Keith handled himself remarkably well in this crisis, though he did later blame the accident on me: "You make me nervous," he said, his voice getting high-pitched and muppety for a second.

At the time of the accident we'd been talking about Keith's book "All The Sad Young Literary Men," which Viking will publish in April. Jonathan Franzen had said that reading Keith's book made him wish to be a young man again. And last night, Choire quoted a friend of his who's reading a galley of the book as saying that the book was a cautionary tale. [The friend had written: "I just started reading Keith Gessen's novel — irritating of course, it's the n+1 world, where women are mere accessories, but not bad! But SUCH a cautionary tale.... To me it's screaming *Get out of NY before it's too late*!!! Or, shrink your life in NY... stop going to all those lame competitive parties. Look, I always liked Sloane Crosley too, but when the fact that she is *nice* is the subject of an Observer article, that is a culture in deep, deep decline."]

Keith didn't understand how the book could be a cautionary tale.

Not having read the book, it's impossible to say with any certainty whether it would make me want to be a young man or whether it would make me want to leave New York.

While Keith was writing a note for the minivan's owner, I had time to flip through n+1 issue 8. In it, Wesley Yang writes about Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, and of other "essentially unlovable" people, including himself:

Jasper once told me that I was "essentially unloveable." I've always held that observation close to my heart, turning to it often. It's true of some people—that there's no reason anyone should love or care about them, because they aren't appealing on the outside, and that once you dig into the real person beneath the shell (if, for some obscure if not actively perverse reason, you bother), you find the real inner ugliness.

In the Budget truck, I also had time to read most of Carla Blumenkranz's review, 'In Search of Gawker.' Carla went back into the Gawker archives to trace the site's evolution from Elizabeth Spiers' first post in 2002 to the decadent Gawker of today. "Reading through the early Gawker archives means watching Spiers receive and record her New York education," Carla writes, also observing that "her persona was part of her appeal," while the site's next editor Choire Sicha's appeal was that he was "almost impersonally sharp and cruel and correct."

"Sicha's persona did not change much during his time at Gawker, but he did reveal himself to be invested, in a strange way, in the integrity of Gawker as an institution," Carla goes on to say. It's hard not to be invested in the integrity of an institution that you are, to some extent, the public face of. Yes, also it's just a job, it's just a business. Right now, it's a business that is fairly hell-bent on increasing pageviews in light of the allegedly coming internet advertising downturn—whether that means that content is a tertiary concern after pageview-boosting commenter-friending features and sponsored contests. And still when you work here, Gawker is, to some extent, you. Carla also wrote:

No one ever said Nick Denton was an altruist. But it's important to note that Gawker Media was designed to compete with the corporations that Gawker abused from the sidelines, because this is what created the dissonance of the site's later years....It was the writers, from Elizabeth Spiers to Emily Gould, who sold Denton's cynical project to his cynical audience, on the strength of their authentic interest in the material....

"The status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully," she wrote.

And finally:

In early 2007, Choire Sicha—the outsider, the non-careerist, the one who had known restraint, whose parody of journalism had retained some memory of journalism's ethics—returned from the Observer to save Gawker. But it was too late.

Keith finished his note to the minivan-owner and, with Choire behind the truck waving his arms in an impersonation of usefulness, backed the truck out of the too-narrow street.

Later Keith asked me what I thought about Carla's essay and I said that I didn't really think she was wrong about anything, except that Jessica Coen had not "grown up in Los Angeles." By then we were standing high on the F train elevated platform at Smith and 9th Streets. The Statue of Liberty looked like a little dashboard adornment beyond the B.Q.E.

I took a phone call and when I got back, Choire had told Keith he was quitting Gawker.

"Yup, we're quitting!" I said.

"Because of this?" Keith asked.

"Sort of. Well, not because it was written. But because it's not untrue."

n+1 editor Keith Gessen held court behind a makeshift bar strewn with beer bottles and pizza boxes, tufts of black chest hair peeking from the unbuttoned collar of his American Apparel polo, making sure the undergraduate-looking girls got as many beers as they needed. He was also quick to point guests to the box of copies of "What We Should Have Known," which is being distributed free to college freshmen and 18-year-olds with proof of ID.

