Sam Lipsyte. (Photo by Ceridwen Morris)

It was snowing, big wet chunks falling everywhere. Morningside Avenue and Morningside Drive are two different things, and this particular afternoon in February was a bad time to realize that, because they’re separated by a park with a steep cliff that drops off sharply, and I was at the bottom of the cliff. I believe I already mentioned the snow. By the time I arrived at the writer Sam Lipsyte’s apartment—40 minutes late—at the higher point of the journey, my clothes were soaked through with cold water and sweat and the sole of my right shoe had fallen off. Mr. Lipsyte answered the door looking surprised. I coughed twice.

This wasn’t the graceful entrance I was hoping for, but there was something appropriate about it; Mr. Lipsyte’s fiction is about lowered expectations. In his 2010 novel The Ask, the middle-aged protagonist, Milo Burke, a failed idealist and former artist who’s recently been fired from his job asking people whose lives worked out better than his to donate money to a university, thinks to himself, “How little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.” The novel is a comedic masterpiece, but depending on where the reader is in life, it can seem much less funny.

His new book is a story collection called The Fun Parts. There’s one about a struggling poet working as a part-time teacher who thinks she’s finally found some luck when the father of one of her students—a poetry patron—asks her to be his daughter’s personal caregiver; the job is great until the night she starts opening up to him and he begins pleasuring himself, reassuring her that he’s still listening. Another character is a male doula—a “doulo”—who loses his already tenuous accreditation due to his tendency to demonstrate how to breast-feed using his own mouth. There’s also an overweight child who starts smoking in order to stop snacking and grows dangerously envious of the other fat kid in his class, the one who has a gland problem and therefore an excuse for being the way he is.

There’s an irony to Mr. Lipsyte’s literature of failure. His excellent second novel Home Land, released in 2004, was rejected by 25 or 30 editors (it depends on whom you ask) before finally securing a place for Mr. Lipsyte as one of the great talents of American fiction. The more he writes, the more he cements that reputation.

Mr. Lipsyte, the son of two writers, grew up in New Jersey. His father is Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times sports columnist, and his mother wrote for local papers and authored a novel.

“I knew what a literary agent was before I knew all the positions in baseball,” Mr. Lipsyte told me. “And I remember once when I was a kid, my dad came home and said, ‘I fired my agent today.’ I burst into tears, because I imagined now this agent would have no money and would be wandering around the streets and maybe be homeless. Then the system was explained to me.”

Seeing his parents work demystified writing. (“My parents would say, ‘Wow, it’s pretty purple, your prose,’” he said. “And I was 11.”) He saw it as a routine, a discipline. We were sitting in the book-lined room at the end of his apartment where he writes, and it was decidedly unromantic, the floor scattered with toys belonging to his two young children. Teaching writing full-time at Columbia (he’s on leave, working on a new novel) and raising a family means he writes whenever he can get a spare hour or minute. But he wrote from an early age, in imitation of the stories he’d find in the stacks of New Yorker magazines around his parents’ house, trying for “spare, haunting stories about divorced couples, which is tough when you’re 15,” he said. He went on to Brown, where he read a lot of Baudrillard and learned to “denounce everything that came before me.”

“So I spent a few years after college just screaming into a microphone, not incoherently, but at a level below the guitar,” he said. He was the screamer in a hardcore band in New York. They called themselves Dungbeetle. He’s proud of the band, but he can’t help but chuckle when he says the name. “We all went sort of knowing we’d fuck ourselves up on drugs and be irresponsible and that our band would probably fall apart.” He paused. “And that’s exactly what happened.” He enjoyed his role as screamer because “I liked the idea that I couldn’t really be understood.”

After the band dissolved, Mr. Lipsyte was trying to get clean. He was mostly unemployed, aside from a few odd jobs. His mother, who had divorced his father, was dying. While taking care of her, he began submitting stories to The Quarterly, a journal edited by Gordon Lish and distributed by Random House. Mr. Lish’s rejection letter was several hundred words long and “very sympathetic,” talking about how hard it is to write and offering a novelty, “Try again,” a suggestion Mr. Lipsyte took at face value. Mr. Lish eventually published two of his stories and asked him to attend one of his legendary writing classes.

