The Clock Without a Face transcends any preconceived notion of what genre is. It’s a hefty, pentagonal hunk of text and image, but it’s also a puzzle/treasure hunt. The storyline is simple. The great detective Roy Dodge teams up with his assistant, Gus Twintig, to solve the mystery of 12 missing emerald-studded numbers from an ancient clock. But here’s where things get interesting: the numbers, designed and hand-crafted by Anna Sheffield, can really be found buried in twelve holes across the country (“an extra bonus for especially energetic or greedy readers”). We interviewed one of the book’s three co-authors, Eli Horowitz, who is also an editor at McSweeney’s, to find out how they came up with this crazy idea.




