About The Book

Open City magazine, a hub of literary excitement and innovation since the first issue in 1991, pulls together the greatest hits of its first two decades. Publishing a wide array of authors who have made a mark on American letters, the magazine has been edited since its inception by author Thomas Beller, who provides an introduction that recollects the magazine’s beginnings with fellow writers Daniel Pinchbeck and Robert Bingham, narrates the tumultuous changes, disaffections, and, in Bingham’s case, a death that shook the magazine at its tenth anniversary, and then describes the productive and illustrious decade that followed with coeditor Joanna Yas.

Contributors to the anthology include Michael Cunningham, Robert Stone, David Foster Wallace, Mary Gaitskill, Scott Smith, A. M. Homes, Jim Harrison, Alicia Erian, David Means, Kirsty Gunn, Christopher Sorrentino, Rachel Sherman, Jerry Stahl, Nick Tosches, Bruce Jay Freidman, Walter Kirn, and Geoff Dyer. Also included are posthumous works by Richard Yates, Paul Bowles, Alfred Chester, Robert Walser, and Gregor von Rezzori.

Open City is known as a platform for numerous debuts, such as Martha McPhee, Irvine Welsh, Lara Vapnyar, Vestal McIntyre, and Sam Lipsyte, all of whom are featured. Not only a chronicle of twenty years of this important institution, this lively and engaging anthology is also a fascinating portrait of a literary generation in the making.