The Believer

Summer 26

By Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, Ed Park, and more

2022

First Published

3.83

Average Rating

144

Number of Pages

4H24M

Audio Length

Named the best magazine of 2022 by Alta . Sound the bugles! The Believer is back with McSweeney's! This massive 144-page resurrection issue is packed with highlights. We have essays from Rafia Zakaria, Sarah Marshall, and Ryan Walsh, and new guest columns from Claire Vaye Watkins and Hanif Abdurraqib . There is an interview with Alan Alda, in which he extensively discusses fruit cake. There are conversations with musicians Angel Olsen and Rickie Lee Jones, and between Aubrey Plaza and Miguel Arteta . There is a new crossword, which is very difficult but also, in our opinion, very enjoyable. There is commentary, from Oscar Villalon, on San Francisco's 24th Street McDonald's, and a tribute to Greg Tate from Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah . There is an exegesis of thirteenth century children's art. There is a surprise guest advice columnist (you'll just have to pick it up to find out who it is). There are other new ingredients too, like our first-ever worldwide best sellers list. Not to mention all of the other regular things you have come to expect from The Believer, like Nick Hornby 's column on what he's been reading, and schemas that exhaustively analyze the demon babies of medieval art. This one is not to be missed. Revel in the relaunch of this unkillable arts and culture magazine.

Avg Rating

3.83

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

20%

4 STARS

45%

3 STARS

33%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Authors

Heidi Julavits

Author · 9 books

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney's Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003) and The Uses of Enchantment (2006) and The Vanishers (2012). She was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University. She wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (subtitled: "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue of The Believer, a publication which attempts to avoid snarkiness and "give people and books the benefit of the doubt." In 2005, she told the New York Times culture writer A.O. Scott how'd she decided on The Believer's tone: "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't." She added her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience." She has also written short stories, such as "The Santosbrazzi Killer", which was published in Harper's Magazine. Julavitz currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children

Vendela Vida

Author · 10 books

Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of four books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers, and a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She is also the co-editor of Always Apprentices, a collection of interviews with writers, and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. As a fellow at the Sundance Labs, she developed Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name into a script, which received the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award. Two of Vida’s novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the year, and she is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children, and since 2002 has served on the board of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring lab for youth.

Ed Park

Author · 5 books

I'm the author of the forthcoming novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (November 2023). I started writing it in 2014, but the inspiration for parts of it reach even further back. I hope you like it. My first novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was named a top 10 fiction book by Time Magazine and one of the decade's top 10 pop culture moments by The Atlantic. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. My story WEIRD MENACE is available as an Audible Original. A short story collection is forthcoming. What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and many other places. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some recent pieces.) NB, I am *not* the author of THE WORLD OF THE OTTER, by the late nature writer Ed Park, but it's worth picking up if you see a copy (and like otters).

Dave Eggers

Author · 60 books

Dave Eggers is the author of ten books, including most recently Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, The Circle and A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of eight tutoring centers around the country and ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible. He lives in Northern California with his family.

Nick Hornby

Author · 44 books

Nick Hornby is the author of the novels A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and The Polysyllabic Spree, as well as the editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the winner of the 2003 Orange Word International Writers’ London Award. Among his many other honors and awards, four of his titles have been named New York Times Notable Books. A film written by Hornby, An Education – shown at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim – was the lead movie at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and distributed by Sony that fall. That same September, the author published his latest novel, Juliet, Naked to wide acclaim. Hornby lives in North London.