McSweeney's Issue 79(2025)

Carol EmshwillerAimee BenderMichael Chabon

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.