“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

"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."

Mr. Gourevitch, who is also a New Yorker staff writer, said in an interview that his decision to resign was motivated by a desire to focus his energies on his writing, and that his current book project, which is about Rwanda, is proving too time-consuming to allow for a successful balancing act.

"I want to give that everything," he said. "You can't take time off when you're in charge."

Mr. Gourevitch's decision to step down in order to write a book distinguishes himself from a number of other prominent New York magazine editors-- hello Jon Meacham, Rick Stengel, and David Remnick!-- who have elected to pull double duty.

Asked whether he'd been spread too thin when he was working on his recent book with Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, Mr. Gourevitch said he felt like he'd done a pretty good job holding it together, but that he felt "extremely exhausted" at the end. "I didn't want to do that again," he said.

Mr. Gourevitch informed Paris Review publisher Antonio Weiss earlier this week. "Everyone has been enormously understanding," Mr. Gourevitch said. 

According to an announcement, Mr. Weiss and Paris Review Foundation director Terry McDonnell will lead a search committee for Mr. Gourevitch's replacement that will also include New York Review of Books editor Bob Silvers and Paris Review founder and author Peter Matthiessen.

Mr. Gourevitch said he does not expect his replacement to be named "before Thanksgiving or Christmas." Asked if internal candidates would be considered for the job, he said that "nothing has been ruled out at all.

Ms. Godoff and Ms. MacFarquhar know one another well, partly because they met through a mutual friend years ago but also because Ms. Godoff edited Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, Ms. MacFarquhar’s husband, on Standard Operating Procedure, his 2008 book on Abu Ghraib with the documentarian Errol Morris.

“I had always hoped to work with her and it’s just a wonderful outcome,” Ms. MacFarquhar said. “I was hoping that she would like the proposal and I was hoping that she would want the book, and she did.”

The author said the idea for the book grew out of a piece she wrote for The New Yorker last summer about individuals who donate their kidneys to strangers. “It’s sort of that piece minus the kidneys,” Ms. MacFarquhar said. “In writing that piece, one of the things that was very interesting to me and somewhat surprising was the degree of hostility these people encountered, so this will be both writing about those sorts of people and a history of our reactions to them.”

She said she plans to take time off from The New Yorker to complete the project, but will not be doing so for some time.
Ms. Godoff declined to comment on the book; the Wylie Agency did not respond to an email.

“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.

--Gabriel Sherman

“The front row is a debacle,” one publicist told The Transom, “and it must be stopped! If you are not there to buy or review the clothes, you have no place being there!”

But as those two front-row seats went free, it wasn’t outlandish to suppose that certain socialites would muscle their way in because they felt entitled to them.

The scene is familiar: A prominent socialite is given her seat assignment; it doesn’t place her in Row 1. She loiters on the runway with her other socialite friends until the last minute, when she squeezes her way into the front row. Another scenario: A friend of the designer is given a seat assignment that doesn’t place her in Row 1. She makes her way backstage to complain to the designer himself, and when she is refused access, she storms back and wedges herself into the front row. “Let’s be clear,” said Annelise Peterson, who handles publicity for women’s wear at Calvin Klein. “If you’re not front row, there’s a reason.”

Devising seating arrangements at shows can be a trial, especially when there are hierarchies to obey. “You don’t want to piss off the older socialites,” said another publicist. “When a young unknown is sitting in the front row, you don’t want the older contingent saying, ‘Who put her there?’ These women have been loyal customers for many, many years, and you want to reward them for it.”

But there are customers, and then there are customers. Some aren’t always given preferential treatment, and so they will take it for themselves. And once such a customer has settled in, it is very hard to evict her. “It’s just hard to kick them out of their seats, because our business even depends on them to a degree,” said Kelly Cutrone, whose company, People’s Revolution, handles many of the best shows. “I’ve tried this season to be a little kinder, because I don’t want to be this hard, cold fashion bitch. The truth is that I do all of this out of love for my clients.” Ms. Cutrone breaks it down: “The front row is for clients, buyers, reviewers and, in that rare case, celebrities. No one else. But someone will always try to tell you that they deserve it.”