In this pamplet, Keith himself expresses regret that he ever attended college, a sentiment later echoed by Siddharta Deb, Rebecca Curtis, and Ben Kunkel. Ben also dismissively calls college "summer camp." These people's other regrets include having read Paul de Man before Wordsworth and Deleuze before Proust and having read Frederic Jameson instead of Perry Anderson. The pamphlet is 126 pages long. However, it only takes 5 minutes and 52 seconds to listen to the song "Common People" by Pulp in its entirety.

"So you're the bartender?" I asked Keith. I wanted a beer. "So you're a yoga teacher?" he countered. This neg immediately attracted me to Keith. Mystery knows what he's talking about with that shit. For a moment, I was charmed by Keith's big, wide-eyed face, his lips perpetually curled in a smirk of what is either amusement or disdain. But then he tried to explain to me why "Indecision," his pal Kunkel's debut novel, is a good book—apparently, I had missed the point and failed to see that Ben was satirizing 28-year-old navel-gazing boys who've read too much literary theory.

It is always so helpful when friends of authors whose books you didn't like explain why said books are good!

In a corner, debut novelist Porochista Khakpour huddled with novelist Alexander Chee, whose second book is nearly finished. They were talking about how some of their students are so dumb it's sad (they both teach writing). An Observer intern wandered around, asking people, "Will you give me a quote?"

Who is that pale woman who keeps giving me the hairy eyeball? I wondered aloud to a friend. It turned out to be Carla Blumenkranz, the n+1 editorial assistant who's best known for her in-depth takedown of American Book Publishing, based on her experience as an intern at Plume. At that commercial publisher, she discovered a stunning truth: Editors try to find marketable authors, because they would like to publish books that people will actually purchase! For shame.

She has just completed an essay about this website for n+1's next issue, so I suppose it isn't surprising that she didn't want to talk to me. Sometimes it's so much easier to perceive things from a distance.

*Keith Gessen, 'What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions,' 2007, n+1 Research. p. 118.

"Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity.... [The resulting books are] kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as 'the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.'"

The one problem with Brooklyn writers that goes unmentioned is that they discard all criticisms. In the land of emotional truth, who can be wrong? So while history may prove this essay on-target, it's a bit like the crazy lady muttering in the food co-op—everyone can hear her but oh my God isn't all that organic home-grown kale just so special and amazing?

Wonder Bread [American Scholar, via]

n+1's latest e-blast (ha!) also plugs editor (and Dalton graduate!) Marco Roth's memoir in progress. Here's some out-of-order sentences from it: "[L]ight pouring from the East River through the bank of windows overlooking Central Park... I hate myself for writing a memoir and I hate most contemporary memoirs... [The living room was] large enough to seat 30 people for the chamber music concerts my parents hosted two or three times a year... a magnificent, pre-war, two-story temple to neo-classicism... the kitchen was about the size of the one-bedroom apartment where I'm writing now." There, done!

Finally, there's a genius plan to send out copies of their mag all over the world using traveling lawyers. That's just funny.

From: Editors of n+1 < subs@nplusonemag.com> Date: Aug 3, 2007 2:31 PM Subject: n+1 reading on the Hudson Pier To: subs@nplusonemag.com

Dear Beloved Subscribers,

Greetings from n+1 headquarters, where the air-conditioning is not what it is in your standard major New York publisher, to put it mildly. But we do have Microsoft Word, and email, and the hardiest
band of interns in n+1 history.

Some news:

READING NEXT WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8. At the Hudson Pier, Manhattan, 7 pm. Rebecca Schiff, who appeared in the Issue 4 Fiction Chronicle, will read her dark, comic tales of post-industrial love-seeking in New York and Boston. We will also inaugurate, on the Hudson Pier, our first experiment in having a trained actor read a piece from n+1—in this case, Eli Evans's "TV Diaries," from Issue 5. We'll see what
happens. Please come if you can. Afterward we will go over to the [SITE OF PARTY REDACTED, TO AVOID ANNOYING EMAILS] which happens to serve an excellent burger, if you're hungry, plus beer.

*Note*: We don't yet have the exact pier assignment from the Parks Department. To avoid incessant emailing of everyone, we're going to post the location at the top of our website (www.nplusonemag.com) as soon as we have it, we hope by Monday at the very latest.

PAMPHLET #2: We are making another pamphlet—this one 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 slipping it under the doors of incoming first-years at select universities this September. Really. It will also be on-sale to non-college students, just in case. But anyone who can prove college first-year status is entitled to a free copy.