“Each class would be about six or seven hours,” he said. Mr. Lipsyte’s fellow students included Will Eno, Sam Michel, Noy Holland and Christine Schutt. “And [Mr. Lish] would talk. What you’d learn is that he was building this narrative out of several threads he had started earlier in the evening. Everything would build and unwind and crescendo. And then at the end of the class, he would ask people what they had. His assumption was that you were writing all the time and you’d just open your notebook and begin to read whatever you were working on. More often than not, he’d stop you. But then sometimes you’d have something good going, and you’d get to read it for a while. That was the moment of triumph in the class.”

Mr. Lish remembers his student as promising, but with a lot to learn. “One read aloud so long as one was capable of reading aloud, given the quality of the work,” he told me in a phone interview. “Sam was struggling, as was everybody else who was new to the setting. There were some that outpaced him, and then Sam progressively caught up, and as you know now, has outpaced a great multitude.”

The class ended, Mr. Lipsyte’s mother died, and his first book, a collection of stories called Venus Drive, was published by the small press Open City. At a reading, the editor Gerald Howard came up to him and said he wanted to see his novel. The Subject Steve, about a man, prodded by doctors, who is essentially dying from the illness of being alive, had the misfortune of being published by Broadway Books on September 11, 2001. Naturally, it was not widely read, though it did introduce Mr. Lipsyte’s concept of the 21st Century Man, who appears in some form in all of his fiction. Typically a chronic masturbator, who has long ago given up on hope and, though desperate for its return, has resigned himself to mediocrity, he is thoroughly modern but would rather be anywhere but the present. In the new collection, he manifests as one of Mr. Lipsyte’s more humorous losers, Oldcorn, from “Ode to Oldcorn,” an American shot-
putter who won gold at the Mexico City Olympics and is the childhood hero of the story’s narrator. Oldcorn, who has dropped out of society, shows up at the narrator’s high school shot-put event—he’s old friends with the team’s coach—and is a disaster. He “was as huge as I’d always imagined, but bald, with muttonchops whiskers and a gut that split his belt. He wore cop shades, a T-shirt for a titty bar.” One of the students asks him, “Do you want a beer?” “‘I want all the beer in your town,’ said Oldcorn. ‘And I want teen poot, if that’s available. Let’s ride.’” Then he asks the high schoolers if they want some coke.

The 21st Century Man is much bleaker in “This Appointment Occurs in the Past,” wherein a man, living (and sleeping) with his “ex-mother-in-law” in Michigan, travels to New York to see a college friend who called and said he was dying:

I’d booked a tiny room in the Hudson Lux in New York City, high up and hushed, a loneliness box of polished walnut and chrome. You could picture yourself dead of a hanging jackoff in such a room, your necktie living up to its name, your lubricated fingers curled stiff near your hips. I stretched out on the narrow bed, decided not to picture this. It wasn’t the kind of thing I figured I’d ever try. Aficionados cited the bliss spasm caused by air loss, but I wondered if most got orgasmic on the gamble. Anyway, everything in my life was a gamble, a wager that somebody would see to my needs.

The friend, it turns out, is fine and also quite wealthy—a common foil for the 21st Century Man; the dying story was a ruse to recreate a college party that featured an aborted game involving a Pushkin-esque duel. The narrator goes through a lot of trouble only to get shot in the ass.

Mr. Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land, passed through the hands of dozens of American publishers before he eventually published it in England. People didn’t get it. It got to be an inside joke among editors, who all had a Word document of the manuscript on their computers.

“People would read it and send it around and talk about it,” said Lorin Stein, a former editor at FSG who finally published Home Land in paperback in America through a deal with Picador (it received nearly universal acclaim). He called it “the first e-book of my life. We talked about that book a lot. I remember going to a reading where Sam started reading from the first page and everyone started chanting along in unison. We used that book as Exhibit A for the stupidity of American publishing.”

Home Land is written as a series of open letters to a New Jersey high school alumni newsletter by Lewis Miner—unaffectionately known as “Teabag,” a guy who survives on odd jobs and occasional shifts at his father’s banquet hall. His unimpressive life culminates at his high school reunion, which ends with the usual rejection, embarrassment and, finally, murder.

Mr. Lipsyte’s own high school reunion, which he attended for the first time last year after avoiding it his entire adult life, didn’t fare much better.

