THEY'VE GOT SOME NERVE

Genevieve Field and her boyfriend Rufus Griscom have created the perfect scenario for a breakup: they walked away from their day jobs, set up an office in their tiny New York City apartment, created an online sex magazine and contributed lots of incredibly personal stories. I give them six months max.

But for now, Field, 27, and Griscom, 29, are clicking. Attractive, bespectacled and living in a bookshelf-clogged apartment that looks very much like grad-school housing, they've become the cyber Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. Since they launched their online magazine, Nerve, on June 26 (the very day the Supreme Court knocked down the Communications Decency Act), they've got great reviews, a book deal with Broadway Books and about 10,000 visitors a day.

What's the attraction? Nerve www.nervemag.com is the only intellectual publication that trades in smutty stories and pictures of naked women--one of whom is lapping water from a bowl. There's sleaze aplenty on the Internet, of course--but how often is it accompanied by contributions about sex from literary luminaries like Norman Mailer, John Hawkes and Rick Moody? That combination gets attention (though you can't underestimate that bowl-lapping thing).

Griscom and Field, former co-workers at a small publishing house, were able to attract such writers--from Joycelyn Elders on masturbation to William T. Vollmann on venereal disease--simply by writing them mash letters and offering to pay them $1 a word--not bad for the magazine world and extraordinary for the Web. "I spend the majority of every day thinking about how best to communicate with writers," says Field. "And that's what did it." The letters work. Moody (The Ice Storm, Purple America), who doesn't use the Web and can't imagine anyone reading onscreen, got half a dozen of the letters. "They kept sending me letters saying, 'I love your work. I love your work.' And I kept saying, 'I don't have any time. I have nothing to say about this.'" Eventually he relented. "I'm against online publications in principle, but just found Genevieve's energy appealing," he says. Likewise, Griscom was able to persuade a professor of his from Brown, Hawkes, 72 (The Blood Oranges, An Irish Eye), to contribute. "As soon as he made clear that they were writing seriously about sex, I thought it seemed extraordinarily necessary," he says, "though I confess that I didn't know what online meant."

Sallie Tisdale (Talk Dirty to Me), who also doesn't read on the Web, pitched in. "I write for Nerve because there is not a hip, general-interest sex magazine around." One submission, excerpts from Catherine Texier's Breakup, was scooped up after being rejected by the New Yorker, possibly because of its sexual content.