One of my least favorite McSweeney's, this one is physically pretty cool: a mock-leather hardcover contains three separate paperbooks, each magically held in place by magnets in the bindings.
The first volume is "From the Notebook: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald." It contains modern writers impersonating Fitzgerald to create short stories based on a list of Fitzgerald's own story ideas. In general, I'm not a fan of this "in the style of..." type of writing but I can see why authors dig it.
The second volume is "The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo." It contains work by members of the Oulipo, a group dedicated to develop new literary structures based on principles of science and mathematics. The group self-imposes constraints on their writing, such as using only words found in Tom Waits songs, and sees what happens. Enough said about that.
It's all rounded out by "The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford," a collection of 100 poems. McSweeney summer intern Dominic Luxford chose a poem from ten working poets, then asked that poet to choose one of their own poems to include and then choose a poem from another working poet who then provided another of their own poems and chose another poet. Each chain is five poets long. So, ten chains of five poets each contributing two poems. That's a lot of poetry! Nothing against any of the poets and I actually enjoyed some of the poems. I'm just not the biggest poetry fan. ( )

Short stories prompted by F. Scott Fitzgerald ideas, a volume of recent Oulipo work, and a third volume of poetry chains. A few interesting bits here and there, but nothing that managed to hold my attention all that well. ( )

A decent compendium of work from present-day OuLiPo-ians, but nothing phenomenal. Some works I'd swear I'd seen before, and some were just 'nothing much' in terms of the constraint (such as the 'choose your own adventure' story). Perhaps because the entire works weren't always present? I'm not sure. I'd recommend the OuLiPo Compendium or OuLiPo Primer over this.

haven't read