Happiness: Ten Years of n+1
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first anthology of America's foremost intellectual magazine.
n+1 appeared in the fall of 2004, the brainchild of a group of writers working out of a small apartment. Intended to revive the leftist social criticism and innovative literary analysis that was the hallmark of the Partisan Review and other midcentury magazines, n+1 was a rejoinder to the consumerism and complacency of the Bush years. It hasn't slowed down since. n+1 has given us the most clear-eyed reporting on the 2008 crash and the Occupy movement, the best criticism of publishing culture, and the first sociological report on the hipster. No media, new or old, has escaped its ire as n+1's outspoken contributors have taken on reality TV, Twitter, credentialism, drone strikes, and Internet porn.
Happiness, released on the occasion of n+1's tenth anniversary, collects the best of the magazine as selected by its editors. These essays are fiercely contentious, disconcertingly astute, and screamingly funny. They explore our modern pursuits of happiness and take a searching moral inventory of the strange times we live in. Founding lights Chad Harbach, Keith Gessen, Benjamin Kunkel, Marco Roth, and Mark Greif are featured alongside Elif Batuman, Rebecca Curtis, Emily Witt, and other young talents launched by n+1.
This n+1 anthology is the definitive work of the definitive twenty-first century intellectual magazine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In just ten years, the Brooklyn magazine n+1 has seen its founders and contributors break into the mainstream of American literature and publishing. This collection of work features at least one essay from each of the founding editors, stories and essays from several of the magazine's most prominent stars, and four unsigned editorials that attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the times. However, the quality of the contributions varies wildly. Some of the essays, like Mark Greif's proposal for the redistribution of wealth, read as amateurish and overly earnest. Other pieces, like the short story "Fish Rot" by Rebecca Curtis, are so far off the beaten path they seem lost. Elif Batuman's wonderful essay on Isaac Babel (which also appears in her acclaimed 2010 collection, The Possessed), however, stands out as a highlight. Batuman masterfully weaves together literary history and personal experience, to entrancing effect. Emily Witt's daring essay on sexuality reports directly from the set of a public dominatrix video shoot and raises several provocative questions, starting with the title: "What Do You Desire?" Ultimately, the collection's unevenness is illustrative of an ambitious but young magazine's growing pains. There's hope that its next ten years will produce even more consistently substantive and enduring writing.