“You know, I worried, of course, that everybody had read the book and would judge, but of course no one even knew that I wrote books,” he said. “I got a call from an old friend I hadn’t kept in touch with who mentioned another old friend I hadn’t kept in touch with. And he said, ‘We’re going. I know we haven’t seen each other, but you should go. I’ll drive.’ And it turns out one of them is an optometrist right around here. I actually got glasses from him. He cut me a deal. But the other guy, the guy who was driving, took us there. I was having a fine time reconnecting with some important people in my life, and then this guy gets me sort of alone. And he just starts attacking. He’s the only one who’s read my work and he starts attacking me. And not for the portrayal of high school, just his literary opinion. He orchestrated this whole thing so he could have this big moment telling me to fuck off.”

If Mr. Lipsyte’s fiction is any kind of model, it must not have been a very satisfying confrontation for the old friend, the 21st Century Man of this scenario. It makes me think of a line from one of the new stories, the one about the failed poet. For 16 years, she’s been pining after a man she met once at a party, one of her sister’s friends, and imagining what she’d do if she ran into him. He was her fallback plan. When she does run into him, he says, after a brief conversation, “Whatever the opposite of compatible is, that’s us.” “Was it possible he could be a moron and still be her savior?” Mr. Lipsyte writes. Of course not, but you still have to live with the disappointment.

mmiller@observer.com

Feeling a little clingy.

Everybody in New York publishing is very happy for Ira Silverberg. The former literary agent, a fixture in the industry for 26 years, started his new job as literary director at the National Endowment for the Arts earlier this week. And from the day his departure was announced to the day the job began, colleagues and clients have affected determined good cheer.

“I’m sorry for his writers,” said Sarah Burnes, a literary agent and friend. “But I’m happy for the writers of America.”

“It’s the perfect job for him,” said Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, “securing money for worthy projects -- especially projects that aren’t on the face of it worthy or obvious.”

But beneath all the breezy congratulations a hint of dread could be detected. Ira Silverberg might have left New York, but was New York ready to lose Ira Silverberg? Especially to Washington D.C.?

As an agent, Mr. Silverberg shepherded the careers of writers such as Neil Strauss, Sam Lipsyte and Dennis Cooper, but he has also served as the gay godfather to the rank and file of his profession. He has officiated at weddings, including the marriage of Twelve publisher Cary Goldstein. He provided the biologically necessary genetic material for two babies and serves as their "Uncle Mame" (they are raised by their mothers).

He is a man known for never shying away from a fashion statement, be it windowpane check or paisley, and for his expertise as a deal maker. Geoff Kloske, publisher of Riverhead, recalled how Mr. Silverberg helped him haggle for a dishdasha at the Abu Dhabi Book festival.

“I used to think Ira was all big talk and good looks until I witnessed him hondle on my behalf in a souk in Abu Dhabi,” wrote Mr. Kloske in an e-mail. “He is an incredible negotiator.”

Mr. Silverberg co-founded a club of editors-turned-agents who have met for lunch together at Japonica every six weeks for 14 years. He has hosted the annual Council of Literary Magazines and Presses spelling bee, strong-armed colleagues into bidding in silent auctions and buying raffle tickets, and served on the boards of the New School MFA Writing Program and BOMB Magazine. He also has a reputation as a good source for reporters (we’ve heard). Does this sound like an obituary? Good!

Mr. Silverberg got his first glimpse of the publishing world while still in college—enrolled not in an English literature program but in a joint six-year B.A./J.D. program offered by City College and New York Law School, which trained lawyers to work in underserved communities. But Mr. Silverberg’s career as a lawyer was short lived. At 18, over a drink at a bar on Avenue A, he met and fell in love with James Grauerholz, William S. Burrough’s longtime “manager and amanuensis.” The romance led Mr. Silverberg to drop out of school, move to Kansas and immerse himself in a world of aging beat writers.

“William was my mother-in-law when I was quite young,” said Mr. Silverberg of Burroughs.

