McSweeney's Issue 37 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern) - Tapa dura

Presents a collection of stories from around the world, including five stories set in Kenya.

Mike Sacks has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Radar, Funny or Die, MAD, New York Observer, Premiere, Believer, Vice, Maxim, Women's Health, and Salon. He has worked at The Washington Post, and is currently on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. His first book, And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Humor Writers About Their Craft, was released in Summer 2009. His 2014 book was a sequel to And Here's the Kicker, called Poking a Dead Frog. His latest book, Stinker Lets Loose, is the 40th anniversary re-release of the movie by the same name. James Fleming is a college literature instructor and writer, and the author of the Cosby Codex for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Jamie Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary, and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, VQR, Agni, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in The O.Henry Prize Stories 2013, The Story and Its Writer (ed. Ann Charters), and the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology. A Contributing Editor at Oxford American, Quatro teaches in the summers-only MFA program at Sewanee, The University of the South, and lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Christopher Monks is the author of The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life and has been the editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency since 2007. Ted Travelstead is an actor and writer working at Vanity Fair. He is a co-author of SEX: Our Bodies, Our Junk. Hallie Haglund is an American comedian and Emmy-winning writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She began working for the show in 2006, becoming a staff writer in 2010. Haglund is currently the longest-serving female writer on The Daily Show. Previously, she had worked as an NBC Studios page in Los Angeles while studying improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade's L.A. theater. Jamie Allen has published fiction and nonfiction in outlets like the Missouri Review, Salon, Slate, Paste, and New South. Brendan Emmett Quigley has been a professional puzzlemaker since 1996. In fact, he's the sixth-most published constructor in The New York Times under Will Shortz's editorship. Brendan's puzzles have also appeared in every major market including Creators Syndicate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Crosswords Club, Dell Champion, Games Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Sun, Tribune Media Services, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He regularly contributes work to The AV Crossword Club, Bawdy Crosswords, Spirit Magazine, Visual Thesaurus, and The Weekly Dig. At one point in time, Blender, Electronic Business, Paste Magazine, Quarterly Review of Wines, The Stranger, Time Out New York, and Wired.com ran his work. His puzzles have been mentioned on episodes of "The Colbert Report," "Jeopardy!," and "Sunday Night Football." He is the author of over thirty different books. In his spare time he can be seen banging on typewriters in the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. Steve Delahoyde is a writer and filmmaker in Chicago, where he plies his trades at the creative firm Coudal Partners. Laraine Newman (born March 2, 1952) is an American comedian, actress, voice artist, and writer who was part of the original cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet. His book Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution came to America was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Jonathan Franzen is the author of Purity and four other novels, most recently The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project, all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. J. Malcolm Garcia's writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Mother Jones, West Branch, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and various other publications. He's written about the drug war in Mexico, race relations in Jena, Louisiana, and the poor of Buenos Aires, among other topics. He is the author of memoir about his work in Afghanistan, The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon Press). Jess Walter is the author of six novels, most recently the New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins (2012). He was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and winner of the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel for Citizen Vince. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, Playboy and other publications. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington. Nelly Reifler has published stories in magazines such as Bomb, Black Book, Post Road, Exquisite Corpse, and The Florida Review, as well as the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. A Rotunda Gallery grant recipient and MacDowell Fellow, she received the Henfield Prize for two of the stories in this collection. Her plays have been performed in the United States and Australia, and she currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is the most popular writer among Israel`s young generation and has also received international acclaim. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope. Over 40 short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV Prize. His feature film Wristcutters (2006) also won several international awards, and $ 9.99, based on a number of his short stories, was released to critical acclaim in 2009. At present, Keret lectures at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has received the Book Publishers Association`s Platinum Prize several times, the Prime Minister`s Prize, the Ministry of Culture`s Cinema Prize, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize (UK, 2008) and the St Petersburg Public Library`s Foreign Favorite Award (2010); he was also a finalist for the prestigious Frank O`Connor Short Story Collection Prize (2007). In 2007, Keret and Shira Gefen won the Cannes Film Festival`s "Camera d`Or" Award for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award of the French Artists and Writers` Guild. In 2010, Keret was honored in France with the decoration of Chevalier de l`Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Edan Lepucki is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me and the novels California and Woman No. 17. Edan is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, and The Cut, among others. The Los Angeles Times named her a Face to Watch for 2014. A contributing editor to The Millions and the founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, she is also the creator of the popular Instagram @mothersbefore. John Hyduck's writing has appeared in Ohio and Cleveland magazines. Kevin Moffett's first collection of stories, Permanent Visitors, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by George Saunders, and was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Believer Book Award. His new collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is forthcoming in March from Harper Perennial. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney's and his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Harvard Review, American Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune, the Believer, A Public Space, and in three editions of The Best American Short Stories (2006, 2009, and 2010). He has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He won the National Magazine Award in 2010 for "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events." Novelist, essayist, and poet Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She earned a BA from Syracuse University, where she graduated valedictorian, and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Oates is the author of over 70 books, including the novels them (1969), winner of the National Book Award; Bellefleur (1980); You Must Remember This (1987); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Blonde (2000), winner of the National Book Award; The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007); and The Accursed (2013). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Harper's, and have been widely anthologized. Oates has also authored ten books of poetry, including Women In Love and Other Poems (1968), Love and Its Derangements (1970), The Time Traveler (1989), and Tenderness (1996). Oates is the winner of the O. Henry Award, the National Humanities Medal, the Pivano Award, the Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rae Award for the Short Story, and the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Joe Meno is a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize, he is the author of seven novels, Marvel and a Wonder, Office Girl, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender as Hellfire. His short story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir and Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, One Story, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. He is also the creator of Star Witness, a seven part serial on Electric Literature. He was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago Magazine. Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina (born 18 January 1971) is a Kenyan author, journalist and 2002 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. In April 2014, Time magazine included Wainaina in its annual TIME 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World." His debut book, a memoir entitled One Day I Will Write About This Place, was published in 2011. Keguro Macharia is a poet and literary critic. A member of the concerned Kenyan Writers collective and the Koroga collaborative, he blogs at gukira.wordpress.com. He teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Richard Onyango's work has been exhibited in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Billy Kahora is the Managing Editor of Kwani? He also writes fiction and completed an MS.c in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Edinburgh as a Chevening Scholar in 2007. Before that, Billy studied and worked in South Africa for 8 years and in between worked as an Editorial Assistant for All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He has a Bachelor of Journalism degree and post-graduate diploma in Media Studies from Rhodes University. His short story, 'Treadmill Love', was highly commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He edited 'Kenya Burning', a visual narrative of the Kenya post-elections crisis published by the GoDown Arts Centre and Kwani Trust in March 2009. His extended feature, 'The True Story of David Munyakei' on Kenya's biggest whistleblower has been developed into a non-fiction novella and was released by Kwani Trust in July 2009. Billy was a Regional judge for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize as well as the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born 1968) is a Kenyan writer, who won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers", which considers an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in Kenya. The story was originally published in Kwani?, the Kenyan literary magazine set up by Binyavanga Wainaina after he won the Caine Prize the previous year. In 2004, she won the Woman of the year (Arts, Heritage category) for her contributions to the arts in Kenya. In September 2015, her critically acclaimed book Dust was not only shortlisted for the Folio Prize, but also won Kenya's pre-eminent literary prize, the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Annette Lutivini Majanja holds an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Maryland), a B.A in Language and Communication from the University of Nairobi and a certificate in Book, Magazine and Electronic Publishing. Annette is a fiction writer and has published stories in various publications including Kwani?, Lawino, Jalada and the Golden Key.