Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—The editors of the award-winning new literary journal n+1 will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 13, in the Paino Lecture Hall in the Earth Science and Natural History Building at Amherst College. Sponsored by the English Department at Amherst College, the event will be free and open to the public.
n+1, a twice-yearly journal of politics, literature and culture, received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing in 2006 for its third and fourth issues. The fifth issue, currently available, has as its theme “Decivilizing Process.” Continuing the n+1 “tradition” of critiques of exercise, postmodern warfare and current literary practices, the writers in this issue consider “the way modern technology and the politics it spawns has changed the life of people all over the world.” The issue features a funny short story about nuclear proliferation in North Korea; a memoir of Kashmir, militancy and torture; and essays on pornography, watching television in Milwaukee, and American torture of terror suspects abroad and flying cars. Novelist Benjamin Kunkel considers “man’s being a spider to man.”
At Amherst College, editors Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen and Marco Roth will read from “Decivilizing Process,” offering “a critique of contemporary technology and life practices, such as e-mail, cell phones, blogs and Internet pornography.” They will then take questions about the magazine, literary publishing and “whatever else people think of to ask.”
Keith Gessen’s journalism and literary criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, New York, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005. His novel in stories, All the Sad Young Literary Men, will be published in 2008.
Mark Greif’s essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, Dissent, the TLS and The American Prospect. His essays from n+1 have been selected for Best American Essays 2005 and The Norton Reader.
Benjamin Kunkel is the author of the novel Indecision, a New York Times Notable Book for 2005. His criticism has also appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, In These Times and The New York Review of Books.
Marco Roth is a native New Yorker, literary critic and independent scholar. He is a frequent contributor to the TLS and n+1, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe and Nextbook.
Chad Harbach is an editor and novelist, and was the Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received his M.F.A. in 2004.
Allison Lorentzen is an assistant editor at HarperCollins. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2003.
The n+1 college tour, with stops in Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia and Providence in addition to Amherst, is designed to bring the magazine to an audience outside New York City.
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