"I sometimes ask myself," writes editor Daniel Pinchbeck, "whether the process of putting out Open City isn't akin to one of those tribal ceremonies, described by anthropologists, in which all of the excess goods of a tribe—in our case, the editors' time, the advertisers' money, the artists' work—are combined and destroyed in one huge bonfire and bacchanalia." Pinchbeck published this lament in The New York Times Book Review in 1998, bemoaning the difficulty of publishing a highbrow quarterly at a time when bohemia and belles lettres had withered, leaving a climate in which it was barely possible to give a literary magazine away, let alone sell one.

Only two years later, it seems that either literary culture has changed, or the wantonly destructive bacchanalia has only gotten bigger, for Open City is one of several literary magazines that have optimistically expanded into a new arena: book publishing. Open City Books debuted with the successful publication of David Berman's poetry collection Actual Air in 1999 and has since released a second title (Sam Lipsyte's Venus Drive) and signed up a third. Dave Eggers's impish literary-and-humor hybrid McSweeney's recently published its first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, while experimental poetry journal Fence revealed plans to publish two titles next spring.

While they're not the first literary magazines to try their hand at book publishing, these three bring a new sensibility—and a new urgency—to the pursuit. Run mostly by thirtysomething writers and editors, this latest generation of New York literary journals are stylishly packaged, serving up a mix of prominent names, undiscovered aspirants, and lost treasures from the vaults. Each has staked out a different aesthetic territory, but between them they cover a wide swath of contemporary literature.

Open City (founded by Pinchbeck and novelist Thomas Beller, who were later joined by the late Robert Bingham) is perhaps most notable for an athletic balance of hipster glamour and highbrow esoterica. While the lives of young urbanites naturally receive their share of coverage, the magazine also publishes more rarefied and unexpected work: Geoff Dyer's rumination on his visit to Algiers in the footsteps of Camus, Alfred Chester's letters to Paul Bowles, passages from the journals of Edvard Munch. Fence (the brainchild of poet Rebecca Wolff) is primarily dedicated to poetry that defies the aesthetic categories and ideological allegiances that dominate much of the field. It was one of the first nonacademic journals to publish Anne Carson, and continues to feature counterestablishment innovators like Harryette Mullen, Stephanie Strickland, and Geoffrey G. O'Brien.

Probably the best known of the three magazines is McSweeney's, partly because of the success of founder Dave Eggers's recent memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. McSweeney's is backhanded and sly, publishing not only humor pieces but also short stories and serious essays and various mutations in between. Ken Foster's story "Red Dresses" was memorably published with an en face running criticism by Ana Marie Cox, as well as Foster's response to her critique; the piece is characteristic of McSweeney's irreverent postmodern sensibility, and at the same time a rare instance of actual dialogue between critic and writer.

If Open City, Fence, and McSweeney's have developed their own distinctive sensibilities, they all have in common a certain cachet that separates them from the crowded field of literary publications (which also includes newcomers like Zoetrope, the older Granta and Grand Street, and dozens of smaller and university-affiliated journals). Perhaps the most telling example of their shared cultural currency is the small group of contributors they have in common: critically successful, au courant writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, and Rick Moody. From the beginning, the magazine editors have been able to draw well-known writers to their fledgling publications due in no small part to their wide network of friends. Of course, the big names don't always contribute their most significant work (indeed, they sometimes seem to be sleepwalking through the pieces), and sometimes one has to sift through predictably angsty confessional moments, bits of solipsistic whimsy, and halfhearted gags to get to the true reward: the work of talented newcomers, perhaps still rough, but exuberant and powerful nonetheless. It's these pieces, plus a certain alchemy of literary stars, youthful sensibility, and convenient connections (many of the underpaid staff members have other jobs elsewhere in the publishing industry), that have won the magazines a reputation among publishing professionals for an energy and spirit of innovation that go by the shorthand "edge."

