McSweeney’s “Audio Issue” Experiments With Storytelling Across Mediums

McSweeney’s, the idiosyncratic San Francisco publishing company, releases a literary journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, with no fixed format. The quarterly has been published in a variety of artistic, unusual forms from an oblong edition to a bundle of mail delivered to the wrong address. Its new “Audio Issue” may be the most elaborate yet. It’s a box of booklets, a scroll, a keychain, a fictional toy company catalog and other objects that, in a collaboration with Radiotopia producers, all have audio components. The issue experiments with ways audio and text work together in storytelling, and it seeks to expand our understanding of what it means to make art accessible to those with impaired hearing, or sight, by expanding content across the senses.