No Samplers Left Behind
Just a quick note to complete unfinished business: when I posted some comments on McSweeney’s 31 , I mentioned it came with a “summertime sampler.” I said I’d probably talk about this sampler later. So here’s later. The sampler is 16 tabloid-sized pages long, and it includes samples from three novels published by McSweeney’s: Bill Cotter’s Fever Chart , Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent , and James Hannaham’s God Says No . You can read shorter samples of the first two of those novels here and here . I guess a sampler is meant to entice you, so that you can’t wait to get your hands on the full-length novel. With that in mind, the only sample that made me want to read ahead was that of Cotter’s Fever Chart . It’s about a man who recently left the Boll, a psychiatric center. All sorts of foul things happen to him on the outside, from a house without a heater in winter to the same house, whose heater doesn’t switch off now and is thus out to spew mattresses in balls of fire. A...