OUR TWENTIETH ISSUE.
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It's taken eight years, but our quarterly has made it—one-fifth of 100 issues. Back in the late '90s, when short fiction was still regarded with fear and suspicion, like cloning and organic vegetables, no one believed we would last. They said to us, or to our clunky, desk-sized answering machines, "You won't last. I don't believe it." We still have those messages, hundreds of them; we listen to them every morning, while we do abdominal exercises.
It's worth remembering that it took Newsweek over a decade to get this far, to this distant aerie, where the air is clear and bright. And they cheated, too—they may have changed the cover, but the careful reader will see that Newsweek Issue 14 was really just a reprint of Newsweek Issue 3. Ask your librarian, or one of your elderly relatives, if you don't believe us; and if they deny it, don't believe them. We did not cheat, is our point. Issue 20 is not just a leftover copy of Issue 9 with its registration number chiseled off that we spray-painted gold (unlike, say, National Geographic Issue 38). It is solid, nonstop newness, exactly 103 percent as new as any issue that came before it.
And because up here the vistas fill us with an appreciation for light and form and a strange love for all humanity, Issue 20 includes, along with 14 stories, 50 full-color paintings, one filling every fourth page, as well as another that bulges, truly bulges, off the cover. They're by artists like Franz Ackermann, Kevin Christy, Jules de Balincourt, Mamma Andersson, Chris Duncan, and Rachell Sumpter, and they look great. The fiction is just as vivid—expect willful dictators, capricious supreme beings, collegiate and postcollegiate and correctional-facility intrigue, and, tucked in the back in its own unassuming booklet, the opening 50 pages of Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, about which you'll be hearing a lot more soon. For now, though, you can read half of the issue's first paragraphs below. This is what other publications call a "teaser"—we prefer "el embromador," but really it's tomato/tomahto. The full issue can be purchased here.
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Seven Beginnings
From Issue 20.
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When God gave me my own island, He said, take this island and make it yours. Do whatever you want, He said. Invite anyone and drink all the booze there is. But there's one caveat, you must never take the coconuts from the tree with the purple trunk. I asked him why, but He had already vanished into a plume of smoke.
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The two of them, Ben and Adria, meeting in a manatee pool. The pool, part of Manatee Encounter, is edged by smooth-topped coquina rocks on which elderly couples sun themselves, apparently tired of communing with the lumbering sea life. "Nature's speed bumps," one of the men says. The elderly couples watch the rehabilitated manatees swim around and around beneath Ben and Adria, the sole humans in the pool, who tread water in black life jackets. "Mauled by boats, all of them," one of the wives says.
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Dennis and I are playing chess when the guards bring Jingo in. His name is Jingo because this is what someone yells from the first tier. Hey, the voice yells, look at this Jingo. Our tier is the second, and there is a third and fourth above. We stare out onto an expanse of concrete and across the expanse, a control room where the guards stare back. There is the control room, and there are railed walkways (our side and theirs), and the men pace back and forth behind their rails, back and forth in front of ours, back and forth and back and forth in their tan and brown uniforms with PCI stenciled on their patches and PCI on their badges of shiny brass and AR-15s braced against the shined buckles above their hips. Those rifles are saying, go ahead and see, why don't you. Go ahead and see.
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Say a rising movie star visited a children's hospital and a little boy fell in love with her and decided that she was his destiny. Say the nature of his disease mattered. Say it also mattered that she had received no guarantees about the future of her professional success. Say the industry is fickle. Say bad things can happen to innocent people. Say good things, too. Say the story ends neither happily nor sadly because it is not always the privilege of stories to know when they are about to end, are ending, or have ended.
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Dear Amytis,
Today I had a visit in my cell from some very self-important men who had many questions which, presumably, they thought to be very provocative and profound, but which ultimately bored me and took me away from the work that has become all I have left: my most recent novel. Dedicated, of course, to you.
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Spring came and Pop sold half the flock and took his preaching on the road. As per usual, I set about to fuck up all gainfulness toward a future. Like Pop said on his radio sermon: a man is full of water; water runs downhill, seeks out the lowest places. One transgression feeds into another like runnel into river, until you're drifting in a fog-locked ocean of iniquity.
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A man grabbed my father by his shirt. Then he punched my father's face.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Our Twentieth Issue
Future Garfield Strips, If Garfield Aged at the Normal Feline Rate (Based on Real-Life Experiences With a Twentysomething Cat) By Andrew and Edward Kirkpatrick
We Must Never Forget Whatever Happened Here Today By John Howell Harris
George Viebranz Has Taken to His Bed By George Viebranz
Stephen Dixon Returns
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Black dot denotes newish content.