New York Inquirer: A while back, A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy feature for the New York Times Magazine that played up the rivalry between n+1 and McSweeney’s. He went so far as to suggest a new literary beef: you all in this corner, McSweeney's in the other. I've always found the idea of literary rivalry a bit funny: as in boxing, no one fights out of his weight class. So, what are people really talking about when they say n+1 versus McSweeney's, and what kind of backlash have you experienced in the wake of the article?

Keith Gessen: Aha, the backlash. I think this is interesting, actually. Backlash Studies should be a course offered at your more top-quality hip universities. There's this mistaken idea that anything that's achieved certain renown will automatically experience a backlash against it. To some extent I guess that must be true, but my sense of our own backlash is that it's not just self-generating. That is to say, aside from a few instances, it's not a case of people caviling just because we were in the Times. There's actually something about n+1 that people don't like. Whereas (we think) all we do is publish really good funny essays and stories! So what is it?

This is where McSweeney's and the Believer come in. When we launched, it seemed like they were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we've said so a number of times.

What I've realized in the last couple of years is that, while the Believer is certainly still a good place to find this attitude, it's a mistake to think that they generated it in any meaningful way. It's everywhere and has been for a while. Basically, the notion that books and ideas are things that you buy and have a kind of interest in (it might even be a powerful interest, like when you are "obsessed" with an author), and that this interest is something you'll tell people about (the way you tell people that you are "obsessed" with the new Babyshambles record, and then they tell you what they're obsessed with, and then you go home), is not just everywhere; it's about all there is. This leads to the idea that you shouldn't criticize and you shouldn't be mean: it's all just a matter of taste, of obsession, rather than ideas or beliefs. But of course you should, if any of this stuff means anything to you. Of course you should.

NYI: You have said that n+1 was founded in response to the launch of the Iraq War. What's your mission and is it accomplishable?

KG: I think to start anything like this, for it to be worthwhile, you need to be angry about enough things, over a long enough period of time—I mean, years and years. Certainly leading up to Iraq, the commentary of some of the people we most admired felt misdirected, off. I'm thinking in particular of Paul Berman, George Packer, Michael Walzer—writers grouped around Dissent and the New Republic, two magazines that have meant a lot to us for different reasons.

We’re still mostly a literary magazine. The mission more generally was to create a forum for these things to be talked about in the way that we, specifically, wanted to talk about them. One of the things you learn, if you write for enough different magazines, is that each has its own culture, and that culture is very powerful and affects the way you write for the magazine, even unconsciously That's before the editors get to it, and the copy-editors, and the typesetters. Meanwhile, we felt there was a group of people who had developed, partly independently and partly from learning from one another, a different approach to literature than was and is being practiced right now. For us it was not just Iraq but also the practices of everyday life: exercise, dating, eating, reality TV, the NBA playoffs, writing a dissertation, taking anti-depressants, etc. The great push in modernity has been to specialize, specialize, so that you have micro-magazines, basically, this one for people who care about politics, that one for people who care about food, another one for people who care about books. Some people read all three! But life isn't like that.

I think we also had a mission that was a little more social. When we got out of college, in the late 90s, there were a number of really good highbrow magazines for us to try to write for—online there were Feed and Suck, and then in print there was the Baffler, Hermenaut, and Lingua Franca. Some were higher-brow than others. Suck, despite the name, assumed a lot more cultural knowledge of its readers than did Feed. Most of those magazines are now gone. So as of three years ago, basically, the only thing you could aspire to as a young writer was to write for the New Yorker, which isn't a bad aspiration in itself, but it strikes me as the wrong aspiration for a young person to have. The New Yorker wasn't meant to serve that function—a highbrow function—and really I don't think it ever was asked to before just a few years ago.

So with respect to creating a place that is unapologetically highbrow that—if you were me eight years ago—you'd want to write for, I think we've partly done that. Unfortunately, we've failed to create an infrastructure to help us work with people who come to us and want to write. We’re working on that.

NYI: In many ways, you're a very typical literary journal. Your main focus is on the print publication; you feature lengthy multi-book reviews, etc. But you're also a kind of alternative to that model. In what ways are you similar to and different from, say, the old New Criterion?

