McSweeney's 31

'Everything about the way we write changes constantly. New forms are created and destroyed, conjoined with others and absorbed back into the cultural mainstream; parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones. In the wake of those changes are dozens of dead forms from every corner of civilization, strange and wonderful styles thousands of miles and hundreds of years removed from what we read now. With this issue, we've dug up those old genres, dusted them off, and recruited writers to revitalize the ones we thought demanded it' - Darren Franich and Graham Weatherley.