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McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #77
Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 77
Three-time National Magazine Award-winning McSweeney’s Quarterly returns, now helmed by new Editor Rita Bullwinkel. Inside this ecstatic paperback you’ll find a stunningly exuberant and delirious portfolio of paintings by former Quarterly Editor Claire Boyle, and new work by seventeen writers. Gasp in awe at a story by Mieko Kawakami told entirely through the lens of overheard phone calls; a sci-fi epic by Yuri Herrera; fresh, heartstopping, and scathingly beautiful prose by Venita Blackburn, Joanna Howard, and Icarus Koh—a never-before-published fiction writer; and brilliant letters from Nell Zink, Jennifer S. Cheng, Elisa Gonzalez, and more! Get through the winter blues with this issue’s vibrating, radiant, maximalist energy and stand squarely in opposition to the literary vogue de jour of cold, minimalist austerity.
150 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2025
3 people are currently reading
11 people want to read
About the author
Rita Bullwinkel
21 books223 followersRita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot and Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. She is a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney's Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, and the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in Germany, where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 21, 2025
Apart from a couple of good stories (Hell Is A Thousand Eyes by Icarus Koh and Cote De Nuits by James Kaelan) this was a pretty forgettable issue. I really disliked Clare Boyle's ugly pictures.
The perennial problem of the price of McSweeney's raises its head once more. I'm paying approx £25 per issue which is a bit much for an issue such as this which is barely 150 pages
The perennial problem of the price of McSweeney's raises its head once more. I'm paying approx £25 per issue which is a bit much for an issue such as this which is barely 150 pages
March 16, 2025
An unusually short issue with better than average stories. Favorites are "Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs" by Icarus Koh and "Cote de Nuits" by James Kaelan. I also enjoyed the (creepy) surrealist art, especially the piece on the cover (not currently shown, here, as of 3/17/25).
June 23, 2025
This is a solid and playful edition of my favorite magazine. As always, I was amused by the Letters. I was less taken by the pieces, but with key exceptions.
Emily Crossen's "The Orts" is a fun writing exercise, turned into an autofiction experiment as a frame. This one's for writers.
Sasha Graybosch's "The Pill" has an interesting POV ending:
...She went around the side of the building, to where no windows faced, and looked out across the empty lot protected on all sides by fence. Scrubby bushes, stretches of dirt. The clouds passed quickly, and the distant traffic made a low roar like waves. On her way inside, she passed a sign detailing plans for a forthcoming building expansion. In the renderings, all the people looked busy and happy but strangely out of place, as if they'd been plucked from another world mid-sentence and dropped into this one, and hadn't yet realized they were there.
I know exactly what effect this describes.
James Kaelin's "Côte de Nuits" has an opening section that is a master class on inserting POV and protagonist characterization in the opening. In point of fact, I'm stealing it for my workshops on openings, it's such a good example, so I'll share it with you, to tempt you to find the longer work it's part of:
Amelia's last night at Anderson, with the wine director out sick, a middle-aged couple arrived five minutes late for their reservation. They looked a little out of place. The woman wore white slacks and open-toed, four-inch Louis Vuitton heels. She'd gotten a blowout that afternoon, and her ash blond hair looked blue in the marine light of the Chihuly chandelier that hung from the foyer ceiling like a giant anemone. Her blouse--Hermès, Amelia guessed, purchased from a discount reseller--was covered in short-brimmed equestrian helmets festooned with silk bows. The top was meant to signal that she rode horses. Judging by her husband, though, she didn't own a stable. He was jowly and red-faced and wore a golf polo with a TravisMathew logo on the collar. Almost certainly a developer from Escondido with a LOCK HER UP bumper sticker on his truck. He was the kind of man--rough, funny, casually racist, always ready to haul something for a friend in his Ford F-250 Super Duty--that Amelia's father got paired with at charity golf tournaments but would never invite over for dinner.
