Editor Dave Eggers Frequency Quarterly Company McSweeney's | Categories Literary magazine Year founded 1998 (1998-month) Country USA | |
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Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is an American literary journal, typically containing short stories, reportage, and illustrations. Some issues also include poetry, comic strips, and novellas. The Quarterly Concern is published by McSweeney's. The journal is notable in that it has no fixed format, and changes its publishing style from issue to issue, unlike more conventional journals and magazines. It is produced by the publishing house McSweeney’s. The Quarterly was first published in 1998, and it is edited by Dave Eggers.
Contents
The first issue featured only works that had been rejected by other publications, but the journal has since begun publishing pieces written with McSweeney’s in mind. The journal is based in San Francisco.
History
McSweeney's was founded in 1998 after Dave Eggers left an editing position at Esquire, during the same time he was working on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. McSweeney's is a sort of successor to Eggers' earlier magazine project Might, although Might was focused on editorial content and news, and not literature. Eggers also refers to McSweeney's as having "less edge" than Might.
Although originally reaching only a small audience, McSweeney's has grown to be a well respected journal, with Ruth Franklin, writing for Slate, referring to the Quarterly (and company) as "...the first bona fide literary movement in decades". NPR, writing about the company's fifteenth anniversary, referred to the journal as the "flagship literary quarterly" of a "literary empire based in San Francisco".
Authors
Notable authors featured in McSweeney's include Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Robert Coover, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace and Ann Beattie. The Quarterly has also helped launch the careers of dozens of emerging writers, including Philipp Meyer, Wells Tower, and Rebecca Curtis.
Awards
In 2007, McSweeney's received the National Magazine Award for Fiction for three stories published in 2006: "Wild Child" by T.C. Boyle (Issue 19); "To Sit, Unmoving" by Susan Steinberg (Issue 20); and "The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan" by Rajesh Parameswaran (Issue 21). In 2010, Anthony Doerr, Wells Tower, and Kevin Moffett won the National Magazine Awards for their stories "Memory Wall", "Raw Water", and "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events", respectively, all published in Issue 32.
Published issues
McSweeney's publishes each issue in a different format. Past issues have ranged in format from simple hardcovers or softcovers to more unconventional configurations, such as newspapers, a bundle of mail, a box emblazoned with a man's sweaty head, and a deck of playing cards. Some issues feature writing exclusively or mostly from one geographic area, such as Issue 15, which contained half American and half Icelandic writing.
In Issue 10, it was claimed that exactly 56 issues of the journal would be published. In Issue 20, this claim was repeated in an advertisement that stated: "There will be roughly thirty-six [issues] to come; then, a five-year retrenchment."