Photography by Danielle Levitt
Choire Sicha
"I didn't even start writing until I was 30," says Sicha, a Gawker alum and co-founder of the smart, spiky website The Awl, whose Gen X mix of despair and ennui has won him a legion of admirers. That same quality illuminates Sicha's debut book, Very Recent History, which follows a group of gay men around a city buffeted by the 2008 crash. "What has been really strange is that everyone thinks it's a novel, but it's actually entirely true," says Sicha, whose subtitle for History -- An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City -- is intended to be read literally. As for his next act, Sicha is characteristically tortured. "Writing a book is a terrible, terrible thing to do," he says, before adding, "Of course I'm going to write another one."
Phil Jimenez
Considering he's an artist on the X-Men franchise for Marvel, the Transformers for Hasbro, and the man behind out character Kevin Keller in the Archie comics, being a dreamer is practically a job requirement for Jimenez. "One of the things that appealed to me about fantasy was stuff that was bigger than life," he says. "You can create art that reflects the world we live in, or you can create art that suggests another way to live in our world. And I've always been a big fan of the latter."
Photographed at the Skyline Hotel in New York City on August 21, 2013
