McSweeney's three-time National Magazine Award-winning quarterly returns with a subjective and selective group of manifestos, all from the twentieth century and onward, all roaring with outrage and plans for a better world. Featuring life- and history-changing works from André Breton, Bertrand Russell, Valerie Solanas, Huey Newton, John Lee Clark, Dadaists, Futurists, Communists, Personists, and many more past and future -ists, plus brand-new work from brilliant radical thinkers Eileen Myles and James Hannaham. Let this incendiary collection light your whole world on fire.
From the introduction:
We need manifestos. They are often strange, ill-considered, and regrettable. They are just as often brilliant and pivotal in changing government, art, and the direction of the human animal. But always manifestos are passionate, always they command attention and use language for perhaps its most urgent purposes--the rattling of complacent minds.
Featuring:
The Manifesto of Futurism (1909) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Dada Manifesto (1918) by Tristan Tzara
Dadaism in Life and Art (1918) by Richard Huelsenbeck
Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) by André Breton
Manifesto (1952) by John Cage
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955) by Bertrand Russell
Personism: A Manifesto (1959) by Frank O'Hara
Second Declaration of Havana (1962) by Fidel Castro
Plan of Delano (1966) by United Farm Workers
The Ten-Point Program (1966) by Huey Newton
S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967) by Valerie Solanas
Principles of the Asian American Political Alliance (1968) by Asian American Political Alliance
Redstockings Manifesto (1969) by Redstockings
Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female (1969) by Frances M. Beal
The Gay Manifesto (1970) by Carl Wittman
The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective
Why Cheap Art? (1984) by Peter Schumann
The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988) by Guerrilla Girls
I want a president (1988) by Zoe Leonard
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010) by Edwidge Danticat
The First Manifesto of the Museum of Everyday Life (2011) by Clare Dolan
No Stage (2015) by John Lee Clark
Manifesto for World Revolution (2023) by Kalle Lasn
Press Conference for a Tree (2023) by Eileen Myles
Destroy All Manifestos (2023) by James Hannaham
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern began in 1998 as a literary journal that published only works rejected by other magazines. That rule was soon abandoned, and since then McSweeney's has attracted some of the finest writers in the world, from George Saunders and Lydia Davis, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and David Foster Wallace. Recent issues have featured work by Tommy Orange, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lisa Taddeo, Mimi Lok, and Lesley Nneka Arimah. At the same time, the journal continues to be a major home for new and unpublished writers; we're committed to publishing exciting fiction regardless of pedigree.
