Superworse — Ben Greenman

The original McSweeney's Superbad comprised more than two dozen pieces in various genres from serious fiction to post-modern satire to lyric. As Susan Minot put it, Greenman's mind may contain "a Russian short story writer, a slap-stick gag writer, an art critic, a literary critic, a cultural commentator, a cowboy, a satirist, a scientist...a surrealist, a nut, and genius...a child prodigy...and a poet." The new Soft Skull edition will reconceive Superbad with an eye toward its overall architecture, emphasizing that the individual pieces are intricately related to one another, as movements in a symphony or gears in a clockwork. Onge, the [fictitious] editor who introduced Superbad, will oversee the paperback, allowing a clear set of themes and characters to emerge from the welter of styles. The book is tightly constructed, with a mirror-image arrangement and many characters, not all human, threaded throughout. Rather than conceiving this project simply as a paperback edition, the release is more like a remix, in the fashion of popular music. Superbad was a humor collection in the finest McSweeney's tradition; Superworse is a novel in the spirit of Borges and Barthelme.