He enrolled at the University of Kansas, cooked dinner with Mr. Grauerholz for Burroughs every night and absorbed the wisdom of Alan Ginsberg and Norman Mailer when they passed through town. At a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road at Naropa University in Boulder, Col., Mr. Silverberg met Peter Mayer, the founder of Overlook Press. When Mr. Silverberg’s sojourn in Kansas ended in 1984 and he returned to New York, Mr. Mayer gave him a job as a file clerk, then promoted him to editorial assistant. The job was fun, but paid only $10,000 a year, so Mr. Silverberg famously moonlighted as VIP doorman at the nightclub Limelight.

Silverberg, right, singing with Bob Morris in 2008.

“I probably made as much money in one night at Limelight as I did working 40 hours a week at Overlook,” he said. Even better, his two offices were close to each other. “I could leave work at Limelight, sleep on the couch at Overlook, and make coffee for everyone when they came in in the morning,” he said.

He then moved to Grove, where Barney Rosset hired him as its director of publicity in 1985, when Mr. Silverberg was 22. He left in 1990 to start a freelance publicity company serving small presses, non-profits and literary magazines and edit the US line of books for the British publisher Serpent’s Tail. After returning for another short stint at Grove, now under Morgan Entrekin, Mr. Silverberg decided he wanted to work more closely with writers. In 1998 he joined Donadio & Olson as an agent. The Japonica lunch group for editors who became agents began shortly thereafter, and they have met for lunch every six weeks ever since.

“It was started by him and Betsy Lerner,” said Sarah Burnes (Mr. Silverberg adds that Mary Ann Naples was another founding member). “We all made a similar transition which isn’t as easy as one might think.”

They discussed when, as agents, they should stop editing a client and how to deal with a hazard of being a former insider at a publishing house—when, as Silverberg put it, “you know too much.”

“We were probably too author-friendly and we all stayed that way,” he said.

Mr. Silverberg’s authors certainly remember him that way.

“I remember when no publisher would take my book Home Land Ira stood by me very bravely. He fought and fought,” recalled the novelist Sam Lipsyte in an e-mail. “At one point he said, ‘I'm not crazy, this book should be published.’ And even though I could hear a faint trace of ‘Am I crazy?’ in his words, I knew he would not let that thought win.” Mr. Silverberg did, however, mention that other of his clients had gotten real estate licenses.

“But that's Ira, covering all the bases,” wrote Mr. Lipsyte. “He speaks honestly to his writers, no bullshit.” Mr. Lipsyte said he hasn’t decided on a new agent yet.

“Ira is a great gossip and he’s mischievous and sometimes he likes to stir up trouble, but he never sacrifices the well being of the client-editor relationship as long as he can preserve it,” said Mr. Stein, who as an editor at FSG had a storied working relationship with Mr. Silverberg and published books by many of his clients. He added that Mr. Silverberg was usually “the grown up in any complicated situation.”

Given his experience as a publicist, editor and agent, Mr. Silverberg also had a reputation as a fixer.

“Ira is the kind of guy who knows everybody,” said Twelve publisher Cary Goldstein, who wrote Mr. Silverberg seeking a recommendation for someone licensed to conduct wedding ceremonies. Mr. Silverberg, who had gotten a license to officiate the wedding of food writers Christine Muhlke and Oliver Schwaner-Albright, wrote back a two-word reply: “I am.” To which Mr. Goldstein said he replied, “Shut the fuck up!” and retained his services.

“Long story short,” Mr. Goldstein concluded, “Ira, as he does all things, took it very seriously.” He invited the engaged couple to a “counseling dinner” to get to know Mr. Goldstein’s bride, Gina LeVay, and discuss the details of the ceremony.

“I have to tell you, in all honesty he performed the most beautiful wedding,” said Mr. Goldstein, who said that it opened with Mr. Silverberg welcoming guests to “Cary and Gina’s nondenominational nontraditional multicultural wedding.”

Mr. Goldstein sighed and said he would be missing Mr. Silverberg—but of course, “I think having somebody like Ira at the NEA is good for all of us.”

Mr. Silverberg will not be totally absent from New York -- his family, including his husband Bob Morris, is still here -- but he sounded wistful as he acknowledged the difficulty of saying goodbye to his clients, whom he called “people who I kind of can’t imagine a life without.

“For me it was very hard because it’s ending relationships that I don’t think I ever really thought about ending,” he said.

