Courtney Love.

A few weeks before The Paris Review’s Spring Revel, the Transom asked Courtney Love if she would be in attendance to watch her grandmother, the novelist Paula Fox, accept the Hadada Award.

No, she would not.

“Paula’s absolute dislike of me is shocking and inexplicable,” Ms. Love told us.

The strained relationship is perhaps not that inexplicable. Ms. Love found out about her literary lineage late in life, when her mother, Linda Carroll, tracked down Ms. Fox, who had put her daughter up for adoption. Ms. Fox had herself been abandoned by her mother, a Hollywood gadabout who party-hopped with her husband’s cousin, Douglas Fairbanks, out-drank F. Scott Fitzgerald and once got thrown into a lake by Humphrey Bogart.

Ms. Love and Ms. Fox have met only once, during a brief sit-down at the Mercer Hotel. And Ms. Fox has no relationship with her great-granddaughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Much of Ms. Love’s animosity toward Ms. Fox, she told us, stems from the fact that she doesn’t know the identity of her grandfather. She’s wondered, given some evidence from the past, if it could be Marlon Brando.

This speculative genealogy lingered when the day of the Spring Revel arrived last week. Paris Review editor Lorin Stein had corralled Gay Talese, Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith, Sam Lipsyte, Mona Simpson and many brilliant others into Cipriani on 42nd Street, and they all mingled beneath the marble buttresses, exuding literary genius and ordering drink after drink at the bar.

The novelist Lynne Tillman asked if we wanted to meet Ms. Fox and then steered us to a tiny table. There sat Ms. Fox, the writer whom Jonathan Franzen called superior to John Updike and Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, diminutive and raspy but still vigorously alive.

“These chandeliers,” Ms. Fox said, staring up. “They look like tangerines.”

Or blood oranges, we countered.

“Blood tangerines,” she decided.

The subject of Courtney Love came up.

“She’s awful, she’s awful. She’s terrible!” Ms. Fox told us. “I met with her for an hour, and the hour was like an hour in the devil’s pocket, for both of us. Things last such a short time in this country. People have their moments. Courtney had her moment, and was very strong, and she had enormous vitality, but that moment is gone.”

She launched into a coughing fit.

“I don’t want to be mean,” she said after composing herself. Her eyes almost watered, and maybe she was on the brink of forgiveness. “Poor everybody,” she sighed.

A few days later, the Transom rode out to New London, Conn., where the Lyman Allyn Art Museum was hosting a reception for Mentoring Courtney Love, an exhibition displaying watercolors by Ms. Love and photographs by David LaChapelle. It is her first museum show.

“Over here, over here,” Ms. Love beckoned from the middle of a mob as we entered the lobby, squeezing by a cluster of local teenage girls clutching Hole records and posters, pens at the ready. “It’s like a record signing,” she said.

Later that evening, Nancy Stula, the director of the museum, had arranged for an intimate dinner at her home in Old Lyme, and we found ourselves near the head of the table, where Ms. Love sat.

Art by Courtney Love.

“You know, Nate met my grandmother the other night,” Ms. Love told the muted Connecticut gentry seated around her. That topic hung like a ghost in the room, and after a few moments, the discussion turned to Paula Fox’s onetime companion, the unknown man who begat Courtney’s mother.

“It could be a sailor, for all I care,” said Ms. Love, though she admitted that she would at least like to know who granddad is—and pursuing that theory is a fun parlor game. “Paula was living with Ellen Adler when she became pregnant, and Marlon Brando was basically a member of the Adler household then,” she said.

We rattled off the evidence to skeptical guests: Ms. Love had become intrigued by comments Brando made to her while hanging out at Carrie Fisher’s house, and then she discovered the connection between Brando, Stella Adler—the actor’s influential mentor who housed him before he became a star—Ms. Adler’s daughter, Ellen Adler, and Ms. Fox. They were all very close—Ms. Fox would dedicate her 1990 novel, The God of Nightmares, to Ellen, and Brando spoke with Ellen daily until his death. What’s more, during the period that Ms. Fox was pregnant, Brando claims to have fathered dozens of kids he’d never know.

