Books with title McSweeney's Issue 20

McSweeney's Issue 23 includes ten stories from ten excellent writers, including Wells Tower, Chris Bachelder, Ann Beattie, and other agile talents bringing visions of the Dallas/Fort Worth fake-watch trade and Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. Every story gets its own front and back cover drawn, collaged, or embroidered by the polymathic Andrea Dezsö. The whole thing is wrapped in a jacket that unfolds into five square feet of double-sided glory — spread it out one way for dozens of very short stories by Dave Eggers, arranged in what we're pretty sure is a volvelle; flip it over and witness all those Dezsö illustrations stitched into one unbroken expanse.

In eight illustrated books, elegantly held together in a single beribboned case, McSweeney’s 28 explores the state of the fable—those astute and irreducible allegories one doesn’t see so much anymore in our strange new age, when everyone is wild for the latest parable or apologue but can’t find time for anything else. Featuring fable-length work by Daniel Alarcón, Sheila Heti, and Nathan Englander, and different illustrators for each piece, McSweeney’s 28 promises to offer many nights’ worth of fine reading.

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.

McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal that published only works rejected from other magazines. Today, it attracts work from some of the finest writers in the country, including David Foster Wallace, Ann Cummins, Rick Moody, and William T. Vollmann. McSweeney's Issue 21 includes work by Roddy Doyle and Stephen Elliott, as well as the triumphant return of Arthur Bradford. There's also new stories (written by secretive and heretofore unknown authors) of beauty and acuity. Determined to find new voices, publish work of gifted but underappreciated writers, and push the literary form forward at all times, McSweeney's Issue 21 proves McSweeney's continued commitment to excellence.

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.

McSweeney's 26 comes in three parts: two small, oblong books of stories by writers large and small (John Brandon, Amanda Davis, Uzodinma Iweala, and eight more), set in regions near and far (Kazakhstan, Bosnia, Spain, Arkansas), and a third book, Where to Invade Next, edited by Stephen Elliott and inspired by actual Pentagon documents, which seeks to give a picture of just how our government could create a rationale for its next round of wars. Read them one at a time, or all at once, but know that this one’s got it all--whirlwind visions of the world of today, and dead-serious essays about which parts of it the United States might soon be confronting.

Barthelme said that "The Novel of the Soil is dead, as are Expressionism, Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Regionalism, Realism, the Kitchen Sink School of Drama, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, Black Humor, and Gongorism." But he left out, pointedly, the Biji, the Nivola, the Graustarkian Romance, the Consuetudinary, the Whore's Dialogue, the Fornaldarsaga, and the eighties, which are not dead; they are all in McSweeney's 31, as rendered by Douglas Coupland, Joy Williams, John Brandon, Shelley Jackson, Mary Miller, and Will Sheff, along with other fugitive genres recaptured by our finest writers, as part of a project to bring them back alive (except for the eighties, there is actually nothing about the eighties). In an oversized format, with annotations, illustrations, and pantoums, Issue 31 aims to introduce you to all the genres you never knew you loved.

Because it seemed important to know in advance, we've dedicated Issue 32 to an investigation of the world to come--expect a set of near-future stories, written by the likes of Anthony Doerr, Heidi Julavits, and Salvador Plascencia, each of 'em unearthing a different corner of life in the year 2024. This will be, we are sure, way more entertaining than waiting fifteen years for the real thing.

In classic quadruple-stamped hardcover clothing, Issue 39 offers a whole lot to behold—Elmore Leonard’s latest Karen Sisco caper and Roberto Bolaño’s Neochilean road trip, J.T.K. Belle’s unkillable bovine and Benjamin Weissman’s Louella Tarantula, Julie Hecht on Marimekko dresses and Jess Walter on going to cardboard, and amazing, far-ranging fiction from Amelia Grey and Abigail Maxwell and Yannick Murphy, too. (Plus some pretty incredible nonfiction on the fall of the Peacock Throne.) Don’t miss this one!

Our laurels went unrested on for this one: Issue 34 features new stories of shipwrecks and kidnappings and bad vacations by (among others) Anthony Doerr, Daniel Handler, and T. C. Boyle, new letters about wine and Hawaii from John Hodgman and Sarah Vowell, twenty-one dead-on self-portraits drawn by the likes of Michael Martone, Michel Gondry, and Sarah Silverman, and, beyond all this, in a standalone volume, Nick McDonell's stunning exploration of the latest iteration of the war in Iraq—a ground-level account from within the 1st Cavalry Division. The whole thing weighs in at just under 400 pages, and comes in its own custom-made double-sleeve. It is, without a doubt, a beaut.

Issue 38 is due to be a real beauty, with stories pulled in from all over the world—a grand tour, in prose, of a dozen places you have perhaps neglected to visit, up to now. There is Ariel Dorfman in Paris, with one eye on Chile, Bisi Adjapon in Ghana, Chanan Tigay with the Israeli Arabs of the Desert Scouts Brigade, Nathaniel Rich exploring the Northeast Kingdom, and Steven Millhauser somewhere far away, deep, deep in the woods—and more stories, besides, plus a comic and color photography and a cover that'll earn you admiring glances in whatever environment you're in. Don't even think about missing this one.