Open City Magazine & Books are published by Open City, Inc., a nonprofit corporation based in New York City. The editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, strive to keep the literary journal vital for each new generation by publishing a dynamic array of poetry and prose with a daring, youthful, spirit. The editors aim to add a voice to the culture that values wit, depth, and ingenuity, and, in particular, the exposing and elucidating of the human predicament which is often devalued by commercial publishers.

The magazine was founded in 1990 by Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck and the book series was founded in 1999 by Robert Bingham.

The magazine comes out three times per year, and at this time Open City Books releases two to three books per year. The magazine and books appear in the Grove/Atlantic catalog and are distributed by Publishers Group West. The magazine is also distributed by Ubiquity and Kent News.

“Literary and urbane, the magazine harkens back and forward to the tradition of Baudelaire's Flaneur or Whitman's long riffs on the Lower East Side. The journal and press have carved out a vital place for themselves, being both very literary and showing the disruptive aspects of the human imagination. Think of Hermes as embodied in a literary magazine, the magazine as literary boundary-crosser, putting into language and art the ways in which a society actually speaks its social and private worlds. Open City is at a crucial stage in their growth and development, gaining momentum and prominence, and fast becoming what Poetry magazine was to the seventies, Paris Review was to the eighties, and Ploughshares to the nineties.”—Catherine Bowman

“Open City is, simply and supremely, the best American magazine there is. It is, like toilet tissue and the Bible, a paper product that belongs in every home.”—Nick Tosches

“Open City takes the old literary magazine format and revitalizes it for a new generation’s tastes.”—Library Journal

“Open City reminds me of what I crave from magazines: surprise, humor, nerve, a sense of collective imagination that takes in the totality of the enterprise and is reflected in each contribution so that the thing is more than the sum of its parts.”—Luc Sante

“Open City showcases the literature of tomorrow today.”—Los Angeles Times

“Intelligent and accessible . . . a hip, urban aesthetic.”—Poets & Writers

“Open City is one of those wonderful journals that testify to the vitality and health of the reading and writing impulse.”—Identity Theory

“Open City exists as a perpetual love letter to literary tradition and a welcoming embrace to art and literature of the moment.”—Powells.com

“I buy every issue of Open City. I can’t say that about any other literary publication. Like many of its contemporaries, the magazine offers a mix of traditional and experimental offerings, but here the blend actually works, managing to be lively and harmonious at once.”—Maud Newton (maudnewton.com)

 

 

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