McSweeney's – förlag

Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and 900 pages later, with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Ejected from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy?a novel that is muscular and verbose, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable.

McSweeney's 65: Plundered spans the Americas, from a bone-strewn Peruvian desert to inland South Texas, and considers the violence that shaped it. In fifteen bracing stories, the collection delves into extraction, exploitation, and, crucially, defiance. How does a community, an individual, resist the plundering of land and peoples?

Guest-edited by acclaimed author Valeria Luiselli, with Heather Cleary, Issue 65 brings together stories of stolen artifacts and endless job searches, of nationality-themed amusement parks and cultish banana plantations. Including contributors from Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, the United States, and more, Plundered is a panoramic portrait of a hemisphere on fire.

Praise for McSweeney's Quarterly

"A key barometer of the literary climate."-The New York Times

"McSweeney's is so much more than a magazine; it's a vital part of our culture. " -Geoff Dyer, McSweeney's contributor and author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

Featuring a foreword by Jason Reynolds.Award-winning viral curator and poet Natasha Marin follows up her acclaimed Black Imagination with a brilliant new collection of sharply rendered, breathtaking reflections from more than one hundred Black voices.When do you feel most indigenous?What does it sound like when you claim yourself?When do you feel most powerful?Black Powerful explores the monumental resilience, joy, and triumph of Black People everywhere.

It is 1968 and everything about being a Black woman in America is changing. A society once walled off has begun opening doors. Against this backdrop, three young women meet at a New England college and form a friendship that endures, heals, and dramatically shapes their lives. With backgrounds and temperaments symbolic of the many questions around attaining selfhood in the aftermath of freedom movements, Faith, Crystal and Serena struggle to exercise personal agency in an era when family history, along with race and gender identities, threaten to dictate their paths. As a poet-creative Crystal reaches for expression in language and in choosing who and how she loves. As a budding activist, Serena eschews conventions of marriage, and belonging, to become a global being, leaving the soil of America for Africa, where NGO work evolves into leading women toward an independence she herself maintains by remaining the mistress, never the bride, of a powerful man. Surprisingly, it is Faith, the most introverted, drawn into the self by a series of traumas, whose seemingly self-limiting choices will more directly affect a generation of women to come. The Philadelphia Tribune declared it, “a story of hope, a story of triumph and, above all, a testimony to resilience.”

Published in 1986 after the award-winning autobiography Migrations of the Heart, A Woman’s Place is Marita Golden’s first novel. More than fourteen books in fiction and nonfiction, including Gumbo: An Anthology of African-American Writing co-edited with E. Lynn Harris, followed. Golden went on to create and helm the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which has become a literary rite of passage for such talents as Nicole Dennis-Benn, Brit Bennett and Tayari Jones. A Woman’s Place is reprinted here as an esteemed addition to McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, edited by Erica Vital-Lazare, and opens with a new introduction by the author, with foreword by Women’s March co-founder Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs.

A finalist for the Believer Book AwardEmerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess-electrifying, gorgeous, defiant.

At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose-all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton-to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.

An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book."A forceful act of writing."-Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

"A poetic, candid, probing reckoning with childhood, the maternal, gender, and the possibilities of theory which will both speak to its time and outlast it." -Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

"An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Longlisted for the 2024 Mass Book AwardProceeds from the sale of Shadow Act will benefit the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, advocating for the freedom of all Americans held hostage abroad and promoting the safety of journalists worldwide.In his second collection—a powerful act of documentary poetics a decade in the making—Johnson chronicles the perils and joys of fatherhood and a shattering tragedy that plays out thousands of miles away. Nearly two years after the poet’s closest friend went missing, journalist James Foley was executed by ISIS in Syria. In this poetic daybook like no other, Johnson often speaks directly to his missing friend—“I don’t know, Jim, where you are,” even long after his death. Page to page, Foley ghosts in and out of the book, as the poet hails the birth of children, recounts hunting for the body of a neighbor’s missing cat, and, later, pores over the hand-written pages that Foley smuggled out of a Libyan prison in his shoe. An educator and poet, Johnson has crafted a vibrant, urgent collection that pulses with the terror and hardship Foley faced, the anguish of those he left behind, and the everlasting friendship between the two men. During a time of great collective trauma and mourning, this heartfelt, formally rich collection tackles the question: “How do you go on living, loving, and creating in the face of unthinkable loss?”

In issue 142 of The Believer, Amy Fusselman trawls the streets of New York for “everyday weirdos” with filmmaker John Wilson; Joshua Hunt treks to the peak of Japan’s “Mount Fear,” rumored portal to the underworld; and Ted McDermott meets a scientist who claims he doesn’t have a brain. There are also new interviews with Jim Jarmusch, Julie Otsuka, Gail Scott, and William Kentridge, as well as a comic by Chris Oliveros on the Front de libération du Québec. Plus, Patrick Martinez talks us through his process, and John Wray gives his perspective on a “love-it-or-loathe-it” documentary. Not to mention columns from our trusted experts Nick Hornby and Carrie Brownstein, book reviews, author trivia from Roxane Gay, a deep dive into the glorious world of unauthorized movie remakes, and more inside these freshly pressed pages waiting patiently for your reading pleasure.