RENEW: Please renew if you haven't! There will be many more n+1s, and renewals keep us alive.

www.nplusonemag.com/renewal.html

(Note: The pamphlet referred to on the renewal page is the PS1 pamphlet on the avant-garde. We'll make the second pamphlet available for purchase as soon as we send it to the printer.)

NPLUSONEMAG: Continues to produce high-quality internet-only web gems, recently featuring the work of the beloved crazy German-Swiss writer Robert Walser:

www.nplusonemag.com/newnovel.html

Also, Nikil Saval on Bobby Seale at BAM.

www.nplusonemag.com/seale.html

and Carlene Bauer on how Sassy didn't actually change her life:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/sassy.html

Elsewhere on the internet, we're proud to recommend Marco Roth's continuing series of memoirs at Nextbook.org. They're really quite remarkable:

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=554
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=571
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=597
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=652

And a bonus treat:
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=464

Finally, while we're at it, Rebecca Curtis's book of stories, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money is now in bookstores. "The Near Son," which appeared in Issue 5, is in it; it's a very good book.

AND, our good friends at Paper Monument are now putting the final touches to their first issue, and threaten to throw a large party in September. Be sure to subscribe here:

www.papermonument.com.

NEW INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION SCHEME: Remember how we called on people to contact Greg Jackson, International Distribution Tsar, if they were going abroad? Well, that did sort of work—heroic
subscribers lugged issues with them on vacation to Beijing, Berlin, Barcelona, and Bogota (seriously). But now we've added a whole new dimension: lawyers. All across midtown New York, boxes of n+1s are now
sitting in prestigious law firms, ready to be toted by lawyers who need to fly to Europe or South America for two days in order to read through a single foreign document. But we need people to meet the
lawyers. So: The old offer—bring n+1 on vacation—still stands. The new offer: If you're already *in* a foreign city and think n+1 could sell three or four copies there, we'll send a corporate lawyer out
there as soon as—well, as soon a major corporation in your country gets sued. So let us know you're there.

WEST COAST TOUR: We're doing a West Coast tour in the late fall. The n+1 informational blackout on the West Coast must end. There are entire communities in California that have never even heard of the
magazine. And yet every day they die a little for lack of what they'd have found in Issue 5. "TV Diaries," for example. "The Blog Reflex." "The Meaning of Life, Part 2." More on this later. And if you happen
to be attached to a university in California, Washington, or Oregon, please consider inviting us to speak.

Speaking of Issue 5...

ISSUE 6: We've entered production on the issue. Poetry from an unknown poet, fiction from an admired literary critic, the definitive history of the cubicle, and also the first-ever world-wide appearance
of the new novel by the incomparable Helen Dewitt, author of the Last Samurai. Seriously. Estimated shipping date: October 1. If you plan on moving between now and then—please let us know your new address. Issue 6 is not to be missed.

Finally, a very short but militant story by the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev:

"In Praise of Evolution"
The owner of a factory—his underworld nickname was Toothache—sat in a cafe wondering how he was going to destroy the union. For a while this was the most important thing in his life. He was working up some ideas about it now, when all of a sudden a group of comrades walked by the cafe bearing a red flag. The factory owner decided that the revolution had come, and he began to repent, and shed tears, and share his profits with the workers. But it turned out this was just a slow evolution, and there was still plenty of time to exploit, crush, and kill.

As ever,

Keith Gessen (for n+1)

Carla Blumenkranz

Mark Greif

Chad Harbach

Ali Heifetz

Benjamin Kunkel

Allison Lorentzen

Marco Roth

Nikil Saval

"Hi Moby," said a downtown art star who, when she's wearing a fruit headdress, is known as Carmen Mofongo. She was in civilian mufti last night so maybe that's why Moby was like "Mph." He and his posse were headed out; they had only stayed for the meat of the debate, which was on the topic of "Is It Better To Be Dumped or To Dump Someone?" It is interesting to think about what side of this issue Moby falls on; maybe "better to be dumped because then you don't have to feel obligated to underwrite the dumpee's vegan teahouse business," but that's just a wild guess.

Reverend Jen opened the debate by explaining why it's worse to be the dumpee. Her main contention was that it's worse because while you're being dumped, this is what the dumper is essentially saying to you: "Remember that awesome blow job you gave me last week? I never want that again." Point Reverend Jen.