Around each magazine a social scene has coalesced, a loose network of artists and writers and musicians and hangers-on cultivated through parties at downtown clubs where the the price of admission is sometimes buying the magazine itself. San Francisco-based poet August Kleinzhaler recalls the buzz around a recent Fence party he attended while visiting New York. "I had never seen the magazine, but I was having drinks with some of my former students, and they all mentioned the Fence party that night. Then I was talking to my editor's assistant, and he brought it up too. It was a party to be seen at."

Indeed, the social events sometimes acquire reputations that precede the magazines themselves. This is particularly true of Open City, whose well-attended, open-bar gatherings have been elaborate ("One was in a bar that had this weird downstairs with huts, round huts, and you could go inside the huts, it was sort of like they were saunas," recalls a breathless partygoer), and at least as likely to be attended by indie rock stars as budding poets. "We have people who only know about Open City because of the parties," laughs managing editor Joanna Yas.

However dubious such fame, it's won the magazines not only readers but also writers, designers, and a constellation of informal consultants. "Having friends who are writers and artists and work at other publications is the only way we could have done this," says Yas. A devoted following that provides unpaid assistance is indispensable, given that the magazines rely on private money, grants, and the goodwill of advertisers to stay afloat. "It's totally useless in any commercial sense," Beller says of the literary magazine. "It's a hobby, we put our own money in. To this day when I run around trying to get ads, I may as well be saying, why don't you take $300 and just burn it, or instead of burning it, give it to us, and we'll burn it for you. There's not even the pretense that 'our readership is your type of person.' "

If these bleak circumstances oppress even the hippest literary magazines, then putting out books would seem to be throwing more money into the fire. Editors say their book publishing projects were spontaneously conceived as a response to the limitations of mainstream publishing—namely, the notorious unwillingness to commit to any author who doesn't have "bestseller" potential. The editors at Open City hadn't even realized they wanted to publish books until they saw one of their writers being turned away from other houses. "David Berman had been rejected by a couple different publishers," recalls Joanna Yas, "and Rob Bingham was infuriated that David was not able to find a publisher." So Bingham decided Open City should publish Berman's Actual Air, a collection of gently wistful, accessible poems, scenes of small-town and suburban life tinged with gothic weirdness.

Other editors have similar stories of watching writers they admire search unsuccessfully for a publisher. According to Rebecca Wolff, "In poetry there's this whole world of first-book contests, and every year hundreds of first books come out, but then it's next to impossible for the poet to have another book published. There's no dedication to the writer."

McSweeney's open grievance against the industry is particularly striking because the magazine's needling humor rarely confronts head-on media or cultural institutions. The introduction to issue No. 4 riffs on the failure of jacket designers to capture the tone of a book, and the Web site for McSweeney's Books is a manifesto that indicts publishers for bungling the sales of books like Neal Pollack's. His Anthology of American Literature is a collection of satirical sketches from the perspective of "America's greatest living writer." At once silly and erudite, the book refuses to fit neatly into the usual categories of humor or literary fiction, and thus seeds confusion in the mainstream publishing machine:

Publishers are convinced that such books do not sell well, because the applicable trade magazines have told them so, while citing sagging sales of recent Drabble cartoon compilations, which are invariably grouped in with the work of people like Mr. Pollack. The salespeople representing the publishing company would have no idea how to sell such a book . . . and thus the book would be ignored and would not be ordered by stores and it would quickly disappear and Mr. Pollack would never get another book contract and the trade magazines would chalk it all up to the lamentable fact that people simply don't like this kind of book.

So far, the magazines' publishing projects seem to be driven by a dedication to supporting the talented writers who slip through the cracks of bottom-line-driven publishing. Noble intentions aside, however, there's a certain nagging paradox in this publishing scheme: How is it that tiny literary magazines can afford to flout the very financial restrictions that keep editors at Norton or Knopf hamstrung in their editorial choices? Part of the answer is, of course, that it's easier to take such risks when you're already turning out a privately funded "hobby" from which no one expects to earn a living. There's a sense of entitlement behind the costly and likely unprofitable ventures, and a lingering question of how long they'll keep putting out books when the only imperative to do so is an idealistic vision—one that seems slightly less radiant in light of the fact that Beller, Bingham, and Eggers all chose to publish their own books through mainstream publishers (W.W. Norton, Doubleday, and Simon & Schuster respectively).