Amelia had discovered that she was good at ascertaining the wealth of Anderson's patrons. She felt nasty doing it, but as a sommelier, she found the talent was useful. Guessing wrong could be dangerous. For some people price was aphrodisiac; for others it was poison. Anderson was not just the only restaurant in San Diego with two Michelin stars. People came specifically for their cellar. They had Californian and Chilean and South African and Australian wines, of course. But they specialized in the Old World. On at least a monthly basis, a single four-top might order a flight of pinot noir from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that totaled fifty thousand dollars. For what they were paying to get drunk, you could buy a foreclosed home in a lot of American cities and return it to the family who'd been evicted. But a bill like that might even put five hundred dollars in the dishwashers' pockets. Furthermore, as Amelia kept reminding herself, these people were having spiritual experiences. Domaine Leroy, for instance, following Rudolph Steiner's astrological calendar, gave each individual vine in its twenty-two-hectare vineyard a tea made from the fermented manure of a lactating cow, stuffed into a horn and buried for the winter on a south-facing hill. One of Amelia's clients, who'd ordered the 1996 Leroy Musigny Grand Cru for himself three separate times, claimed the first two bottles had been dominated by grapes oriented toward Saturn, and that the third had been influenced by Mars.
"Which do you prefer?" Amelia had asked.
"Mars," said the man. "It tastes like I've just won a war."
My end note on the piece as a whole was, "Hmmm. A little off the rails, but it's only an excerpt."
Issue recommended, as is a subscription thereto.
Emily Crossen's "The Orts" is a fun writing exercise, turned into an autofiction experiment as a frame. This one's for writers.
Sasha Graybosch's "The Pill" has an interesting POV ending:
...She went around the side of the building, to where no windows faced, and looked out across the empty lot protected on all sides by fence. Scrubby bushes, stretches of dirt. The clouds passed quickly, and the distant traffic made a low roar like waves. On her way inside, she passed a sign detailing plans for a forthcoming building expansion. In the renderings, all the people looked busy and happy but strangely out of place, as if they'd been plucked from another world mid-sentence and dropped into this one, and hadn't yet realized they were there.
I know exactly what effect this describes.
James Kaelin's "Côte de Nuits" has an opening section that is a master class on inserting POV and protagonist characterization in the opening. In point of fact, I'm stealing it for my workshops on openings, it's such a good example, so I'll share it with you, to tempt you to find the longer work it's part of:
Amelia's last night at Anderson, with the wine director out sick, a middle-aged couple arrived five minutes late for their reservation. They looked a little out of place. The woman wore white slacks and open-toed, four-inch Louis Vuitton heels. She'd gotten a blowout that afternoon, and her ash blond hair looked blue in the marine light of the Chihuly chandelier that hung from the foyer ceiling like a giant anemone. Her blouse--Hermès, Amelia guessed, purchased from a discount reseller--was covered in short-brimmed equestrian helmets festooned with silk bows. The top was meant to signal that she rode horses. Judging by her husband, though, she didn't own a stable. He was jowly and red-faced and wore a golf polo with a TravisMathew logo on the collar. Almost certainly a developer from Escondido with a LOCK HER UP bumper sticker on his truck. He was the kind of man--rough, funny, casually racist, always ready to haul something for a friend in his Ford F-250 Super Duty--that Amelia's father got paired with at charity golf tournaments but would never invite over for dinner.
Amelia had discovered that she was good at ascertaining the wealth of Anderson's patrons. She felt nasty doing it, but as a sommelier, she found the talent was useful. Guessing wrong could be dangerous. For some people price was aphrodisiac; for others it was poison. Anderson was not just the only restaurant in San Diego with two Michelin stars. People came specifically for their cellar. They had Californian and Chilean and South African and Australian wines, of course. But they specialized in the Old World. On at least a monthly basis, a single four-top might order a flight of pinot noir from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that totaled fifty thousand dollars. For what they were paying to get drunk, you could buy a foreclosed home in a lot of American cities and return it to the family who'd been evicted. But a bill like that might even put five hundred dollars in the dishwashers' pockets. Furthermore, as Amelia kept reminding herself, these people were having spiritual experiences. Domaine Leroy, for instance, following Rudolph Steiner's astrological calendar, gave each individual vine in its twenty-two-hectare vineyard a tea made from the fermented manure of a lactating cow, stuffed into a horn and buried for the winter on a south-facing hill. One of Amelia's clients, who'd ordered the 1996 Leroy Musigny Grand Cru for himself three separate times, claimed the first two bottles had been dominated by grapes oriented toward Saturn, and that the third had been influenced by Mars.
