Dave Eggers has been doing something rather unusual in literary circles: he has been using the success of his books to help the careers of other would-be writers. Royalties for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius have gone towards the establishment of 826, Valencia, an academy in San Francisco that encourages and teaches creative writing for those between the ages of eight and 18. McSweeney’s, the literary magazine that Eggers founded and edits, combines high production values with new and sometimes experimental writing. Then, time presumably weighing heavily on his hands, he noticed that mainstream publishers tend to treat authors like “raving morons”, so he set up his own independent imprint. Clearly the man is a saint.

“The MO here is to let writers be, to fool around a little, to take a chance,” Eggers said in a recent interview when asked how editorial selection at McSweeney’s worked. The danger of encouraging writers to have fun, of course, is that the fun can be somewhat solitary, leaving the poor reader bemused, irritated and on the sidelines, so it is important to reassure those turning nervously to The Best of McSweeney’s that the prose here is not of the impenetrable, headache-inducing kind. What you get is a sort of fringe festival in print, with established names from the new generation of writers, notably Rick Moody, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, William T Vollman and Eggers himself, rubbing shoulders with relative unknowns, who have either been published minimally or not at all.

Indeed, some of the strongest contributions are not fiction at all but essays, journalistic explorations of varying sophistication. In Three Meditations on Death, Vollman takes a cool, quizzical wander through some catacombs and into an autopsy room, while Gary Greenburg recounts, in an unnervingly dispassionate confession, how he tried to jump-start his literary career by inveigling his way as a writer-for-hire into the life of the imprisoned Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

The new writers, mostly American, represented by McSweeney’s have concerns and interests that are rather different from what one would expect. Their perspective is outward-looking (into space, or to Tasmania, Hawaii or Africa) and slightly serious-minded. Technology seems to interest them little and their stance is apolitical. Strikingly, the emotional, interior worlds of desire and domesticity that have inspired the best and most powerful short stories of recent generations of American short story writers from John Updike to Lorrie Moore are hardly in evidence at all. Two stories — Paul LaFarge’s moving The Observers, and Zadie Smith’s The Girl with Bangs, a story of a brief lesbian affair and probably the most memorable contribution to the book — strike a welcome note of intimacy in an atmosphere that occasionally seems oddly cool and cerebral.

There are a few duff shots here — sophomoric stories hobbled by magic-realist whimsy that seem too slight for translation into book form, contributions that would have benefited from the firm hand of an old-fashioned editor. Eggers’s own story, a goosed-up, fictionalised reworking of his ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro, falls some way short of staggering genius.

But that’s the way it is on the fringe. Part of the fun lies in spotting talent as it is developing. There is, in The Best of McSweeney’s, an exciting sense of writers spreading their wings, of being given the opportunity to succeed or fail without their subsequent careers being destroyed. Some of them may never be heard of again, but others will soon have mainstream publishers reaching for their chequebooks.

THE BEST OF McSWEENEY’S: Volume One edited by Dave Eggers

H Hamilton £17.99 pp432

Available at the Books First price of £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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