But there is no proof. Ms. Love explained that she had a chance to steal Brando’s toothbrush and test the DNA, but decided against it.

Then she rose, though we were still on our salad course. She had to fly to Las Vegas to film a commercial for an electronic cigarette. But before leaving, she had time to offer one more clue as to her bloodline.

“If you look at me before my first nose job,” Ms. Love said, smiling, “I kind of look like Marlon Brando.”

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

"To change the topic, any thoughts on Picasso's Blue Period?"

--writer for Paris Review, during Michael Bloomberg's March 2 press conference at the Armory Art Show.

Mr. Banks’ metaphysical moment:

“[T]hey embraced and with their hands caressed each other’s breasts and backs and arms—her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone—and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.”

Ms. Fonseca, taking the idea of petting literally:

“Dan held her hair back with both hands, he kissed and nibbled her throat and licked her torso, first like a cat—working his way cleanly over a small area, tasting her skin—and then like a dog, with broad-stroked abandon, bunching her breasts together to meet his flattened tongue.”

And Mr. Updike, indulging in plain old porn:

“She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole continued. … Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room. …”

LAST YEAR, THE Bad Sex prize was awarded posthumously to Norman Mailer for The Castle in the Forest, though it might as well have been for lifetime achievement: His long career of courting disaster with frank sexual content began six decades earlier with The Naked and the Dead (“Julio, like the dogs, okay?”). In The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III (Picador, $16), Andrew O’Hagan nudged an 84-year-old Mailer with a remark about the large number of Americans who think God and Satan are at work in their daily lives. “I think they are,” Mailer replied. “Not in a controlling sense—I don’t believe that the devil seizes you and you’re gone forever. But can you say that you’ve never had a fuck where you didn’t feel evil for a little while?” Good old Stormin’ Norman—the devil really did make him do it.

This latest volume from The Paris Review contains 16 interviews with an astonishing array of writers, among them Ralph Ellison, Evelyn Waugh (“I find Faulkner intolerably bad”), John Cheever (“All great men are scrupulously true to their time”), Ted Hughes, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Salman Rushdie (“Never trust a writer when he talks about the future of his writing”) and Mailer. The motley cast makes for exhilarating reading, especially when you come across a writer as effortlessly articulate as Isabel Fonseca’s husband, Martin Amis.

Here he is on the writer’s voice:

“It’s all he’s got. It’s not the flashy twist, the abrupt climax, or the seamless sequence of events that characterizes a writer and makes him unique. It’s a tone, it’s a way of looking at things. It’s a rhythm, it’s what in poetry is called a sprung rhythm. Instead of having a stress every other beat, it has stress after stress after stress. One’s a little worried about having one’s logo on every sentence. What’s that phrase about a painting consisting entirely of signatures? That obviously is something to be avoided, but it would never inhibit me. I never think, Let’s write a piece of prose that is unmistakably mine. Really, it’s an internal process, a tuning-fork process. You say the sentence or you write the sentence again and again until the tuning fork is still, until it satisfies you.”

The crowd at the literary publication’s annual fund-raising event included writers Joan Didion, Jay McInerney and Frank McCourt, topped off with froth like departed Elle fashion director and Project Runway judge, Nina Garcia, and socialite Tinsley Mortimer.

“I don’t really know the magazine that well, I don’t read magazines,” Mr. Price told the Transom when asked how he thinks The Review has changed over the years. “My daughter is an intern there, though.” (We quietly wondered how that gig has changed since editor George Plimpton was alive, when it involved mostly slicing cheese cubes, pawing through unsolicited manuscripts and flashing a little leg!) “She graduated college and managed to find a job that doesn’t pay; we’re very proud of her.”

