The name came from a moment of exasperation. In 2004, Keith Gessen — a Moscow-born, Harvard-educated writer who'd spent his twenties translating Russian poetry and reviewing books for early online magazines — kept asking his friend Chad Harbach why they should bother starting yet another literary journal. Harbach's answer was pure algebra: whatever already exists, there's always one more thing the world needs. n+1 was that plus-one, and from its very first issue it declared war on what its editors called "demented self-censorship" — the polite, cautious writing they saw everywhere from the New Yorker to the New York Review of Books.
Three of the four founding editors — Gessen, Mark Greif, and Benjamin Kunkel — had cut their teeth at the Harvard Advocate, but n+1 was no ivory-tower project. It launched from Brooklyn with a budget so thin that half its income came from just 2,000 subscribers and a quarter from bookstore sales. For years, there was exactly one paid staff member. A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times Magazine, described the enterprise as a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism. Theater director Alessandro Cassin, writing in Milan's Diario, compared its intellectual bravery to T.S. Eliot's Criterion and the Partisan Review.
What made n+1 matter was its refusal to stay in its lane. It published long, closely argued essays on everything from the financial crisis to the meaning of the hipster, then spun off a book series, an arts journal called Paper Monument, and an online book review. Gessen himself got arrested at an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011 while simultaneously covering and participating in the march — a very n+1 thing to do. The magazine launched careers: Elif Batuman, Wesley Yang, and a generation of writers who wanted criticism that felt urgent rather than decorative.
More than two decades on, n+1 remains the rare literary journal that feels genuinely dangerous — the kind of publication where an essay about Marxist economics might sit next to a devastating piece of autofiction, and where the editors still believe that if enough people would just admit in public that they care about ideas, something might actually change.
<a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/">Visit n+1