McSweeney's three-time National Magazine Award-winning quarterly brings you our 79th issue, featuring a beautiful embroidered cover and a brilliant selection of new fiction.

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.

Featuring new stories by:

• Joseph Earl Thomas
  
• Valeria Parrella, translated from Italian by Sonya Gray Redi
  
• T.C. Boyle
  
• James Kaelan
  
• Caroline Beimford
  
• Diane Williams
  
• Ahmed Naji, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

A new essay by: Camonghne Felix

Novel excerpts by:

• Josephine Rowe
  
• Joanna Ruocco
  
• Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

A graphic novel excerpt by: Patrick Keck

A portfolio of paintings by: Leanne Shapton

Letters by:

• Meng Jin
  
• Abraham Adams
  
• Jac Jemc
  
• Rebekah Bergman
  
• Hannah Pittard
  
• Enrico Rotelli

About McSweeney's Quarterly:
Ever changing, each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned (there have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head), but always brings you the very best in new literary fiction.

Editors: Dave Eggers / Rita Bullwinkel / Thi Bui / Vu Tran
Publisher: McSweeney's Books
Pages: 220pp
Size: 6.5 x 9.5
Notes: embroidered hardcover
Release Date: August 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1963270204