All this, and Lemony Snicket too

THERE is much to admire in McSweeney’s new anthology for young adults, but unfortunately, it’s not always the stories themselves.

The 11 tales in “Noisy Outlaws,” including one graphic story aimed squarely at the Pokemon crowd, are stretched over a little more than 200 pages, with many illustrations. Contributors include such literary and cult authors as Nick Hornby, Neil Gaiman, George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer, plus an unfinished story by Lemony Snicket that readers can complete and enter in a writing contest. With its celebrity roster and innovative approach, the hipster quotient is high in this book, as are reader expectations.

But despite several standout stories, “Noisy Outlaws” has a slapdash, let’s-put-on-a-show quality and would have benefited from more contributors and deeper stories. If a short story is supposed to be a compressed, multifaceted jewel, then some of these need more facets and better polish. With all those names, we’re expecting a complex winter stew. Instead, we get an artfully seasoned egg-white omelet. Tasty, but we’re still hungry.

If anything, this volume illustrates how difficult it is to create good young adult literature. These days, every writer seems to think it’s easy just to dash off a kid’s book (as do all those odious celebrities). “Noisy Outlaws” proves that isn’t true. As Adam Gopnik is learning with his young adult debut, “The King in the Window,” not everyone can segue as deftly as crime writer Carl Hiaasen from adult novels to such prizewinning -- and beloved -- kids’ books as “Flush” and “Hoot.”

While reading this collection, I wondered whom the audience is supposed to be. Some stories are clearly written for kids. Others read like witty tales designed to impress adults, such as “Lars Farf, Excessively Fearful Father and Husband,” an absurdist tale by Saunders that one imagines might have been narrowly rejected by the New Yorker.

It’s telling that two of the best entries are reprints of children’s stories by lesser-known authors. “Grimble” by Clement Freud, first published in 1968, is a perversely enchanting tale of a boy whose parents go to Peru, leaving him to fend for himself for a week, which he does ably with the help of some odd emergency contacts. Richard Kennedy’s “The Contests at Cowlick,” a sly Western yarn about a kid who outsmarts a criminal gang to save his town, originally came out in 1975 from Little, Brown and would work perfectly today as a picture book.

Indeed, editor Ted Thompson says he originally envisioned this as an anthology of beloved children’s stories that had fallen out of print. It evolved into “Noisy Outlaws” after he contacted authors to solicit favorites and they gave him recommendations, then offered to write their own. Maybe Thompson could revisit his initial idea. If he includes a personal introduction for each story from well-known contemporary writers, that might yield interesting insights as well as resurrect neglected classics.

Then, we might avoid clever misfires like that of Jon Scieszka, whose “Time Warp” series is widely read by the preteen set. His McSweeney’s contribution, “Each Sold Separately,” consists of aphorisms, advertising slogans and other pop culture detritus slung together into 51 lines and reads as if he were phoning it in from a nasty, tedious vacation far beyond Pluto. To wit:

The girl collapses back in her chair.

-- How do you spell relief?

-- You buy one, get one free, says the boy.

Several authors have contributed fables, such as Foer, whose haunting fragment about New York called “The Sixth Borough” appeared in slightly different form in his latest novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

But overall, the work from famous names is a mixed bag. Gaiman (of “The Sandman” graphic novel fame) provides an exquisite take on the mythical phoenix -- this time rising from the ashes of gastronomical greed -- in his baroque “Sunbird.” But Hornby’s soccer tale “Small Country” left me unmoved.

Maybe the lesser-known just try harder. “Monster” by Kelly Link is a surreal romp through the cruelties of summer camp, where the scary story is transformed into a tale of a mud-smeared boy in a dress who is befriended by a monster with “a voice like a dead tree full of bees: sweet and dripping and buzzing.”

There is welcome humanity in Jeanne DuPrau’s “The ACES Phone,” which recounts the story of a boy who finds a magic cellphone that helps locate dogs in trouble. DuPrau hit it big in 2003 with the young adult title “City of Ember,” a stunning fantasy debut about a young girl who leads an exodus out of her fascistic city.

Where this collection really shines is in its clever packaging and interactive extras, including a map, an “excessively difficult crossword puzzle” and the half-written Snicket story inside the dust jacket, which folds into a mailable envelope pre-printed with the contest address.

Snicket, a.k.a. Daniel Handler, the famously cantankerous creator of the Baudelaire orphans and their “Series of Unfortunate Events,” also contributed the book’s tart introduction, which is interspersed with drawings from “Series” illustrator Brett Helquist.

Equally clever, or perhaps just unwieldy (and guaranteed to give migraines to book catalogers everywhere), is the formal title of this collection: “Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones ... “ (I’d quote the full title, which is longer than Scieszka’s story, but it would use up too much space.)

The wink-wink tone continues in the book’s dedication to “General Wilson, a lonely oak tree who donated his bark, branches, and heartwood to form the pulp that made this paper so you could have a few hours of reading pleasure.”

There is visual pleasure to be had in the full-color artwork scattered throughout the book; Thompson got a different artist to illustrate each story, showcasing such extraordinary talents as Peter de Seve and Marcel Dzama.

All the artists and writers donated their work, and proceeds from the book go to 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center that helps students develop writing skills and now has branches in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Ann Arbor, Mich. It is a laudable intent that one hopes will inspire our next generation of noisy literary outlaws. *