recruit who is in training to fight GI Joes. His numbing daily routines in service of Destro are absurd, and also bizarrely touching: while he prepares for battle, an internal war rages between endless enthusiasm and disheartening ennui. He also shouts "COBRAAAAAA!" a lot. But the collection's high point comes when Jonathan Ames narrates "Bored to Death," his modern day, New York-spanning detective noir. In a performance as commanding as his prose, Ames explains how Craigslist turns out to be the perfect venue for a self-loathing, Raymond Chandler-obsessed recovering addict to offer his amateur investigative services. The tropes familiar to all Hammett fans are well played, and Ames' voice - guttural, beleaguered and resigned - brings an alarming authenticity worthy of 1,000 Bogarts. And you can't get much more dangerous than that.

Pucker up, all you hopeless romantics. Prepare to share a big wet kiss with the folks from McSweeney's. For this second installment of Field Recordings, created exclusively for eMusic, the venerated indie book and magazine publisher has combed its archives to create a seductive story collection subtitled Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams. So think of this audiobook as a literary mixtape, one that strikes the perfect balance of tender, brainy and... lusty tracks, a combination designed to make both the mind and the pulse race. McSweeney's creates an intimate mood by delving outside the impersonal confines of a studio: the five storytellers record their pieces in locations of their own choosing, an effect that allows them to inject their own personalities into their readings. Sheila Heti takes narrative freedom to new heights, bringing a fresh perspective to two of her jarring fairytales. From her New York City apartment, Heti first makes a gleefully NC-17 proposal to read while engaging in other more, um, athletic activities with her boyfriend. Her plan, however, quickly devolves into something totally different, making for the first time in audiobook history that a narrator interrupts her reading in order to bicker with her significant other. What better way to frame a pair of stories that challenge the concept of happily-ever-after than by catching a slice of the author's own romantic travails on tape? Pia Erhardt also uses setting to great effect, recounting her heartwrenching story from the Katrina-wracked shores of Lake Pontchartrain. The sound of the lake lapping beneath Erhardt's confessional narration could almost be an ambient nature effect on a meditation record. But the water carries a threatening undercurrent; the story, titled "How It Floods," details the efforts of a woman to prepare for an approaching hurricane even as she tries to navigate her own tumultuous love life.nn The collection's most romantic piece is Tony D'Souza's "The Man Who Married a Tree." The story is just as the title implies: a pseudo-oral history documenting the intense connection between a plant and the man who loved her. D'Souza's astounding performance finds him assuming the roles townspeople, animals, inanimate objects, even God. Try not to sob when the title character's sister reveals, "I loved an elm. Loved him my whole life." To narrate "After the Disaster," Ben Ehrenreich sits in the relative calm (with the exception of a passing helicopter) of Elysian Park in Los Angeles. His peaceful location provides a sharp contrast to his post-apocalyptic tale of two lost souls and the giant squid they rescue from the Museum of Natural History. After carrying the mollusk through the ruined streets of Manhattan, Bruno and Mildred's fates and bodies soon become as entwined in each other as they are in the squid's tentacles.nn Be sure to stick around for comic relief from Chris Bachelder, who reads his epistolary story perched near a mailbox. "My Son, There Exists Another World Alongside Our Own" is a hilarious missive from a father who attempts to teach his sexually curious son a valuable lesson beyond birds and bees: "there exists a parallel universe precisely identical to ours, but for the fact that its inhabitants engage in frequent, vigorous and thrillingly filthy congress." His advice? Go forth into this other world where people are actually engaging in sexual activity rather than just imagining it: "Enter it. Penetrate it... Seek asylum, citizenship on the other side." The second volume of Field Recordings echoes that advice, encouraging immersion and citizenship in the amorous, and offering a hint of what might happen when that occurs.

Cigarettes are cool. Bullies are petrifying. Adults just don't get it. The third installment of McSweeney's Field Recordings features young protagonists who subscribe to these perennial pubescent tropes. But for some kids, there comes a time when your worldview expands beyond pop quizzes and school dances and football games. A particular incident or decision or maybe even a simple conversation can somehow determine what kind of person you'll grow to become. Narrated... from various outdoor locations by authors who deftly channel their inner adolescents, these six stories - all of which originally appeared in McSweeney's literary magazine - capture these life-defining moments with an intensity and candor that would make Judy Blume blush. The collection kicks off with K. Kvashay Boyle's sweet portrayal of a self-proclaimed "brainy dweeb" who desperately wants to fit in. In "St. Chola," the bubbly but insecure teenager must reconcile how to wear American staples like scrunchies and Bongo jeans along with a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Stephen Elliott's story follows with a jolt of ferocity and fury: "Forefathers" takes place in a claustrophobic juvenile hall visiting room, as a former inmate returns to talk some sense into a cocky 13-year-old who's on a similarly destructive path. The most squirm-inducing story of the bunch is "The Neutered Bulldog," Rachel Sherman's creepily intimate depiction of a charismatic teacher whose relationship with her two prize pupils crosses all kinds of boundaries and wreaks havoc on their young lives. Peter Orner also takes on the loss of innocence in "Pampkin's Lament," in which a boy overhears his father consoling a baffled politician who has just found out that his wife is in love with another man. The story is funny and devastating at the same time, just like adolescence itself. It's the perfect conclusion for this gut-wrenching collection that captures both the magic and brutality of coming of age.

A body of water that looks like "a case of pink eye inflamed to geological scale." Smart phones that dictate your entire destiny based on probability. Packs of abandoned pit bulls that wander through vast, lawless cannabis farms. The fourth installment of McSweeney's Field Recordings is filled with these kinds of nightmarish images, the kinds that are revolting and compelling all at once. The twist, in this collection of recent writings from... McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, is that some of these horrific scenarios come from provocatively imagined fictional pieces, while others are culled from true stories. From hard-hitting investigative journalism to contemporary literature at its sharpest, the latest gem from McSweeney's spans genres to straddle the line between fact and fiction. What will our world be like in 2024? That's the question McSweeney's posed to writers for its 32nd issue, resulting in a swath of speculative fiction that brushes up along the swampy shores of dystopia. In "Raw Water", short story master Wells Tower captures the depravity of life in the desert alongside America's first inland ocean, where the oysters are as freakishly large as the characters' appetites. Sheila Heti imagines the near future as a place where technology trumps free will in her wistful story "There Is No Time in Waterloo." The 2024 Salvatore Plascencia imagines in his exceedingly witty "The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic" is nothing if not recognizable - it involves the great American bureaucracy, where misunderstandings and misinformation reign. Complementing these short stories are two foreboding reports from the Panorama, a one-off daily newspaper centered around McSweeney's home city of San Francisco. The landscapes that Jesse Nathan and Lisa Hamilton describe in their NPR news-style reports sound like they should be science fiction: poverty-stricken fallow towns, dusty and brown and dull due to lack of water, the stench of rot and abandon. Nathan exposes how massive marijuana farms are destroying the environment, and how government regulation resources are as tapped out as their natural resources. Hamilton talks to citizens of California's Central Valley, where inequality in water rights means that one side of the valley is lush and green, while the other side that irrigation doesn't reach slowly circles the drain. These pieces serve as an incisive warning - we must act now to preserve the land, so that further environmental devastation can remain safely in the realm of fiction.