McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Volume 15

This, of all the McSweeney’s editions I’ve read, is the least memorable. Despite that, I was actually a little surprised at the quality of the Icelandic stories that were included, and essentially comprised the second half of the issue. I didn’t think Icelandic would translate all that well into English, and that I’d have to spend a couple hundred pages slogging through stories about whale blubber and the forty-seven different Icelandic words for snow. (I just love showing my ignorance with statements like that.) These stories were far from the Eskimo (sorry, Inuit) tales that I thought I might encounter, and in fact could have taken place in just about any medium sized city in the entire world. And, yes, I know the difference between Iceland and Greenland, thank you. Most of these tales center around Reykjavik, and are thoroughly modern in scope. There are exceptions, of course, but even those tales could have easily taken place in the old west. Despite not being overjoyed with the compilation as a whole, the overall quality was solid. There weren’t any experimental stinkers in there that made me want to toss the book out the window. There were no highs and now lows, just a bunch of solid stories that as a whole neither thrilled nor disappointed.