Also attending was esteemed author E. L. Doctorow, most recently of 2005’s The March. “Literary magazines publishing today are more glamorous than The Paris Review was when it began; they tend to come out of university communities,” he said, perhaps thinking of n+1, the creation of four Harvard classmates. “But we need every one of them.”

“The more the merrier,” gamely agreed The Review’s editor, Philip Gourevitch.

Oh my God—did our eyes deceive us? There was The Actors Studio host James Lipton! A past Review contributor, it turned out (he interviewed playwright Neil Simon for the magazine 15 years ago). “Literary magazines are being launched on a very turbulent scene today because people don’t read books very much,” he said. “I’m very conservative and I don’t like it.”

Don’t even get him started on the World Wide Web!

“Reading online is similar to people who watch a massive film on their iPhones—it’s an insult to the filmmakers,” Mr. Lipton said. “It’s an eternity of Cliffs Notes and Reader’s Digest,” he added, before being interrupted by a waiter who tried to remove a collection of various hors d’oeuvres arranged on a cocktail napkin next to him. “I’m eating those, don’t take those away!” the bearded broadcaster bellowed.

“I thought the magazine was physically unattractive,” he told The Observer on a recent rainy afternoon. He was behind his glass-topped desk, in a large, private office in the back of the magazine’s newish floor-through space in a Tribeca loft building, approximately four miles from the old home of the magazine in the bottom of Plimpton’s townhouse on East 64th Street. There, a bicycle hung from the rafters. Here—except for the stuffed birds hanging from the ceiling and the pool table—it’s all business, albeit in the downtown creative idiom: high ceilings, light wood floors, shiny glass. In Mr. Gourevitch’s office, neat rows of back issues of his own magazine, as well as those of magazines such as Granta and the now-defunct Grand Street, lined the walls.

The 45-year-old Mr. Gourevitch is, like the young Plimpton, personally attractive and preternaturally successful. He also writes for The New Yorker, and his book about Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, was well received. Another book, A Cold Case, is being made into a movie starring Tom Hanks with a screenplay by John Sayles and Eric Roth. His hair is a curly black mop, his dark eyes piercing; he moves his hands when he talks. When Mr. Gourevitch took over the highbrow literary magazine, he was charged with the formidable—some might say unenviable—task of revitalizing a magazine that had for decades been the expression in print of George Plimpton, arguably New York’s most fashionable and well-loved arbiter of literary taste.

He did not immediately follow Plimpton in the role. First there was Brigid Hughes, then 32 years old, who had spent her entire professional life at the magazine under Plimpton; her last job before taking over was managing editor. But The Review’s dissatisfied board of directors threw her out in early 2005, after a tenure of just one year.

At the time, at least part of the New York literary world was not so happy to see the cord cut connecting the magazine’s future to its Plimptonian past. In an article about Ms. Hughes’ ouster, Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times that “her failing appears to be that she was insufficiently Plimptonian and excessively Plimptonian at the same time.” (She has since started her own literary magazine, A Public Space, taking a few loyalists with her.)

Mr. Gourevitch is neither. But when he talks about the magazine, and the major changes he has brought to it in two and a half years on the job, the specter of Plimpton is always just threatening to peek in from the margins.

One of the first tasks was a major redesign, which, Mr. Gourevitch said, was not done simply to establish his mastery of the magazine.

“It wasn’t simply to say, ‘I’m here,’” he said, before giving a history of the physical form of the magazine.

“The first issues were very thin and on light paper, and as it went along it got thicker, and that stabilized. In the last five years it got really fat. It was like 400 pages. It was actually physically hard to open! If you opened it up it would break the spine and snap shut like it didn’t want you to read it, and it kind of had this archaic feel which made it seem as though it wasn’t so classy anymore. So it was a sense that it felt uninviting, and it got thick in the way that made me think—can all this stuff really be that good?”

