- - - - 826 WRITING & TUTORING CENTERS - - - - Seeking McSweeney's interns! We're looking for intelligent people with an interest in journalism who can help us between very soon and November. Research and writing skills are a must, as is the ability to be in San Francisco. Also: we don't care if you're in college or not. Send an email to Chris Benz at benz@mcsweeneys.net for more info. - - - - Congratulations to Deb Olin Unferth for winning the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. The panel named her book Vacation the best debut novel published in 2008. - - - - 52 Weeks, Heads, and Quotes, the Believer's first ever, non-date-specific daily planner is now on sale, featuring Charles Burns's beautiful drawings, as well as quotes by Jack White, Tina Fey, and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal. To peruse sample pages please click here. - - - - San Francisco: On Tuesday, August 18th Dave Eggers will be signing his new book Zeitoun at Green Apple Books at 12 p.m. Click here for details and information about his other future appearances.The New Orleans Times-Picayune says Zeitoun is "a fiercely elegant and simply eloquent tale.... So fierce in its fury, so beautiful in its richly nuanced, compassionate telling of an American tragedy, and finally, so sweetly, stubbornly hopeful." To read more reviews, please click here. - - - - We've announced the winners of our Columnist Contest. Thanks again to all who entered. - - - -
- - - - Having spent most of his life medicated, electroshocked, and institutionalized, Jerome Coe finds himself homeless on the coldest night of the century − and so, with nowhere else to go, he accepts a ride out of New England from an old love's ex-girlfriend. It doesn't quite work out, but he makes it to New Orleans, and a new life − complete with a bandaged hand, world-champion grilled-cheese sandwiches, and only the occasional psychotic break. Things get better, and then, of course, they get worse. From a writer who's worked as a debt collector, book restorer, toilet scrubber, and door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman, and filled with a cast of Crescent City denizens that makes for one of the most vivid ensembles since Toole's Confederacy, Bill Cotter's debut novel Fever Chart is, we think, funnier and more exciting and just generally better written than any other book or movie or theatrical production you'll see this year. And if you happen to be in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, August 18th, join Bill Cotter for a party at BookPeople (603 N. Lamar Blvd.). There will be grilled cheese, readings, and merrymaking. It starts at 7 p.m. In the meantime, please enjoy this excerpt from the opening of the book, which you can buy a copy of today. - - - - In the kitchen of my new apartment, Mr Kline and I sat on two milk crates on either side of a paint-spattered sawhorse. I gave him a money order for $265. He handed me a house key and a mailbox key and a grody, dog-eared paperback entitled Shuffle, whose cover was adorned with a photo of a Zippo-brandishing monk sitting Indian-style next to a can of gasoline. "Son," said Mr Kline, "I've quartered a number of you boll dischargees before now and I have come to learn that they will occasionally, and with no alert, do themselves in, often without due regard for their surroundings." Mr Kline owned a half-dozen section-8-friendly apartments on Onion street in the middle of town, and was (according to Mina Purvis, the head social worker at the boll Compound For A Variety Of Disturbances) sympathetic to the plights of the melancholy, the obsessive-compulsive, the manic, the bulimic, the merely crazed. "And the other, too, Jerome," Mina had said during my boll outtake interview, winking at me while playing cat's cradle with the giant green rubber band that she used to hold my file together. "The other." Mr Kline stared at me. "I'm pretty sure I won't be committing suicide," I said. "Good, because it's just plain rude to commit a suicide, especially a messy one. but if you just have to do it, please be tidy," he said, stabbing a short, Band-Aided index finger at the jacket photo of the author, a certain Quentin Bohner. "I think the most neighborly way would be Pharmaceutical method #16, the one with the nerve pills in the mashy potatoes. That's how I'd go if I went nutso or got quadriplegized in a skidoo crash. Another good way's Bohner's Easily Obtainable Lethal Vapors #6. Just get schnonklered and tape a plastic bag over your head. See?" The injured finger indicated a cartoon diagram of an asexual individual on a couch, head swaddled in a trash bag. A tipped-over bottle on the floor read XXX. I'd always considered this method déclassé, but maybe it was experiencing a revival. "But maybe the best way is #22, same chapter. The old CO." "CO?" I said. "Carbon monoxide. Car and hose and duct tape. See, look here at the