"Which do you prefer?" Amelia had asked.
"Mars," said the man. "It tastes like I've just won a war."
My end note on the piece as a whole was, "Hmmm. A little off the rails, but it's only an excerpt."
Issue recommended, as is a subscription thereto.
April 8, 2025
all McSweeney's publications get 5 stars from me
March 28, 2025
The real standout here was James Kaelan’s “Côte de Nuits,” a story from the POV of a sommelier at an upscale restaurant. A good unsettling story from Clare Beams, as well.
But overall, this was the slightest and most forgettable volume of McSweeney’s I’ve yet seen. Maybe I’m still trying to relive the high of the anniversary issue and the horror issue, but the last few volumes have been kind of…meh. I guess that’s the problem with greatness: you come to constantly expect it.
But overall, this was the slightest and most forgettable volume of McSweeney’s I’ve yet seen. Maybe I’m still trying to relive the high of the anniversary issue and the horror issue, but the last few volumes have been kind of…meh. I guess that’s the problem with greatness: you come to constantly expect it.
April 2, 2025
A delightful little edition of the Quarterly, thoughts on each story below. There were a few weaker stories offset by incredible ones. I enjoyed the original paintings and covert art by Claire Boyle. I normally can take or leave the letters but I also really liked the letters by Elisa Gonzalez ruminating on her divorce and by Caille Millner - such a reflection on autonomous technology and humanity!
The Orts by Emily Crossen, 5/5: A short one about the “ratself” many of us have within us. A thoughtful, comical and eerily relatable metaphor for darker parts of ourselves whether it be mental illness, hedonism, or introvert tendencies. I reflected on the connection between my own anxiety and depression and the “ratself” version of me.
The Pill by Sasha Greybosch, 4/5: I liked this one! As a woman in my late 20’s that’s been on the pill for ~15 years I’ve also wondered how pervasive its effect may or may not have been on my life. I wanted a bit more from the ending but this one was entertaining and relatable.
The Pantry/Merlin by Matthew Rohrer, 2/5: These ultra short stories don’t typically feel very impactful for me but I did enjoy the line about his wife “handling whatever this next thing was so softly, and whatever it was, I wished it was me.”
Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs by Icarus Koh, 5/5: I loved this one! A story about an optometrist specializing in care for non-human species meeting his final patient - a biblically accurate angel. So creative and interesting. I love stories where the fantastical and the mundane come in contact.
Playspace by Claire Beams, 5/5: Another great one about a child’s playspace turning into a sort of existential lottery of the children’s futures. And what a interesting and powerful prediction for the narrators own daughter!
An Incessant Discourse by Yuri Herrera, 1/5: Personally I didn’t really get this one and it didn’t stick with me at all
Excerpt from Porthole by Joanna Howard, 1/5: Same with this one, not memorable
Cote De Nuits by James Kaelan, 5/5: My favorite in this edition. A story of high-stakes fine dining from the perspective of both the sommelier trying to make a big sale to a maybe wealthy couple and from the wife in question. A reflection on how we perceive others and ourselves.
Just a Call Away by Mieko Kawakami, 2/5: I was excited to read this one as this author has been on my list for awhile… not sure if her style is for me.
