THE BELIEVER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015

After a half decade away The Believer has returned home to McSweeney’s. To celebrate the momentous occasion, we’ve dug through our archives and found an extremely limited number of classic and timeless issues for your purchasing pleasure. Once these are gone, they’re gone forever.

Read Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s wonderful essay, A River Runs Through It, here.

This issue is also available as an ebook. You can purchase it from Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Amazon, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents:

A River Runs Through It by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
Two generations of guardians have fostered Jimi Hendrix’s dream of Electric Lady Studios as a haven for peace, love, and the universal language of music.

What the Swedes Read by Daniel Handler

Encounter with the Infinite by Robert Schneider with Benjamin Phelan
A mathematics so powerful that it anticipated discoveries by nearly a century—and turned a psychedelic-pop musician into a number theorist.

“The Undeserving River”: a new poem by John Ashbery

Schema: Now Let us Laugh Together by Annie Julia Wyman

How to Follow a Recipe by Tamar Adler

All Across the Desert Our Bread Is Bloming! by Lisa Wells
“I was asking Jesus to guide me to a living bread, and by God, he did. I ended up right in the middle of it.”

The Process with Sara Roffino

“Comics” edited by Alvin Buenaventura

“Everything We Can See in the Universe Glows”: a new poem by Jynne Dilling Martin

Perpetually Awaiting a Rebirth of Wonder by Steven Boyd Saum

You’ll Never Write About Me Again by Livia Manera Sambuy

Robert Crumb interviewed by Dan Nadel

Zainab Salbi interviewed by Jonathan Meiburg

Symposium
A discussion on (mostly) books as they relate to the theme of disease. Stephen Burt on virality, David Roth on the War on Terror, Theodore Gioia on illness as lifestyle, Colin Dickey on the epidemic of forgetting, and Nicole Pasulka on a modern plague.

Roz Chast interviewed by Joanne Furio

“The Craft Talk”: a new poem by Rae Armantrout

Stephin Merritt interviewed by Ross Simonini

Dian Hanson interviewed by Elina Shatkin

Kumail Nanjiani interviewed by Jane Marie

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby