McSweeney's 34

From the credits page:

We all took a little break after the Panorama, which you may remember, and went off to rest up and treat our papercuts and reintroduce ourselves to our loved ones, who had not seen us in some time.  But after seven months as newspapermen and several weeks of blissful furlough, we came back hungry for a good old-fashioned short-story quarterly, the kind of issue we hadn't made since early last year, dense with well-nourished fiction—and that is what we set out to assemble.  But then we were reminded of how good it is to include shorter pieces—including letters—among the longer stories we tend to run, so two pages beyond this one we've resurrected that practice, which we first took up way back in the first few issues of McSweeney's.  And then, a couple hundred pages accounted for but still, somehow, hungry, we realized we were still a bit hooked on running long works of literary journalism, so here, in the other pocket of the plastic sleeve from which you retrieved this volume, we're proud to present Nick McDonell's stunning reporting from Iraq in a standalone paperback.  Now, of course, the issue is just a hair under four hundred pages and we're feeling a bit wobbly on our feet, but we couldn't be happier with how it turned out, or with how we turned the damn thing around in two months.  (Jan.4 - Mar. 4 being the working period for this issue—yes we sent it to press on the calendar date that corresponds to its issue number.  This will never happen again.)  We had other ideas, too, involving untested inks and diagonal bands, but we're going to save those for another time.  It's your continued support and enthusiasm that allows us to do that, to continue to do this, and so we thank you.

© 2010 McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the contributors, San Francisco, California

I will state for the record, and not that I'd ever complain about my beloved McSweeney's Quarterlies,* but it is rather difficult to get these two volumes in and out of the plastic sleeve holding them, which itself is probably going to fall apart in a few years. Alas.


* This is a lie. I've complained aloud about radically different sized publications, which make it difficult to line these up on a bookshelf, as well as oddly packaged collections (a cigar box full of pamphlets, a rubber-banded together set of mailbox items, two small volumes which simply must stack on top of each other, etc.). But I guess I wouldn't have it any other way. If nothing else, and they are many other things as well, these guys aren't boring.