Then Katherine Taylor, who once won us over by calling out Indecision for being "simple," took the floor. She was wearing shiny, possibly leather, pants and pointy nude heels. She was tasked with arguing that dumping someone is worse than being dumped, which seems counterintuitive but is actually sort of correct. "Being dumped is out of your hands, like being hit by a bus is out of your hands," she explained.

Unfortunately, this was pretty much the only funny thing she said. The rest of the time she was just sort of studiedly earnest and a little too enamored of her own cleverness. And these problems seem extend to the small part of her book we've managed to read so far, but we're trying hard to reserve judgment till we've read more! After all, the Kunkel thing is still priceless. She went on to talk about guilt and how a little sliver of doubt haunts you for the rest of your life. But Reverend Jen had the last word: "Most relationships boil down to a choice: sex or self-respect."

And also maybe a magazine with a little naked Ben Kunkel!

Previously: Our Dream Magazine

"Some of his titles failed to flourish financially. Most recently, a first novel by Mr. Kunkel was a critical darling but sold only 15,100 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks most online and retail sales," they point out. They also quote an RH spokeswoman as saying that she won't "go into the details" of Menaker's leavetaking. Hmm!

But maybe Menaker's exboyfriendy-sounding protestatations of mutuality are the truth. After all, as Galleycat wisely points out, 15,000 copies "sounds perfectly legit; after all, that's why we have a paperback market, right?" Besides, Menaker will now have time to learn how to play the fiddle, something that he has "always wanted to do."

Top Editor Is Leaving Book Post [NYT]

This class will deal with how to write about ideas and politics in a way that is personal without necessarily being confessional. Along the way, we'll explore themes and conflicts raised by the first six issues of n+1 and its reception, and how these play out as matters of literary style. Topics to be discussed will include: What is it like to write in an information-saturated climate? How do you incorporate contemporary political conditions and ideas into fiction and how use techniques of fiction writing to make political arguments? We'll also debate whether certain stylistic modes-satire, irony, etc.-can have political meaning and whether or how that meaning changes historically. Finally we'll explore the politics and sociology of current literary practices in publishing, the universities, and New York itself. Classes will be organized around intense close-reading of short assignments from the magazine and elsewhere.

From: Allison Lorentzen Date: May 15, 2007 3:33 PM Subject: n+1 Intern Goodbye Party, Friday 5/18 To: Chad Harbach

Friends,

Please join me, Chad Harbach, and the rest of n+1 in wishing a fond
farewell to our winter interns this Friday, May 18, at REDACTED.
If you are an intern or know of interns with a passion for
documentary films, you may be interested in our pre-party screening of
Paul and Dan Catagallo's[sic] "No Outlet," about disaffected young adults
living in suburbia—write to me for more details.

Details for the party:
Friday, May 18
ADDRESS REDACTED
2/3 to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
10:30 PM till late

See you there!
Allison

Katherine Taylor [TONY]

About our Kat-naming poll: It was a close race, but in the end, Kegel narrowly prevailed over KTHXBYE. The first person (of quite a few!) to suggest the name was Gawker commenter Trigger; please get in touch so we can send you your prize. And thanks to everyone who participated.

Previously: Pick Us A Winner

[Photo via]

Thing is, reading M&A probably is a lot like fucking Dana Vachon, or at least, a lot like postcoitally cuddling with him while he bares his soul and discusses the hardship of being a rich person who isn't like the other rich people. It's rare to get a peek into the inner workings of that kind of boy's brain! Maybe reading the book is less like fucking Vachon, actually, and more like what having an actual relationship with him might be like: fast-paced and exciting and even a little bit funny at first, if a little emotionally hollow. And then, as the experience wears on and Vachon palpably puts in less and less effort, the thing becomes increasingly hollow, decreasingly exciting.

This reader kept thinking that five or six more years of actual life experience would have enriched the book considerably, potentially transforming the easy caricatures into insightful portraits. But no one gets that kind of time nowadays; if Vachon had holed up somewhere to hone his craft, we'd be talking about some other fresh-faced, Catholic-nosed specimen's McInerney-anointed debut right now. So the question becomes: why does this uniform take on what it's like to be young, male, and privileged in New York City merit so much retelling?

