IN a five-story town house on East 49th Street, novelists, artists and editors gathered last month for one of the more lavish literary parties of the season, hosted by Scott Asen, a financier who sits on the board of The Paris Review. Fine-featured girls in Pre-Raphaelite dresses swayed to a four-piece Dixieland band as one guest whispered, “There are more literary people here than anywhere.”

Between cocktails, thick slices of pink roast beef were plated and passed around, and Ann Marlowe, the writer and critic, approached a young African-American woman seated at a long kitchen table.

“You’re the woman with the magazine, aren’t you?” she asked.

She is. As the editor of the fledgling literary journal, The American Reader, Uzoamaka Maduka, a 25-year-old Princeton graduate, is proof that even in this iPhone age, some paper-based dreams have not died: bright young things, it seems, are still coming to New York, smoking too much and starting perfect-bound literary journals.

On the night of Mr. Asen’s party, The American Reader was just a week away from deadline for its third issue. The fact the magazine has printed anything at all has left many to wonder: how did this young woman, with no special family or literary connections, manage to wrangle some big names around the unlikeliest of projects — a monthly literary magazine?