McSweeney’s Issue 79 (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern)

Coming to you at the intersection of book and tapestry, the seventy-ninth issue of our National Magazine Award-winning quarterly is embroidered from head to toe--using precisely 133,095 stitches of thread--with the art of Marta Monteiro. Inside this tactile, textile, tangerine-backdropped, cloth-bound art object are nine new stories, three fresh novel excerpts, six timely letters, an essay as sharp as a blade, a stunningly surreal slice of a graphic novel by Patrick Keck, and a shockingly beautiful, hot-pink suite of Mary Magdalenes painted by Leanne Shapton.

As your fingers caress the raised topography of this issue’s beyond-belief weave, marvel at a story by Joseph Earl Thomas in which time stops mid-dunk; a novel excerpt by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff in which invented languages make a play; a story by Ahmed Naji that circles Cairo rap clashes; a captivating, climate-terror portrait of a story by T.C. Boyle; three totally crisp, sentence-gem-adorned stories by Diane Williams; dazzling letters by Jac Jemc, Meng Jin, Rebekah Bergman, and so much more!

Blow a kiss goodbye to summer, and brush your hands over the neon-threaded landscape of Issue 79 to feel a magazine that, both inside and out, is truly like no other.

Ever changing, each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned (there have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head), but always brings you the very best in new literary fiction.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern began in 1998 as a literary journal that published only works rejected by other magazines. That rule was soon abandoned, and since then McSweeney’s has attracted some of the finest writers in the world, from George Saunders and Lydia Davis, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and David Foster Wallace. Recent issues have featured work by Tommy Orange, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lisa Taddeo, Mimi Lok, and Lesley Nneka Arimah. At the same time, the journal continues to be a major home for new and unpublished writers; we’re committed to publishing exciting fiction regardless of pedigree.