Their master’s voice: the rise and rise of brand McSweeney’s
Is Dave Eggers now the most influential man in literary circles?

What to read in 2008? Everybody’s looking for a trusted authority to help them decide, but advice can be self-serving and contradictory. For almost four decades, one tried-and-true method for choosing new writing has been to look to Granta magazine, an unrivalled bellwether for leading hungry readers to emerging authors. In 1996, for instance, it famously devoted an entire issue to naming the 20 best American novelists under 40. Although a few on the list have not exactly set the world alight, the magazine proved to be remarkably prophetic in shouting out authors who were to step to the fore-front of their generation: talents such as Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and Sherman Alexie.

Recently, however, Granta’s primacy as talent-spotter of new American fiction has been challenged by a newcomer, McSweeney’s, which, in less than a decade, has gone from an idiosyncratic literary magazine to a new-look publishing empire. It was founded in 1998 by a then little-known San Francisco writer named Dave Eggers, who decided to call his magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, after a mysterious stranger who claimed to be his mother’s long-lost brother. Despite its whimsical name and modest beginnings – Eggers distributed the first issue by hand – the publication has come to eclipse Granta as the American literary scene’s most astute soothsayer. Although the first issue featured only work that had been rejected by others, it soon started to attract contributions by writers such as David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody.

But it was the publication in 2000 of Eggers’s debut book, the international bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that transformed McSweeney’s into something more than just another interesting literary journal. Suddenly, the magazine, whose masthead claims that it is “created by nervous people in relative obscurity and published four times a year”, started to gain an influence so widespread that by the time Granta published Best of Young American Novelists 2 in the spring of 2007, it had taken a back seat to McSweeney’s as the arbiter of what was novel in the American novel. Among Granta’s latest 20 writers, only Jonathan Safran Foer, a mainstay of McSweeney’s, is already certain to be remembered a decade from now.

So, what is it that makes Eggers’s empire so influential? The most obvious driving force behind its dramatic rise is the charismatic and indefatigable founder himself, who is not only a beloved author and literary style guru, but has also proved to be a crafty entrepreneur, busily creating a very modern publishing empire. His book-publishing wing features works by Nick Hornby, Lemony Snicket and Robert Coover, a key figure in the American experimental-fiction movement. There is also McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a frequently visited website that offers a wide range of satirical content – some of its better entries include Some Relatively Recent College Grads Discuss Their Maids and the wonderfully satirical Jenna Bush’s Book-Tour Diary of Hope.

In 2003, McSweeney’s launched The Believer magazine, a monthly that includes a variety of cultural essays, interviews and profiles, though its main distinction is its long book reviews, which share a decidedly positive tenor. “We will focus on writers and books we like,” the magazine’s mission statement claims. “We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.”

Its editor, the talented novelist Heidi Julavits, wrote that the magazine was launched to combat “wit for wit’s sake – or, hostility for hostility’s sake”, and saw as its particular target the “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt” that she famously dubbed “snark”. More recently, McSweeney’s launched Wholphin, a quarterly DVD magazine “lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learnt that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it”. (Which, evidently, they actually do.)

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