Benjamin Kunkel
N+1 Explains Regrets in Higher Education
We knew we shouldn't have bothered torturing ourselves through a reading of Ulysses! N+1 magazine is publishing a pamphlet for ungraduates titled What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions. The topic, as Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed.com explains, is the relationship between education and regret – read more »
Fear and Loathing at the n+1 Party
The office was tiny and everyone at the party was sweating. Keith Gessen, one of the hosts, was pouring wine and opening beer behind a table while the n+1 extended family—mostly editors, journalists, and novelists who have supported the literary magazine since its birth in 2004—piled in and tried not to touch each other. Taken together they looked like a posse; most everyone had been to an n+1 party before, and despite the heat, they looked happy to be at another one.
The occasion on Saturday was the publication of a new n+1 pamphlet, What We Should Have Known, a primer for college students made up of two panel discussions about life in the academy, reading, and regret.
n+1 Goes to College
Reading n+1—the buzzy, high-minded literary magazine launched three years ago by Ben Kunkel and his friends—has often felt like participating in a particularly erudite, if slightly self-important, dorm-room bull session. So it makes sense that the magazine's editors last night chose to distribute 170 copies of a new pamphlet, What We Should Have Known—in which they join other literary intellectual types to discuss the books they "read too late" "mistakenly read" and the books which they regret reading—by walking around the Columbia campus and placing it in front of unsuspecting students.
Iconoclasm is usually the point of these exercises: One discussion participant describes The Catcher in the Rye as “good…fine…but I could take it or leave it.” And another calls British Romantic poetry a "very bad influence on a writer at a young age.” But there are also more traditional judgments. Among the books recommended: Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, and Moby Dick.
Letters
I've Been Kunkeled! Whose Life Is It Anyway? Indecision On Chambers
I’ve Been Kunkeled! Whose Life Is It Anyway? Indecision On Chambers
I’ve Been Kunkeled! Whose Life Is It Anyway? Indecision On Chambers
In Today's Observer
Matthew Schuerman chronicles the campaign the International Freedom Center is waging to stay at Ground Zero. read more »
Matt Haber reveals the true story of living on Chambers Street with literary it-boy Benjamin Kunkel.
And Anna Schneider-Mayerson learns the fine art of milkshakes over at The Shake Shack.
