The Threepenny Review, her smart and unpretentious literary quarterly. As founder and publisher of The Threepenny Review, based in Berkeley, Calif., Lesser has stubbornly gone her own way for nearly 20 years, with few regrets. But I also don't have the downside of other people's lives. I don't have to go to an office, and my work is all self-assigned. Everything I do makes sense to me.
Young people are interested in that.
In the quiet and effete world of the literary journal, Threepenny speaks to Lesser's determination to do things her way. Back when she was just 27 but armed with Harvard and Cambridge credentials, she launched the publication with a thimble's worth of actual experience. Having edited one issue of the San Francisco Review of Books, she writes in The Amateur , she saw her destiny. In a matter of months after completing that assignment, she had tapped her literary contacts at Berkeley and drawn on the advice of a friend who knew something about start-ups. Hanging by a shoestring, perhaps, but in January 1980, Threepenny was up and running.