McSweeney’s has been defying publishing conventions ever since it was founded in 1998 by author Dave Eggers. Redesigned from the ground up for each issue, the publisher’s Quarterly Concern magazine is a particular labour of love, typically showcasing a mix of short stories, reportage and illustrations, as well as poetry, comic strips and novellas as it’s evolved over the years.

Recent issues have continued to push the boundaries of editorial design, taking the form of everything from a sci-fi horror storybook through to a legit tin lunchbox. Guest-edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran, the latest issue turns its attention to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

Envisioned as a “treasure box” of Vietnamese history, The Make Believers issue includes one paperback magazine, two booklets and one ‘menu’, all packaged in a beautiful foil-stamped cigar box. “The look and design of this issue was largely inspired by images from co-guest editor Thi Bui’s life,” says McSweeney’s art director Sunra Thompson.

“The cigar box idea was all Thi, along with the look and feel of the book and booklet covers. Thi had this idea early on to include a menu, which would list all the contents of the issue and serve as a roadmap for the whole thing. And she contributed tons of art to the issue, including the spectacular painting on the lid of the cigar box.”

It includes not one but three individual covers, each created by a different Vietnamese artist. For one, Duy Võ repurposed a font he found in a collection of short stories called Tuối 15 published in 1986, while Matt Huynh drew on the group poem Nhà (which translates as Home) and incorporated a type treatment evocative of historic Làng Văn covers, and Sam Nga Blum looked to old instructional language books when bringing to life Doan Bui’s essay, A Glossary of Broken Vietnamese.

The cigar box design also features the expression bày đặt – “a call-out, an admonition, a loving tease and a reminder that we are full of it”, according to Bui – subtly stamped on the back. “The idea was always something that felt old, fancy, evocative of Vietnam’s mixed heritage, and that also was getting repurposed the way a metal cookie tin or any other nice container would to carry important objects in a Vietnamese, or really any number of immigrant households,” she adds.

Inside its pages are contributions from ten different writers, spanning diverse diasporic perspectives and multiple languages that examine a collective loss and joy. “In the contents and the design of this issue, we draw from the eclectic hodgepodge that is our shared imagination of what ‘Vietnamese’ is,” says Tran.

“Whether highbrow or lowbrow, proper or naughty, logical or absurd, painful or funny. We hope it shows that being Vietnamese in the diaspora is often about making more out of what we have, given everything we lost.”

McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers issue is out now; mcsweeneys.net