Another publicist tells of an experience at the Narciso Rodriguez show a few seasons past, where “Zelda,” the ubiquitous fez-wearing eightysomething fashionphile, arrived with a coterie begging to be seated, when “the Twins,” two other famous seat-crashers, came to her aid, leading her to a second-row seat originally meant for Janet Ozzard, who at the time was the executive editor of Style.com. Ms. Ozzard wound up sitting somewhere else. Crashing the after-party too, Zelda then claimed to be twentysomething Deborah Schoeneman.

—Jessica Joffe

Second Fiddle

The outburst took everyone by surprise.

It was an evening in “Celebration of The Paris Review” at the New York Public Library, and it had drawn an auditorium full of elderly matrons, students and intellectuals murmuring with eager anticipation. They had come to see a pair of literary headliners: the writer and filmmaker Miranda July, and the novelist and husband of Padma, Salman Rushdie, who were to read and submit to questioning by Philip Gourevitch, the editor of The Paris Review. In between the two readings, there would be a mini-reception; a bar and tables piled with snacks beckoned tantalizingly at one end of the room. Ms. July went first.

“I have to keep talking, because I’m really nervous,” the pixie-like Ms. July confessed as she hovered over the podium. Standing tall in black pumps and jeans and a striped chiffon blouse, Ms. July read her finely worded short story “Birthmark,” about a woman who had an unsightly stain on her body removed. She then moved to an armchair onstage to be interviewed by Mr. Gourevitch and to take questions from the audience.

About 20 minutes into Ms. July’s Q&A, an elderly woman stood up with belligerent determination. It was Saturday night, and she couldn’t take it any more.

“Where is Salman Rushdie?” she shouted.

There was some isolated clapping, and then the room went awkwardly silent. Many in the audience gasped in horror.

“Oh my God, that was so rude I can’t even believe it,” said Ms. July onstage, her voice wavering.

They continued the interview for a few more minutes, and after she and Mr. Gourevitch stepped down, a protective huddle formed.

“You gave the perfect response,” said Padma Lakshmi, Mr. Rushdie’s ravishing wife, who was seated in the front row in a shorter-than-thou miniskirt and suede-fringed boots.

“Throw her out!” said Mr. Gourevitch to Paul Holdengraber, the library’s dashing head of public programming.

After the intermission and a few swigs of Jack Daniel’s, nerves had been calmed and the indiscreet older woman stayed on. Mr. Rushdie took to the podium, dressed somberly in a gray dress shirt and dark slacks.

“Ma’am,” he said gravely, “ your intervention was philistine and has no place here.” There was hearty applause.

During his own question-and-answer session, there was a second “intervention,” but that one posed less of a problem. A young woman took the microphone, trembling.

“First of all, I just want to say … I can’t believe that I’m standing in front of you!” the woman gushed. “It’s out of my wildest dreams!”

Mr. Rushdie flushed for a brief moment.

“It’s fiction,” he said.

—Sheelah Kolhatkar

Ms. Johnson Comes to Town

True, it is after Labor Day. But Sheila C. Johnson was mostly worried about her white shoes because of the groundbreaking. They’re “my wedding shoes,” she said.

Ms. Johnson, who was divorced in 2002 from Robert L. Johnson, will marry William Newman Jr., the Chief Justice of the Arlington County Circuit Court, this month at her Virginia farm.

Fortunately for the shoes, and for her gold-buttoned coral skirt-suit, the groundbreaking ceremony was really more of a wall-breaking ceremony, and therefore not that messy an affair. In the awkwardly named Parsons the New School for Design on Fifth Avenue, Ms. Johnson took a gray mallet in hand and gave a wall the first thwack.

Thwacking rights are undoubtedly hers. Work now begins on a radical revisioning of the Parsons campus, spurred by a $7 million gift from Ms. Johnson, which was announced in 2003. The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center will unify the first floors of the four Parsons buildings, creating a more dynamic street-level presence.

Ms. Johnson, a co-founder of BET with Mr. Johnson and the first female African-American billionaire—yes, before Oprah—was brought to the Parsons board of governors by her friend Tess Gilder. After an intense vetting process, she became a member and is now the vice chair. “They really put you through the wringer,” Ms. Johnson said.

