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McSWEENEY’S FALL 2013 CATALOG

55 60

65 75 90 110 160

amFICTION NONFICTION POETRY FOODMcMULLENS

NICK HORNBYHORNBY

A C O L O R G U I D E

how to order. PGW/Perseus Distributionphone: (800) 788-3123 | fax: (800) 351-5073

orderentry@perseusbooks.comkeep in touch.

sales/bookstores: Sam Riley (sam@mcsweeneys.net)

rights: Laura Howard (laura@mcsweeneys.net)

publicity: press@mcsweeneys.netwww.mcsweeneys.net

E L I Z A B E T H

G I L B E R T MARCOS GIRALT

TORRENTE•

DAVIDBYRNE

•

VICTORIACHANG

A N D L I Z C R A I N

j O H N G O R H A M

McSweeney’s McMullens, our tiny new children’s book department, publishes several great titles each year for all age levels—from picture books and middle readers through young adult novels. Every book is produced with special care and built to last, and strives to remind readers of just how delightful it can be to sit down and read a book. Here is a sampling of our latest titles. For full catalog and backlist, visit store.mcsweeneys.net or drop us a line.

LOST SLOTHj. OTTO seIbOld

Sloth’s phone rings and rings. He races across the room to answer the call, but he’s a sloth, so it takes a while. The phone says he’s won an afternoon shopping spree! Can the sloth get to the store in time to claim his prize? Yes, but it’s going to take a lot of fun steps to make that happen.

“Another clever, quirky outing.” —Kirkus

june 2013 hardcover picture book 7" × 9" 32 pages $16.95isbn: 978-1-938073-35-9 rights: World

mOmOmICHAel eNde (Trans. by luCAs zwIRNeR)

Illustrated by mARCel dzAmA

The Neverending Story is Michael Ende’s best-known book, but Momo is the all-ages fantasy masterpiece that

first won him wide acclaim. A brand-new edition, freshly illustrated and translated for the fortieth anniversary.

“So ingenious in its conception… so powerful in production. Splendid.” —Times Literary Supplement

august 2013 hardcover all-ages novel 6" × 8" 288 pages $23 isbn: 978-1-938073-14-4 rights: US

RECIPEANGelA & mICHAelANNe peTRellA Art by jACk TeAGle

Step aside, Mother—it’s Kristen’s turn to pick the recipe and make the dinner! There’s just one teensy problem: Kristen’s imagination is far more developed than her cooking skills. The recipe may not end up so delicious, but that’s okay: there’s a hungry raccoon family in the backyard who’ll eat just about anything.

august 2013 hardcover picture book 7" × 9" 48 pages $17.95isbn: 978-1-936365-84-5 rights: World

CRabTREEjON & TuCkeR NICHOls

Join Augustus Crabtree—hoarder… er, collector extraordinaire—on an epic

housewide quest to find his teeth. This whimsical and witty debut will nestle

nicely between the Richard Scarry books and Where’s Waldo on any

overstuffed bookshelf.

august 2013 hardcover picture book 7.5" × 12.5" 32 pages $17.95

isbn: 978-1-936365-82-1 rights: World

STuff THaT STayEd REadNICk HORNby

In late 2003, soon after an upstart magazine called the Believer was making its way into the world, Nick Hornby turned in the inaugural installment of a monthly column that immediately became a reader favorite. For the next ten years, Hornby’s incandescently funny

“Stuff I’ve Been Reading” chronicled a singular reading life—one that is measured not just in “books bought” and “books read,” as each column begins, but in the way our feelings toward Celine Dion say a lot about who we are, the way Body Shop Vanilla Shower Gel can add excitement to our days, and the way John Updike might ruin our sex lives. Hornby’s column is both an impeccable, wide-ranging reading list and an indispensable reminder of why we read.

Praise for Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column

“Very entertaining.”

—Boston Globe

“Terrific.”—Salon

“Hystericallyfunny.”—NPR

“Wonderful.”—The Guardian

“Brilliant.”—Austin Chronicle

“A joy.”—Philadelphia Weekly

november 2013 hardcover 6" × 8.5" 464 pages $28 isbn: 978-1-938073-73-1 rights: North America

HOw muSIC wORkSdAVId byRNe

Now available in paperback, How Music Works is David Byrne’s bestselling, buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Drawing on his work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and myriad collaborators—along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists—Byrne shows how music emerges from cultural circumstance as much as individual creativity. It is his magnum opus, and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.

“The book [Byrne] was born to write. I could make a good case for calling this How Art Works or even How Everything Works.” —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

“A decidedly generous book—welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence—and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years.”

—The Washington Post

“By all accounts, Byrne’s style and energy are as apparent on the page as on the stage.”—New York Magazine

NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

pApeR- bACk

september 2013 full-color paperback 6.5" × 8.375" 352 pages $20isbn: 978-1-938073-53-3 rights: WxCW

Also available in

hardcover!

isbn: 978-1-936365-53-1

THE bOSSVICTORIA CHANG

Written in “a breathless kind of fury,” the poems in award-winning poet Victoria Chang’s virtuosic third collection The Boss dance across the page with the brutal power and incandescent beauty of spring lightning. Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.

“Part meditation on corporate life, part exploration of mother- and daughterhood, part elegy for a father who has not yet died, The Boss is essential reading for anyone who has ever had a job, a child, a parent, or a heart.” —G.C. Waldrep

“In these pages, the question of whether to boss or be bossed is, in some sense, beside the point, for it becomes clear as this serial poem progresses that Chang is interested less in the brute structures of power that determine our day-to-day lives than in the more metaphysical question of what it really means to be human.” —Katy Lederer

“Brilliant.… To say simply that Chang takes the Modernist’s music and makes it new again, makes it alive, is to say only half-truth, for she truly re-inhabits it, re-kindles the flame. This radically new music is political, yes, but it is also ecstatic. It sees how ‘everything [is] green everything grown and aglow.’ And after each firework or verbal surprise or beautiful pyrotechnics comes flame of recognition. Each reader will find her own revelation in this rich collection, some will find fire, others healing, others ecstatic abandon. I, for one, found music.” —Ilya Kaminsky

august 2013 hardcover 6" × 8.25" 64 pages $20isbn: 978-1-938073-58-8 rights: World

TORO bRaVOjOHN GORHAm and lIz CRAINPhotographs by dAVId ReAmeR

At the heart of Portland’s red-hot food scene is Toro Bravo, a Spanish-inspired restaurant whose small plates have attracted a fiercely loyal fan base. But to call Toro Bravo a Spanish restaurant doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. For chef John Gorham, each dish reflects a time, a place, a moment. For Gorham, food is more than mere sustenance. The Toro Bravo cookbook is an honest look behind the scenes: from Gorham’s birth to a teenage mother who struggled with drug addiction, to time spent in his grandfather’s crab-shack dance club, to formative visits to Spain, to becoming a father and opening a restaurant.

Toro Bravo also includes 95 exceptional recipes, from simple salads to homemade chorizo, along with an array of techniques that will appeal to both the home cook and the most seasoned, forearm-burned chef.

THE COOKBOOK

JOHN GORHAM

& LIZ CRAIN

october 2013 full-color hardcover 9" × 9" 336 pages $35isbn: 978-1-938073-57-1 rights: World

aT HOmE ON THE RaNGEA Cookbook Presented by elIzAbeTH GIlbeRTWritten by Her Great-Grandmother mARGAReT yARdley pOTTeR

A cookbook far ahead of its time, Margaret Yardley Potter’s At Home on the Range, originally published in 1947, was rediscovered by the author Elizabeth Gilbert—who just so happens to be the author’s great-granddaughter. Gilbert’s “Gima” was no ordinary housewife: at a time when the American dinner table was hurtling towards homogeny, Potter espoused the importance of farmers’ markets and ethnic food (when pizza was considered ethnic), derided preservatives and culinary shortcuts, and lustily celebrated her epicurean adventures. Part scholar, part crusader, and always throwing parties, Potter could not but be a source of Gilbert’s own love of food, and her warm, infectious prose.

