Dear McSweeney's

The mission of the American Writers Museum is to excite audiences about the impact of American writers - past, present and future - in shaping our collective histories, cultures, identities, and daily lives.

American Writers Museum

Contributing writers read and discuss "Dear McSweeney's," approximately twenty-three years of exceptional letters to the editor.

Join us for a fun night with a range of writers who'll discuss their contributions to Dear McSweeney's. Hosted by McSweeney's senior editor Daniel Levin Becker.More about Dear McSweeney's:McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern has been printing issues
 since 1998 and sending them into the world with reckless faith. Now and then, the world writes back. In two
 decades and change, we’ve accumulated a heady archive
 of letters to the editor: dispatches, pleas, confessions,
 treatises, ruminations, rants, raves, and the occasional
 misdirected customer service query. Dear McSweeney’s
 takes readers into the depths of this archive—including
 material that’s long been out of print. “We like to think of
 these pieces as personal essays smuggled into the Quarterly
 in the form of letters,” says Quarterly editor Claire Boyle.Collected here are one hundred installments from this
 sprawling many-to-one correspondence, including but
 not limited to musings on moths and mummies, macaroons and cats, armadillos and homicidal sea worms and
 the arcana of Jerry Lewis’s acting career. In turns poignant
 and absurd, these letters are a sparkling glimpse into the
 strange and unforgettable lives of McSweeney’s readers.
 Their unexpected perspectives—messy, weird, tender,
 funny—synchronize here into a collective portrait of who
 we are. Says Levin Becker: “Think of Dear McSweeney’s as
 a highly experimental epistolary novel whose only real
 plot is the gentle, inevitable passing of time.”Contributing writers include Hanif Abdurraqib, Ana Marie Cox, Yuri Herrera, Brandon Hobson, Julie Klausner, R.O. Kwon, Jonathan Lethem, Thao Nguyen, Jenny Odell, Jason Polan, Simon Rich, Michelle Tea, Sarah Vowell and more than 80 other writers, artists, comedians, musicians, poets, and thinkers.DANIEL LEVIN BECKER is senior editor at McSweeney’s. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels (Harvard University Press, 2012) and What’s Good (City Lights Publishers, 2022), and translator of works by Georges Perec, Éric Chevillard, Michelle Grangaud, and Eduardo Berti, among others. He lives in Paris.

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Dear McSweeney's

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Dear McSweeney's

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