After just a few board meetings, she took a tour of the facilities. “I was just appalled,” she said. She found the cramped spaces and “half-mile-long line for the elevator” to be unfitting for Parsons’ reputation. “I wondered what I could do here. After I saw the conditions of campus, I thought, ‘Aha, I know how I can help.’”

And Ms. Johnson has been busy!

“The resort finally got approval,” said Ms. Johnson. Back at home in Middleburg, Va. (pop. 600), her plans for a luxury resort and spa were finally approved by the town council. In exchange for a zoning variance and the town’s consent, Ms. Johnson agreed to provide Middleburg with a “new wastewater treatment plant,” according to the memorandum of understanding between her company, Salamander Development L.L.C., and the council.

Previously, Ms. Johnson had found there were few good local spots to dine, so in 2004 she built Market Salamander, an adaptation of a European country market.

So let’s say the lady knows how to get things done. New York should only hope to have more of her attention.

Ms. Johnson bought her daughter, Paige, her first pony when she was 7; she is now an accomplished rider with Olympic aspirations. “I’m not just saying this as a mother! She’s very talented,” said Ms. Johnson, who is now also a board member of the United States Equestrian Federation. “I support that organization too,” she said with a very slight eye roll.

Lyn Rice, formerly of OpenOffice, the firm that did up Dia:Beacon, and now of Lyn Rice Architects, won the bid to build the new center. Mr. Rice said that he was looking to build “an urban quad,” and that he wants the new space “to convey a sense of Parsons’ commitment to the new.” Mr. Rice was hesitant to offer a completion date for the project. “It’s an extensive renovation,” he said.

—Raegan Johnson

This Is It

“Everyone abandoned us and moved to Chelsea!” said Taki Wise, co-owner of the Staley-Wise gallery, at Amanda De Cadenet’s Soho opening last week. Her thumb was wrapped in gauze from a manicure gone awry earlier last week. “People who go gallery-hopping Thursday nights, gallery-hopping and drinking for free from gallery to gallery—they’re mostly in Chelsea now.”

Ms. De Cadenet gamely greeted the guests, despite having had back surgery only the week before. “Every piece I chose is an image that I love,” she said, her blond hair pulled away from her face with butterfly barrettes. “I’m just enjoying that people are enjoying the work—”

She was interrupted by a shattering crash—not the overhead lights à la Diane von Furstenberg, thankfully, but rather fallen stemware.

“Uh-oh,” said Ms. De Cadenet. “The first broken glass.”

The photographs of her A-list friends were mingled with family pictures. In a shot of a shaven-headed Tobey Maguire, he sat at a table with a can of Mug Root Beer at his elbow, his eyes, through dorky glasses, looking off in the distance, as if he were eyeing a pretty girl. Or something.

Photographer Stephen Klein kissed Ms. Wise. “This is it! This is IT!” he said. “You called it. There’s nothing else going on in this town. Compared to a marching band at Marc Jacobs? Anyone could get a band!”

Keanu Reeves walked in, his beard even shaggier in person than in his De Cadenet portrait.

“That’s a good one,” Mr. Klein said. “That’s who you pulled in!”

The Strokes’ Nick Valensi, Ms. De Cadenet’s beau, looked ever the rock star with his long and luscious brown locks, a blue bandana loosely draped around his neck, and a pack of Camel Lights squashed into the left pocket of his jeans.

“I am just so fucking proud of Amanda,” he said, taking it in. Mr. Valensi said they were going to have a quiet night at home because of her back.

“She’s supposed to be on bed rest, and I’ve been charged with keeping an eye on her,” he said, watching as she got out of her chair—again—to hug and kiss another friend.

“We’ll probably order in some dinner, rent some movies,” he said.

—Nicole Pesce

Bad Habits

“I sucked my thumb, constantly, until I was at Princeton,” said Walter Kirn. “I wrote an autobiographical novel. Just my luck, they made a movie—so the whole world would know. I thought it’d be just the literary crowd.”

It was the Thumbsucker premiere last Wednesday, sponsored by Paper magazine and Jack Spade, at Guest House.