The month of long goodbyes culminated with a party on the rooftop of The Standard hotel on November 29. "No rsvp," said the invite, "just come & weep."

Lunch with Mr. Stein?

Frustrated because you can't very well buy the Steve Jobs biography for all your Republican uncles this Christmas? Well the Paris Review has the perfect solution: a holiday auction offering the company of its editors and friends! Act quickly -- high tea with Jon-Jon Goulian, "one of New York's best read and dressed and most charming conversationalists," is going for $100.

Also on offer are meals with Paris Review editors, including Lorin Stein (to discuss Henry Green's Loving), Sadie Stein (Barbara Pym's Excellent Women) and Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn (Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot "over a bowl of tatziki.")

And then there's the invite to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit party, sure to be a major draw for your average Paris Review reader.

"

Stein. [Photo via Park and Bond.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Marea, oh my!

Before Jeffrey Eugenides was attacked on a Princeton-bound train by a man singing a ditty about his genitals, the author of Middlesex was having a pretty nice boys’ night out.

“We’d had an outstanding celebratory dinner at Marea,” Farrar, Strauss & Giroux president Jonathan Galassi—his date for the evening—told The Observer. “Then I dropped Jeff off at Penn Station.”

The dinner, at Central Park South’s ritzy seafood mecca, got quite celebratory indeed. The receipt obtained by The Transom shows that the duo started out with a bottle of La Castellada ($95) and carried forth with the pricey, scaly stuff. The typical Marea four-course prix-fixe runs $91 per person. In total, the duo’s bill came to just over $520.

Seriously, what didn’t they have? Waiters served dishes of Sogliola (sole), Ono (wahoo), Sgombo (mackerel), Seppia (cuttlefish), Dentice (snapper) Baccala (salt cod) and Ricci (sea urchin), alongside a heaping of spaghetti and a spread of cheeses. After, Macluan Torcolato dessert wine cleansed the pallet, and then Campari cocktails eased their literary minds.

What a shame that the night had to be ruined by a drunk fixated upon the Middlesex author’s nether-regions! As a train carrying the author bounded south of Manhattan, an assailant harassed the passengers in the car with shouted obscenities. After he refused to stop, Mr. Eugenides grabbed at his phone, and promptly got socked in the side of the head.

“I was happy that chivalry is not dead on N.J. Transit, and that it should be alive and well in Jeff Eugenides,” said Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, whose publication was the first to excerpt The Virgin Suicides, back in 1990.

The author attended a private reading in his honor at the lit journal’s offices last Thursday despite the black eye and cut-up mug.

“Oh, he looked dashing,” Mr. Stein told The Transom. “I would have ran with it, but I don’t usually get in fist fights.”

The publicist for Mr. Eugenides said he would rather not comment on the affair.

And what’s become of the man crooning about his naughty bits? Some sources told The Transom that the man has been arrested. On Twitter, the handle “@cyberhack7” sent out a message claiming to be the infamous attacker, and did so because Mr. Eugenides wrote a David Foster Wallace-esque character into his new novel, The Marriage Plot. “i should have beaten him to death but i didn’t have time,” he said.

Regardless of who and where this guy is, though, it’s pretty clear the train was better off without him. “Jeff told the story in a very self-deprecating way,” Mr. Stein said, “but, as my sister said, he’s a hero.”

Photo credit: Howard Levy

Spider-Senses were working overtime at the battle of comic publishing houses on the softball field as the Marvel Knights decimated DC Comic’s Bullets 19-4. Supermen and Wonder Women, DC was not.

A costumed superhero dressed up as Peter Parker’s Arachnid-alter ego scaled the batting cage and mugged for pictures. He didn't even charge.

“My friend works for a newspaper called The Daily Bugle, his name is Peter Parker,” said Spider-Man (he insisted we add the hyphen).

Although he wouldn’t break character to tell us his name, his wife volunteered that he was her husband, Nelson Ribeiro, is an associate editor at Marvel when not dressed as a superhero. Mary Jane Watson, Mrs. Ribeiro isn't.

“You have to be limber before a game in case Dr. Octopus shows up,” said Spider-Man.

“I’m sticking the tag in,” a teammate told the superhero as she walked by him.

At stake were “bragging rights for one year,” although a former Marvel employee pointed that movie sales may be a better way to measure the rivalry. “Green Lantern isn’t making their money back,” he helpfully pointed out.

