Co-workers of mine have loved the book as well (and I work for a small series of bookstores). I have a copy but haven't got to it.

Instead, I'm currently reading and loving "One Big Damn Puzzler" by John Harding.

Tell me why I should read it. I'm reading fewer and fewer novels these days, because they don't really satisfy me. I only have another 40-60 years left on this planet, and there's a finite number of books that I can read in that time. So "that's all" isn't enough to convince me. (Also, I have a bit of a knee-jerk antipathy towards the whole McSweeney's endeavor because so many of their writers just seem so smugly showoffy and proud of themselves. I'm willing to have counterexamples demonstrated to me, though.)

Is this the part where I tell kids to get off my lawn, now?

We were at Iowa at the same time, but I didn't know him that well.

matildaben: I'm deliberately avoiding discussing the book's content, since so much of the marketing of it is devoted to not doing so (the "book jacket" with the blurb says nearly nothing about the plot and is intended to be removed, e.g.). But more often than not I am disappointed by most new fiction--I finish most books by younger novelists out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. I've been reading this book whenever I can, though. The page I linked to has a link to reviews, if you want to spoil yourself.

If by "McSweeney's" you mean short works of literature in which the sentences are all mildly interesting in and of themselves, but don't add up to much when they're strung together, this book isn't like that. It's big and ambitious and shameless about it.