when you bring in women or people of color

“There was something about the invitation that made me wear a jacket,” the novelist Sam Lipsyte deadpanned last Friday night at a magazine launch in an apartment on West 10th Street. Yes, some usual suspects were there—Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Marcus, editors from The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, and writers from The New York Times and The New Yorker—but aside from that, this wasn’t your average literary party: the attire was more art-world chic than MFA tweedy.

The American Reader isn’t your average literary magazine. The Princeton grads who run it have barely closed their second issue, and already it is being hailed as the next Paris Review or n+1.

But Uzoamaka Maduka, the 25-year-old editor in chief, doesn’t go in for the comparison. She’s looking for wider appeal.

“There’s a way in which both the larger society and the literary world have collaborated in allowing the literary world to be very hermetic and recede from the daily back and forth of culture,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet.” she told The Observer over coffee last week at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee in the West Village

Then they started pulling in the big guns. Mr. Mullen emailed one of his favorite contemporary writers—now Ben Marcus is the fiction editor. Ms. Maduka got in touch with Dean Young, her favorite poet—he is now their poetry editor.

“It’s like when you have a kid or a friend and you’re willing to do things on their behalf that you wouldn’t do for yourself,” Ms. Maduka said. “I would never email Dean Young and be like, ‘Let’s hang out.’ But I would for the magazine.”

“We are young, and when you are young, you have less inhibitions, and you just power through and don’t think about how it doesn’t make sense,” said the magazine’s 32-year-old creative consultant, Shala Monroque, a regular on the international art and fashion circuits who has been romantically linked with the art superdealer Larry Gagosian.

At their party, Ms. Maduka attributed the stylishness of the crowd to Ms. Monroque. Ms. Monroque attributed it to Ms. Maduka’s editorial vision.

“It was immediate, automatic; I was really inspired by what Max was saying about the magazine,” Ms. Monroque said. “I’m often really bored at fashion parties, and it’s nice to get to have intelligent conversations.”

Ms. Monroque was introduced to Ms. Maduka through the Reader’s editor at large Stephanie La Cava, whom Ms. Maduka met at a PEN event. The other editor at large is writer Sage Mehta, a fellow Princeton alum and a recognizable face on the literary circuit.

Despite her youth, Ms. Maduka, who is Nigerian-American, is a commanding presence. Part of that is due to her height—she is over six feet tall—but it also comes from her style. An afternoon coffee merited an ankle-length black dress,View the fantastic range of comfortable and stylish Women Factory Clearance from women shoes factory. dangly zig-zag-shaped rhinestone earrings, an oversize quilted black coat and liquid eyeliner.Have a look at all our custom bobbleheads models starting with free proofing.

“She is always so well-dressed,” said Ms. Monroque, who knows from well-dressed, being creative director of the art and fashion magazine Garage. “The first time I met her, she had on this blue turban to the side and her Afro hair was sticking out. She looked like a different version of the girl with the pearl earring. And then she opens her mouth and immediately is impressive.”

Impressive, but not aloof or off-putting. Ms. Maduka comes across as just another 25-year-old aspiring to work in the lit world, as though she could have climbed the editorial ranks at The New Yorker or Harper’s but instead decided to start her own thing, and just happened to meet the right people at the right time.

Ms. Maduka met Mr. Mullen,laser cutter is a technology that uses a laser to cut materials, the magazine’s co-founder and executive editor, during her senior year at Princeton, when she was editor in chief of the student-run Nassau Weekly, the highbrow humor and arts alt weekly that was co-founded by David Remnick and John McPhee. Mr. Mullen, a year below her, wrote for the Nass.

“Working at The Nassau Weekly really primed me as a thinker and a critical writer,” she said. “I can’t imagine I’d be doing anything I’m doing today if I didn’t write for the Nass.”

Her path to The American Reader was somewhat circuitous. After graduation, she did a stint as an au pair in Switzerland, then wrote in Croatia for three months. Mr. Mullen took a year off of college to tag along. Back in America, Ms. Maduka interned for Verso Books, an independent publisher of mostly translated political theory.

“I benefited from being raised always on the edge of something,” Ms. Maduka said. “I’m black, but I’m not African-American. I’m African. I’m Catholic. That sense of constantly being lost in translation allows me to stay marginal in a way.”

She is aware of something that many magazine editors probably don’t often stop to notice—that she is operating in a white world.

“The literary scene in New York is one of the last bastions of white male privilege,” Ms. Maduka said over coffee, explaining that it there is still a narrow framework for diversity. “Even when you bring in women or people of color, it’s still, like, Harvard, Princeton, Yale. I went to an Ivy. Look at what I’m wearing”—she gestured at her dress, rhinestone earrings, quilted coat—“This is ridiculous.Fun Custom Bobble Heads Video to celebrate our 10th year make your own bobblehead.”