“She could have drunk and smoked Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher and probably even Dorothy Parker under the table.” —The New York Times

“A cookbook for modern times and modern cooks, full of sassy jokes and smartly written recipes.” —Bon Appetit

“Delightfully humorous and remarkably insightful.” —Los Angeles Times

pApeR- bACk

may 2013 paperback 5.75" × 8" 240 pages $15isbn: 978-1-938073-68-7 rights: USCO

Just in time for

Mother’s

Day

THE ENd Of LOVEmARCOs GIRAlT TORReNTeTranslated from the Spanish by kATHeRINe sIlVeR

In this quartet of mesmerizing stories, Marcos Giralt Torrente explores the confounding, double-edged promise of love. Each finds a man carefully churning over his past, trying to fathom how the distance between people can become suddenly unbridgeable.

Two tourists visit a remote island off the coast of Africa and are undone by a disconcerting encounter with another couple. A young man, enchanted by his bohemian cousin and her husband, watches them fall into a state of resentful dependence over the course of decades. A chaste but all-consuming love affair between a troubled boy and a wealthy but equally troubled girl leaves a lasting scar. The son of divorced parents tries in vain to reunite them before realizing why he is wrong to do so. In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente forges discomfiting and gripping dramas from the small but consequential misunderstandings that shape our lives.

“Marcos Giralt Torrente deserves to be considered one of the top players in contemporary Spanish literature.” —Enrique Vila-Matas, Babelia

From the book:

According to contemporary physics, space and time are one; how vexing that they should be, and that the Joanna I knew is now as remote as the one on the other side of the globe who possibly remembers me.

october 2013 hardcover 5.75" × 8.25" 176 pages $22isbn: 978-1-938073-56-4 rights: World

THE bEST Of mcSwEENEy’SEdited and with an Introduction by dAVe eGGeRs

To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the journal called “a key barometer of the literary climate” by the New York Times and twice honored with a National Magazine Award for fiction, here is The Best of McSweeney’s—a comprehensive collection of the most remarkable work from a groundbreaking magazine. Drawing on the full range of the journal thus far—from the very earliest volumes to our epic, Chris Ware–edited graphic novel issue to our most popular project yet, the full-on Sunday-newspaper issue known as The San Francisco Panorama, The Best of McSweeney’s is an essential retrospective of recent literary history. With full-color contributions from some of the pioneering artists and illustrators featured in our pages over the years (Marcel Dzama, Art Spiegelman, and many more) and a breathtaking array of first-rate fiction (and some incredible nonfiction, too), this is a book to be pored over, and lasting proof that the contemporary short story is as vital as ever.

“The first bona fide literary movement in decades.” —Slate

Also available: a special slipcased deluxe edition, featuring a bevy of the best-loved objects—playing cards, comics, minibooks, and combs—that have appeared in the quarterly over the years.

FeaturingwELLS TOwERRICk mOOdy

JOHN HOdGmaNZadIE SmITH

ROddy dOyLE

LydIa daVISSTEVEN mILLHauSER

and many more!

november 2013 hardcover 6.125" × 9.25" 384 pages

trade edition: $28 isbn: 978-1-938073-59-5deluxe edition: $50 isbn: 978-1-938073-60-1

rights: World

fEaTuREd baCkLIST

Mission Street FoodAnthony Myint & Karen Leibowitz

“An amazing story.”—Anthony Bourdain$30 isbn: 978-1-936365-15-9

The Very Persistent Gappers of FripGeorge Saunders

Illustrated by Lane Smith“Poignant, profound.”

—Entertainment Weekly$20 isbn: 978-1-932416-37-4

It Chooses YouMiranda July

“Captivatingly original.” —O magazine

$16 isbn: 978-1-938073-01-4

bESTSELLERS

How Music WorksDavid Byrne

“Truly dazzling.” —The Onion A.V. Club

$32 isbn: 978-1-936365-53-1

Song ReaderBeck

“The best-looking, music-free pop album ever.” —Fast Company

$34 isbn: 978-1-938073-38-0

The Expeditioners

Sarah Stewart Taylor “Full of kid power, clues,

codes and maps.” —Kirkus $22 isbn: 978-1-938073-06-9