Daniel Levin Becker is the columnist of Abounding Subtle Channels and What’s Good, and the translator of books including Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure and Eduardo Berti’s An Ideal Presence. He is chief editor at McSweeney’s.
In this post, Daniel discusses his hopes for approaching letter autograph like those featured in the anthology, Dear McSweeney’s, his acquaintance combing through two decades of letters, and more!
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Name: Daniel Levin BeckerBook title: Dear McSweeney’s: Two Decades of Belletrist to the Editor from Writers, Readers, and the Occasional Bewildered ConsumerPublisher: McSweeney’sRelease date: September 21, 2021Genre/category: Literature, anthologiesPrevious titles: As author: Abounding Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard UP, 2012); What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (City Lights, 2022). As translator: La Boutique Obscure by Georges Perec (Melville House, 2013); Minute-Operas by Frédéric Forte (Burning Deck, 2015; with Ian Monk, Michelle Noteboom, and Jean-Jacques Poucel); All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo, 1963–2018 (McSweeney’s, 2018; as co-editor and co-translator with Ian Monk); An Ideal Presence by Eduardo Berti (Fern Books, 2021) The Revival of Democracy in America and the Bigger Angels of Your Nature by Renaud Lassus (Odile Jacob, 2021); and Light Revealed: From Galileo’s telescope to breakthrough aberancy by Serge Haroche (Odile Jacob, 2021). As editor: All That Is Evident Is Suspect (see above); Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianism vols 1 & 2 (McSweeney’s, 2018).
Elevator angle for the book: Back 1998, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern has been accepting belletrist to the editor: dispatches, pleas, confessions, treatises, ruminations, rants, raves, and at atomic one misdirected chump account query. Gathered actuality are one hundred installments from this sprawling one-to-many correspondence, including but not bound to musings on moths and mummies, macaroons and cats, armadillos and bloodthirsty sea worms, and the arcana of Jerry Lewis’s acting career—all from some of the brightest abreast choir in… well, American letters.
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Amanda Uhle, controlling administrator of McSweeney’s, asked me to do so, and I accustomed afterwards hesitation. I knew I would be abutting a baby but boss birth of added McSweeney’s anthologies—including but not bound to best-of volumes for the Quarterly and the Internet Tendency and collections of abbreviate stories, amusement writing, and the like, and the vote of aplomb was absolutely welcome.
The accomplished action took about 15 months. Abundant of that consisted of account all the belletrist printed in accomplished issues and the somewhat unrulier addendum of online letters, afresh selecting, triaging, and sequencing the ones I capital to include. (In some cases, belletrist additionally bare to be transcribed, back the blueprint files for the issues in catechism are now so old that none of us had a computer that could apprehend them.) The abutting appearance complex tracking bottomward contributors and accepting their permission to album their letters, and afresh came design, proofreading, and the added assembly processes that took the accomplished affair from a sprawling Word certificate to the handsome aggregate you see—or will anon see—before you.
The abstraction itself was open-ended, and the antecedent claiming was chief how to adapt it: thematically, chronologically, geographically, etc. But afterwards diving into the archive, I had a anticipation that it would be bigger not to draw too abundant absorption to acclimation principles, instead sequencing the belletrist in a affectionate of affable narrative—even if it’s a anecdotal clear alone to me—and that’s absolutely what I assuredly did.
Not to allege of, admitting it was a little adventure to ability out to some contributors whose assignment I’ve continued admired. For instance, we’ve aloof started alive with Brendan Emmett Quigley on a crossword addle that we’ll use to advance the book, and the anticipation of accepting to be a crossword editor for a few canicule has abounding me with abundant glee.
While accumulation these belletrist I kept assured to apprentice article about McSweeney’s or the Quarterly or its readership, but ultimately I feel like I abstruse added about how bodies catechumen their own lived acquaintance or abandoned ruminations into a allotment of autograph they appetite to allotment with a potentially ample but absolutely cabalistic audience—that’s the abstraction of readers acceptable writers that I acknowledgment in my editor’s note.
Otherwise, no—no absolute surprises, aloof allure to see how abounding altered approaches there are to said conversion.
I adulation books, anthologies or otherwise, that bulldoze us to appoint added anxiously with forms that don’t get spotlighted much—that aren’t the capital arcane attraction, so to speak—and the letter to the editor occupies a aberrant abode in the printed amount landscape, a abundant lonelier one in the internet age.
So I’d adulation for this to get bodies aflame about that affectionate of letter-writing again. If it causes an uptick in awe-inspiring epistolary novels, I’ll accede that a bonus.
Write a letter to McSweeney’s Quarterly! Or to any editor, really! It’s array of like dancing like nobody’s watching, except you get to break seated.
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