The Good One by Venita Blackburn, 3/5: A short look at the author reconciling the different paths of life her and her sister have taken and what really makes you “the good one”
The Orts by Emily Crossen, 5/5: A short one about the “ratself” many of us have within us. A thoughtful, comical and eerily relatable metaphor for darker parts of ourselves whether it be mental illness, hedonism, or introvert tendencies. I reflected on the connection between my own anxiety and depression and the “ratself” version of me.
The Pill by Sasha Greybosch, 4/5: I liked this one! As a woman in my late 20’s that’s been on the pill for ~15 years I’ve also wondered how pervasive its effect may or may not have been on my life. I wanted a bit more from the ending but this one was entertaining and relatable.
The Pantry/Merlin by Matthew Rohrer, 2/5: These ultra short stories don’t typically feel very impactful for me but I did enjoy the line about his wife “handling whatever this next thing was so softly, and whatever it was, I wished it was me.”
Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs by Icarus Koh, 5/5: I loved this one! A story about an optometrist specializing in care for non-human species meeting his final patient - a biblically accurate angel. So creative and interesting. I love stories where the fantastical and the mundane come in contact.
Playspace by Claire Beams, 5/5: Another great one about a child’s playspace turning into a sort of existential lottery of the children’s futures. And what a interesting and powerful prediction for the narrators own daughter!
An Incessant Discourse by Yuri Herrera, 1/5: Personally I didn’t really get this one and it didn’t stick with me at all
Excerpt from Porthole by Joanna Howard, 1/5: Same with this one, not memorable
Cote De Nuits by James Kaelan, 5/5: My favorite in this edition. A story of high-stakes fine dining from the perspective of both the sommelier trying to make a big sale to a maybe wealthy couple and from the wife in question. A reflection on how we perceive others and ourselves.
Just a Call Away by Mieko Kawakami, 2/5: I was excited to read this one as this author has been on my list for awhile… not sure if her style is for me.
The Good One by Venita Blackburn, 3/5: A short look at the author reconciling the different paths of life her and her sister have taken and what really makes you “the good one”
November 12, 2025
Nothing stood out. This was a very bland edition.
If I had to choose something, it would be the paintings. A handful were located a few pages past center of the book, and the cover art was by the same artist.
Looked over and quickly forgotten.
If I had to choose something, it would be the paintings. A handful were located a few pages past center of the book, and the cover art was by the same artist.
Looked over and quickly forgotten.
September 3, 2025
A nice edition from the fine folks at McSweeney’s.
Favorite stories:
- The Pill, by Sasha Graybosch
- Playspace, by Claire Beams
- Cote de Nuits, by James Kaelan
Pretty good too:
- The Orts, by Emily Crossen
- Just a Call Away, by Mieko Kawakami
Meh:
- Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs, by Icarus Koh
- Battle Scenes, by Claire Boyle (artwork)
- The Good One, by Venita Blackburn
Disliked
- The two one-pagers from Matthew Rohrer
- An Incessant Discourse, by Yuri Herrera
- Porthole, by Joanna Howard (mainly because I dislike excerpts from larger works)
Just this quote, on being a wife and mother:
“Cold winter mornings when I woke up and felt more exhausted than I had ever imagined a person could feel, more exhausted than when I’d gone to bed, and when my husband went to work and our daughter became my daughter and she and I were home all day with only each other. She wasn’t nothing, he wasn’t nothing – but sometimes the self they needed from me bore no real resemblance to who I actually was, so that I, the real I, was nothing, or might as well have been. And nothing couldn’t hold them. Had no hands no eyes no ears no arms to do the holding with. Did it matter on what side the lack was, if the holding couldn’t be done?”