Mr. Kirn, a 7 Days and Spy alumnus, fell into fiction by happenstance, when he told then–Knopf editor Gordon Lish that he wrote fiction, even though he hadn’t. (Bloggers, take note!) After Spy, he moved off to Montana to become a novelist.

Michael Mills’ film adaptation of Mr. Kirn’s novel wants to tell you that everyone’s a little screwed up—whether it’s 17-year-old Justin Cobb’s (Lou Pucci) thumb-sucking, or his mother’s (Tilda Swinton) obsession with a drug-addled TV actor. Under the effects of Ritalin, young Justin speeds through Moby-Dick, becomes the star of the debate team, and experiments with sex and marijuana. Mr. Reeves lends his messianic posturing to the role of a hippie physician (“Are you ready to let go of your thumb?”) who asks Justin to draw strength from his “power animal.”

So does Mr. Kirn still suck his thumb? “Only when I’m really, really tired and very stressed. I’m 43. There can be no more embarrassing habits.”

Oh, can’t there be? In the dimly lit lounge, GQ deputy editor Michael Hainey confided, “I still hate my mother … and I wet the bed.”

The film’s young star, Lou Pucci, bedecked in a suit, black silk bowtie and Converse shoes, reported that he sucked his thumb until he was 8. He didn’t see a problem with it. His father—also named Lou—concurred. “We do things that the public would rather not see. That’s what makes us people.”

“I don’t have any real odd habits,” said the younger Mr. Pucci. “Except for acting. That’s an odd habit—going into someone else’s eyes.”

A skinny man in 80’s workout gear flitted past.

“Do you have any weird habits?” the young Mr. Pucci asked. The Transom said no.

“Can you just tell me one weird habit of yours? I know you have at least one. Ha, ha!” Again, The Transom claimed to be perfect—except when it is not.

“Jesus, you’re like … Jesus! That must be rough.”

—Blythe Sheldon

The Secret of Gwen

Barred from Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. show, which kissed off the end of Fashion Week last Friday, The Transom waited outside Roseland Ballroom with heaps of fashion victims and disgruntled journalists.

Just when the only option seemed to be drinking Fashion Week into oblivion across the way at Gallagher’s bar, it was noticed that the L.A.M.B. standing-room tickets were merely three-by-five-inch index cards with the word “Standing” scrawled on them in black pen.

With a quick trip to Duane Reade on 50th Street and Broadway, The Transom returned to the line holding its “official” key into the L.A.M.B. show. To see Ms. Stefani, $1.29 ain’t too shabby.

Madness! Snakeskin fleece pants, yellow track pants, cashmere hoodies, Chevrolet Cadillacs, scalloped blazers, diagonal zip-front jackets, silk chiffon Rasta gowns and mesh street glam!

At the end, the Orange County girl herself came skipping down the walk in drawstring pants and a black see-through tank layered over a gold bikini top. On her way offstage, she kissed Anna Wintour, her husband Gavin Rossdale and, of course, her mom.

Afterward, backstage at the Roseland Ballroom, the slim, platinum-blond beauty gushed in front of a crowd of reporters. “It couldn’t have gone any better than that,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying right now! I’m so thankful.”

Some Gilmore Girls stopped by to shower Ms. Stefani with compliments. When asked about her next show, she smiled. “Who knows?” she said.

The Transom tried to score some fashion swag: a haunting pair of alligator-green sequined high heels, which had been worn by one of Gwen’s lanky models. But a production freelancer named Mike stood in the way.

“You don’t want to wear these,” Mike said. “They’re five inches.”

But just before a brawl over shoes began, Lenny Kravitz walked by. With raw instinct, The Transom grabbed his upper arm—his buttery-smooth bicep—and asked him about the show.

“I loved the show,” he said. Why? “It’s Gwen.” Mr. Kravitz also liked the familiar aura of the models. “They’ve all got Gwen’s vibe,” he said.

Of course Gavin Rossdale was publicly smitten by his wife’s show. “I’m 50 million out of 10 proud,” he said. “Her flavor was everywhere. Fashion should be about … fun. The line is quite rare.”

