Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. New Directions is excited to reissue the Gardner classics, beginning with October Light, a complex relationship rendered in a down-to-earth narrative. October Light is one of John Gardner's masterworks. Th
Issue 11 features contributions by many of your favorite McSweeney's writers, as well as a chorus of new voices. Contributors include: Tom Bissell, Sean Warren, Samantha Hunt, Robert Olmstead, T.C. Boyle, David Means, Doug Dorst, Joyce Carol Oates, A.G.
Here are six fictional stories about Americans colliding with a remote and often perilous part of the world:Two journalists, stranded in wartime Afghanistan, are taken in by a warlord who becomes the arbiter of their fates.A female scientist investigating
In April 1975, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, John Bissell, a former Marine officer living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was glued to his television. Struggling to save his marriage, raise his sons, and live with his memories of the wa
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore t
In Magic Hours, award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Wer
Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a pound at birth, at twenty-three weeks’ gestation. During the delivery she begged the doctors to "let her babies go" — she knew all too well that at twenty-three weeks they could very well die
Since 1998, McSweeney's 'Quarterly Concern' has been emerging from various kitchens, attics and an old laundromat roughly four times a year - or definitely at least three. Almost 100,000 stories have been submitted, usually in manila envelopes. Approximat
Twenty-two of today's most talented writers (and comics fans) unite in Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology featuring brand-new superheroes equipped for the threats and challenges of the twenty-first century -- with a few supervillains thrown in for good me
