Is Hollywood PR practice infecting New York's lofty cultural industry? Two young stars together are always bigger than two separate entities. "Hot young New York authors Sloane Crosley and Keith Gessen," as the press release says, will do a joint reading next Wednesday in Brooklyn. Ooh! The n+1 editor (Gessen), and the popular twentysomething book publicist (Crosley) both have new books to promote—Gessen has already jokingly (we think) admitted in his NYT Styles profile to keeping a watchful eye on Crosley's sales, which are beating his. It's better this way: if readers get annoyed by Gessen's overblown male characters—at least they'll have her quirky essays to lighten the mood. [BookCourt]

This week, everybody's wondering why boys (yes, they call them boys) can't write anymore! In the Observer, Choire Sicha argues that with the current crop of women writers looming over them—Janet Malcolm, Ursula Le Guin, Didion, Dunn—dude writers simply can't concentrate, much less perform. " A little penis, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing," he writes. "But it's not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books." Or what they haven't done to us with them! Debut novelist and n+1 editor Keith Gessen's photo, tragically, illustrates this article. And now Emily Gould chimes in on Galleycat. (Disclosure? "Whatever. Google me.")

Oh noes! Someone at the Spectator, Columbia University's student paper, wrote a negative review of literary mag n+1 editor Keith Gessen's novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Now another Columbia kid, Mark Krotov, is coming to the rescue! Wait for the disclosure: "I have done a little work for Gessen and his magazine, which has a very low circulation rate." NEG! Is it just us, or is Keith's entire world very incest-y?

Keith Gessen, editor of literary magazine n+1 (the most important literary magazine of our time with a print run of 7,500), and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, was on Leonard Lopate's show on WNYC, talking somewhat naively about how tough it was for his characters, and him, to graduate from college at the end of the 90s, a "very exciting time," only to struggle to find "a life that's going to be true to their ideas... I had no idea how to go about it." Yet he somehow soldiered on. (Lopate chimes in with something about how there are 300 million people in America, and if only ten percent of them are interested in literature, that's still an audience of 30 million!) Meanwhile, the city's moms lament that their daughters aren't dating Gessen:

Book publicist/author Sloane Crosley is so magically delicious that she even brightened the painful Sunday Styles feature on N+1 editor and Emily Gould-dater Keith Gessen in today's Times. "At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel's Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel's Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley's essay collection, 'I Was Told There'd Be Cake,' than his book." But to get to that, I had to come face-to-face with one particularly offensive nugget.

Writing is hard, lonely work. At least that's what all the great writers say, so that's the line to stick to at dinner parties. But when your Great American Novel is complete, there's loads of self-congratulations. And after that, praise from friends and family. But then strangers who went to better colleges than you, the critics, come in to eviscerate you in 600 words. How is a writer to a respond? Violence? Sex? Passive-aggressive letters?

That is what I have been wondering about the hype surrounding founding editor of n+1 (the most important literary journal of our time) and his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Last night at McNally Robinson, while waiting for his reading to begin, I gazed over his head and across the street into the PinkyOtto boutique, glaring at their evil shopgirl. A strict-looking, skinny brunette in the crowd made a big show of fanning her face: "He's hot!" she stage-whispered to her girlfriend, cocking her head towards the author. "What?" the friend asked. "He's so hot!" she repeated, louder this time. She looked like she hadn't eaten in days.

"All the Sad, Young Literary Men has too many men, none of whom is particularly sad, literary or, for that matter, interesting." That's The L Magazine's Jonny Diamond on N+1 editor Keith Gessen's first novel. The interesting bit is how Gawker, you dear commenters, and the scribblers of Magical Brooklynism fit into the equation. "Gessen has rightly and eloquently lamented the impoverishment of intellectual discourse in 21st-century America, particularly in a New York literary scene that prefers whimsy to gravitas, adolescence to adulthood and typography to teleology." (Yeah, Gessen and his privileged band of bores are the answer. Okay, I'll stop.) "And if lit journal-cum-publishing house McSweeney's has come to stand (albeit unfairly so) as shorthand for this particular style of whimsy-sotted, Brooklyn-born preciousness, then online media gossip Gawker has served as its natural enemy, employing snark and irony to interrupt the daydreams of thousands of Michel Gondrys and Miranda Julys." Sounds good. But it isn't!