Mr. Gourevitch’s eighth issue was published last week, and Picador will release a new volume of the magazine’s famous interviews with writers this week. Both speak to Mr. Gourevitch’s ambition for the magazine and his position on its 54-year history.

This year The Paris Review won a National Magazine Award, its first ever, for photojournalism—which is something the magazine didn’t even do before Mr. Gourevitch came on board—for a portfolio of photographs taken in Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, “one of the world’s biggest slums,” as the accompanying text reads.

The new issue includes a portfolio of photographs of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, and an interview with the Israeli novelist David Grossman.

Figures supplied by the magazine seem to show a more than 70 percent increase in its paid circulation and doubled newsstand sales since Mr. Gourevitch took over. It’s still not an industry powerhouse, with distribution a relatively small 14,000 copies per issue.

And as the memory of Plimpton fades, the onus will increasingly be on Mr. Gourevitch to convince readers (and writers) that this relatively small endeavor is more than just an extension of Plimpton’s personality—that without his promotional power it can be not only solvent, but relevant; and not just what Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Jonathan Galassi, who was the magazine’s poetry editor from 1978 to 1988, told The Observer he thought of as “the American-in-Paris Review. Now, said Mr. Galassi, “it’s more the foreign correspondent than the American in Paris.”

But some, if not most, of the magazine’s appeal never had anything to do with what was actually in the magazine; it was about the idea of the magazine, the mystique associated with it as a place where young lovers of literature, most of whom were the well-groomed and well-mannered graduates of the nation’s elite colleges, could apprentice for a year, or more, after college, and attend some glamorous parties in exchange for reading through the slush pile.

(The parties now held at the magazine’s office are still the best opportunity for Manhattan’s most promising editorial assistants to brush up against the likes of Salman Rushdie, who was at last week’s soiree for the Fall issue.)

Plimpton was in large part the perpetuator of this mystique—he was, after all, the man who was a professional amateur (or, more pejoratively, a dilettante), who seems to have been engaging and wildly intellectually curious and more than a little mischievous, and he also happened to have loads of rich friends whom he was able to convince to support his little but influential magazine. For most of his tenure, the magazine was run as a for-profit enterprise, though most of the time there wasn’t much profit to speak of. Plimpton himself never took a salary, and some years it was only due to his largesse that the magazine stayed alive.

At the same time, he cultivated a motley crew of interns and “editorial assistants” who were welcome to work for free at his townhouse, many of whom (Mr. Gourevitch’s wife, the New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar, among them) went on to illustrious publishing careers of their own. But it was never the kind of place that made much of an effort to hire writers or editors who were not of a social milieu that would have been unfamiliar to Plimpton. One of the current board members, Antonio Weiss, who is a managing director in Paris at the investment bank Lazard, is Plimpton’s former assistant and a former editor at the magazine, and is married to the magazine’s Paris editor, Susannah Hunnewell. He recalled that he was an editor of the literary magazine as an undergraduate at Yale, “which was sort of a link into The Paris Review,” he told The Observer by phone. “I got to know George just by being around.”

Does that New York really still exist? In some ways, that’s the question that faces Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review. He probably wouldn’t put it that way, but he does think that a magazine has to be relevant, has to be of its time.

“Even the ones that are really great, they belong to a moment, a certain kind of getting together of energy and taste,” he said. “And often the editors themselves are new writers, and everyone either fails miserably or succeeds spectacularly, and the energy is not in that place anymore and another group starts up another magazine.”

Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review is another magazine. Though he never, exactly, criticizes his predecessor, and certainly not by name, Mr. Gourevitch seems to regard Plimpton’s tenure as one of some rather unrealized potential. “Yes, it was a little bit madcap and it was kind of funny,” he said. “But it’s important to me that this is not a break from the past. It is an attempt to take something and give it a rethink that it hadn’t really been given. It was sort of moving on momentum for a long time. And some bits of it were great—the interviews—but some were clearly better edited than others.”

