Uzoamaka Maduka Leaves a Paper Trail With the American Reader
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Version 0 of 1. IN a five-story town house on East 49th Street, novelists, artists and editors gathered last month for one of the more lavish literary parties of the season, hosted by Scott Asen, a financier who sits on the board of The Paris Review. Fine-featured girls in Pre-Raphaelite dresses swayed to a four-piece Dixieland band as one guest whispered, “There are more literary people here than anywhere.” Between cocktails, thick slices of pink roast beef were plated and passed around, and Ann Marlowe, the writer and critic, approached a young African-American woman seated at a long kitchen table. “You’re the woman with the magazine, aren’t you?” she asked. She is. As the editor of the fledgling literary journal, The American Reader, Uzoamaka Maduka, a 25-year-old Princeton graduate, is proof that even in this iPhone age, some paper-based dreams have not died: bright young things, it seems, are still coming to New York, smoking too much and starting perfect-bound literary journals. On the night of Mr. Asen’s party, The American Reader was just a week away from deadline for its third issue. The fact the magazine has printed anything at all has left many to wonder: how did this young woman, with no special family or literary connections, manage to wrangle some big names around the unlikeliest of projects — a monthly literary magazine? The answer is that Ms. Maduka, or Max to her friends, has combined an unusual charisma with sheer determination to meet the right people, find the right parties and propel herself into the city’s literary set, even before the magazine has produced much in the way of writing. Her personality presents a stark contrast to the clubby and often critical literary party scene, with a warm, open nature that has built a parade of new best friends — along with admiring profiles in The New York Observer and The Daily Beast. “All of a sudden we found ourselves on fast-forward, almost,” said Julian Tepper, the novelist, who met Ms. Maduka last June at his own book party. “All I can remember is being very good friends.” “It’s no wonder people have responded so well to her, and so quickly,” he added. The journal’s masthead alone makes for interesting reading. Her editors and advisers lean heavily toward Princeton connections, sprinkled with writers, poets, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and two women more frequently photographed than written about. The memoirist and former Vogue writer Stephanie LaCava and Shala Monroque, occasional muse to Miuccia Prada, make it a better-dressed list than usual. “It sounded intriguing and a bit insane,” said Ben Marcus, the novelist who joined The American Reader as its fiction editor in the fall. He was recruited by an e-mail that was part fan letter, part cold call. When he met Ms. Maduka and her executive editor (and on-again, off-again boyfriend), Jac Mullen, at Le Monde on the Upper West Side, Ms. Maduka had already ordered Champagne for the table. They said he could edit three pieces of fiction each month, but he remained skeptical. “No matter what objections I raised,” he said, “Max seemed gorgeously undeterred.” While The American Reader aspires to publish important fiction, poetry and criticism, the most interesting thing about the project may be the editor in chief herself. Born to Nigerian parents and raised in Maryland, Ms. Maduka is easily mistaken for well over six feet tall (she is 5-foot-11, “it’s all hair and heels,” she said, laughing), and wears spandex, turbans and kimonos as easily as a floor-length gown. She smokes with relish and is a practicing Catholic eager to defend her beliefs, attending weekly mass at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue with Mr. Mullen, who became Catholic while they dated at Princeton. The idea for the journal came after Mr. Mullen was injured in a freakish skating accident last year. As he was stuck at home for months with his leg in a cast, the two talked over everything, the way they did in college. They felt the literary world had become too hermetic, especially for readers under 35. “So many of the voices in fiction that are out there are deeply neurotic white male stories of how, ‘Oh, I had weird sex, I can’t figure things out, I’m going to ramble for 300 pages, you better sit still because I’m a tour de force,’ ” Ms. Maduka said. “I kind of felt like, I really don’t want to sit still for this.” “Literature, from women of any race and men of any race, besides white, would always be pigeonholed as, ‘Now I’m going to tell you my Nigerian story,’ ” she added, “And it was so tiring.” Few have read The American Reader yet — it is currently sold in only two downtown bookstores — but those who have say it is too early to offer a critique. Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, has read most of the first two issues, and said he was very impressed by the confidence and energy of its young editors. “I like the unprecious look of the thing,” he said. “It’s made to be read. Of course it will be tricky putting out a new one every month, but that’s clearly part of the fun of the endeavor.” The magazine’s financial backer has preferred to remain anonymous. But that has not quieted the array of rumors that have sprung up at dinner parties around town. Was it the superstar art dealer Larry Gagosian, who has been romantically linked to Ms. Monroque, a creative consultant for the magazine? (“Not true,” Ms. Maduka said.) What about Mr. Asen, who threw Ms. Maduka a birthday party last summer? (No.) Are Ms. Maduka’s parents famous, wealthy Nigerian writers bankrolling their daughter? (Her father is a pediatrician, her mother is a chemical engineer.) The real story? “It was random,” she said. One of Ms. Maduka’s college friends, she explained, was offered money for some kind of cultural project. The friend had nothing in the works, however, and passed the opportunity onto Ms. Maduka, acting as a middleman for the mystery investor. That money allows her to pay the writers and two full-time staff members, and to print the magazine. Ms. Maduka and Mr. Mullen are still living off their savings from previous jobs — she as an au pair and Mr. Mullen as a copy editor. To keep expenses down, Mr. Mullen lives in The American Reader’s offices, while Ms. Maduka shares a nearby town house with several Juilliard students. They are hustling to sell subscriptions and advertising, but more urgently, they need a second investor. Without other money coming in, the initial investment runs out in March. “We’re at such a critical time right now,” said Ms. Maduka, which is why her end-of-year calendar was filled with events where she scouted new writers and potential investors, often while smoking. (“I’ve always viewed the smoke break as the golf course of the creative class,” she said.) It is aggressive, if cheerful, networking. On a Wednesday in December, she wore a dingy, rough-edged sweatshirt and red knit cap at the Gin Mingle fund-raiser held by the Housing Works bookstore. The next night, sheathed in a long, lean black dress, she addressed a cocktail party full of supporters for her magazine in a West Village apartment. A week later, she arrived in a textured peplum top and spandex pants at a warehouse bookstore in Dumbo, where she spoke at a PEN American Center party. Sometimes there is cat-eye makeup. Sometimes there is not. Between all this, the magazine is struggling with the inevitable start-up problems. The first issue was printed on the wrong paper. Its glossy cover crinkled badly and was quickly redesigned for the second issue (lifting the design almost entirely from an obscure midcentury French political journal, Le Contrat Social). The magazine is working to set up distribution beyond New York City, and is hoping to increase the 20,000 unique hits to its Web site per month. The content remains uneven. The second issue’s central piece was a reprint of a famous 1955 James Baldwin essay, which is easily found on the Internet and has its own Wikipedia page. Many people who have read The American Reader said in interviews that they were still waiting to be impressed by it. But Ms. Maduka is keeping her fingers crossed that a new investor will provide the chance for the magazine to build a lasting legacy. She dreams of its becoming a truly national publication or printing an undiscovered story by Dostoyevsky. In the rented apartment that is the office, a printout of a long article on the history of the 60-year-old Paris Review sat on the kitchen counter, laying the magazine’s aspirations bare. She worries that if the money runs out, people are going to view The American Reader as just another cautionary tale about the death of print, and that her generation will again be stereotyped as unserious multitaskers who prefer to Instagram the world rather than to write about it. “You start to feel,” she said, “like you have a lot more on your shoulders.” |