McSweeney's Issue 64 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): The Audio Issue

McSweeney's 64: The Audio Issue, co-produced with Radiotopia from PRX, orbits the ideas of access and augmentation--what does it mean to translate something visual into audio and vice versa; how does meaning shift and expand in the process; and what is created when these mediums come together? We're excited about marrying sound and printed matter--exploring how they augment each other and combine to create a new, layered experience. Each piece in the issue will establish its own relationship between audio and print--the contributor's unique experiment in weaving the mediums. In addition to the physical issue, we're producing an accessible transcript that will appear online. In it, each piece will be available in multiple forms (audio, visual, digital), in order for the story to be experienced through a variety of sensory organs and accessibility tools.

Pieces will be both fiction or nonfiction; some will lean heavier on audio, some heavier on the textual/visual. They'll be bizarre, surreal, heartfelt, personal, informative, interactive. The form of the issue will be a box containing multiple booklets and other printed matter, in order to accommodate the varied, experimental types of pieces included.

The issue's contributors include fiction writers, audio producers, photographers, composers, illustrators, playwrights. Amongst the issue's contributions are Peter Orner and Jean Pierre Marseille with an audio essay on Haiti in the era of Covid; Pulitzer Prize winning composer Kate Soper with a transhumanist, interactive software upload; DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark on the limits of accessibility; Claudia Dey, Jason Reynolds, Renee Gladman, Sharon Mashihi and more taking us on universal audio tours of our own homes; Aliya Pabani, with a radio drama whose plot is complicated by a 24 x 30 fold-out poster featuring seven comic strips; Katie Booth disproving the myth that the Deaf experience is one of silence; Yvette Jackson, with an Afrofuturist radio opera; Ian Chillag, with an absurdist, interactive phone tree for a toy manufacturers' support line; Jason Fulford, translating audio stories into photography; James T. Green, Sayre Quevedo, Catherine Lacey, and This American Life's Sean Cole with voicemail dispatches to the editor; and so, so much more.

The issue is co-produced by Andrew Leland (former Believer managing editor, and creator/host/co-producer of The Organist podcast), and supported by Julie Shapiro (executive producer of Radiotopia) and Audrey Mardavich (managing producer of Radiotopia).

About McSweeney's Quarterly:

Ever changing, each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned (there have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head), but always brings you the very best in new literary fiction.

A key barometer of the literary climate.-The New York Times

McSweeney's is so much more than a magazine; it's a vital part of our culture. -Geoff Dyer, McSweeney's contributor and author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

• Format: Misc.
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1952119057
• ISBN13: 9781952119057
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: McSweeney's Quarterly Concern
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 8.7" x 10.8"