Books in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern series

With a special section on Donald Barthelme, including remembrances from Ann Beattie, David Gates, and Oscar Hijuelos, and some of Barthelme’s barely published and never-collected early work, and a highly theoretical but potentially amazing Z-binding that we can’t describe very well here, or even to each other, McSweeney’s 24 will never be mistaken for anything else. (Except possibly the June 1978 issue of Popular Mechanics.)

Our return, after four issues, to pure hardcover bookness features Jonathan Franzen on Upper East Side ambition, Jess Walter on the men who ride children's bicycles in Spokane, Washington, Joe Meno on women who want to be eaten by lions, Etgar Keret and Joyce Carol Oates on murder and language in a restaurant called Cheesus Christ and at Gate C34 of Newark International Airport, respectively--and ten more stories besides, five of them strange and beautiful pieces from Kenya that will tell you, indelibly, what it's like to be drunk for seventy-two hours straight in Nairobi or to smuggle contraband jam into the girls' dormitory of the Precious Blood Riruta Secondary School or to fly over the Kalacha Goda oasis in a small plane, at sunset, with your brother in a coffin next to you. Other topics covered include unemployment, drumming vs. painting, and Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square car-bomb attempter. As if that wasn't enough, this one is our first full-color issue in quite a while, too, with illustrations on every page—so if the absence of art was your last excuse, you no longer have any reason not to subscribe in time for this one.

If issues were anniversaries, this one would have to be printed on silver plates. You could melt it in some sort of forge and then pound it on an anvil until you had a set of earrings. Instead, it's a hardcover book with stories by a few of our old favorites—Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Padgett Powell—and more than half a dozen others, investigating everything from ape men to unlucky island-hoppers to what happens when Canadians go AWOL in Bosnia. Pound this one on an anvil and it'll pound you right back.Featuring three different cover types, and illustrations of various horses by Amy Jean Porter

Even beyond Edmund White's youthful hustler, Joyce Carol Oates's fatherly killer, and Roddy Doyle's Rwandan refugee, Issue 18 will not stay at home. Bears, clouds, assassinations, and demons lurk in a high-concept labyrinth of stories. And for those who have decided that the written word is simply too static a medium for their active lifestyle, we'll be inserting the first issue of a new DVD magazine called Wholphin, which includes films by Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Miranda July, and the National Clean Up, Paint Up, Fix Up Bureau.

With tremendous new stories from Steven Millhauser and Roddy Doyle, an epic, genre-shattering novella from Hilton Als, and a really excellent special section on Norway's finest writers (featuring not just Per Petterson but also Kid Icarus and a woman named Blind Margjit)—along with, probably, correspondence from a man we can't yet name and an unbelievable disappearing-ink cover done by Jordan Crane—Issue 35 is a full-to-bursting edition in the tradition of the best ones we've ever done. For several hundred pages of unrivaled summer reading, this is your book.

Plunging straight into the grayish, faintly understood area of the art world that involves oddly drawn objects coupled with uncertainly spelled text, McSweeney's Issue 27 brings together a previously uncategorized cadre of pithy draftsmen, genius doodlers, and fine-artistic cartoonists, and buffets them with articles examining just what it is that these people are doing and why the world should know about it. Featuring work from David Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, and many others — including an unreleased Art Spiegelman sketchbook — the latest quarterly from McSweeney's presents a new kind of contemporary art.

McSweeney's began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected from other magazines. But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces written with McSweeney's in mind. Soon after, McSweeney's attracted works from some of the finest writers in the country, including David Foster Wallace, Ann Cummins, Rick Moody, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollmann, and many new talents.Today, McSweeney's has grown to be one of the country's best and largest-circulation literary journals. The journal is committed to finding new voices, publishing work of gifted but underappreciated writers, and pushing the literary form forward at all times.McSweeney's publishes on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus.

With our biggest line-up in quite a while – fifteen stories from writers like Yannick Murphy, Roddy Doyle, Ben Greenman, and Peter Orner – McSweeney's 29 offers everything a good book should: there is jungle warfare, there are boomerang factories, there are tragedies and romances and animals it might not have been wise to bring home. There is also art on every damn page, and a finely die-cut cover, wrapped in several kinds of cloth, that will make other people want to grab this one right out of your hands, so watch out.

McSweeney's Issue 19, our first issue of 2006, turns toward earlier and equally uncertain years, traveling back by way of pamphlets, info-cards, and letters addressing bygone conflicts and still-constant concerns. Expect, among other recovered works, carefree strategies for insurgencies in Nicaragua, astrological advice for the Nixon/Agnew campaigner, sanguine guidance for the soldier stationed in the Middle East at mid-century, and commonsense reinforcement for the doughboy drifting toward a gonorrhea infection. Also featured is T.C. Boyle's feral child novella and additional quasi-historical work by new writers.

Every fourth page is a full-color figurative painting, each one by an excellent artist. The other pages have fiction on them, with only one color but lots of words including punched, pants, and Puerto — that's actually just the first page. After that, there are stories exploring animal-plant romances, psycho librarians, and passive-agressive ventriloquism. No fewer than two dictators appear as protagonists. And after all that, loosely glued to the inside back cover, there5;s a fifty-page booklet containing a harrowing excerpt from Chris Adrian5;s The Children5;s Hospital..This is a handsome, handsome issue, brimming with fulfilling things.

McSweeney's Issue 22 is a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form. In section one, poets (yes — poets!) including Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, and D. C. Berman initiate poet-chains, picking a poem of their own and one by another poet. The next poet will then do the same, and then again, and again, and so on. In section two, Fitzgerald (yes — F. Scott Fitzgerald!) provides a list of unused story premises first cataloged in The Crack-Up; his mission is completed by writers like Diane Williams and Nick Flynn. In section three, finally, the president of France's (yes — France!) legendary Oulipians offers a rare glimpse into his group's current experiments with linguistic constraint. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.