Who

Co-founder/editor of intellectual rag n+1, Gessen is a novelist, critic, and connoisseur of taking yourself as seriously as humanly possible.

Backstory

Born in Moscow—he left for America when he was six, later changing his given name from Kostya—Gessen grew up in Boston and went to Harvard, where he played on the football team (and, he says, "thought about modernity, the Renaissance, etc."). After attending, but not graduating from, the MFA program at Syracuse, he moved to New York and started freelancing, contributing book reviews to The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and New York magazine. In 2004 he co-founded n+1 with Benjamin Kunkel, Mark Greif and Marco Roth (see below). He won a National Book Critics Circle award a year later for his translation of Voices From Chernobyl, a collection of oral testimony from those effected by the power plant disaster.

Of note

n+1 has been a lightning rod for criticism since its launch in 2004. The editors have made no secret of their ambition to become "the New New York Intellectuals," nor of their disdain for n+1's rival, the Dave Eggers-created, Heidi Julavits-edited anti-snark organ The Believer ("mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking," n+1's debut issue declared). And the n+1 editors' all-white, all-male demographics and elite educational pedigrees (three are Harvard alums, the fourth came from the comparative backwaters of Columbia and Yale) have attracted derision. But the journal—which Gessen likes to refer to as "a research institute that has taken on the form of a literary magazine"—succeeded in making a big splash, with a glowing profile in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2005 and extra buzz that same year with the release of co-editor Benjamin Kunkel's debut novel Indecision. The twice-yearly n + 1 now has six issues under its belt, and its mix of intelligent and ridiculously pretentious content invariably gets a rise out of literary types.

Recently

Gessen's debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published in April 2008 to extremely mixed reviews. Much like Kunkel's novel, the book explores the struggle to find meaning in life when you're privileged, white, educated, and male. According to the Village Voice: "Gessen, in a thinly disguised roman à clef, traces the post-collegiate wanderings of three young men, but barely musters the craftsmanship of a Tuesday-afternoon e-mail."

Personal

Gessen, who is divorced, had his love life placed under the microscope in March '08 when, just in time for the April publication of his novel, he began dating ex-Gawker blogger and notorious attention-seeker Emily Gould. The coupling was all the juicier given that Gould had just dumped former n+1 intern Leon Neyfakh, and she was working on a magazine feature about Gessen and several other writers at the time. The couple apparently split in May 2008, although they've since spent time together in Moscow, where erstwhile Brooklynite Gessen has decamped for reasons best known to himself.  

Family ties

His elder sister, Masha Gessen, is the author of Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace.