If you open McSweeney’s 38, out later this month, to page 193, you’ll find something we haven’t tried before: our first-ever set of coupons, printed on the back of a small, sewn-in comic book. This is something we’ve wanted to do since Issue 33, at least, and now we are doing it—every copy of our thirty-eighth issue comes with three clip-and-mail rectangles that, if you send them to us, offer you a chance at having something sent back to you.
What might you get? We’re twenty-some issues in to our weekly syndicated comics feature, The Goods; we’ve made a handful of those issues into a tiny batch of giant posters, and a select few coupon-senders will get one of those. Coupon #2 commemorates Lucky Peach, our newest quarterly; Tokyo ramen magnate Ivan Orkin is sending us a few breathtakingly rare containers of his garlic maze men, a variety of reheatable noodle otherwise unavailable in the United States but soon to take Honshu by storm, and these will go to a randomly selected bunch of those who use the relevant coupon to sign up in time for Lucky Peach no. 2.
And then, perhaps most intriguingly, there are the ten pounds of coffee roasted by Mr. Nathan Englander, occasional McSweeney’s contributor and author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and The Ministry of Special Cases. He has been practicing, as the below video will attest, and by the time the winners are chosen (there will be ten bags, specially designed, of one pound each), we think his coffee will be very good indeed.
There are other excellent reasons to sign up for this issue, too—it’s got some incredible new fiction from Ariel Dorfman and Nathaniel Rich and Steven Millhauser and Roddy Doyle, plus some incredible nonfiction in the form of Chanan Tigay’s fifty-page exploration of what it means that Arab soldiers in the Israeli military seem to keep getting their houses knocked down by the Israeli government, and it’s got that sewn-in comic, on top of everything else, which tells the story of a man named Keith who is trapped in the jungle with his friend, a cat. It’s a very good issue, in other words, and subscriptions are as cheap as ever; you can read more about what’s inside it right here.
But if those details leave you unmoved, remember this: by signing up for this one, you’re one step closer to drinking what may well be the best cup of coffee being produced by an American novelist today. If another writer comes forward to challenge Mr. Englander’s grasp of the roasting process, we’ll consider a follow-up offer; for now, though, “Englander’s First Crack Coffee,” as he calls it, available only through McSweeney’s 38 and personal friendships with the author himself, has set the standard.
There are a few weeks left to lock in a subscription; for questions, write to custservice@mcsweeneys.net. Do we need to say Void where prohibited here? If so, please understand that wherever they are prohibited, these offers are void; in all other places, where the clear light shines on free men and women as they enjoy noodles and coffee and posters acquired through the honest labor of cutting up literary magazines, we gratefully extend these coupons to you.