This is meant to be a bleak time for young people and words, as an entire generation is assailed by "death of journalism" notices and financial catastrophe. Yet economic collapse can bring opportunities. When there are no jobs to be had at established magazines, and when the spectre of student debt makes further study impossible, you can either despair or you can, like a growing number of New York graduates, just set up your own thing.
Publishing is undergoing something genuinely exciting in New York, a new, post-digital dawn in which a web-literate and politically engaged generation is re-energising journalism with fierce-thinking in stylish print and online publications; it's from them that we'll take our next generation of household-name writers.
Any pretentious 20-year-old can, of course, make a blog and call it an important new literary journal but these magazines, driven by ego (not necessarily a bad engine) and by social conscience, are as committed to articulating their grievances – the iniquities of drone strikes, for example, or the perniciousness of online anonymity – as they are their enthusiasms. They're enriched, too, by cross-pollination: the editors write for one another, go to the same parties and, like actual friends, call each other out as frequently as they big each other up.
The new publications include Triple Canopy, a digital journal of arts and culture, as well as the radical online magazine, the New Inquiry. The newest title to generate heat is the American Reader, which has already been hailed as "the New Yorker's younger, cooler sister". But, as founder Uzoamaka Maduka points out, she and her peers constitute "one big community". The New Inquiry's Rachel Rosenfelt expresses a similar sentiment, venturing that her project might be "a movement as much as a magazine".
Also part of this movement is Jacobin, a left-leaning magazine founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara when he was 21 and an undergraduate at George Washington College. Two years on, his site has a quarter of a million unique users per month and has expanded into print.
Among Sunkara and his peers, the most namechecked publication is n+1, a literary journal founded in Brooklyn in 2004 by Keith Gessen, Benjamin Kunkel, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach and Marco Roth, all of whom are now established authors. Harbach's debut, The Art of Fielding was one of 2011's bestselling novels and November saw a publishing milestone for the magazine in the form of Say What You Mean: The n+1 Anthology.
"Sometimes," Greif says, "publications are kind of alone, passing the torch on from one to another. But then there are other eras where a whole lot of small magazines are brawling or collaborating or influencing one another: this is one of those ages again, one of the great moments. This is the kind of era we wished for when we started n+1."
I ask if these new publications are in n+1's debt and he has a gracious answer: "I'm grateful that these friends materialised – and I mean friends in the sense of people you can really fight with, learn from, move things forward. I'm in their debt for making what we all do worthwhile."
The American Reader: 'We were fed up with neurotic white males'
The American Reader is only two issues old but its inception is a story that has already taken on a sort of mythic gloss, thanks to praise from places as diverse as Vice and the Economist.
Last winter, Uzoamaka Maduka and her boyfriend, Jac Mullen – both Princeton graduates who had met working on the college newspaper – were sharing a smoke on a fire escape while complaining about the literary landscape.
"One thing we were dissatisfied with, exasperated with, was this one kind of voice constantly being shown – this white male neurotic voice, over and over and over," says Maduka. Eventually, "we realised that there was a lot of talking going on from us but not much doing".
So they began sketching out ideas and, last March, funded by an anonymous investor, they launched the American Reader, which publishes essays, criticism, original fiction and poetry, with an impressive first print run of 8,000 copies.
Maduka is a very tall and striking 25-year-old Nigerian American. When she gesticulates, she does so with her whole body, arms spread.
"You have to fight for the thing you actually want," she says, and that included securing novelist Ben Marcus as fiction editor and Dean Young, one of her favourite poets, as poetry editor.
Like Mark Greif of n+1, Maduka welcomes the efforts of her contemporaries: "It's like when you move into a new neighbourhood, you're not building a whole new neighbourhood – you do your best to host others when they're in your home and then you go to their home as well and you're a good guest."
Many of the American Reader's staff contribute to similar publications, including the arts periodical Cabinet and n+1's film review.
"We have people from all over the place," she says. She thinks it is "really weird" to sequester yourself off and play at not being part of the larger world around you.
"As for more established magazines – Harpers, the New Yorker and the rest – it behoves new publications to make their magazines worthy of being on the same shelf.
"It's a really important time right now – a point where this generation is coming of age in terms of culture. It's so vitally important that we never get to this place where we think this is just for us, where we think: 'We like these books, but everyone else likes Twilight.' Your life really does depend on this, whether or not you notice it!"
But passion does not preclude playfulness: the American Reader's recent "10 Under 10: writers to watch" list of kindergarten authors includes "Daniel Yu, age five", expounding on what makes fiction work: "In the end, it's all failure: you swirl some glue on it, like so much construction paper, sprinkle glitter and spangle… That's the prize of a writer: spangle and sweat – sometimes simultaneously, most often not."
The New Inquiry: 'There is a simmering need to congregate'
In a shabby enclave of uptown Manhattan you'll have to struggle to find a book shop called Brazenhead Books. You'll struggle because Brazenhead – a cramped space plugged floor-to-ceiling with books and smelling of yellowed paperbacks, whisky and marijuana – is an invitation-only secret. The shop is run by Michael Seidenberg, a bearded, bushy-browed veteran bookseller missing one of his front teeth. He's also the closest thing the staff of the New Inquiry have to a patron saint.
