McSweeney’s Issues 1 and 3 First Printings Dave Eggers David Foster Wallace

Description

These two early issues capture McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern before it became an institution, when Dave Eggers and company were still inventing the magazine almost issue by issue. The inaugural 1998 Gegenshein includes work by David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, Neal Pollack, Komar & Melamid and others, wrapped in the deadpan editorial jokes, mock bureaucracy and obsessive typography that immediately established the McSweeney’s voice. Issue No. 3, Windfall Republic, pushes the experiment further with contributors including Jonathan Lethem, Aleksandar Hemon, Brian Greene, Judy Budnitz, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Lawrence Weschler and Tom Tomorrow.

The fun of the earliest McSweeney’s issues is that the publication still feels handmade, provisional and slightly unhinged. Editorial policies become comedy, submission instructions turn into literature, typefaces and diagrams become part of the joke, and the physical form of each issue seems determined to resist becoming an ordinary literary journal. These first-printing copies of Issues 1 and 3 make a terrific little snapshot of the moment when Eggers and McSweeney’s were becoming a defining part of late-1990s independent literary culture.

A great early McSweeney’s pair—Issue No. 1 and Issue No. 3 together, with David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Sarah Vowell, Jonathan Lethem and the rest of the early crew.