McSweeney’s No. 27 Art Spiegelman Stephen King Basquiat Pettibon

Description

McSweeney’s No. 27 is less a literary magazine than a little boxed exhibition. Published in 2008, the issue consists of three separate books housed together in an ingenious illustrated slipcase: a fiction volume; Art Spiegelman’s Autophobia, reproducing a sketchbook he kept in 2007; and Lots of Things Like This, an oblong collection devoted to that wonderful territory where drawing, handwriting, cartoons, jokes and fine art all run into one another.

And what a lineup. The fiction volume includes Stephen King’s “A Very Tight Place”—which first appeared here before its later inclusion in Just After Sunset—along with work by Jim Shepard, Larry Smith, Mikel Jollett and others. Lots of Things Like This brings together work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Cohen, Raymond Pettibon, David Shrigley, Maira Kalman, David Mamet and plenty more, while Spiegelman’s Autophobia gives us something altogether different: the Maus artist drawing privately and experimentally as a way of getting himself drawing again. It’s exactly what McSweeney’s did so well at its peak: take the idea of a literary quarterly and turn it into a beautifully designed, slightly crazy physical object.

Three books, one ingenious box, and a ridiculous collection of talent—one of those McSweeney’s issues you buy as much for the object as for what’s inside it.