By Jesse Cataldo

For all the 26 stories featured in The Better of McSweeney’s – a sampling from the San Francisco literary magazines first 10 issues – none encapsulate the general tone and feel better than the first.

“The Ceiling,” by Kevin Brockmeier, is pure McSweeney’s – clever if cloyingly pretentious at times, prone to flights of fancy and notably insular. The story recasts a Chicken Little-esque myth into a grimly realistic suburban fairy tale; rather than falling, the sky slowly descends and leaves Brockmeier’s characters crawling on their stomachs under cloud cover. Unfortunately, too many stories in this collection operate similarly; the narrative scopes tend to be tight, even stifling, leaving the reader and the author wedged together in a very small space.

The star of McSweeney’s, which began as a small press for short stories and humor in the late ’90s, has continued to rise along with its creator, the author Dave Eggers. Eggers had a hit with A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius and followed it with a novel (You Shall Know Our Velocity!) and a short story volume (How We Are Hungry). Trailing behind in his wake, McSweeney’s now features the work of some of today’s best-known authors, from Stephen King to Haruki Murakami and Neil Gaiman.

While stylistically similar to much of Eggers’ work, the content here fortunately doesn’t suffer from many of the same shortcomings. While immensely talented in his own right, Eggers tends to employ huge, overarching themes that don’t quite fit the parameters of his stories, leaving them overstuffed with unnecessary ideas and questions that they can’t answer. None of his stories are featured here however, and the writers presented are decidedly more obscure.

While Eggers is obsessed with setting and location, the stories here are much more concerned with self. Many never venture far outside the minds of their narrators, and this fixation on internal struggles can be problematic, giving the stories a claustrophobic feel. Even “The Republic of Marfa,” Sean Wilsey’s non-fiction description of a tiny Texas town, delves more into its internal consciousness than anything else, making it more of a psychological analysis than a description of setting.

Even with the often-stifling internal focus, most of the stories work. Notable exceptions are David Foster Wallace’s overly verbose stream-of-consciousness train wreck “On the Pourousness of Certain Borders” and “Mown Lawn,” Lydia Davis’ painfully self aware attempt at cutesy wordplay. Standouts include stories by K. Kvashay Boyle, Paul Le Farge and Zadie Smith.

Even more important to the book’s ultimate success are Paul Collins “Banvard’s Folly” and Glen David Gold’s “The Tears of Squonk.” The former, a short biography of Banvard, the forgotten 19th century artist and showman, crackles with the energy of the man that Collins so ably exhibits. The latter, an account of a tragedy at a circus in 1916, eventually unspools into a twisted tale of deception. Both stories are great, transcending not only the books narrow boundaries but the modern setting in general. In the cramped room that is The Better of McSweeney’s, these two stories provide a window upon a different world.