Among Mr. Gourevitch’s signature early moves was to fire the magazine’s longtime poetry editor, Richard Howard, in favor of the poets Charles Simic, who is also a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and Meghan O’Rourke, who is also the literary editor of Slate.

Legend has it that Mr. Howard was known for encouraging his Columbia M.F.A. students to submit poems to the magazine.

“I thought the magazine just had way too many things in it,” said Mr. Gourevitch. “It had way too many poets—not poems, but poets. Are you telling me, as an editor, that there are 30 poets I must not miss for this quarter? Is there not something else out there, considering that this magazine is not the sole outlet for poetry? I don’t believe it. So then, I think you are actually throwing way too much stuff at me waiting to see if it will stick, and I would much rather be given a much more contained choice.” Today, the magazine has cut its poet quotient by about two-thirds, publishing around 10 per issue. Mr. Gourevitch’s most recent hire is Matt Weiland, who swapped his deputy editor position at Granta for the same title at The Paris Review.

And then there are less tangible changes. According to Mr. Gourevitch, the magazine had early on proceeded from a certain antiacademic vocation. Here’s how Mr. Gourevitch paraphrased George Plimpton’s early mission for the magazine, from the manifesto that appeared with the first issue of The Paris Review:

“It’s not really philistines that are going to kill us, it’s learned chatter that is going to kill us, and that is going to kill literature, and what this magazine should be is for the good writers, not people who are table-thumpers,” he said. (A Time magazine article from 1958 called it “a magazine dedicated to the proposition that authors are more interesting than critics.”)

There was something “secular,” Mr. Gourevitch said, about The Paris Review.

“You could pick up many issues without knowing what year they were from,” he said. “I mean, you could guess by certain kinds of aesthetic things—probably by the illustrations more than anything, and some texture of the prose—but you wouldn’t know that there was a civil rights movement or a Vietnam War or a decolonization of the world.”

The time, it would seem, is over for The Paris Review’s secular proclivities. But Mr. Gourevitch, whose own new book, out this spring, is about Abu Ghraib, with an accompanying documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, repulses the notion that his aim is simply to make the magazine more political.

“I don’t want pieces where you feel as though they’re trying to tell you how to think, or that there is a conclusion, so much as that there’s a kind of scrutiny, and that they are using writing as a way of reflecting on the world and seeing the world,” he said. “I feel like a lot of stuff we have now doesn’t do that, and that there’s actually a very open space for that. We are living in very twisted times, and people are, I think, unhappy about the way that they are getting told about it the whole time.”

And then some things stay the same. The Paris Review still offers possibly the most elite slush-pile-reading job in town.

“We want to see everything,” he said. “There is a notion out there, I think, that just getting people to read you is the hardest part. But really, writers want to find magazines and magazines want to find writers. I think it’s worth having four people reading 20,000 pieces a year, just so we can publish one of them. That’s what we’re here for.”

Mr. Gourevitch is continuing Plimpton’s tradition of publishing unknown writers alongside very famous ones; the new issue has short stories by Stephen King and Danielle Evans. (She’s never been published in a national magazine.)

And then there is the Paris Review Foundation, established to Plimpton’s own distaste to try to tap into his skill at cultivating long-term financial relationships with the city’s cultural power elite to stabilize the magazine’s resources.

The major fund-raising for the year takes place at the annual Revel, a springtime gala at which the magazine’s Plimpton prize (a $10,000 award for emerging writers, which this year went to the 28-year-old Benjamin Percy) and its Hadada prize (for established writers; this year’s went to Norman Mailer) are awarded, organized by the magazine’s development director, a new position under Mr. Gourevitch.

Tickets for the Revel, which this year was held at the Puck Building, start at $500; tables are $10,000 to $50,000; and this year’s event grossed $750,000—more than half of the magazine’s operating budget for the year.

Like any good philanthropic board, The Paris Review’s is comprised of the wealthy and/or well-connected.

