Well, that New York is. The 1920's crushed into the 1930's, and the 1990's crumbled into … this.

The New York that was drunk on its own identity--the New York of Friends, Seinfeld and Sex and the City--was marketed to a nation that became so besotted with it that it trampled here and ate us alive. Right up to the Republican National Convention, with the astonishing picture of Barbara and Jenna Bush standing at Madison Square Garden chiding their grandmother and a hall full of alien delegates for not understanding Sex and the City.

That was the snapshot of the final retail state of 90's New York. Even the Bushes had bought it. Ritzy restaurants, fuck-me shoes, Mr. Big--even as the publishing guy on whom Mr. Big was based had the real New York idea of getting the hell up to Vermont to reinvent himself.

Why? Rebirth and reinvention.

Which is what this issue is all about: New York's unceasing ability to reconfigure itself and find its creative soul, even as its heavy old bulk falls away. It's about new, cocky philosophers who think they can put on the robes and mortar boards of the old Partisan Review crowd; about the publishing industry, bereft of the old-fashioned Maxwell Perkins big editors, resorting to outsourcing; about the new white-collar man, replacing the old sidewalk serendipiter with internalized voyages, with computer games on his video screen; about a once-massive ad agency, the greatest name on Madison Avenue, replacing its own dead weight with ambitious imports; about high-fashion footwear designed here, brought back on racks to be resold in Manhattan as Midwestern discounted product; about magazines, built for a nation that wants to look, not read, percolating with glossy, cheap guile; about how music never fails to find a new voice here; about once-cool neighborhoods going through the classic cycle of discovery, coronation, cliché, prestige and non-affordability.

Just as in the 1980's, when we had beloved urban auteurs like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Norman Mailer, Fran Lebowitz, we are breaking in a new set. They are coming up from sidewalk cracks and through high-speed cables. As usual, there are new mutant species. The city's artists, writers and filmmakers have the same cycle they always have: Initially barred from the power structure, they hunker, searching the wild imagings and broad talent that has escaped their elders. In his new autobiography, Bob Dylan explains how he could have come nowhere but here, to Greenwich Village, to become himself, with his lovers, his music friends, his clubs and his poetry. In some ways, little has changed in the dark and fertile heart of this city that drives its new citizens to madness and rebirth. Will one of them become Dylan or inhabit the supercharged darkness that made our beloved Jimmy Breslin--who just hung it up this year--a daily poet? Probably not. Reading isn't what it used to be. But lookit those blogs! Murray Kempton and Dwight Macdonald would be proud.

We are reborn, but also recyclers. Look at Rudy, his blazing star doused by his former driver. He's doing the New York thing--pretending it didn't happen and moving on. Donald Trump doesn't do so well in real estate, so he makes a TV show. Seinfeld goes off the air, it goes in a box and makes millions on Amazon and Tower Video! The big boys are still lighting the way, showing the punks how to do it.

New York, city of rebirth, reinvigoration and redemption. Also retail.

That's our baby!

Never mind that it's also unrealistic and unrealizable.

I published my first book last month, and no sooner had the boxes arrived in the stores than people-those in publishing and those outside-began asking: When do you go on tour? How many cities are you going to? My answers: I was going on a tour-lette, to just a couple of places where I actually had some friends and thus could beat the drum and send mass e-mails and call in old favors to get people to show up-and oh, by the way, this was not necessarily an all-expenses-paid-by-the-publisher boondoggle, but rather a cobbled-together financial plan involving my publisher, the venues that were hosting me, my day job and my very own bank account. To some, this was all surprising: Surely, the thinking goes, if a publisher is really "behind" a book, the house will pony up the money and the arrangements for an author's soon-to-be-triumphant national tour.

Yet while I have no doubt that Hyperion, say, has paid for publicists to cater to Steve Martin's whims as he goes around the country flogging his beguiling new novel The Pleasure of My Company, or that HarperCollins is covering Gail Collins' multi-city trip on behalf of America's Women, I'm equally sure that most so-called "mid-list" authors-like, God-willing, me-aren't getting the same treatment.

But this is not a complaint; it's a fact. And besides, the publishers are right: In an age of dwindling local-newspaper book coverage, formidable Internet, radio and TV outlets and-let's face it-strained budgets and stagnant (at best) book sales, most authors shouldn't spend thousands of anybody's dollars to show their faces in Cleveland-unless, of course, they happen to have grown up in Cleveland. It's simply not cost-effective, especially since even the author of a book showing modest to decent sales will likely end up in a Barnes and Noble in Berkeley with only three audience members, two of whom are homeless.

"I'd rather they just gave me the money," opined one such mid-list author whose name you'd know if only he'd let me use it. Or, better yet, spent the cash-and, not incidentally, the publicist's energy-on ads, or on placement in stores, or on national radio coverage. "I'd spend days and days planning an author's trip and arranging local TV shows in St. Louis-where we'd ultimately sell five books," said a former book publicist. "It would take away from the time and energy I might have had to get the book on Charlie Rose or Fresh Air."

But to authors, appearances-

especially public appearances-

remain important.

"I can't tell you how many authors still believe a publisher's love is measured by the number of cities on their book tour," said Barb Burg, a senior vice president and director of publicity for the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. "I tell my authors, 'You'll know I really love you and care about your book when I spare you the humiliation of empty bookstores and lonely hotel rooms and spend our publicity time, energy and dollars on what's best for the book.'"

