McSWEENEY’S NEW RELEASE + QUARTERLY COMBO SUBSCRIPTION

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

“There are few examples in publishing that equal the care and inventiveness McSweeney’s offers their readers—the industry at large should take note.”
—Bookends and Beginnings, Evanston, IL

Life is too short to worry about not having enough reading material. That’s why we’ve decided to combine two of our most popular long-standing subscriptions into one super-sized combo, bringing you no fewer than ten McSweeney’s publications—and one special tote—straight to your mailbox. You’ll get four issues of our ever-changing, always boundary-pushing, National Magazine Award-winning literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, PLUS the next six titles from our books division, sent prior to or upon publication and bundled with special letters of introduction from the authors themselves. On their own, these books and quarterlies can retail anywhere from $16 to $30, so this is truly a deal worth writing home about. And, like the cheesiest of infomercials, that’s not all! Combo subscribers will also be sent a beautiful green McSweeney’s tote immediately upon purchase.

Take a look at what you’ll have coming your way:

McSweeney’s Issue 79
Coming to you at the intersection of book and tapestry, the seventy-ninth issue of our National Magazine Award–winning quarterly is embroidered from head to toe—using precisely 133,095 stitches of thread—with the art of Marta Monteiro. Inside this tactile, textile, tangerine-backdropped, cloth-bound art object are nine new stories, three fresh novel excerpts, six timely letters, an essay as sharp as a blade, a stunningly surreal slice of a graphic novel by Patrick Keck, and a shockingly beautiful, hot-pink suite of Mary Magdalenes painted by Leanne Shapton.

As your fingers caress the raised topography of this issue’s beyond-belief weave, marvel at a story by Joseph Earl Thomas in which time stops mid-dunk; a novel excerpt by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff in which invented languages make a play; a story by Ahmed Naji that circles Cairo rap clashes; a captivating, climate-terror portrait of a story by T.C. Boyle; three totally crisp, sentence-gem-adorned stories by Diane Williams; dazzling letters by Jac Jemc, Meng Jin, Rebekah Bergman, and so much more!

Blow a kiss goodbye to summer, and brush your hands over the neon-threaded landscape of Issue 79 to feel a magazine that, both inside and out, is truly like no other.

Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories by David Haynes
Martha’s Daughter is the brilliant and influential author David Haynes’s first short story collection and the first time that Haynes’s stories have ever been assembled in one volume. Steeped in everyday gossip and lives, this collection ranges from the magically real life of a city’s crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home. In the titular novella the first hours are chronicled after Cynthia finds out her mother has died. What we learn is that Cynthia is a woman who has been bullied by her mother’s overbearing opinions, her disdain for difference, her respectability politics, and her outdated beliefs about how men and women should relate to one another. Martha’s death is less a catalyst for Cynthia’s grief than an opportunity to free herself of a burden too long endured.

The sixth in McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, Martha’s Daughter is another record in David’s oeuvre, of the people and places he’s been recording since the beginning of his career, some thirty years ago. With its full-circle connection to David’s previous novels, Martha’s Daughter is guaranteed to enthrall longtime fans and new readers alike.

After You Were, I Am by Camille Ralphs
An extraordinary debut from Camille Ralphs, heralding the arrival of a major new talent. In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections—rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee—obsess over individual human characters, and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. This is poetry as incantation, plea and invocation.

Drawing on a vast range of influences, from sacred texts and early modern drama to metaphysical wit, twentieth-century Confessionalism and contemporary irony and mistrust, this ambitious debut embodies the variety and singularity of living voices past and present, which through rapturous music, anarchic wordplay, and formal distortion are dragged to breaking point. The very history of the English language glows through the cracks. The effect is a terrestrial transcendence, as spaces within and between human thoughts expand to reveal a shared heritage of faults and answerless questions at every turn. Ralphs’s style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, maker of poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.

Only Son by Kevin Moffett
Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personals ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.

Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape.

With wit and compassion, award-winning author Kevin Moffett’s debut novel delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.

And then?
Keep an eye out for three more thrilling and innovative collections of the kind of cutting-edge literary content readers of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern have come to expect for over two decades, including our uber-deluxe Trapper Keeper-inspired year-end issue. Plus, three more unforgettable works of fiction and nonfiction from McSweeney’s Publishing.

Praise for McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

“A key barometer of the literary climate.”
—The New York Times

“The first bona fide literary movement in decades.”
—Slate

“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, 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?



IMPORTANT LOGISTICAL INFORMATION: This is a one time combo price, all subscriptions to McSweeney’s Quarterly automatically renew after four issues, at 15% off the price of a regular sub (currently $80.75), while the McSweeney’s New Release Subscription renews after six issues at a price of $95. 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 auto-renewal, you can log in to your account and adjust your subscription settings. Or send an email to custservice@mcsweeneys.net with the subject lines “End Quarterly Renew,” “End New Release 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 before October 15, 2025 will begin with McSweeney’s Issue 79, and both Martha’s Daughter and After You Were, I Am. If you’d like to give the Quarterly Concern as a one-time gift, purchase a gift subscription here. Any subscription purchased with the “gift” option marked at checkout will not be enrolled in autorenew.

International shipping costs for the full ten-book combo subscription: $70