To see the masthead, click here.
Open City Magazine was founded in 1990 by Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck. They were joined in 1993 by Robert Bingham. Open City Books was founded by Robert Bingham in 1999. From 2001 through 2011 Open City Magazine and Books was edited by Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas. The last issue of the magazine, Open City #30, was published in December 2010. Click here for more information about the closing of the magazine.
Open City Books appear in the Grove/Atlantic catalog and are distributed by Publishers Group West. Back issues of Open City are available here.
Praise for Open City:
“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)
