Coming to you at the intersection of book and tapestry, the seventy-ninth issue of our National Magazine Award-winning quarterly is embroidered from head to toe--using precisely 133,095 stitches of thread--with the art of
Marta Monteiro. Inside this tactile, textile, tangerine-backdropped, cloth-bound art object are nine new stories, three fresh novel excerpts, six timely letters, an essay as sharp as a blade, a stunningly surreal slice of a graphic novel by
Patrick Keck, and a shockingly beautiful, hot-pink suite of Mary Magdalenes painted by
Leanne Shapton.
As your fingers caress the raised topography of this issue's beyond-belief weave, marvel at a story by
Joseph Earl Thomas in which time stops mid-dunk; a novel excerpt by
Helen DeWitt and
Ilya Gridneff in which invented languages make a play; a story by
Ahmed Naji that circles Cairo rap clashes; a captivating, climate-terror portrait of a story by
T.C. Boyle; three totally crisp, sentence-gem-adorned stories by
Diane Williams; dazzling letters by
Jac Jemc,
Meng Jin,
Rebekah Bergman, and so much more!
Blow a kiss goodbye to summer, and brush your hands over the neon-threaded landscape of
Issue 79 to feel a magazine that, both inside and out, is truly like no other.
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.