Radically cutting a path from the past Throwbacks to a literary life

For a sense of a spell that's broken, talk to Ed Park, whose novel comes out at the end of May. With his rumpled-preppy dress and pointy glasses, Park, sitting at an eatery near his West 95th Street apartment, could be one of the geek-chic protagonists in Adrian Tomine's "Optic Nerve" comic. Inspired more by the hip taste and fanboy ethos of the alternative press than the intellectually striving postwar "little magazine," he worships Philip K. Dick instead of Philip Rahv.

In the years after he started at the Village Voice in 1995 -- first as a copy editor -- he thrived on the paper's cerebral and politically progressive tone. But as he rose through the ranks over a decade, eventually heading the Voice Literary Supplement, things turned dour.

"Whatever romantic view I had of what I was doing," he said of the period around '05, "I started to see it was all driven by money and profit."

"Personal Days," much of which he wrote right before and after being fired by the paper's new owners, New Times Media, in 2006, looks at the curdling of that young writer's dream: We see the hyper-intellectual workplace of the Voice -- never identified as such -- with all its literary or political idealism burned off. With its gossip and minutiae, elevator flirtations, Orwellian e-mails and looming layoffs, it could be the Dunder-Mifflin paper mill of television's "The Office" -- the Village as Scranton, Penn.

"I never say what they do," he said of the office's employees. "I wanted it to stay focused on the universal workplace environment and interactions. Everybody knows what an office is like."

But Park also burns, in his gently obsessive and sometimes tongue-tied way, with a bit of Rich's optimism. In 2003, as things were going from bad to worse at the Voice, he and some of the McSweeney's crew started the Believer, an impassioned and sometimes precious magazine that, with its retro typefaces and eccentric illustrations, seemed to revel self-consciously in its identity as printed matter.

"It was an interesting year to launch a print magazine," Park said. "It's really something you can't get on the Web. The beauty of each issue isn't simply cosmetic -- a 'cool design'; the attractiveness also has to do with a marriage of form and function."

Under the radar

The old office for n+1 -- which, notwithstanding its detractors, has also been hailed as the most important new journal in decades -- sat in what Gessen called a "dank dungeon" in the no-man's land between SoHo and the Lower East Side. Staffers would descend for entire days at a time to write, edit and think deep thoughts.