drawing. Just run the hose from the tailpipe up to the crack, there, in the window. Tape it down snug." He looked closely at the diagram. "Looks like a Pontiac," he said. "Who wants to go in a goddam Pontiac? Christ. Well, it doesn't matter. Got a car, son?" "No," I said, a little depressed now. "No car." "Well, good," said Mr Kline. "Cars are more trouble than they're worth anyway, and they always crash. Anyhow, whichever one you pick, just don't get any blood or matter on anything. And don't stick your head in the oven. One can't turn off an oven if one is dead." Mr Kline wrote out my lease agreement with an unsharp sharpie. "Sign there, and there, initial there." I signed, I initialed. "Good. Call if you have problems with the potty or the radiator." "I will." "And here." He handed me two stamped postcards: one addressed to him, the other to the County Coroner. "If you decide you do want to push up your own daisies, please write down the particulars and drop them in a mailbox. There's one up the street by the Dome Restaurant." - - - - My apartment needed occasional maintenance. I didn't like to bother Mr Kline, so I always waited as long as I could to call about the flushlessness of the toilet or the moody radiator or the scuttling noises beneath the floor. When I could stand the privations no longer, I'd call Mr Kline and leave a timid message on his machine, and an hour later some maintenance gorilla with oily knuckles would come by and pour insecticide between the floorboards or snake the toilet or whack the oil-filled radiator with a wrench. A couple of months after I moved in, during the deadest, shortest days of winter, Mr Kline died. His daughter Pat took over the management of the properties, a period I experienced as one of spotty maintenance and surprise inspections − conditions much like the hospital I'd recently left. The rent went up. The power often failed. All the drains would occasion- ally organize an apartment-wide clogging. The refrigerator micturated coolant in the night. A long crack shaped like the coast of Alaska appeared in a wall. A bizarre, purplish smut began to grow in a kitchen cabinet. The linoleum squares of the bathroom floor unstuck themselves and curled up like scrolls. I could handle all that. But the radiator... that worried me. As winter deepened, it radiated less and less and less. Soon, I was forced to install my toaster oven on the bedside table, and construct at the foot of the mattress a berm of hot-water bottles fashioned from empty cranberry-juice jugs. I called Pat often with my no-longer-timid complaints. They all went unanswered. Meanwhile, I went faithfully to work − three hours a day guiding a 2.0 horsepower Mister Wobbler brand buffing machine over one or another bit of flooring in a community college down the road. Afterward, I went to the loathsome day program that was one of the conditions of my discharge from the boll. It was conducted at a defunct social club in the middle of town, where the day-programmers chain-smoked and muttered harmlessly, or, for a change, took turns at the game table with Murray Pupino, an old guy in pink seersucker sansabelt overalls who enjoyed obliterating people at scrabble and boggle and Othello. He liked to remind one of one's lifetime record against him in various contests, whenever one happened by. "Othello: Murray 42, Jerome 0. Scrabble: Murray 66, Jerome 0," he might say, as you were wandering across the room to see if there was anything interesting in the trash. On a terrifically cold day a few weeks after Mr Kline's death, I nearly beat Murray at Othello, but he had a "seizure" and knocked the game board off the table. He "recovered" from his "seizure" − which also carried symptoms of "amnesia" − and promptly set up the Othello game again as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Then he lit a Carlton 100 and invited me to try my luck. "Othello: Murray 42, Jerome 0." I stomped around the day-program room for a while after that, wishing I hadn't quit smoking. If you didn't want to play games with Murray, there was absolutely nothing else to do, except smoke. You weren't allowed to sleep. There was never anything interesting in the trash. I sat down next to Terry Gold on the wicker loveseat across from the game table and glared at Murray. There were hours left until I could go home. At least it was cozy here. - - - - To read Bill Cotter's Dispatches From a Hangdog Bankrupt, please click here.- - - - OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES: - - - - Bill Cotter's Fever Chart Has ArrivedOur Columnist Contest: We Have Some Winners It's Weird to Think That One Day I'll Photoshop You Out of These Very Vacation Photos By Colin Nissan Excerpts From Induction Speeches Into The Taxidermy Hall of Fame By Jon Methven I Challenge You to the Ultimate Event in Manly Competition By Steven Markow |
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