Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is an American literary journal, founded in 1998, typically containing short stories, reportage, and illustrations. Some issues also include poetry, comic strips, and novellas. The Quarterly Concern is published by McSweeney's based in San Francisco and it has been edited by Dave Eggers. The journal is notable in that it has no fixed format, and changes its publishing style from issue to issue, unlike more conventional journals and magazines.

The first issue featured only works that had been rejected by other publications, but the journal has since begun publishing pieces written with McSweeney's in mind.

McSweeney's was founded in 1998^[1][2] after Dave Eggers left an editing position at Esquire, during the same time he was working on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. McSweeney's is a sort of successor to Eggers' earlier magazine project Might, although Might was focused on editorial content and news, and not literature. Eggers also refers to McSweeney's as having "less edge" than Might.^[3]

Although originally reaching only a small audience, McSweeney's has grown to be a well respected journal, with Ruth Franklin, writing for Slate, referring to the Quarterly (and company) as "...the first bona fide literary movement in decades". In 2013, NPR wrote about the company's fifteenth anniversary, and referred to the journal as the "flagship literary quarterly" of a "literary empire based in San Francisco".^[4]

Notable authors featured in McSweeney's include Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Robert Coover, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace and Ann Beattie. The Quarterly has also helped launch the careers of dozens of emerging writers, including Philipp Meyer, Wells Tower, and Rebecca Curtis.

In 2007, McSweeney's received the National Magazine Award for Fiction for three stories published in 2006: "Wild Child" by T.C. Boyle (Issue 19); "To Sit, Unmoving" by Susan Steinberg (author) (Issue 20); and "The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan" by Rajesh Parameswaran (Issue 21).^[5]

In 2010, Anthony Doerr, Wells Tower, and Kevin Moffett won the National Magazine Awards for their stories "Memory Wall", "Raw Water", and "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events", respectively, all published in Issue 32.

McSweeney's publishes each issue in a different format. Past issues have ranged in format from simple hardcovers or softcovers to more unconventional configurations, such as newspapers, a bundle of mail, a box emblazoned with a man's sweaty head, and a deck of playing cards.^[6] Some issues feature writing exclusively or mostly from one geographic area, such as Issue 15, which contained half American and half Icelandic writing.

In Issue 10, it was claimed that exactly 56 issues of the journal would be published. In Issue 20, this claim was repeated in an advertisement that stated: "There will be roughly thirty-six [issues] to come; then, a five-year retrenchment." With the publication of Issue 56 it was revealed that this had always been a joke and that they would continue to publish until at least issue 156.

^ Contributors: A few of the purported contributors—especially in the Letters sections—are pseudonyms used by Eggers and others associated with the journal. Also, although Dale Peck appears in the list of contributors at the end of Issue 1, his name is not attached to any actual contribution, and his name does not appear in the Appendix to The Better of McSweeney's, which lists all of the main contributors to Issues 1 through 10.
^ Issue 1: First printing of 2,500 copies.
^ Issues 1-3: The first three issues were reprinted as a set in 2002, and again in 2006.
^ Issue 5: The four dustjackets: 1) medical drawing of an arm, with text, 2) illustration of a person with a head lesion, 3) plain white cover, and 4) "Simple red cover". All four have a list of contributors on the back; jacket 3 also has the illustration of the head lesion and two medical drawings of arms. The three book covers: A) front similar to jacket 1, but with a different arm and different text, which is reversed; the back shows a collection of small black-and-white drawings with the caption, "The Assembled", B) an outtake from Susan Minot's piece on Uganda, front and back, and C) color photographs of Ted Koppel, front and back.^[7] Also, the jackets and books were not matched randomly. Jackets 1 and 4 go over book A, jacket 2 over book B, and jacket 3 over book C.
^ Issue 10: The retail edition was issued, in a slightly different form, as a Vintage Original paperback in February 2003. (ISBN 978-1-4000-3339-3) It was followed in 2004 by a companion volume, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, also edited by Chabon and published as a Vintage Original (ISBN 978-1-4000-7874-5)
^ Issue 11: 20,000 total copies: black, 9,000 copies; brown, 8,300; yellow/orange, 1,800; blue, 900.^[8]
^ Issue 12: Contents and Letters (white); "Twelve new stories from twelve new writers" (pink); novella by Roddy Doyle (blue); Twenty-Minute Stories (green).
^ Issue 17: The mail is addressed to: [Sgt.] Maria Vasquez, 4416 North 16th Street, Arlington, VA 22207
^ Issue 21: According to the editor's note on the copyright page, there are "eight different covers, quiet variations made possible by a quirk of the printing process." The variations are a result of different left/right displacements of the illustration.
^ Issue 22: The subtitles of Books 2 and 3 are as they appear on the front covers of the books; different subtitles are shown on the case.

• Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
• The Best of McSweeney's, Volume 1 (Hamish Hamilton, 2004)
• The Best of McSweeney's, Volume 2 (Hamish Hamilton, 2005)
• The Better of McSweeney's: Volume One — Issues 1 – 10, Stories and Letters (McSweeney's Books, 2005)
• The Best of McSweeney's (McSweeney's Books, 2013)