In 1998, Dave Eggers was in his late twenties, working as editor at large for Esquire and hating it. He had already co-founded and buried Might, a cult San Francisco magazine, and was tinkering with a memoir that would become A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In his Brooklyn apartment, he began assembling a literary journal from stories that other magazines had rejected. He named it after a man he had never met: Timothy McSweeney, who had written letters to Eggers's mother claiming to be a relative — a claim that was never resolved. The first issue was printed with loving care in Iceland, featured an all-text cover that looked like a Victorian funeral card, and included a then-topical, now-inscrutable joke about a failed Condé Nast publication. Eggers expected it to last four issues. Eight, at the most.
He was so wrong. Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern became what Slate called "the first bona fide literary movement in decades" and what NPR described as the flagship of a San Francisco-based literary empire. The journal's defining innovation was its refusal to have a fixed form. One issue arrived as a box of postcards. Another as a bundle of junk mail. Another as a full-color Sunday newspaper written entirely by novelists, with cartoons by Chris Ware. Issue 36 came in a large square box printed to look like a balding, sweaty human head, with a booklet of oral histories, a two-act play, and a 150-year-old excerpt from a Scottish minister rattling around inside. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition was contained in an Art Spiegelman-illustrated lunch box. "We're going to have to put an old banana in each one," Eggers told his art director.
The journal funded its early existence through $100 lifetime subscriptions — the same price as a two-year subscription at the time. Eggers assumed the publication wouldn't outlast the two-year mark. The lifetime subscribers eventually had their eternal promise revoked. The contributors list, meanwhile, grew into a roll call of contemporary literature: Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, William T. Vollmann. The Quarterly Concern is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Fiction and an eight-time finalist. In 2019, VIDA reported that it published the highest percentage of women and trans writers — 71 percent — of any comparable literary journal.
From the journal, an entire publishing ecosystem grew: The Believer, a monthly arts and culture magazine; Lucky Peach, a food quarterly; Wholphin, a DVD magazine of short films; Illustoria, a children's art magazine; the daily humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency; and the book imprint that published Vollmann's 3,352-page Rising Up and Rising Down when every other house passed. In 2014, McSweeney's transitioned to nonprofit status. It now operates on a $2.2 million annual budget from San Francisco, still putting out four issues a year of a journal whose form changes every time but whose Garamond typeface — elegant, old-fashioned, at odds with the packaging — stays the same. Issue 10 promised that exactly 56 issues would be published. Issue 56 revealed that this had always been a joke. They intend to continue until at least 156.
Explore McSweeney's Quarterly Concern at <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/" target="\_blank">mcsweeneys.net