KG: We think of ourselves as a research institute that has taken on the form of a literary magazine. The idea is: there are these problems in the contemporary world. What can we say about them, what can we know, what do they mean? Sometimes the book review is a pretty good way of getting at these questions; sometimes it’s a short story. Long essays, if they are direct and have a clear argument, can also do it.

The standard model for a literary magazine these days is not the New Criterion but something more like Ploughshares or McSweeney's—basically, a kind of short-story contest curated by one editor or a rotating series of editors. You might have a mix of stories and essays, but they will be chosen because they met certain standards of being a "good story." And obviously those standards are very different from one magazine to the next. I really don't think there's a tyranny of the workshop creating a particular kind of story. Even [the] Iowa [Writers’ Workshop] creates different kind of stories. But the point for us is we're much more focused on the idea of a story’s or essay's necessity—is it necessary, does it explain our situation, some part of our situation? If so, then we'll edit it until it's good. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how good it is.

In this sense I should say that we are a lot like the old New Criterion in many ways, though that wouldn't be recognized as a literary journal now. It was a polemical journal; it had a bone to pick with contemporary culture. It came from the right, whereas we come from the left; it hated contemporary art, whereas we hate the contemporary systems of buying, selling, profit, speed, etc., but we like a lot of contemporary art; one of the few rules we have for book reviews is that they can't be about dead authors. It's very easy to say—and conservative critics love to do this, this is practically the essence of what they do, whether they're writing for the New Criterion or the New Republic—I love Tolstoy or Flaubert or whoever, and my contemporaries are not up to that standard. Which—well, it’s fun, I'll admit—but in the end nothing could be less interesting or useful. And nothing could tell us less about the way we live now.

NYI: I've noticed that there's a curious section of the n+1 website called "News." Ostensibly, this is n+1's tongue-in-cheek attempt at blogging. A choice excerpt from earlier this summer reads, "Just read this and this and this on Kos. Can you believe that guy? What an idiot! I'm just kidding. Those aren't even links. Who's Kos? Who's Atrios? Are all the bloggers Greek?" What was your intention behind that, and, more generally, do you see any literary possibilities in the blog?

KG: We've talked about this a lot among the editors—what we think of blogs. Obviously the blog is a medium, a format, like television is a medium, so to say something in general about blogs is kind of pointless. I think blog diaries—those are fantastic. For a while a couple of us were reading a blog by a guy who was trying to date strippers (unsuccessfully, but there was a lot of texting involved). It was fascinating! Some of the blogs by soldiers in Iraq were pretty incredible, though I've lost track of those. I wish someone would do a blog about the new season of Laguna Beach. Or maybe someone is.

The trouble with blogs arises when they go from being diaries (very private expressions, telling us something only that person knows) to being basically attention-grabbing mechanisms. That fake blog we had up was the result of my frustration with lit-bloggers. Back in the day, you would occasionally stumble upon some person blogging about their very private reading, what it was like, what their reactions were. Those people still exist, but they're drowned out by people who are just purveyors of literary gossip--who comment on books they haven't even read, who, as Marco likes to say, are just basically freelance publicists. It's one thing to be corrupted by, say, the pressure of writing for the New York Times Book Review, or the prospect of employment somewhere, or a blurb. But to sell your birthright for a couple of review copies and a link on a blogroll! For shame. So I spent a few weeks making fun of lit-bloggers and it was therapeutic. But then I stopped when I discovered the Alexa traffic ranking system and saw that I was practically the only person reading these things.

NYI: Can you give us a preview of some of the highlights of the next issue of n+1?

KG: The theme of the issue is "The Decivilizing Process." It looks at the practices that are changing our civilization, undoing in a very short span of time a lot of the "civilizing" work that's taken thousands of years to perform. So we have pieces on cell phones and blogs and email, naturally; also pornography and television—actually, a lot about both of those things; also torture in Kashmir by the Indian army and torture in secret prisons by the CIA; and then a fiction chronicle, and a history of the "Argonaut Folly." Also a piece on flying cars. Hermenaut did a Technology/Anorexia issue in 1998, but things have gotten much worse since 1998. It's the most intellectually cohesive issue we've done. Look for it late in December. Or early in January. Or mid-January.