WE MADE AN APP?

It’s true. We hereby announce the debut of the Small Chair, a weekly selection from all branches of the McSweeney’s family. One week you might receive a story from the upcoming Quarterly, the next week an interview from the Believer, the next a short film from a future Wholphin. Occasionally, it might be a song, an art portfolio, who knows. This week we’re delivering “On the Assassination of the President”, a secret film revealing the truth about…something. Previous weeks have seen appearances by Jonathan Ames, Spike Jonze, Maurice Sendak, and a spatulator; bad wizards and bank robberies will be following soon after. None of this material will be available online and it’s all pretty sure to be good stuff.

The app will also deliver the daily humor from our Internet Tendency, specially formatted for the iPhone, along with news, updates, and announcements. This feature will remain active and free, even if your Small Chair subscription expires.

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow the Small Chair to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom. The Small Chair is available on the iPhone® and the iPod touch®, and currently nowhere else. It can be downloaded from the App Store℠, via the normal channels.

$5.99 (or local equivalent) gets you the app plus six months of weekly excitement — a half-year of surprises, all delivered straight to your pocket.

WHAT ABOUT, LIKE, REAL BOOKS?

We are more committed than ever to books, paper, and exploring the possibilities and challenges of our physical objects. This fall we’re publishing a prototype for future newspapers (the folded-newsprint kind); next spring we’ve got a rollicking pentagonal building-book coming; right now we’ve just debuted terrific novels from Jessica Anthony, James Hannaham, and Bill Cotter — all printed on sturdy 21st-century paper.

At the same time, we’re always looking for new ways to communicate with our readers. McSweeneys.net has been an important part of our operation from our very beginning, and this project is the next logical step. It’s fun to try things like this, and the iPhone format provides opportunities for working with different types of media, especially in small chunks and with fast delivery. We expect it to evolve in interesting and unpredictable ways, and hopefully you’ll follow along with us.