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Today we are celebrating the release of the latest issue of our award-winning quarterly journal. To celebrate, subscriptions are $10 off, and we’ve asked our brilliant and fearless editor, Rita Bullwinkel, to share a few words.
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Dear Readers,
Today, McSweeney’s Quarterly Issue 79 lives! This issue exists at the interaction of book and tapestry, and is embroidered from head to toe — using precisely 133,095 stitches of thread — with the art of Marta Monteiro. It contains new work by Leanne Shapton, Helen DeWitt, Joseph Earl Thomas, Patrick Keck, T.C. Boyle, Diane Williams, and so much more. If you’re not already a subscriber, subscribe now, and this issue will be the first to reach you.
The immensity of this ask — of asking you to subscribe — is not lost on me.
I think you should use your agency in this world to access objects and ideas and people that make you feel bewildered by the beauty of life. You should not give your money to anyone, or purchase objects, out of guilt, because it is “virtuous” or “good for you.” I abhor the idea that art is medicine: something difficult to swallow that must be done for the good of your soul. Read for pleasure. Read for beauty. Read because you are restless, your mind alone, whirring in your own consciousness, and you seek the profound enchantment of, through reading a book, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. No technology can mimic the feeling of being inside someone else’s mind better than literary fiction. It’s the best tool we have for achieving collective consciousness. No other art medium, or “technological advancement,” comes close.
As you likely know, the design of every issue of the Quarterly is completely novel. It is one of the great privileges of my life that, every three months, I get to sit down with our truly peerless art director, Sunra Thompson, and brainstorm ways we can challenge, embrace, reinvent, and upend the boundaries of book design.
Most literary journals publish three to four stories an issue. We routinely publish upwards of ten. I am wonderfully, and miraculously, tasked with acquiring, editing, and publishing northward of 1,000 pages of short literary fiction per year. Since coming on last year as editor, I have worked to publish 118 authors and 15 translators working from eight different languages, bringing stories to the magazine that were originally written in Japanese, German, French, Vietnamese, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew. The New Yorker, a weekly, is perhaps the only other magazine in existence that is also publishing short literary fiction at that scale.
We accomplish a tremendous amount with an impressively lean team and budget. I am the only full-time employee of McSweeney’s Quarterly. I man a hard-copy open-call submissions pile at our San Francisco office. Every issue I publish from new-to-me voices alongside some of the greatest and most well-known writers of our time. I acquire work only because it has moved me, and because I want to share it. At McSweeney’s, we do not publish things because we want to make money. We publish things because we want to know what you think of them. When we make each issue, we are thinking of you. We made this for you. There is so much brilliant prose and art coming for you in 2026 and beyond: a novella by Alejandro Zambra, a portfolio of paintings by Percival Everett, a piece by Suzanne Rhodenbaugh, a new-to-me writer in her eighties who submitted via mail, in which she tells the story of her life in the form of devastatingly brief, abbreviated, decade-long summaries.
We’re ending 2025 with the truly astounding year-end finale that is issue 80, which consists of seven (!) literary art-objects housed inside a Trapper-Keeper-style binder including a flower catalog by Yiyun Li, a story in the form of a Scantron by Pip Adam, a story in the form of a crossword by Chris Ames, and literary criticism in the form of a stencil by Tamara Shopsin.
I would really love to share all of this with you. If you’re not already a subscriber, subscribe now, so that the next time I see you, we can talk about it. If your subscription is near its end, renew now so you can experience this all for yourself. It is my lofty hope that you might be delighted by what we make, and that, through devouring the astounding art and literature we have published, you and I might be able to have a sliver of a shared consciousness. It’d be fun to be inside the radiant and wild minds of our contributors with you. The Quarterly exists because of you.
In faith,
Rita
P.S. If you are already a subscriber and have more to give, I would be grateful if you made a donation.