That said, even the most harried publicist and frustrated author will agree that the human touch-a personally signed book at a reading or, maybe even more important, a friendly relationship between author, publisher and smart independent booksellers-never hurts sales. Yet it seems to me that you can establish those relationships without necessarily getting on a plane. My publisher, Putnam, brilliantly suggested that I send personal notes and signed books to booksellers around the country-some of whom I've met, thanks in part to my column in this paper-but also to many I have not. I've also been making a point of stopping in bookstores and signing stock; who knows if one of those "Autographed Copy" stickers might sway a wavering book buyer?

And yes, I've gone out of town, too-I'm writing this from a hotel room in Florida, in fact-but I doubt I'll ever log as many miles as Jill Nelson, the journalist and author of Sexual Healing, who said at the Sarasota Reading Festival on Nov. 1 that she's visited more than 20 cities since her book appeared last summer. Her novel-from tiny, brand-new Chicago-based publisher Agate-is doing well; it's selling strongly and has been sold to the movies.

But is a book a hit because its author toured, or is a tour successful because the book's a hit?

These thoughts came to mind after I read D.T. Max's piece in The New York Times Magazine (Aug. 9) on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish–or was it Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver? That's exactly the question Mr. Max poses in his irresistible and disconcerting (irresistible because disconcerting) piece of literary detective work. When he plunged into Mr. Lish's archives at the Indiana University library, he found plenty of smoking blue-pencil work: documentary evidence that Mr. Lish, former fiction editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf, had pared Carver's famously piercing stories into the minimalist masterpieces widely heralded as original contributions to American literature. Mr. Lish stripped away many whole sentences, sentences often devoted to inward rumination. He added new sentences that played up the lovely obliqueness in Carver's work, the sense of a beckoning or frightening space the reader must leap over to make the work connect. He made huge cuts and rewrote endings with aplomb. Evidently, not only did Mr. Lish have a lot to do with discovering Carver, catapulting him onto the literary map, but he had a good deal to do with the lay of the land that came to be known as Carver's. The distinction between early Carver and late Carver is as stark as Mr. Lish's handwriting on Carver's manuscripts. The documents certainly make the case that Mr. Lish entered into the spirit of Carver's work.

Or do they? What is the marrow of a writer's work, anyway? Wherein lies the Carverness of a Carver story? In the fierce, Lish-boosted compression of early Carver, or in the looser, perhaps more forgiving emotionality of the late, Lishless Carver? Or in the former for some years and the latter for later years? No easy way to answer.

In the investigative spirit of this time, for all the postmodernist blather about relative truth, we like to think we can penetrate to the essence of things–the real Carver, the real Bill Clinton. We long to unmask, to bring low the high and mighty. We think that handwriting experts settle the matter of authorship with incontrovertible facts. But facts, as Ronald Reagan gloriously said, are stupid things. This age of pathography–Joyce Carol Oates' memorable term for biography that strips the flesh off the subject, leaving a quivering carcass of neurotic tics–is also the age of investigative criticism. Academics do it, journalists do it. The deconstructionist habit that began in the academy has passed into popular writing. What Michel Foucault called "the death of the author" (a passing that did not lead him to take his name off his books) has devolved into Gotcha! scholarship.

Tom Engelhardt has edited five books of mine over the course of 16 years–two when he was at Pantheon, then my first novel (as a friend, pro bono). In recent days, he has finished laying hands on my second novel, for Metropolitan Books, where he is now a consulting editor. (I don't have to get on his good side by writing this–he's already finished his demoniacal labors. The gall of the man, to stop me from sprinkling my work with false notes.) Many a time over these years, he has known what I wanted to say better than I did. When we first worked together, he x'd out a long passage at the beginning of one chapter. I looked at the gash and thought, Damned if he isn't right, this is a long throat-clearing and doesn't belong here. Fifteen or 20 pages on, I thought, Yes, that earlier passage belongs right here. I turned the page to see a note from Tom: "Todd, that passage I cut at the beginning of the chapter goes here." The good editor knows these things because he or she has entered into the work's fiber.

Tom Engelhardt is not unique; I have been blessed with Sara Bershtel on three books now, too. (I am evidently the kind of writer who needs all the help he can get.) I hear good things about some other editors blessed with the skill, devotion and time to make a book the best possible version of itself. But I do not hear good things about many. The actual editing of words–what is called "line editing" as opposed to acquisition–is, let's face it, rare. It's not necessarily cost-effective. It does not necessarily give good lunch.

Scribner's renowned Maxwell Perkins edited Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, the latter so massively that, without Perkins, Wolfe might have been well-nigh unreadable. (He's rough enough even with Perkins' help.) But nobody would mistake Look Homeward, Angel for A Farewell to Arms . For many if not most writers, editors are probably indispensable. But editors are not authors. Perkins knew that.

The issue D.T. Max does not raise in "The Carver Chronicle" is why Mr. Lish archived his own edits in the first place. If not to burnish his reputation, why save them at all? Certifying one's contributions sounds like itemizing expenditures during a marriage to start building a case for a post-divorce settlement. An editor ought not to be preoccupied with his or her subsequent reputation. He ought not to be proud of having shepherded a whole stylistic movement among writers he edits–the School of Lish, as someone once dubbed it. He ought not to be honing his own style on someone else's plots, characters, moods, notions. The satisfaction ought to be that the work is good. If the writer Carver declared independence of Mr. Lish after a point, that was his perfect right. His readers were free to note that his style had changed–meaning that his final decisions had changed. Carver seems to have honored Mr. Lish often enough. Mr. Lish ought simply to have been pleased that the work was good. End of story.