McSweeney’s 68 starts strong and peaks early, ending up being a decent but not a standout issue. The letters to the editor from authors and friends of McSweeney’s are always a pleasure. I really enjoyed those from Sreshtha Sen (on cooking a proper aloo gobi and coming out to Bend it Like Beckham), Dave Schilling (on the absurdity of a Kanye West/Yeezy Gap Round Jacket), and William Brewer (on book etiquette and not wanting to loan or be lent books).

Of the short stories, the first was certainly one of the strongest, and that was On Soccer Sadness, by Alejandro Zambra. It related coming of age in Chile as a soccer fan, and was as wonderful as it was timely, given the recent World Cup. Another excellent work was Inheritance, by Laura Van Den Berg, about a woman who improbably inherits a house in Mexico from her stepfather, but upon moving there, finds the people from his past – and reality itself – rather mysterious and unsettling. I loved how this one ended.

A solid work and enjoyable read was Found, Paper, Soot, by Andrew Martin. It dealt with the death of a friend, and reminiscing the past with another, while acknowledging personal and professional shortcomings. How the work of self-taught artist James Castle was integrated was a nice touch. Another decent story was Long Black Socks, by Stephanie Ullmann, about a boy going to Beijing for his father’s funeral, and remembering the days when his parents divorced and he remained in America.

There are other works from Hallie Gayle, Lisa Ko, Catherine Lacey, Santiago Roncagliolo, Andrea Bajani, and James Yeh, but I found them just OK, not terribly good or bad. The Tour, by Carmen Maria Machado, on flitting between alternate universes to encounter slightly different versions of themselves, was the worst of the bunch. Too derivative of other science fiction and too easy for the author to come up with the variations, the story lacked depth, though I did like the queer representation and the line “An orgasm feels less like a thing my body can do and more like an ancient prophecy that has wound its way through ten generations of elders.”

All in all, worth reading, and it’s nice that the issue is simply a single hardbound book, avoiding the creativity that started getting too gimmicky (I’m looking at you, issue 53, with your supplemental stories on balloons that needed to be inflated). ( )