But he admitted that Ms. Stefani’s inspiration may have at least a little something to do with him.

“She likes to sketch on me,” Mr. Rossdale said, breaking out with a rakish smile. “She jams on it. It’s a great process.”

—Erin Coe and Nicole Pesce

Mr. Gourevitch was looking freshly scrubbed in blue-and-white-striped, rolled-up shirtsleeves, sitting in the newly inhabited offices of the magazine—a suite of airy, sun-flooded rooms with blond wood floors, cathedral ceilings and a Tribeca address (White Street between Broadway and Church) that could almost be described as swanky.

In addition to the vast amounts of light and space, the new office is awash in popsicle colors, shelves of carefully arranged old issues and framed Pop Art prints. The furniture has a vaguely Scandinavian feel; six slender desks house interns and editors tapping at computers or peeling bubble wrap off of posters and boxes, while Mr. Gourevitch resides in a commodious atelier in the back. There’s a fax machine and one of those office kitchens and talk of acquiring plants. It’s a long way downtown from the cramped enclave the Review used to occupy, practically for free, on the ground floor of the late George Plimpton’s far East Side townhouse on 72nd Street. Then, the magazine’s physical surroundings were at one with its identity as a center for emerging fiction and poetry—an entrenched culture of noble dishevelment.

“The old office was about this big—pretty dark and dingy,” said Mr. Gourevitch, gesturing towards the plush sitting area tucked in the front of the new space, a cluster of overstuffed loveseats around a square coffee table. “[This] is a place where we have some room to be a proper full-time office.”

Nearly everything about the rickety old Paris Review has been brushed off and upgraded to a shiny new standard as part of a summer-long restructuring led by Mr. Gourevitch that makes the new Review seem practically … corporate.

The new issue is larger than the old one, slim and elegant and more magazine-like, printed on buttery paper. Rather than featuring graphic artwork, the cover displays a sepia-toned photograph of a solemn little child in galoshes—the adorably plump Salman Rushdie as a boy in Bombay, looking serious beyond his years and cute enough to eat. Inside is an interview with Mr. Rushdie; three nonfiction pieces by Liao Yiwu, a Chinese dissident writer; three short stories (one a debut); two collections of poems by two poets; and excerpts from Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished notebooks, among other things. The table of contents has been refashioned in numerical order. (“It was as if it was trying to keep you a little off-kilter,” Mr. Gourevitch said of the old thematic arrangement.)

Some of the other changes might be less apparent to the unprofessional eye, but are sure to be noted by the community of writers and editors who seem to regard the Paris Review as sacred literary real estate, and who tend to scrutinize the magazine’s every move. For one thing, there is the masthead, which has been completely erased and rebuilt. (Managing editor Oliver Broudy, the one hold-out editorial staff member from the previous regime of George Plimpton and his successor, Brigid Hughes, sent an e-mail to friends over the summer announcing that he was leaving the Review to freelance.)

“In the past, there were not a lot of job searches,” Mr. Gourevitch said, adding that for the first time they’d be employing a circulation manager. “We didn’t do vast searches and hire headhunters, but we cast a broad net when we interviewed people. We tried to find the right match. In the past, it was much more of a sense of who came along, who stumbled along. Somebody bright would appear, and you’d try to find some way to include them.

“The other difference is that on the editorial side, there was a tendency to be here primarily because they entered as unpaid interns and rose up by sticking around,” Mr. Gourevitch continued. “But many people who were here had not had substantial experience elsewhere in the business, in publishing and magazines and editing and what have you. And I favor that, partly because we’re such a small operation. I do not think that it should be a hermetic world or a kind of self-taught or autodidact magazine.”

Mr. Gourevitch said that he’d culled all the part-time positions that used to clutter the masthead, and that the Review was actually “paying competitively” for its full-time staff positions (although there’s still plenty of unpaid, Ivy League–style labor)—which, combined with the magazine’s plush new digs, suggests that the Paris Review Foundation Board of Directors has loosened the purse strings, allowing the place to function as an actual business.

