McSweeney's 31 - Tapa dura

'Everything about the way we write changes constantly. New forms are created and destroyed, conjoined with others and absorbed back into the cultural mainstream; parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones. In the wake of those changes are dozens of dead forms from every corner of civilization, strange and wonderful styles thousands of miles and hundreds of years removed from what we read now. With this issue, we've dug up those old genres, dusted them off, and recruited writers to revitalize the ones we thought demanded it' Darren Franich and Graham Weatherley

Edited and founded by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know our Velocity. How We Are Hungry and What is the What, McSweeney's is quite simply the best literary journal in the Americas. Its compilers are committed to publishing the work of gifted but often under-appreciated writers, and pushing the literary form forward at all times. Co-published by Hamish Hamilton on a roughly quarterly schedule, each issue of McSweeney's is unique in both design and content