If there is someone on your holiday list who is a voracious reader that can spend hours in their local independent bookstore, then this is the perfect gift for them.
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is a literary journal, first published in 1998, edited by Dave Eggers. The first issue featured only works rejected by other magazines, but thereafter the journal began to include pieces written with McSweeney’s in mind. McSweeney’s has since published works by many notable writers, including Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and T. Coraghessan Boyle.
The journal publishes on a quarterly schedule and each issue is very different from the last. One issue came in a box, one was Icelandic, another was held together with magnets and one looks like a pile of mail.
Their current issue is # 33 which is a one-time only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It has news, sports, arts coverage, comics (sixteen pages of full-color comics, from Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and many others), a magazine and a weekend guide. The 300 plus page newspaper includes journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much more. You can purchase this issue HERE for $16, an annual subscription HERE for $55 and past issues HERE for $5 – $24.