An empty superman cape hung on the DC side, which at a certain point in the game began to feel like a metaphor. A DC Bullet put on the cape as Marvel’s runs piled up.

Elsewhere, book publishing may be in a troubled state, but then, so is the economy. Publishing company Hachette’s Catchers in the Rye won with a 50 percent lead over Baron Funds.

“If we don’t win, we'll be like the Mets: overpaid and underachieving,” said another. Alas, with a 12-6 score, it didn’t take a spreadsheet to see that Baron's numbers were falling.

“We make money,” said one well-off softball player. “This is the most fun we have all week,” said another. Apparently, making money is not enjoyable for Baron’s Investors. “It’s work.”

Unfortunately for book sales, Baron Funds’ employees don’t appear to be buying books with all that money. The Investment managers were not entirely clear on the day jobs of the team they were playing.

“Catcher in the Rye is a corny name for a team. They're just copying from a book,” said a woman on the Baron’s team. Little, Brown, which is owned by Hachette, publishes the American classic.

“Is 'Hatchet' their company?” asked a money-maker, pronouncing the word like a weapon.

The party finally ended for High Times – WNYC’s Broadcasters cashed out the marijuana mag, handing the Bonghitters their first loss of the season with a 5-4 score. Sadly for the rest of the league, the Bonghitters' losing streak only lasted one game. They won 7-6 to Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

It seems everyone is getting into the marijuana-punning action. “HT took us 7-6 in a thriller. Down 7-2 in the 7th, we rallied for 4, and had tying run on base before they finally snuffed us,” Newsweek coach Randall Lane wrote on the New York Media Softball facebook page.

Lorin Stein may be in his publication’s namesake-city—and posting diaries from France on their site—but The Paris Review showed that his softball-related leadership is anything but Napoleonic. They finally celebrated their first win of the season with a 14-4 game against The New Yorker.

ksmoke@observer.com

A verbal skirmish flared up between a High Times Bonghitter and a Review Parisian over whether one Parisian slapped a Bonghitter’s glove, and furthermore, whether another Parisian had properly apologized for kicking a Bonghitter as he rounded the bases.

“It’s the paranoia,” said contributing editor Sadie Stein, citing a potential cause of the Bonghitters’ apparent agitation.

Both teams have small staffs, so they have to rely on friends and contributors of dubious frequency to fill out their lineups. When The Paris Review brings in a ringer, he’s writing a book on German-Jewish relations, and wearing swim trunks instead of athletic shorts. When trade magazine High Times brings their ringers, they have marijuana leaves tattooed on their arms.

The tumultuous game ended 12-11 in the Bonghitters favor. As the opening strains of the Bonghitters rallying cry “Take Me Out to the Bong game” flooded the field, a Parisian observed: “Smoking weed has never been less cool.”

The Parisians leadership was far less cynical about the affair: “I’m still shaking from all the adrenaline,” said editor Lorin Stein as he unlocked his bike after the game. Mr. Stein was on his way to DUMBO to talk about Roberto Bolaño’s recently released compendium of non-fiction.

The Bonghitters played a double header on Monday. After the narrow win, the team headed uptown to play Vanity Fair.

The Vanity Fair team—commonly known to many as the “Veefers”—has more staff to draw from, and was a mix of everyone from shiny-haired women from advertising to an art department staffer in knee socks and American Apparel shorts, among others.

High Times, having warmed up with the Review, clobbered Vanity Fair 19-2.

Chronic winners that they are, High Times slayed The Daily Beast/Newsweek—who were fresh off of a victory against defending league champions The Wall Street Journal—18-0 in a shortened, four-inning game due to torrential rain. Next week should be easier for the High Times’ rivals: many of their star players are headed to San Francisco for a medical marijuana conference.

It’s too bad “Newsbeast” won’t have their shot against High Times this week: the Observer recently obtained an exclusive on the team’s new uniforms (above), from a source deep within their confines (spokesperson Andrew Kirk). They even came to us with a quote!

Randall Lane, team captain and Daily Beast editor-at-large: "In the highly competitive New York Media Softball League, the combined Newsweek and Daily Beast team has already beaten the reigning champion Wall Street Journal and crushed The Economist in a friendly [non-league game]. We're confident that we will flex our combined muscles again Thursday when we play Forbes."