Maybe it's because the ease with which it can be taken down makes it a publicist's dream. Lizzy Ratner and I fuel the hype machine in the same predictable way, just as sympathizers and enthusiasts like McInerney and Balk fan the flames. There's no winning with this next big thing, flavor of the month shit. We'll all just keep playing our roles and nothing will ever change except for the specifics. It's a dysfunctional relationship, all right, one that leaves us feeling dirty and vowing never to get involved with this kind of guy again, even though we know that we'll probably be a sucker for the next one who comes along. —emily

Earlier: Dana Vachon Backlash Begins In Gritty, Blue-Collar Paper
Breakfast At Balthazar [NYO]

So it was especially hard to pick up today's Observer, in which Vachon gets that paper's Douchebag of the Week treatment. (He's now in the pantheon alongside the Berkelhammers and the Lalibertes!) Lizzy Ratner writes an incredibly dismissive profile, referring to him as Lit Boy and coming up with the phrase "B.B.F. (best blogger friend)" to describe his relationship with Elizabeth Spiers (Gawker founding etc.). Vachon certainly doesn't help his case by choosing to meet Ratner at Balthazar for breakfast (it's already been well established that only mammoth twunts brunch there.) And mentioning the Satyricon and Saul Bellow as influences, however appropriate, might be a little too sophisticated for Observer readers and writers. You know, God forbid a portrait of our new Gilded Age attempt to build on the classics that have come before. It's just so unseemly, especially for someone who used to write a blog. (Also, don't fuck up a Flaubert quote in front of the Observer; they do fact-check occasionally.)

Ratner brings out the knives early, noting that minence douchebag grise Jay McInerney, who blurbed Mergers, has also blurbed Benjamin Kunkel, which confers double-douchebag-by-association status on Vachon. There's also a late hit, noting how goddamn good-looking he is and how his orthodontia is first rate (he's Marisha Pessl in a blazer!). The Catholic Vachon's "nose that stands in strong and pert salute to his resolutely nonethnic ancestry" is also appropriately lauded. Message received: not a serious writer! Still, we couldn't help but appreciate this:

[T]here is something tired in his tales of silicone-pumped trophy wives and smarmy banker-barons, an obviousness that gives his book the quality of one of the designer dresses that clutter his book: a piece of fine, even at times shimmery, fabric cut into a predictable shape.

Breakfast at Balthazar [NYO]

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 the pinkest cover in the world." I wonder why, if Ms. Taylor feels like that, she allowed her editor to send me the galleys of her novel, asking for a blurb. I didn't provide one—though I read enough of Ms. Taylor's book to understand her anxiety about being taken seriously.

Benjamin Kunkel
Manhattan

Farrar Thinks Pink [NYO]

The party was filled with the sorts of publishing-world luminaries who make the rounds of these sorts of affairs, like bespectacled Grove/Atlantic EIC Morgan Entrekin, Random House EIC Daniel Menaker, Little, Brown EIC Geoff Shandler, and Endeavor's own Richard Abate. Oh, and Sean Wilsey, too. (Vintage/Anchor publicist and omnipresent party-goer Sloane Crosley had, alas, taken ill.) Some arrived conspicuously carrying their new tote bags from the Los Angeles Times book awards shortlist announcement, which had taken place earlier in the evening at the National Arts Club. (No Granta tote bags, unfortunately.)

When Granta's Swedish publisher-owner Sigrid Rausing (her grandfather was Sweden's richest person at one time, thanks to his food-packaging business, Tetra-Pak), took her turn at the microphone, she (oddly) began by naming some of the young novelists who had, sadly, missed the cut. Joshua Ferris, Benjamin Markovits, and Benjamin Kunkel, our condolences!

The list itself is mostly a not unfamiliar one: Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, both made the list, though neither was in attendance, despite their willingness to go to the Housing Works cafe at the drop of a hat; former Bill Buford ing nue Nell Freudenberger; Maile Meloy, whose brother is Colin of the indie-rock band The Decemberists; ex-investment banker Akhil Sharma; ZZ Packer, no way!; and the seemingly ubiquitous Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan author Gary Shteyngart (someone was overheard saying, "That's Gary Shteyngart? I didn't realize how... short he was"). The judges seem to be taking a liberal view of "under-35"; Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma, at the least, are 35. Hudson may even be 36. Well, sooner or later, they'll all be.

Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2 [Granta]

Earlier: And The Oscar Goes To...