Praised by novelist Jonathan Lethem (Brazenhead's first employee) for its "extra-institutional intellectualism", the New Inquiry is an online journal and monthly magazine of culture and politics – scrappy, sincere and the work of a group of twentysomethings as well-versed in abstruse Marxist theory as they are Lindsay Lohan. On Saturday nights they turn up at Brazenhead bearing the bottles of cheap bourbon that serve as the unofficial entry fee and stay late to read and drink and argue at a salon presided over by 27-year-old Rachel Rosenfelt. Rosenfelt, who makes the term "chutzpah" feel inadequate, graduated from Manhattan's Barnard College in 2009 with a major in women's studies and began the New Inquiry as a Tumblr blog with her classmates Mary Borkowski and Jennifer Bernstein. Soon after, though, she read a review of Russell Jacoby's book The Last Intellectuals, alerting her to what she perceived as "a historical moment".
"Mass media had atrophied," she says. "The student debt crisis was brewing, and it was really fomenting the imagination of the would-be graduate student." She adds: "You'd have to be completely insane to do what I did. When you don't already have connections, when you're just a kid from Albuquerque without capital, it's hard to start something. In New York there can be a 'mean girls' thing – a lot of fake friends. And that's something we're really not about. We meet people and create positions for them because we're like, 'You're cool, hang out with us! OK, now we do this thing.'"
When someone finally put her in touch with Seidenberg, "it all congealed – I took this ragtag group of misfits and made them into a team".
The magazine doesn't really have an enforced editorial line. "Pieces surprise me," she says and, once commissioned, "editors get complete freedom". Which allows for content that ranges from the fascinations of trashy celebrity – "Encounters with Lindsay" is an oddly affecting collection of Lindsay Lohan testimonies – to mordant political content: a recent issue, entitled Game of Drones, was devoted to the then under-reported scandal of the unmanned aerial vehicles lethally deployed by the US government. "We have a significant audience in Pakistan because of it," says Rosenfelt.
"There are things that I'm surprised we're covering now – we've become increasingly radical," she says, citing their recent food issue, Feast & Famine, , which included a piece on the labour conditions of kitchen staff, a little-examined issue within the conversation about ethical food.
Until now, she's made a living leading a course on 21st-century publishing at Manhattan's New School, but with that teaching gig about to end she'll need to find another source of income, "and that might be working at [supermarket chain] Trader Joe's. I mean there' s no shame in that," she says, equably. "I'd rather pay my writers and do that."
And is the New Inquiry a professional stepping stone, a means to get a job at a more established magazine?
"No," she says, firmly, "that's a huge misconception. I had interned for the New Yorker as a freshman and I thought it was the worst working experience of my life. I just don't feel comfortable honouring a legacy – that just kills my interest." She says that over the last few years she's "become very politically radical, because I'm exposed to people who are changing my ideas. There is an unstructured population of politically sophisticated young people that are in debt, atomised and speak from an important critical position – there is a simmering need to congregate."
Which, to Rosenfelt's mind, was confirmed by the protest movement Occupy Wall Street, which began in September 2011 in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. "Occupy kind of proved my point in a different way than I could have imagined," she says. "It gave a consciousness to what was happening."
Triple Canopy: 'The way we work seems crazy to most people'
Triple Canopy, a collaborative, online-only magazine covering art and literature, shares a name with a US military contractor. But, its editors explain, it is also a term for the three-layered vegetation of jungles: "We thought it would be good to steal something beautiful from something very ugly," says Alexander Provan, its 29-year-old founding editor.
Provan began Triple Canopy in 2007 with "a series of meetings in my living room. Some of us had worked in publishing and some of us had worked at art organisations and it came from a dissatisfaction with both of those models and a recognition of the crises so many of them were in – both in terms of funding and in how to deal with the internet."
They have, without doubt, set a handsome template for the latter. Their tagline is "slowing down the internet" and that translates to long-form pieces exquisitely presented on the site's horizontal scrolling design. Thoroughly web 2.0 in its sensibilities then, but it has precedents in the artists' magazines of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, like Aspen, the "magazine in a box" or Tellus, a journal in audio cassette form."It has rapidly evolved," says Peter Russo, editorial and programme director, "and the reason for that is the excitement on the part of these artists and writers who need and want this to exist." These include rising fiction writers like Joshua Cohen and Rivka Galchen as well as contributions from a sprawl of young east coast film-makers, theorists, photographers and poets.
Has the project developed in ways they didn't expect? "I never thought we'd be getting paid so much," Provan deadpans. "Did you see our Benz outside?"
Notwithstanding the imaginary fleets of Mercedes, Triple Canopy is now financially viable and since January of last year the team has occupied a white-walled space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn which serves as both their office (in the back room they're all diligently bent over laptops, eating salads) and a space for film screenings, readings and performances. This month they will hold a second reading of Gertrude Stein's notoriously prolix novel, The Making of Americans. Last year it took 52 hours.
"I think we certainly occupy a niche," says Provan, "and that is fine with us, but there are a lot of conversations we want to be part of and feel like we have a stake in." And sometimes, they're the ones who start those conversations. One recent piece, "International Art English", in which David Levine and Alix Rule calmly itemised and eviscerated the absurdities of the visual arts press release, was circulated for weeks on Facebook and Twitter.
"You can start a magazine and then everyone respects what you've accomplished and that will help you get a job at another, better magazine," says Provan. "You get a certain amount of cultural capital and you don't make very much money but then you can parlay that into a job." Now, though, none of them shows any desire to leave. "The way we operate probably seems pretty crazy to most people," says Russo. "We will do things like have a 45-minute discussion about what an icon looks like on our website, which is probably exactly what people think that Triple Canopy does. But we really take our time with the work we produce and that doesn't happen everywhere else. So the thought of re-emerging into the workplace is a really scary one."
"When we started there weren't many people doing this kind of thing," says Provan, "and now there are a ton of people doing really interesting work. It's much more inspiring to be working in an environment where a lot of other people are doing things you respect, that you want to push back against."
