McSweeney's Issue 49

The "Covers Issue" features today's top writers rewriting (or covering) classic stories. To name a few, there's Roxane Gay channeling Margaret Atwood, Jess Walter embodying James Joyce, Meg Wolitzer taking on J.D. Salinger—fourteen stories, all told, spanning a slipcased set of five paperback volumes, each featuring stunning illustrations by the award-winning design outfit Aesthetic Apparatus. Guest–art directed by legendary album-cover designers Gary Burden and Jenice Heo of R. Twerk & Co., the issue is packaged in a 9x9-inch LP-inspired slipcase.

McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal that published only works rejected by other magazines. That rule was soon abandoned, and since then McSweeney’s has attracted work from some of the finest writers in the country, including Denis Johnson, Jonathan Franzen, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Ben Marcus, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T. C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Gabe Hudson, Robert Coover, Ann Beattie, and many others. At the same time, the journal continues to be a major home for new and unpublished writers; we’re committed to publishing exciting fiction regardless of pedigree.