It’s an exquisite Indian-summer day in the woods near the Russian River, 90 minutes north of San Francisco, and Eli Horowitz wants to show me his grow room. It’s not a real grow room, inasmuch as there’s no marijuana inside — even though the leftover wiring from the previous owners strongly indicates that there once was. But he’s transformed this room, in the basement of one of three ramshackle cabins he’s nursed back from disrepair and regularly rents to guests, into a sort of magic door: Lift the right book on the shelf he’s perched in its middle, and it swings open. It’s just one of dozens of make-shift wonders in his cabins, which look like they’ve been wrested from the depths of a bizarro, dollar-store version of Etsy.
Rob Williamson for BuzzFeed News
“I got that from an antique shop in Sebastopol,” he says, gesturing to a 2-foot-long panorama capturing the 50-plus members of Native Daughters of the Golden West, taken sometime in the early 1900s. Every object has a simple story: “That doesn’t work,” for a hand-cranked phonograph. “My friend found these on the street in San Francisco, and knew I’d want them,” as he takes out a set of loose Rolodex cards with the names and phone numbers of prominent movie stars from the 1980s — Winona Ryder, Marlon Brando, Eddie Murphy. There are at least three typewriters. There are old report cards and inscrutable knickknacks and several items that Horowitz, age 38, scavenged from the free pile right next to the dump. On a 2-inch-by-2-inch square on the floor where a beam once stood, he’s lettered "WELL HELLO THERE."
Rob Williamson for BuzzFeed News
This might all sound very precious, or very insufferable. But Horowitz is used to people feeling that way: It’s the same sort of criticism that’s long been levied at McSweeney’s, the indie publishing organization that Horowitz ran for the better part of a decade. The cabins expand upon the aggressively twee style that made McSweeney’s publications into bookshelf fixtures in Brooklyn studios and dorm rooms across the land, but the work Horowitz does in those cabins is anything but stale. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true: He’s radically rethinking the boundaries of narrative and our expectations for the technology that surrounds us.
At the moment, Horowitz is commissioned to figure out a new form of audio tour for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and putting together the narrative puzzle pieces as a contributing editor of Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show podcast. He’s editing a narrative project called bcc that plays out in the form of a series of back-and-forth emails between two characters — on which the reader is bcc’ed. But most urgently, there’s The Pickle Index, his collaboration with developer Russell Quinn, which aims to effectively reconceptualize the book — in its digital and printed forms alike.
Horowitz helped change the book world once. Can he do it again?
Horowitz’s name is on five books; as an editor, he's worked closely with dozens of authors, including those of Dave Eggers, indie filmmaker and artist Miranda July, essayist Wells Tower, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Denis Johnson. Every book he’s written has been optioned for film or television: The New World, published in May, was optioned by Olivia Wilde; TheSilent History, a digital app turned paperback from 2012, is slated to become AMC’s new prestige drama. “Everyone who knows him thinks of him as their secret weapon,” July told me.
But to understand how Horowitz arrived at this position of would-be digital visionary, you need to understand a few things about McSweeney’s, and the attitudes at its core. Much of it can be traced, at least originally, to the ethos of Dave Eggers — who, in the early ‘90s, moved to San Francisco and launched satirical magazine Might and slightly less satirical lit magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Literary Tendency. In 2000, Eggers, then 30, published his unconventional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a best-seller and a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
With Heartbreaking Work, what had been a largely San Francisco-based lite