Description
One of the great early McSweeney’s publishing experiments. After three comparatively conventional paperback issues, Issue No. 4 abandoned the idea of the literary magazine as a single bound volume and instead presented fourteen separately designed booklets inside a folding box, accompanied by its wonderfully absurd subscriber agreement. Contributors were given substantial control over the presentation of their pieces: Denis Johnson’s Hellhound on My Trail uses a drawing by his son Matt, while George Saunders supplied the Russian photograph for Four Institutional Monologues. The result is equal parts literary journal, portfolio and artist’s book—a format that helped establish the elaborate physical invention for which McSweeney’s became known.
And the contributor list, twenty-six years later, is ridiculous: Denis Johnson, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, Sheila Heti, Lawrence Weschler, Paul Maliszewski, Rachel Cohen and many others. Individual pieces include Johnson’s Hellhound on My Trail, Murakami’s Dabchick, Saunders’s Four Institutional Monologues, Lethem’s K Is for Fake, Moody’s The Double Zero, Davis’s A Mown Lawn, Heti’s The Middle Tales, and Maliszewski’s Paperback Nabokov. It is an unusually concentrated snapshot of American literary culture at the turn of the millennium, caught just as McSweeney’s was becoming one of the defining independent literary publishing projects of its era.
An early McSweeney’s issue where the writers are extraordinary, but the physical object is half the reason to own it.
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