Anthology fever

I gave a reading last night with Rachel Sherman and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh at the Lillian Vernon Writers' House (it was fun), for the students at the NYU summer session. There I also got to pick up a copy of They're At It Again: An Open City Reader, edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas.

It's huge—I didn't realize it was nearly 800 pages. Who's in it? A quick glance yields Paul Bowles, Jonathan Ames, Geoff Dyer, Bryan Charles, the aforementioned R.S. and S.S., Davids Means and Shields, Sam Lipsyte, Martha McPhee, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Walter Kirn, James Lasdun, Victor Pelevin, Hal Sirowitz, Edmund White, Leni Zumas, Richard Yates (!), Charles Bukowski, Will Eno, Sylvia Foley, Hubert Selby Jr., Jessica Shattuck...the list really does go on...It's satisfyingly heavy, and I'm excited that my story "Bring on the Dancing Horses" (from Open City #30) is included...

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A slimmer book, but with nearly as many contributors, is No Near Exit, an anthology of writing from Post Road magazine, each one selected by a different writer, making for a vertiginous reading experience. Plus, some of the pieces are interviews with writers, and others are writers recommending books by other writers...

Two round numbers

In the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy, Tom Beller reflects on Open City and "a literary magazine's strange relationship to time":

Why did we close? We decided to close the magazine the way Hemingway described bankruptcy—gradually, then all at once. Our last issue was so good, I thought, and the party for it was so good. Why stop? On the other hand, why not go out in top form, when everyone is still in a good mood?

We will keep the books going. Books are much less capital intensive. Also, as Fran Lebowitz has pointed out, a magazine has to keep being published. Books come out at their own pace (or, in the case of Fran, they don’t come out).

Now we have arrived at two round numbers: issue number thirty. Year number twenty. We’d often been referred to as a literary quarterly, and over the years have participated in a kind of soft obfuscation—about our circulation, about how often we published. To have these bold round numbers, 20 and 30, seemed almost funny in their plain truth.

The height report

The WSJ's Speakeasy talks to Joanna Yas about Open City: "These tall men were standing at the door, waving around copies of their literary magazine."