ce n'est pas genève

THE AMERICAN READER x UZOAMAKA MADUKA 

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Meet The American Reader, a monthly journal of literature and criticism. Or, the answer to my prayers. 

The brainchild of Ms. Uzoamaka Maduka, The American Reader is embedded in a sort of worldly sophistication that rarely finds its way onto American newsstands. The journal features New Yorker style illustrations and and an interactive bookcase, as well as interviews with outspoken literary heavyweights like Jamaica Kincaid. It incorporates elements that set it far apart from the crowd, such as the Lettres column that today published a 1959 archived letter written by John Steinbeck to Eugène Vinaver. On May 9, a 1911 letter from George Bernard Shaw to F.C. Whitney; on May 15, a 1933 letter from Ernest Hemingway to his friend John Dos Passos, where he swears like a sailor, comments on his fishing abilities and discusses efficient travel routes: "Caught 2 damned fine marlin. They bit like grunts. Saw 20 yesterday. We go to Mariel Cabañas Bahia Honda on Tuesday. Wish to hell you and Katey could come down—come in June and you can still get to Pamplona—a boat from here to Vigo—see Santiago de Compostella—get a train Coruña—Madrid—train to Pamplona. Buy your Kilometrico [mileage ticket] in Vigo. You can get a car cheap to drive to Santiago from Vigo—can drive to Noya too—use the damned $ before it’s worthless." For people who revel in lost history and find vintage records and photographs as interesting as I do, The American Reader will prove a vault of high-caliber information, a treasure chest of forgotten works, and certainly a staple in your monthly reading.

Rather ironic that a conservative publication based quite explicitly on traditional mores and a highly Americanized lens is considered refreshing, "radical and ambitious", cutting edge. The classic cornerstone of the Reader might be a product of its well-bred Editor-in-Chief, Uzoamaka "Max" Maduka, a 25-year-old Princeton graduate recently featured in Town & Country, The New York Times, Vogue, and Forbes, among others. The sparkling profile in the New York Times lends some insight into Ms. Maduka's background: she was born to Nigerian parents, raised in Maryland, stands a statuesque 5-foot-11, "wears spandex, turbans and kimonos as easily as a floor-length gown," and smokes "with relish." She started the Reader fresh out of Princeton, having been spurred by long conversations with her boyfriend (executive editor Jac Mullen) about their mutual distaste for contemporary literature. In an interview with Vice magazine, she says, "Basically, we saw that what other publications were doing didn’t reflect our tastes and realized that we should make something ourselves rather than just complaining about its lack. Maybe the thing that we want—the thing we look for in the classics—is out there being produced out there right now. Maybe it just doesn’t have a platform."

Maybe now, perhaps, it does. Ms. Maduka's ultimate ambition with the Reader is to reform the American publishing industry and reestablish the lost art of writing - not good writing, not mediocre writing, but an exceptional body of 21st-century classic literature. She laments the inbred microcosm of New York lit society and its effect on the quality of American literature, adopting a bitingly no-nonsense scholarly voice in her criticism of American publishing. In the same interview with Vice, she argues against the "unpaid internship" epidemic in the publishing industry: "It is important that people get paid for this kind of work. It needs to be treated with honor and integrity. Thinking about paying writers and editors, you are talking about socioeconomic diversity in how you make up your staff. That's what makes the whole unpaid thing so uncomfortable. The way it selects, by virtue of its nature, who is determining what culture is. What happens is you have an inbred publishing world where everyone feels the same thing and everybody acts the same and you get this demented, disfigured content as a result." 
Moreover, Ms. Maduka attacks the tired and cynical vein of Internet-style fiction rampant in the American market.“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.' And it was so tiring.”

Despite thoroughly putting me to shame, I will gladly call this 25-year-old Editor-in-Chief a force to be reckoned with. Ms. Maduka's grand visions echo every restoration in history, so her challenge will likely be recognizing the changing face of "classic" without allowing the rose-coloured lens of nostalgia - for the oft-remembered but rarely realistic Golden Age or American Dream - to inhibit the reach of The American Reader.