McSweeney's 29

I'm clearly on a bit of a McSweeney's kick but I've inexcusably let quite a few build up while reading other things. I'm working on rectifying that mistake.

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse but this was another amazing issue. No real theme to this one except it included pictures on every page of art that was on old match boxes. They're from Eastern Europe and are interesting, I especially enjoyed a bunch of the Russian space ones. As a reminder to myself I need to figure out why one particular dog was so important to the Russian space program as there were quite a few that included the little lady/fella.

My absolute favorite story was by Blaze Ginsberg, an autistic teenager who writes stories about his life as an episode on a TV show that he's the star of. The story included here was called My Crush On Hilary Duff and had me close to tears it was so funny. Based on the notes his book should have been out in 2009 so I need to pick it up.

My second favorite was The Painting by Roddy Doyle who is a regular contributor to McSweeney's. In this story an immigrant painter from Poland is struggling to make ends meets in Dublin and takes a job to paint a portrait of a local woman who he finds beautiful. The woman is extremely odd and as the story progresses nicely in only 50 pages or so.

There were quite a few other stores that I liked a lot. Dawn Ryan writes another stand out story about a couple of high school girls who have a lesbian relationship. One of the girls comes from a poor home life and the other is a black girl adopted young by a well off white couple. A Record of Our Debts by Laura Hendrix was an extremely powerful story about a town whose population is going insane. Augury by J. Erin Sweeney is about importing these cute advise giving monkey like animals to a small town. The book ends on a really interesting story by Joyce Carrol Oates called Labyrinth where the words circle around two open pages requiring the reader to rotate the book at the end of the line starting in the upper left corner and ending in the center of the pages. I enjoyed both the story and the form in which it was written.

The other stories deserve to be mentioned too as they're also good but I guess it's just a matter of taste that I prefer these.