Last Thursday, a Broadway titan and a sensational newcomer prepared to square off in game 7 of the Broadway League softball season. “Five minutes to places!” joked a team member shortly before the Wicked v. The Book of Mormon game commenced.

Final score: 5-4, Wickeds. Tyson Jenette, a ‘swing’ cast member of Mormon, was the team’s cheerleader, clad in a shirt that declared “I <3 Mormon boys”, wielding a wooden stick at least six feet tall. “This is my ‘eleka-nahmen’ stick!” he proclaimed, alluding to a lyric from Wicked’s “No Good Deed”.

On occasion, he would shake it at the opposing team. Incidentally, his team seemed to strike out whenever he did so.

Nevertheless, divine intervention was not on their side, as Wicked seemed to have cast a spell over the end of the sixth-inning, ending the 4-4 tie, clinching the game with a final score of 5-4.  As the teams dispersed, an onlooker mumbled, “it’s okay, as long as you all win on Sunday. That’s the only game that matters.” True to form, the Mormons took home a majority on the Tonys, something Wicked wasn’t able to do the year it premiered on Broadway, falling to Avenue Q, which currently plays off-Broadway.

“He was just giddy,” said Philip Gourevitch, who took over the Review after George Plimpton passed and handed the reigns to Lorin Stein last year. Mr. Gourevich and wife, Larissa MacFarquhar, had been sitting at Mr. Talese’s table. “All dinner he was the same grumpy Gay, but Jim connected with him.”

Mr. Salter was in town to collect the literary magazine’s annual Hadada award, which is named for its mascot, an African bird. “I can’t pick this up, it’s too heavy,” Mr. Salter said upon lifting the funny avian statue. He spoke at length about his long involvement with the Review, starting with a phone call from Mr. Plimpton asking permission to publish his first masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime.

The legendary writer was clearly touched.

“This is my Stockholm,” he said before walking off the stage with Mr. Stein.

The ceremony also honored -- and with fanfare! a roaming jazz band! endless cocktails! -- the young April Ayers Lawson with the Plimpton prize and Elif Batuman with the inaugural Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

“I wonder if Terry Southern would have won a Terry Southern award for humor,” said practiced prize presenter Fran Lebowitz. “The answer, of course, is no.”

Ms. Lebowitz also regaled the crowd with one of the many stories she has neglected to actually write down. This anecdote involved Robert Redford, who was slated to appear on stage later and introduce Mr. Salter.

“In the late 1970s I was on a plane with Robert Redford, an L.A. to New York flight,” Ms. Lebowitz said. “As soon as he boarded he was instantly surrounded by all the stewardesses on the plane. The entire flight, all the stewardesses were around Robert Redford. ‘Would you like a drink, would you like a lobster, would you like a steak, is there anything possible we can give you’ -- ignoring every other passenger. They reduced all the other passengers to waving their arms in the air saying, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ to no avail. Finally halfway across the country I leaned over, tapped him on the arm and said, ‘I’m very sorry to bother you, but could you please order me a club soda?’”

“Fran, I’m sorry,” Mr. Redford said as soon as he took the microphone. “I don’t remember you, but I do remember the stewardesses.”

After the ceremony, Mr. Stein arranged for an impromptu after party at The Campbell Apartments, an old-time bar in a corner nook of Grand Central Station. Sam Lipsyte and Gary Shteyngart made the trip across the street. We introduced ourselves, and Mr. Shteyngart mentioned an old article about his first novel, which he referred to in the moment as "The Russian Debutante's Handjob." We corrected him.

Then, upon learning The Observer’s age, the author fondly recounted his follies of youth.

“When I was 23 I was addicted to horse tranquilizers,” Shteyngart said.

A veterinarian friend provided the goods.

“It was a disassociated state. Ah, you just sail off into the sky. It’s used to pacify the horse but I ain’t no horse, I’m a 135-pound man!”

He got over it.

“I just started drinking. It’s more treatable. I’m about to treat it now.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

After years of being denied the honor, the writer will receive this year's Prix Goncourt, the AP reports. The distinction — France's top lit award — counts Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir among its recipients. 

