All the Broke Young Literary Magazines

“Thanks, everybody, for coming,” Keith Gessen said,
although he
was interrupted by three women with long dark hair and knitted winter
caps and shoes that clackety-clack-clacked on the
tile floor while they crossed in front of the podium to take seats in
the front row. At 7:15 p.m., the turnout at Elliott Bay Book Company
had looked like it was going to be dismal, with three or four people
sitting in chairs, but by 7:25 p.m. the crowd had grown to 20 or 30,
and now that the reading was underway it was as big as 45 or 50. “This
is a really nice turnout,” Gessen said. And still more people kept
stumbling in. One of them was a guy more or less the size of New
Hampshire who, apparently deciding he couldn’t fit into a seat if there
were people on either side of him, pulled the seat out of the row and
created a sort of island for himself.

Gessen is one of the founding editors of n+1, a
“twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture” that
was started a couple years ago in New York City by a bunch of guys who
met at Harvard. It was the subject of a big New York Times
Magazine piece a while back, but it doesn’t yet have a huge
presence on the West Coast. “The magazine began in a very aggressive
fashion,” Gessen told the crowd. “We felt literary culture had become
too nicey nice.” Then he went on to list the various subjects and
institutions n+1 “attacked” in its first five issues: The
New Republic, McSweeney’s, happiness, dating (“too
expensive”), cell phones, blogs (“which we came later to regret”),
internet pornography (“although not pornography itself, but just that
you have to look at it on the same computer you use for work, which is
confusing”). “The vast majority of our contributors are still from New
York, because that’s where people know us,” Gessen said. “That’s why we
hit the road.”

He was wearing jeans and a sport coat and an expression of slightly
eroded optimism—the road was not as kind to n+1 as
they’d hoped. Gessen and executive editor Chad Harbach and managing
editor Alexandra Heifetz, who sat onstage with him, had just been in
San Francisco where they’d tried to throw a fundraiser that ended up
losing money. “We overestimated how many people loved us in San
Francisco,” Gessen said.

Then Heifetz read excerpts from an essay of hers in issue six about
independent bookstores, and Harbach read from a short story about
blowjobs, and Gessen read from poetry by Kirill Medvedev that he’d
translated from the Russian. (Gessen is also a fiction writer—his
first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in
April.) And then they took questions. Somehow the readings and the
Q&A failed to overcome the problems inherent in literary readings,
failed to conjure the same excitement that comes from just sitting down
and reading n+1 yourself, and a lot of the audience left
without buying stuff.

It was also probably a mistake that Gessen, Heifetz, and Harbach
didn’t talk up What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions, the
126-page pamphlet n+1 just published that’s a conversation
among writers about college—specifically, what they were made to
read in college that they regret reading, or conversely what books they
regret not having read sooner. I read What We Should Have
Known in one sitting and loved it. It’s funny. It’s got references
you might not know (the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess) but it’s
unpretentious. Caleb Crain compares reading Henry James to smoking
crack. Mark Greif talks about his sadness for college teachers, because
some of their students “have much more power in their brains and they
have youth on their side, and they pick up teachers and fall in love
with them and abandon them, throw them away like bits of trash or
crumpled-up paper. But this is what you have to do as a
student.” What We Should Have Known is only $9, and it’s free
if you can prove you’re a college freshman; nevertheless, they sat
there, unsold.

After the reading, Gessen was carrying a box out of the store and
someone said, “Are you taking out the trash?” and he replied, “I’ll do
anything for a buck.” Half an hour later, over beers at Cyclops, the
n+1 editors were asked about What We Should Have
Known and they said they weren’t even allowed to bring it to
Vancouver, BC, the next day’s stop on their tour, because they didn’t
have the permit to import it. And they didn’t know how they were going
to get from Vancouver to Portland, Oregon, the day after that, what
with the highway being flooded.

The idea was floated that n+1‘s hostility toward capitalism
was having a karmic effect; capitalism was being hostile back. When
someone brought up the failed fundraiser in San Francisco, Harbach told
the story of an earlier fundraiser in New York City that was a smashing
success attendance-wise but also ultimately a financial disaster,
because a thief made off with a cash box with $3,000 in it. The upshot
of that loss was that the New York media, which was in the midst of an
n+1 backlash (the top editors are all white, they’re all men,
and so on), started writing charitable things about the journal again.
Harbach added, “But I don’t know if anyone’s writing articles about how
sad it is we lost money in San Francisco.”

frizzelle@thestranger.com