Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 13 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 13 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13 is all comics. It is edited by Chris Ware (author of Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth), and features so many artists to know and love: R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Los Bros Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, and on and on. The issue also includes essays from Michael Chabon, Ira Glass, John Updike, Chip Kidd, and others. A hardcover, clothbound... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 30 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 30 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Featuring new work by Wells Tower, Michael Cera, and Etgar Keret, along with as always a bevy of lesser-known but nonetheless excellent writers investigating everything from mental hospitals to sentient mists, and possibly some kind of poster, Issue 30 warrants every ounce of attention and industry you'll give it, even if you are very important and your time is valuable--even if the fate of nations rests on your... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 31 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 31 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Barthelme said that "The Novel of the Soil is dead, as are Expressionism, Impressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Regionalism, Realism, the Kitchen Sink School of Drama, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Theatre of Cruelty, Black Humor, and Gongorism." But he left out, pointedly, the Biji, the Nivola, the Graustarkian Romance, the Consuetudinary, the Whore's Dialogue, the Fornaldarsaga, and the eighties, which... (more)

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes (Vintage)

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes (Vintage)

by McSweeney's

As John Hodgman says in this book's introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.” With that in mind, the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters,... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 28

In eight illustrated books, elegantly held together in a single beribboned case, McSweeney’s 28 explores the state of the fable—those astute and irreducible allegories one doesn’t see so much anymore in our strange new age, when everyone is wild for the latest parable or apologue but can’t find time for anything else. Featuring fable-length work by Daniel Alarcón, Sheila Heti, and Nathan Englander, and different... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 29

With our biggest line-up in quite a while – fifteen stories from writers like Yannick Murphy, Roddy Doyle, Ben Greenman, and Peter Orner – McSweeney's 29 offers everything a good book should: there is jungle warfare, there are boomerang factories, there are tragedies and romances and animals it might not have been wise to bring home. There is also art on every damn page, and a finely die-cut cover, wrapped in... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 23

McSweeney's Issue 23 includes ten stories from ten excellent writers, including Wells Tower, Chris Bachelder, Ann Beattie, and other agile talents bringing visions of the Dallas/Fort Worth fake-watch trade and Papua New Guinea in the 1960s. Every story gets its own front and back cover drawn, collaged, or embroidered by the polymathic Andrea Dezsö. The whole thing is wrapped in a jacket that unfolds into five... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 32

Because it seemed important to know in advance, we've dedicated Issue 32 to an investigation of the world to come--expect a set of near-future stories, written by the likes of Anthony Doerr, Heidi Julavits, and Salvador Plascencia, each of 'em unearthing a different corner of life in the year 2024. This will be, we are sure, way more entertaining than waiting fifteen years for the real thing.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 20 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 20 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's has grown to be one of the country's best and largest-circulation literary journals. The journal is committed to finding new voices, publishing work of gifted but underappreciated writers, and pushing the literary form forward at all times. We have no idea what Issue 20 will be.

McSweeney's Issue 11 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 11 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Issue 11 will feature contributions from many of your favorite McSweeney’s contributors, as well as a chorus of new voices. This issue returns to the classic McSweeney’s format last seen in Issue 5, complete with a letters section and an interview with a prominent scientist, in this case with those investigating the recently found collossal squid, the largest known to man. Aside from that, Issue 11 features... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 19 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 19 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal that published only works rejected from other magazines. Today, it has grown to be one of the country’s best and largest-circulation literary journals, attracting works from some of the finest writers in the country, including David Foster Wallace, Ann Cummins, Rick Moody, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollmann, and many new talents. McSweeney's ... (more)

McSweeney's Issues One Through Three

Dave Eggers launched Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1998 as an outlet for writings by himself and his friends, such as David Foster Wallace, who had been rejected by other, established journals. Eggers’ irreverent approach included a pioneering design that incorporated chapbooks, drawings, and all manner of cultural confetti previously unseen in the lit-mag format. McSweeney’s became an instant hit,... (more)

The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, Jemma Claflin, a medical student, finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 24

by Dave Eggers, Shann Ray, Rachel Sherman, Andy Lamey, Wythe Marschall, Ben Ehrenreich, Steve Stiefel, John Henry Fleming, Andrea Deszo, Champ Simpson

With a special section on Donald Barthelme, including remembrances from Ann Beattie, David Gates, and Oscar Hijuelos, and some of Barthelme’s barely published and never-collected early work, and a highly theoretical but potentially amazing Z-binding that we can’t describe very well here, or even to each other, McSweeney’s 24 will never be mistaken for anything else. (Except possibly the June 1978 issue of... (more)

McSweeney's Issue 25

If issues were anniversaries, this one would have to be printed on silver plates. You could melt it in some sort of forge and then pound it on an anvil until you had a set of earrings. Instead, it's a hardcover book with stories by a few of our old favorites—Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Padgett Powell—and more than half a dozen others, investigating everything from ape men to unlucky island-hoppers to... (more)

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling TalesMichael Chabon

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

McSweeney's Issue 27 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

McSweeney's Issue 27 (Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern)

Plunging straight into the grayish, faintly understood area of the art world that involves oddly drawn objects coupled with uncertainly spelled text, McSweeney's Issue 27 brings together a previously uncategorized cadre of pithy draftsmen, genius doodlers, and fine-artistic cartoonists, and buffets them with articles examining just what it is that these people are doing and why the world should know about it.... (more)

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