This doesn't mean, however, that book publishing is merely a whimsical vanity enterprise for the magazines. On the contrary, they have improvised pragmatic schemes that could well influence the industry as a whole. Fence is collaborating with private sponsors on one of its books. An even more unusual financial arrangement is that of McSweeney's, which will not pay Pollack an author's advance, but in return will give the writer 100 percent of the profits for books sold through the Web site (and a slightly smaller percentage for books sold in stores). The publisher is guaranteed to recoup the costs of production (something many conventionally published books never do), and the writer has a chance to make more than he would with an advance. And to generate sales, Neal Pollack is counting on an unorthodox tour that takes McSweeney's New York party scene on the road: "I like to go see writers read, but when I go out, I go to bars and parties and rock shows. So why not try to make it more like an indie rock tour? Why not market a book like an album?"

Why not, indeed, since Open City Books had phenomenal success with David Berman's Actual Air by marketing it precisely that way. The book has sold nearly 10,000 copies, unprecedented in a market where a poetry collection that sells 2000 copies is considered successful. A significant portion of those sales were through music stores and Berman's record distributor. Of course, Berman—singer for the Silver Jews— actually is a musician with a considerable following. Nonetheless, in choosing unorthodox venues and distribution methods, Open City used guerrilla marketing tactics that established publishers have been slow to catch on to.

Certainly the magazines don't have the infrastructure for creating bestsellers, but they may well have tapped into the best way to sell those first novels and books of essays that even experienced publishers have trouble selling. The conventional publishing wisdom is that neither large-scale advertising nor reviews are necessarily effective at selling these books. Open City (which, Yas says, would sooner throw a party than spend money on a full-page ad in The New York Times) seems to have intuited this situation and turned to an underground community-based salesmanship. Its success with Actual Air led to a distribution deal with Grove Atlantic Press (an established though still independent house built on a reputation for outré writers like William Burroughs).

For their writers, the magazines also offer something less tangible than book sales: an intimate understanding of and devotion to the writers' work that comes from having published their pieces in the magazine. Writers and editors report an atmosphere of impromptu deals and genial informality. Sam Lipsyte, the author of Open City's second title, Venus Drive, hadn't even put together a complete manuscript when Open City offered to sign up his collection of stories, many of which were first published in the magazine. Neal Pollack never had a written contract with McSweeney's Books: "I trust Dave, I trust all the people who work with Dave." Since only one book is being published at a time, authors get continuous one-on-one contact with editors who are deeply invested in all aspects of the book.

Relationships like these also exist in larger houses but are harder to cultivate and maintain when publishers have longer lists of books and the publication process is divided between multiple departments. Jason Epstein, longtime Random House editor, wrote an essay in April's New York Review of Books recalling the intimacy and informality of publishing houses in the 1950s, and mourning its loss in today's more corporate publishing environment. By nature, Epstein's essay maintains, publishing is a "cottage industry" that should be run by small, autonomous, decentralized groups of people who expect few financial rewards for their efforts. While this mode of publishing has been made scarce by conglomerates, Epstein predicts that in the near future, when commercial bestsellers are distributed electronically, literary publishing will again become a small-scale, independent operation.

The literary magazine presses seem like nothing so much as a return to Epstein's cottage industry; in both their structure and their sense of responsibility to the writer, there is something profoundly nostalgic about these publishing projects, while their attempts to draw around them a creative community seem haunted by memories of other, now extinct New York bohemias. It still remains to be seen whether there will be enough talented literary orphans—or enough long-term commitment from the editors—for these presses to consistently turn out books. But while much of the industry bends heliotropically toward electronic publishing, these editors suggest that an intimate, improvisational style of book production is not just a sentimental relic of the past, but a promising possibility for the future of literary publishing.

Elaine Blair is an editor at the online magazine Feed.

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