Mr. Gourevitch’s first editorial hire was a fellow named Nathaniel Rich, (who happens to be the son of New York Times culture guru Frank Rich,) who holds the title of associate editor and who worked briefly at the New York Review of Books after college and has written a book on film noir. Mr. Gourevitch described Mr. Rich as “a natural” who discovered the current issue’s debut, a short story by Lisa Halliday, in the unsolicited submissions.

But for every Lisa Halliday, there are many less fortunate writers—and in this case, they are the dozens of mostly young poets who were part of the dreaded “poetry backlog.”

The most radical editorial change at the Paris Review thus far, which is likely to reverberate in the smallest of worlds, was Mr. Gourevitch’s replacement of the Review’s poetry editor of 11 years, Richard Howard, with two new younger ones: the established poet Charles Simic, who teaches at the University of New Hampshire, and Slate culture editor Meghan O’Rourke, who is a nascent poet herself. The co-editorship was one of Mr. Gourevitch’s signature ideas for the magazine (“I thought it was better to have a broader and less single-personality-driven approach,” he said), along with a transformation in how poetry is presented. Rather than single works by many writers, portfolios of multiple poems by one or two poets will appear in each issue.

Mr. Howard, 75, an esteemed old lion of the poetry world, the recipient of Pulitzers, Guggenheims and MacArthurs, the author of 11 books of poetry and countless translations of French literature, is both a feared and revered man of letters. He was also famous for accepting far more work than the Paris Review could accommodate, much of it from his students at Columbia University’s M.F.A. poetry program.

The result was that, at any given time, there were two or more years’ worth of work in the pipeline that had been accepted for publication. It was known among Mr. Howard’s Columbia students that he would pluck his favorites out of obscurity and put them into the Paris Review queue; then they would have to wait—sometimes for several years—for their work to make it into the magazine. But in the meantime, they could say that they had poems “forthcoming” in the Paris Review.

According to Mr. Gourevitch, he asked Mr. Howard to stay on at the Review as one of several poetry editors, but that Mr. Howard “basically felt that he’d done his time” and had decided to move on. Mr. Howard, reached by phone, said, “I didn’t leave the Paris Review; I was dislodged,” and that he had tried to hew to Plimpton’s vision of showing as many different poets as possible during his tenure.

In the aftermath of Mr. Howard’s departure, something had to be done with the extensive backlog of poems (possibly even five years’ worth, according to one person who saw the list) that were awaiting publication. So the controversial decision was made not to publish most of the backlog and pay kill fees to the affected poets.

One poet, a former student of Mr. Howard’s, said that some of the writers were first informed that the number of their accepted pieces might be reduced, and then, several months later, that they might be published on the Web instead, and finally that they wouldn’t be published at all.

“At first I thought they were doing something wrong by not even publishing them on the Web,” said the disappointed poet. “It would have been a really nice gesture to put the work online. But I don’t necessarily blame them.”

According to sources in the poetry world, one distraught poet came into the Poets House library in Soho about a month ago and inquired about any rights the backlogged writers might have, or whether they could try to band together and protest the Paris Review’s decision, although it’s unclear if any steps were ever taken.

“There were a lot of pieces, period, but most of it was poetry,” said Mr. Gourevitch, noting that Jesse Ball, one of the poets featured in the current issue, had been one of Mr. Howard’s choices. “Everything was reconsidered by the poetry editors; some of it will be published, some of it we can’t. I wrote to everybody and explained this. It was the most painful thing I had to do, to be the source of disappointment on that.”

While some poets said that Mr. Howard might have wielded too much power at times, and that he was regarded as very much of an established insider, he was also known as a dedicated champion of young writers.

“Richard is a principle discoverer of young poets, and wherever he migrates, he finds them,” said Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker. “He’s in on careers at a very early stage. My guess is that he introduced 100 new poets over the years.”

“There’s been no greater nourisher of emerging talent in poetry than Richard Howard,” said Stephen Young, the program director at the Poetry Foundation, who was an editor at Poetry magazine for many years and who also said that he welcomed the choice of new editors, particularly Ms. O’Rourke, whom he described as “a very astute reader and critic on a variety of topics.”

