“There was something about the invitation that made me wear a jacket,” the novelist Sam Lipsyte deadpanned last Friday night at a magazine launch in an apartment on West 10th Street. Yes, some usual suspects were there—Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Marcus, editors from The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, and writers from The New York Times and The New Yorker—but aside from that, this wasn’t your average literary party: the attire was more art-world chic than MFA tweedy.

The American Reader isn’t your average literary magazine. The Princeton grads who run it have barely closed their second issue, and already it is being hailed as the next Paris Review or n+1. Read More