Highbrow pink newspaper the New York Observer—home to Gawker employees past, and probably future—launched their fancy new book review section, "O.R.B." (guess what it stands for) with a review of Keith Gessen's book, a profile by Leon Neyfakh, and a Joshua David Stein review. Which means that nearly all the names on the front page of the section belong to people who have, at one time or another, dated former Gawker editor Emily Gould. There are only like ten people who write things in New York, you see. This is like a nightmare we used to have! Click to enlarge the section, with names helpfully circled by a stalky anonymous tipster.

Okay, maybe it was wrong to imply that dating a blogger was useful for an ambitious novelist with a book to market. Literary hearthrob Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and editor of n+1 magazine, was to have featured prominently in an upcoming feature on Russian-American writers. But that was before editors at super-hip Russia! magazine discovered that the article's author, Gawker alumus Emily Gould, was romantically involved with her subject. Reports a spy: "One funny side effect of yesterday's item about the Gould-Gessen romance: RUSSIA! mag, where Gould has a big feature on "young Russian-American writers" in the next issue (closing this week), is furiously scrubbing the story of all mentions of Keith Gessen. Which were, of course, numerous, laudatory and unencumbered with disclaimers." After the jump, a passage from the draft.

No doubt this post will catch grief because it breaks an unspoken rule: speak no ill of a former Gawker writer. But it's a good yarn, of the romantic and professional entanglement of New York's literary and media networks, so fuck it. Enfant terrible of the city's literary set, Keith Gessen of n+1 magazine, has lost one of his acolytes. The desperately highbrow writer's former intern, Leon Neyfakh of the New York Observer, was commissioned to write a piece about his mentor's new work, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Neyfakh's thesis, that galleys of Gessen's first novel have been snapped up by other young writers searching for themselves in the characters, may yet make it into print. But the Observer reporter is unlikely to remain so devoted a promoter. Gessen's novel, which is published in April, is a black comedy centering around the romantic and literary ambitions of three young writers. Fact mirrors fiction: in an improbable twist that could have jumped out of the pages of his novel, the n+1 editor has stolen his devoted follower's girlfriend. And she's a familiar figure.

Keith Gessen

Early in the evening of the day I became Facebook friends with James Frey, Choire and I found ourselves standing on Chrystie Street, unloading boxes of n+1's Winter 2008 issue ("Mainstream") from a very large Budget rental truck. We did this in a fit of perversity. n+1 editor Keith Gessen had driven the truck from the Ingram warehouse in Pennsylvania earlier in the day, accompanied by an n+1 intern that he'd been "mentoring." There were six pallets. As usual, the issue's contributors had been invited to the box-unloading party, and so we staggered, box-laden, past the likes of little Ben Kunkel, wearing his noticeably-heeled boots even for this athletic activity. Probably more people came later for the beer-drinking part of the evening. But we missed that part because, when the truck was fully unloaded, we hopped into it with Keith to return it to the Budget lot in Brooklyn. On the way there, Keith turned up a narrow street and smashed a taillight and a bit of the back end of a minivan that would turn out to belong to an Orthodox Jewish lawyer.

In a tiny, cluttered, and yes, pizza-smelling office on Chrystie Street on Friday night, a group of sweaty thirtysomething men and heavily eyelinered young women gathered to celebrate the publication of a "pamphlet." The work in question resembles a foreshortened Zagat guide filtered through a Brooklyn-ey design sensibility; it contains two transcribed discussions that some very wise people had about what they wish they'd done differently in college. "I wish there were something else I was good at, just a little bit," the author Rebecca Curtis says in one of these discussions. "And not for the money, but just to be able to dip into something else, just to re-engage with the... the other world, the one that's not the literary world. Almost to perceive it better." But this party was not the place to find that other world, or even to acknowledge its existence.