Mr. Howard’s departure seems to herald a different sort of approach to poetry at the Paris Review, one with less emphasis on young, unpublished poets, since those who will be featured will need a critical mass of publishable work to justify an entire portfolio.

“The downside is that we don’t get to introduce as many voices per issue,” said Ms. O’Rourke. “But the upside outweighs that. It really takes two or three poems to get inside a poet’s work. You really don’t get much out of just reading one poem, especially in a culture where poetry isn’t the dominant idiom of our time.”

While seemingly endless shelves of smaller journals publish poetry, the list of high-profile outlets still dedicated to the craft is dangerously short, making the Paris Review and The New Yorker even more important. A career in poetry progresses through the accumulation of credits—an agonizingly slow, often unpaid process that might begin at more obscure journals and, at one time, in places like the Paris Review. But it’s possible that the Review’s poetry portfolios will increase the chances that some poets—those lucky, published few—will garner a burst of desperately needed attention from the publishing world.

“I think if you’re a book publisher, or you’re in charge of a foundation that gives grants, and if you’re interested in poetry, you’re certainly going to be reading the Paris Review and The New Yorker,” said Ms. Quinn. “We published three poems [in The New Yorker] last week by a Louisiana poet, Martha Serpas. And of course poets and publishers have been calling and asking me who she is. I think it was clear that by publishing three of her poems, we felt very strongly about her work.”

But so far the appointment of Mr. Gourevitch seems to have softened a few critics, and some disgruntled staffers may be sticking around to see how the new regime shapes up. The board, which includes Robert Silvers, co-editor of The New York Review of Books, Terry McDonell, managing editor of Sports Illustrated, founding editors Thomas Guinzburg and Peter Matthiessen, and Sarah Plimpton, Plimpton's wife, had the daunting task of trying to keep The Paris Review vital both financially and artistically in the wake of Plimpton's death in 2003. At first glance, Mr. Gourevitch's nonfiction credentials suggested an end to the old, tiny, fiction-and-poetry dominated Paris Review. It was easy to imagine that the new editor would try to turn it into another Granta-the British quarterly known for literary reportage and fiction that was edited from 1979 to 1995 by Mr. Gourevitch's New Yorker patron Bill Buford.

"I'd never thought it would be fun to edit a huge magazine, it was never something that I aspired to," Mr. Gourevitch explained, sitting on a white couch in his brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife Larissa MacFarquhar, a New Yorker staff writer and former Paris Review intern who heard about the editor search underway at The Review several weeks ago. "But the idea of having a small magazine, a writer's magazine that was really about writing-I started to think about it, and I thought, I'd love to do this."

Mr. Gourevitch, 43, most recently covered the 2004 Presidential campaign for The New Yorker, but is best known for his dispatches from Rwanda. Those pieces became the award-winning 1998 book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. (Mr. Gourevitch will no longer be on contract at The New Yorker, but will continue to contribute on a piece-by-piece basis.) He also holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University and spent his early career writing short stories. Mr. Gourevitch said that he was committed to publishing both fiction and poetry, and that, in fact, he has no intention of creating an American Granta, which he described as mostly nonfiction, with no poetry-and "we are not going to go there." But he is contemplating a few changes.

"This is a magazine with a great tradition and a great legacy, and that legacy should be a boost, not a burden," said Mr. Gourevitch. "It shouldn't be something where you're a curator, or where you're stuck with it, where you feel, 'Gee, we have to go and do what the last guy did.'"

Although his selection has been greeted with general approval, it also took many by surprise, as Mr. Gourevitch's name hadn't been mentioned among the handful of contenders. John Jeremiah Sullivan, a nonfiction writer the board had been seriously considering, withdrew his informal candidacy in early February. Mr. Buford, The New Yorker's former fiction editor, was often mentioned as a possibility in press accounts, but one source familiar with the board's activities said that Mr. Buford had never been seriously in the running. According to the source, that left Meghan O'Rourke, the culture editor at Slate, as the front-runner beside Mr. Gourevitch. (Ms. O'Rourke confirmed that she was under consideration.)

"[Philip Gourevitch] is a very brilliant reporter, and a good writer, and we thought that he had very impressive ideas," said Mr. Silvers, the influential board member who led the search. "And so, he seemed the best candidate."