The current members include New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, who was one of the first nonfounders to join the magazine; Lawrence Guffey, who works in London for the Blackstone Group, the private equity firm founded by Steven Schwarzman; the private investor Scott Asen, whose college buddies at Harvard include former Massachusetts Governor William Weld; the artist and writer Bokara Legendre, the daughter of the late socialite Gertrude Legendre, whose family plantation, in South Carolina, has been the site of magazine retreats; and Allure contributing editor Jeanne McCulloch, who has written about her privileged childhood growing up on the Upper East Side for that magazine. The magazine’s publisher, Drue Heinz, was the second wife of the late Jack Heinz, who ran his family’s company from Pittsburgh and was the father of the late Senator John Heinz III.

Board member Thomas Guinzburg, one of the magazine’s original founders and the former president of the Viking Press and Viking Penguin, recently stepped down, and the screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who is married to ubiquitous socialite Tinsley Mortimer’s sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer) and the author Clara Bingham will join the board as its newest members.

“We try to stay away from the editorial approach because we don’t think we should be meddling,” said board member James Goodale, a Debevoise & Plimpton lawyer who was a former counsel to The New York Times (and this newspaper). Mr. Goodale, who was Plimpton’s longtime lawyer, was also instrumental in establishing the Foundation. “George didn’t like the idea at all. He didn’t like it because in his view of history, there had never been a literary magazine that survived,” Mr. Goodale said.

The establishment of the Foundation presupposes the idea that on its own—or as a for-profit enterprise—a magazine like The Paris Review would not survive. “Literature is an art form that has gotten precious little philanthropic support,” said Mr. Asen, the board member. “There simply haven’t been the vehicles.”

And then, of course, Plimpton did not get to choose his successor.

“I don’t plan on dying in this job. George did it for 50 years, but he gave birth to it. I think that there is a lot that we could do with it, and it’s important to me that it’s read—the more people that read it the better.”

Paris Review has a long tradition of throwing open its office parties to the greater literary community of New York, a tradition begun by the magazine's late founder George Plimpton, when the magazine was based in his Upper East Side townhouse. When the current editor-in-chief, New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, moved the magazine downtown after becoming editor in 2005, the tradition of the parties continued. And thus, at times it seemed that every editorial assistant in town (or at least, those at the better publishing houses) was there, swilling from the open bar and dipping their hands into the potato chips.

At the other end of the room, Rob Dennis stood awkwardly by the grapes. One of his poems, Unrequited II, about a crush he had while an undergraduate at Harvard, was published in the new issue. Mr. Dennis, who is 27, works for a hedge fund as the head of technology recruiting when he's not penning verse. He told us that he had submitted the poem, and then "promptly forgot" about it.

"I heard from them six or eight months later," he said. "They asked if the poem was still available. I said it was totally available! It was really exciting."

In the middle of the room, a knot of partygoers—David Shoemaker, an editor at the Overlook Press; Sarah Fan, an editor at the New Press; Mel Flashman, an agent at Trident; and Ms. Flashman's client, Megan Husted, whose book, How to be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to the Meritocracy, comes out in May—chatted. Over there was the author Uzodinma Iweala, whose work has been published in the magazine; the writer Katie Roiphe--who wrote about her divorce in New York magazine and the marriages of aristocratic British writers in her latest book--was deep in conversation with another writer, as was Mr. Gourevitch's wife, the New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar. Someone said they'd seen Salman Rushdie. Simon Rich, the young writer whose first book, Ant Farm, came out before he graduated from Harvard last spring, roamed the crowd. His brother, Nathaniel, is a senior editor at the magazine; you might also know his father, Frank.

Soon the sponsored whiskey was nearly gone and the young ladies in high heels and shiny dresses ("There are a lot of girls here who are dressed up," someone murmured) were having to lean, ever so slightly, on the young men in sportcoats.