"After all, I think it was necessary in my life," Houellebecq told a French TV station in between sips of champagne at a restaurant. "In any case, it's a very good thing."

The work for which the prize was awarded, La Carte et Le Territoire, was released in France in September. Controversy accompanied the book's arrival when the French edition of Slate revealed that passages from the novel were lifted from various Wikipedia pages. Houellebecq defended the practice as "patchwork."

In the latest issue of The Paris Review, Houellebecq is interviewed for "The Art of Fiction," the literary magazine's longstanding showcase of the writerly method. 

"This represents a sea change in French culture," Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein said in a statement responding to the news of Houellebecq's prize. "More than any other writer, Houellebecq has made the social novel respectable again in the land of Balzac."

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

"Robyn and I have been arguing about poems since we met," said Mr. Stein. "I want our poetry section to be made up of showstoppers. I don't want the poems merely to have integrity, or merely to be sophisticated-though I want those things."

Then on Tuesday, at the culture blog We Who Are About to Die, the poet Daniel Nester posted the text of an email Mr. Stein had written to a poet whose work had been accepted before he assumed the helm: "Over the last month, Robyn and I have been carefully reading the backlog of poetry that we inherited from the previous editors. This amounts to a year's worth of poems. In order to give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be able to publish everything accepted. ... We have not found a place for your three poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious consideration."

Holy shit is right. The poet on the receiving end of the note was not named, but Mr. Nester told the Transom that he had heard from at least three poets who had received similar notices from Mr. Stein.

"I've edited journals for 21 years," Mr. Nester told the Transom. "I've never seen anything like this. At smaller journals, there's honor among thieves. Maybe it's a corporate thing. Or they're just clueless."

Elsewhere on the Internet, poets were invited to submit poems de-accepted by The Paris Review to a new online journal called The Equalizer. "Space is unlimited," the announcement read. "If you want in, you're in."

"For good reason," Robert P. Baird, a poet and former editor of Chicago Review, told the Transom, "those of us who care about the state of poetry have developed a kind of PTSD whenever they hear words like 'shakeup.' Change, we've discovered, doesn't usually favor the poets. I'm firmly in favor of withholding judgment till we see what the new dispensation delivers, but I confess it doesn't exactly set my heart at ease to hear that the PR is backing away from poems they've already accepted."

"It's never fun cutting things," Mr. Stein told the Transom. "But an editor's job is to put out a magazine by his or her best lights, and that means you have to have discretion over what you publish."

Indeed, during the last editorial transition at The Paris Review, when Philip Gourevitch took the reins and appointed Meghan O'Rourke and Charles Simic as poetry editors, many poems accepted by the previous poetry editor, Richard Howard, were dispatched to the winds.

Dan Chiasson, who replaced Mr. Simic, a U.S. poet laureate, on the PR masthead in 2008, told Mr. Nester, "I do support Lorin and his vision for the magazine, which is why I was pleased to be asked to stay on as 'advisory' editor [along with Ms. O'Rourke]. I'll personally look for other ways that I can help the poets getting bad news-it's a top priority to make certain this work gets the recognition it deserves."

Within the insular world of American poetry, where small journals proliferate, and many burn brightly for a time, but few for as long as the six-decade-old Paris Review, the poetry editor who is not also a practicing poet is a rare thing. Thus the appointment of Mr. Creswell-who is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at N.Y.U., has published poetry criticism in The Nation and Harper's but has not pursued a career as a poet-took many poets by surprise.

"As far as writers and critics go," Mr. Nester told the Transom, "Creswell seems to be the real deal. But as far as editing a literary journal, he should have an apprentice period. I mean, how did he get this job? Did he see Lorin Stein kill a man?"

Yet historically, many distinguished poetry editors have been non-poets, among them Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe, the late Raritan editor Richard Poirier and longtime New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, now head of the Poetry Society of America. Rob Casper of jubilat and Joanna Yas of Open City are among non-poets now prominently editing poetry today.

Rebecca Wolff, a poet and the editor of Fence, said of Mr. Creswell: "All eyes will be on him to see if he can represent the breadth of different concerns in American poetry. He could be a living example of a non-poet with a deep interest in poetry, and that's important at a time when poets seem to be the only people reading poetry."