Of course, not everyone is happy about the way things unfolded at The Paris Review in the months leading up to Mr. Gourevitch's appointment, which suggests that the new editor might have some bruised egos to mend. The writer Rick Moody, a longtime contributor and financial backer of The Review, was so outraged over the circumstances of Ms. Hughes' firing that he sent a "resignation" letter to the magazine several weeks ago, declaring that he would have nothing more to do with it after Ms. Hughes' final issue. He rushed to complete a 50-page novella, called The Omega Force, for the April magazine, which will be Ms. Hughes' last. But now, with the new editor revealed, Mr. Moody is reconsidering his resignation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Moody did not respond to requests for comment.

There was further discord at The Review in recent months. According to a person familiar with the workings of the magazine, The Review's managing editor, Fiona Maazel, tendered her resignation weeks ago and will have her last day shortly; also, the magazine's treasurer, Marjorie Kalman, the longtime accountant to Plimpton himself, was told by the board in January that she would be let go. She has since worked out a compromise and is still there. Both Ms. Maazel and Ms. Kalman declined to return calls from The Observer.

In the last week, two former board members fired off angry (as yet unpublished) letters to the editor of The New York Times in response to their report about Mr. Gourevitch's new job.

One was by Elizabeth Gaffney, a former Review board member and a champion of Ms. Hughes. In the letter, she accused the board of ageism and misogyny, suggesting that they had fired Ms. Hughes because she wasn't high-profile enough for their tastes and that they had ignored her successes, including the magazine's circulation increase and nomination for a National Magazine Award in Fiction.

In response to Ms. Gaffney's accusations, Mr. Silvers said: "We all liked Brigid very much. We asked her to carry this paper forward at the time when George died, and she sustained its quality, and I admire her very much. But we also felt there was a time for some new directions, new conceptions of what the paper could be."

Ms. Gaffney said that she was pleasantly surprised by the board's selection of Mr. Gourevitch. "I like him very much personally," she said. "He's a better person than I expected them to pick. That doesn't affect the underlying problem that this board disrupted something that was going on with a group of people who were protégés of George's, who had done an impeccable job."

The other letter writer, Deborah Pease, who was the magazine's publisher from 1982 to 1992 and resigned from the board in protest of their activities last April, said she felt that the board was too focused on nonfiction and felt concerned about the future of poetry at the quarterly.

"The anguish I feel, as the magazine changes editors, is that George is really fading fast," said Ms. Pease. "The board is on record as saying they want to make The Review more commercial and to publish more nonfiction. That is on record."

Mr. Gourevitch said that he'd been mostly unaware of the well-publicized power struggle between Ms. Hughes and the board, and that his dealings with the board and magazine staff members had been cordial and straightforward.

"As they've said on the record by now, I have carte blanche," said Mr. Gourevitch. "And that was crucial mostly because, well … for all the obvious reasons."

In a 10-page memo to the board, Mr. Gourevitch outlined some of his ideas for revitalizing The Review, including featuring "portfolios" of several poems by a few poets in each issue, rather than a sprinkling of one-shots by many poets, as is the current approach; "internationalizing" the magazine with more fiction in translation; introducing "closely observed, readable nonfiction"; and adding mini-collections of documentary photography. He signed a multi-year contract with The Review, and anticipates a first issue by September.

He described a possible, ideal issue of the future: "Let's say you have three or four or five short stories, two or three pieces of nonfiction, one or two interviews, a portfolio of photography, and three or four or five poetry portfolios." Mr. Gourevitch added that the board had been receptive to his ideas.

"Of course, when I'm running around, covering a campaign or spending time in a foreign country, trying to figure out the ongoing politics of Zimbabwe or something like that, I think, 'Wouldn't it be great to be home, reading a novel?'" said Mr. Gourevitch. "And when I'm sitting at home, reading manuscripts of fiction, I'm sure that I'll think it'd be really nice to be riding around, in a bad car on a bad road, figuring out a country in trouble. But I think, ultimately, instead of feeling like, 'Oh, I wish I was doing the other thing,' there's a way the two will contribute to each other."