Favorite stories:
- The Pill, by Sasha Graybosch
- Playspace, by Claire Beams
- Cote de Nuits, by James Kaelan
Pretty good too:
- The Orts, by Emily Crossen
- Just a Call Away, by Mieko Kawakami
Meh:
- Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs, by Icarus Koh
- Battle Scenes, by Claire Boyle (artwork)
- The Good One, by Venita Blackburn
Disliked
- The two one-pagers from Matthew Rohrer
- An Incessant Discourse, by Yuri Herrera
- Porthole, by Joanna Howard (mainly because I dislike excerpts from larger works)
Just this quote, on being a wife and mother:
“Cold winter mornings when I woke up and felt more exhausted than I had ever imagined a person could feel, more exhausted than when I’d gone to bed, and when my husband went to work and our daughter became my daughter and she and I were home all day with only each other. She wasn’t nothing, he wasn’t nothing – but sometimes the self they needed from me bore no real resemblance to who I actually was, so that I, the real I, was nothing, or might as well have been. And nothing couldn’t hold them. Had no hands no eyes no ears no arms to do the holding with. Did it matter on what side the lack was, if the holding couldn’t be done?”
February 15, 2025
I've gotten so many of these in the mail and have so rarely cracked one open. For some reason this one hit me at the right time and I read it immediately.
Has a story from Yuri Herrera, who I'd just discovered, so that was a nice surprise.
"The Pill" by Sasha Graybosch was subtly unsettling.
And "Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs" by Icarus Koh has a memorable premise.
Has a story from Yuri Herrera, who I'd just discovered, so that was a nice surprise.
"The Pill" by Sasha Graybosch was subtly unsettling.
And "Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs" by Icarus Koh has a memorable premise.
April 14, 2025
This is one of the best McSweeney's in a while, and they are always good. Maybe "best" is the wrong word, but this one really spoke to me, especially Clare Beams' "Playspace." I ended up reading sentence after sentence out loud to my partner and talking about it to every parent I know. So powerful. Really stellar issue from a really stellar crew.
March 14, 2025
A shorter than usual, but eclectic collection of stories this time. I would definitely be interested in Icarus Koh and Claire Beams' other work. Claire Boyle's paintings in the center of the issue and cover are also very surreal and thought provoking. Looking forward to the next issue.
April 8, 2025
A bit uneven this time for my tastes. I thought the letter pages were good and the last third of stories being exceptional and lyrical. Cote de Nuits and The Pill are the two I keep thinking about.
They were also more of a character study which maybe is why they stood out to me.
They were also more of a character study which maybe is why they stood out to me.
July 3, 2025
My favorite stories in this collection were Sasha Graybosch’s “The Pill” with its deeply affecting account of office coworkers and the hilarious debut “Hell is a Thousand Eyeballs,” by Icarus Koh about an optometrist for mystical beings.
September 4, 2025
Interesting collection of short stories. In particular, James Kaelan's “Côte de Nuits” will stick with me for a long time. I'm not a regular McSweeney's reader; I bought this as a one-off because I had just attended a panel by the editor and one of the authors in this issue.
February 15, 2025
A strong edition of the Quarterly. "Cote de Nuits" by James Kaelan was fantastic in particular.
March 3, 2025
I am not an art person - the paintings did not resonate with me at all. But the stories were excellent.
March 19, 2025
Mcsweeney's has the monopoly on demented narrators who pull the reader into their off-kilter worlds. My only complaint about this issue is that it was too short!
March 27, 2025
Beautiful, surreal artwork by Claire Boyle. Highlights are ‘Hell is a thousand eyeballs’ by Icarus Koh and ‘ Côte de nuits’ by James Kaelan. ‘Playspace’ by Clare beams was also nice.
April 5, 2025
Hell Is A Thousand Eyeballs by Icarus Koh was my favorite story in the issue 👀
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April 27, 2025James Kaelan’s story stands out - brilliant. Also, I must read more of Mieko Kawakami. A pleasant surprise.
June 2, 2025
A few really good stories mixed in with some okay entries. The art was not really for me. A shorter than usual issue.
December 23, 2025
A solid issue with engaging stories.
April 22, 2025
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is my favorite literary magazine of short stories. Unfortunately, issue 77 seems to be a collection of rejected texts from previous issues, only the artwork by Claire Boyle and the stories by Icarus Koh and Yuri Herrerra bring some quality.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews