Early in the evening of the day I became Facebook friends with James Frey, Choire and I found ourselves standing on Chrystie Street, unloading boxes of n+1's Winter 2008 issue ("Mainstream") from a very large Budget rental truck. We did this in a fit of perversity. n+1 editor Keith Gessen had driven the truck from the…
In a tiny, cluttered, and yes, pizza-smelling office on Chrystie Street on Friday night, a group of sweaty thirtysomething men and heavily eyelinered young women gathered to celebrate the publication of a "pamphlet." The work in question resembles a foreshortened Zagat guide filtered through a Brooklyn-ey design…
Seriously, what will happen if our number-one obsession, the world's most important literary magazine n+1, writes a piece about this here bilious website? Will time and ass-space collide? Anyway, we hear the piece is done for the new issue, but this is first we heard about it, because essayists don't report, ya know!…
There's a totally insane assault on Brooklyn writers—yes, nearly all of them! Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss and even the Brooklyn writers who actually live in Manhattan, such as Ben Kunkel—in the Autumn issue of the American Scholar. It's notable for the sheer intensity of its hatred.
n+1—the most important literary journal of your slightly younger brother's time—is making a pamphlet for college freshpeoples! This one is, say the editors, "about what we wish we'd known when we were college freshman, and what books we wish we'd read. 'What We Should Have Known.' Is that too cumbersome? We'll be…
In the basement of Lower East Side dive bar Lolita last night, a capacity crowd gathered to hear Kunkel-feuding debut novelist Katherine Taylor and elven-eared omnipresence The Reverend Jen debate each other. It was a lot like debate team in high school! Actually, no, it wasn't. But you know what high school thing…
Some afternoons, after the requisite low blood sugar-induced perusal of LOLcats, we turn once more to the serious problem of magazines. What do we want to read? Who can bear thumbing through a witty snippy front of book section? But then, who can bear a ponderous essay about boxers or ideas or colors? What all of us…
Kurt Andersen, whose name continues to be very difficult for the Times to spell, will finally have something to fill his days besides writing his column for New York magazine, finishing the two books he just sold, and hosting 'Studio 360.' He'll join his publisher Random House as Editor At Large, in which capacity…
It's been a while since we've heard about the Columbia class on political writing to be taught by the editors of n+1, which is the most important literary journal of our time. Now we've gotten our hands on the class description—and it turns out that Ben Kunkel and Co. will be teaching from... the magazine that they…
N+1's outgoing winter interns are getting a wonderful goodbye present—their elders are sending them off with a night of art film in Brooklyn. They'll be watching "No Outlet," a film (supposedly a documentary) by Paul and Dan Cantagallo, which is all about the despair of the middle-class young in American suburbia.…
Not-chick-lit debut novelist Katherine Taylor laughs and shrugs off Ben Kunkel's snippy letter to the Observer, in which he responded to her assessment of his book Indecision as "ridiculously simple" by revealing that he declined to blurb her book but read enough of it "to understand her anxiety about being taken…
We hear that three of the editors of n+1, the most important literary journal of our generation, will be teaching as adjuncts at Columbia's MFA program this fall. (More bang for your $35K!) Ben Kunkel, Marco Roth, and another—we think Mark Greif? This line has some static—will be tag-team teaching a class on political…
INDECISION SOLD HOW MANY COPIES IN HARDCOVER? BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS A HUGE SALES FLOP? WHAT THE.... If that was also your reaction to reading about the sales of Ben Kunkel's Indecision in New York mag today, come over here and take some deep cleansing breaths with us. Our need for this not to be true was so great that…
And now, a word from those of us who are actually threatened by the size of Dana Vachon's $650,000 advance. Or who, at least, think that publishers dole out such advances to highly marketable youngsters at the expense of real novels by real writers— who don't at all feel that Vachon is "the best pure writer to have…
Those of us who are not actually threatened by the size of Dana Vachon's advance, who feel that he's the best pure writer to have emerged from the blogosphere, and who know him personally and find his affable Westchester goofiness adorable, have had a hard run of it lately. All the press about the Mergers &…
Katherine Taylor is afraid of being considered a writer of chick lit ["Farrar Thinks Pink," Spencer Morgan, The New York World, March 12]. To establish her seriousness, she tells The Observer that my novel Indecision "was ridiculously simple" and suggests that "had it been a girl who'd written it, it would have had…
We so wanted to dislike debut novelist Katherine Taylor. Rules For Saying Goodbye was hyped as "invoking the spirit of Melissa Bank and Curtis Sittenfeld" in the announcement that it had sold to FSG, and it's rumored to be Starbucks' next pick. Oh, and: "It's hard, when you're blond and attractive and you live in…
The first—and until last night, only—list of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists came out in 1996, and anointed such under-35 literary stars as Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore, Mona Simpson, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, and Jeffrey Eugenides, while also selecting a few who slunk into obscurity, and…
