THE BELIEVER SEPTEMBER 2013

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 Christmas in Thessaloniki, Arnon Grunberg’s essay on the attitudes of Greek citizens amidst the country’s financial collapse, here. Check out excerpts from this issue here.

Table of Contents:

Mercury’s Ghost by Rich Cohen
Scandalized, lionized, and then forgotten, 1920s NFL superstar Harold “Red” Grange once made sportswriters resort to poetry.

What the Swedes Read by Daniel Handler

The Ark and the Archivist by Dalia Sofer
Danilo Kiš’s tragic early life left him with an insatiable appetite for the truth—though he sometimes had to invent it.

Sedaratives by Nell Scovell

Linda Ross Meyer interviewed by Jill Stauffer
Part three in a series of interviews on criminal justice, incarceration, and solitary confinement.

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

“Conducting Ivy with the Girl Down the Street,” a new poem by Jamaal May

Musin’s and Thinkin’s by Jack Pendarvis

Schema: Freight Train Hopping in America by Tim Lane

“Comics” by Alvin Buenaventura

Reviews:
Aaron Gilbreath on anonymous promotional materials, Nathan C. Martin on Kurt Hollander, and Tana Wojczuk on William Shakespeare.

Christmas in Thessaloniki by Arnon Grunberg
Life in the long shadow of Greece’s economic collapse, as related by five citizens of the nation’s second-largest city.

Edward Albee interviewed by Linda Leseman
“I get some interesting people together, and I see what happens to them.”

Margaret Cho interviewed by Anna Suzuki
The pioneering comic on crowd control, tattoos, and why comedians are the blue-collar workers of the entertainment industry.

Chris Kraus interviewed by Sheila Heti
“I see my writing as transcription—a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live. I’ve always been a fan of plain writing.”

Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby