ILLUSTORIA + McSWEENEY’S COMBO SUBSCRIPTION

Giving this combo subscription as a gift? Click here to download an official printable PDF gift notice.

This is the combo subscription for both Illustoria and McSweeney’s Quarterly. For just Illustoria, click here. For just the Quarterly, click here.

“A key barometer of the literary climate.”
—The New York Times on McSweeney’s Quarterly

“This is the kind of magazine you keep on your bookshelves with your favorite books.”
— Cece Bell, author of El Deafo, on Illustoria magazine

Whether a literal family in need of reading material to enjoy at the proverbial Sunday morning breakfast table, or an individual lover of both high-quality literature and the very best in children’s illustration, the Illustoria-McSweeney’s Quarterly Combo Subscription has something for every reader in your life.

Subscribe now to receive the next four issues of our always surprising, always redesigned, three-time National Magazine Award-winning literary journal, featuring the best fiction and nonfiction we can get our hands on, AND the next three issues of the beloved art and storytelling magazine for children and their grownups, celebrating visual storytelling, makers, and DIY culture through stories, art, comics, interviews, crafts, and activities, delivered right to your doorstep at an absolutely cannot-be-beat price.

With the sort of year we have planned, there’s never been a better time to subscribe. Here’s what we have up our collective sleeves next:

Illustoria #24: Love
What is LOVE? In this issue, featuring a gorgeous cover by Valerio Vidali, we spotlight friendships, families, hobbies, fan clubs, and unlikely animal buddies. Famous duos of kidlit reveal love in action, a poet ponders where love resides, and collaborating artists discuss the bittersweet joys of co-creating. Learn to say love in another language, send anonymous valentines, and make fairy bread for your bestie.

Write a short story about a professional raisin squisher, learn about unlikely animal friendships, and read an interview with Ashton Mota, an Afro-Latino youth activist. Make wild forage paint brushes, check out cartoon hearts drawn by kids from around the world, explore book reviews submitted by readers on the subject of friendship, and so much more loving content it will make your heart explode into bits!

McSweeney’s Issue 74
McSweeney’s National Magazine Award–winning Quarterly Concern celebrates our first quarter century of being an occasionally actually quarterly publication as so many mid-twentysomethings do (drenching ourselves in a sea of nostalgia for our misbegotten youth and looking forward into the promise of the future) with one of our most dazzling issues to date! Coming to you housed inside a deluxe tin lunchbox illustrated by the legendary Art Spiegelman, McSweeney’s 74 features a portfolio of pareidolia art by Spiegelman himself, wherein he teases out images from random watercolor inkblots; original pieces by Lydia Davis, Catherine Lacey, and David Horvitz printed onto pencils and whose meaning is designed to change throughout the pencil’s lifespan; and three packs of collectible author cards, packaged in real tear-away baseball-card packaging and featuring some of the finest writers of our time, including Sheila Heti, Hanif Abdurraqib, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, Michael Chabon, Eileen Myles, and many more.

Find all this plus the official McSweeney’s Anthology of Contemporary Literature: a book composed of some of the greatest works of McSweeney’s past decade, with a new introduction by longtime editor Claire Boyle. Here you’ll find award-winning, shortlisted, anthologized, and otherwise feted and beloved stories from Lesley Nneka Arimah, T.C. Boyle, Mimi Lok, Kevin Moffett, Adrienne Celt, Bryan Washington, Samanta Schweblin, C Pam Zhang, Eskor David Johnson, Julia Dixon Evans, and more! Dive in with us, readers, as we bathe in the warmth of the past, and get ready for our next quarter century of always thrilling and unexpected literary work.

McSweeney’s 75: New voices
In a June 2023 submission call for new work by never-before-published writers, McSweeney’s received thousands of submissions in a single month. The stories in this issue (our seventy-fifth, an almost unfathomable milestone) are the crème de la crème of that bounty.

Guest-edited by longtime McSweeney’s editor Eli Horowitz, our seventy-fifth issue contains ten radiant stories, each published as an individual booklet with stunning art by ten different artists. All ten booklets are collected inside a beautiful and sturdy and elaborately foil-stamped dossier-like case, which opens (rather extravagantly) to reveal a series of accordion pockets—each one containing a pair of booklets—and snaps shut (rather satisfyingly) with a magnetic closure. In these brilliant literary debuts there are fish guts, meteor hunters, military coups, ghost towns, and fake orphans. The stories, whose authors and settings span continents, dazzle in their originality of vision and voice. They announce themselves with bravado, excellence, and energy. In his introduction to the issue, Horowitz writes, “I’m not sure what set of circumstances allowed these wizards to escape previous publication—youth? shyness? vast conspiracies?—but the wait is over: they have arrived.” Get this issue for eternal bragging rights of being present at the ground floor of each of these ten writers’ sure-to-be-storied futures.

IMPORTANT LOGISTICAL INFORMATION: This is a one time combo price, all subscriptions to McSweeney’s Quarterly automatically renew after four issues, at 15% off a regular subscription price (currently $80.75), with Illustoria subscriptions automatically renewing after three issues at a price of $40. In the event of any future rate changes, we will notify you via email. If you’d like to cancel either subscription at any time prior to its renewal, you can log in to your account and adjust settings or send an email to custservice@mcsweeneys.net with the subject lines “End Quarterly Renew,” “End Illustoria Renew,” or “End Combo Renew” depending on your desires. Refunds will be accepted only up until the first issue of your renewal is shipped. All subscriptions placed by August 15 will begin with McSweeney’s Issue 74 as their first issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly and Issue 24: Love as their first issue of Illustoria. If you’d like to give just the Quarterly Concern as a one-time gift, purchase a gift subscription here. Any subscriptions bought with the “gift” box marked at checkout will not be enrolled in autorenew.

Praise for Illustoria

“[A] beautifully produced print magazine that invites young readers to revisit arresting pages again and again … Illustoria is a visual feast, with a focus on storytelling through art and literature. In addition to crafts and art projects, Illustoria presents stories through comics, and profiles illustrators, artists, and makers … [with] messages of compassion and inclusivity … bursting with creative ideas and inspiration.”
—“Our Favorite Gifts for 6- to 10-year-olds,” Wirecutter, The New York Times

“It’s a rewarding offering that I hope sticks around for many years down the line.”
—Julie Danielson, Kirkus Reviews, blogger of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

“[A] visually exciting magazine with a DIY attitude … offer[s] plentiful opportunities for engagement, while the quality artwork and inventive layouts are sure to inspire imaginative responses.”
—School Library Journal

“Cover to cover, its content and aesthetics are smart, modern and engaging. Illustoria is a magazine I would’ve loved to have growing up.”
— Michelle Sterling, Avery & Augustine

Praise for McSweeney’s Quarterly

“Ever shape-shifting and ambitious, McSweeney’s has redefined what a literary institution can be. Their commitment to publishing strong, strange voices and stories from the periphery has always been an inspiration and I’m always excited to see what they’ll do next.”
—Catherine Lacey, McSweeney’s contributor and author of The Answers

“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

“Some magazines are comfort reads. We turn to them because we can almost predict, issue to issue, what and even who will appear in them. But others, like McSweeney’s, are challenge reads. They’re feverishly inventive, discomfortingly surprising, and therefore among the best reminders that we are actually alive. I love shouting at McSweeney’s, laughing with it, and rolling my eyes at myself while the magazine reads me like a deceptively perceptive carnival psychic.”
—John D’Agata, The Believer contributor and author of Halls of Fame and About a Mountain

“I’m incredibly grateful for the existence of McSweeney’s. Its embrace of world literature is completely unique, lucid, knowing and indispensable.”
—Francisco Goldman, McSweeney’s contributor and acclaimed author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle and The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

Looking for back issues of Illustoria? Visit Illustoria.com.