Our New Year’s Resolution: Spend More Time with the Kids

Film still from Back to School, 1986.

As truisms go, “They grow up so fast” is a doozy. Take it from us. A mere fifteen years ago, when The Paris Review was a sprightly forty-five, we looked on in wonder as McSweeney’s took its first steps in this world, a mock eighteenth-century gazette from the outskirts of Silicon Valley. At moments we glimpsed a younger, friendlier version of ourselves, if we’d been born in a small nonsmoking city where people did graphic design. We laughed at their jokes. We admired the typesetting. We even paid a couple of visits to their pirate store.

What can we say? Time did its thing. We remained on the East Coast, McSweeney’s on the West. As the years passed, we begged off various ballet recitals, countless soccer games, and at least one fiction reading that had an acoustic guitar component. We were an absentee elder sister. No more! With a new year upon us and McSweeney’s entering its headstrong teenage phase, we want a second chance: at the ripe old age of sixty, we’re spending more time with the kid.

All month long, we’re offering a subscription deal in conjunction with McSweeney’s: you can get both magazines for just $75, a 20 percent savings. Because it’s 2014, and you don’t have to make the same mistakes we did. You can have it all: the interviews, fiction, poetry, art, essays, humor, and translations that make us proud to be in the same business.