Through his sharp-eyed pen-and-ink portraits, the Brooklyn-born artist helped shape the nascent NYRB when he joined the staff in 1963. Mr. Levine received an envelope every Thursday containing photos of his subject for the week, and--in the course of his forty years--amassed an amazingly witty archive full of outsized authors and heavy headed heads-of-state. He also contributed to Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Nation.

In his latter years, Mr. Levine's famously sharp eyes suffered from macular generation. "If I look at somebody's face, I can't tell what it really looks like in detail," he told the Observer in 2007. "I can see the general layout, the noses and so on, but if you come into a restaurant where I'm sitting and looking towards the door, I can't tell until the person gets within five feet of me who it is."

"It didn't stop [Edgar] Degas," he said at the time. But it did eventually stop Mr. Levine from contributing to the NYRB, which ran his last portrait in 2007--a quiet separation chronicled by David Margolick in Vanity Fair last year. Mr. Levine apparently thought he had been fired, though NYRB editor Robert Silvers insisted he was open to publishing more of Mr. Levine's work. The paper appears to have considered him something of an illustrator emeritus. He remains on the masthead as a Staff Artist, and the paper's web site contains this eulogy from the late contributor John Updike, written more than 30 years ago:

"Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease. Levine is one of America's assets. In a confusing time, he bears witness. In a shoddy time, he does good work."

What Mr. Levine did for the NYRB might never be done again. "It's safe to say that in a digital era, with little stability or loyalty or even newsprint, there will never be anyone remotely like Levine again," Mr. Margolick wrote in an e-mail, "someone who became the visual signature of a landmark publication, and who depicted (and ridiculed. And debunked. And, in rare instances, flattered), so many of the people who mattered to our civilization."

And he was a good friend. "David Levine was unique as an artist and as an indomitable individual whose positive presence was an indispensable asset to this gallery and to me personally for 45 years," said his friend Robert Fishko, the director of the Forum Gallery, which represented Mr. Levine. "His wry and poignant laughter was completely infectious, his sense of reality totally sophisticated, his insights beyond deep - and it all came naturally and without pretense. I miss him already."

Mr. Fishko said Forum Gallery plans a March exhibition of Mr. Levine's work.

It was an unusual tweet for @nybooks: Normally the account is used to publicize articles that appear in the publication, or else point followers to events and readings involving its contributors. The response to the job post was instantaneous and relatively deafening, as Review fans employed and unemployed alike retweeted the announcement and contributed commentary. 

ZekeFT said, “most brutal-looking job posting ever ever”—presumably in reference to the part about candidates being “prepared to work irregular hours, including weekends.” 

Along the same lines, SuziSteffen said, “Ohhhhhhhh sigh.”

Toualoua said, “I want this JOB,” which was echoed by bianunesdesousa’s exclamation, “Eu quero!!!”

kariannebgilje said, “Ryddet skrivebord og klar for nye utfordringer?” which means, “Cleaned the writing table and ready for new challenge?”

According to the Review's director of Web publishing, Mathew Howard, who mans the @nybooks account, “There have been quite a number of applicants—probably more in the first day then there otherwise would have been.” 

Mr. Howard said he was amused by how eagerly the announcement was received. 

“It certainly got a stronger response than most of the stuff that I post on Twitter,” he said.

New York Times writer-at-large Charles "Chip" McGrath, the 61-year-old former editor of the paper’s Sunday book review, is working on a profile of New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers. The piece will appear in The Times’ Arts section just as soon as Mr. McGrath finishes it, which he said this morning he hopes to do next week.

Mr. McGrath said Mr. Silvers cooperated with his efforts graciously, not only agreeing to be interviewed but uncharacteristically sharing his thoughts (albeit only "a little bit") on the question of succession at the Review.   

Mr. Silvers seriously hesitated before deciding to cooperate with the piece, Mr. McGrath said, which is consistent with the 79-year-old editor's reputation as a press-shy workaholic who wants attention to be focused on "the paper"—as he calls the Review—rather than himself.

"He's very private," Mr. McGrath said. "He agreed to do it with some reluctance. He said it caused him an unquiet night. I think he did it for the Review. He thought it would be good for the Review."

Mr. McGrath said the piece had not been prompted by anything in particular, and that he'd been asked to do it by Times culture editor Sam Sifton. 

"It's not really pegged to anything other than that it's been about 10 years since The Times did anything about Silvers," Mr. McGrath said, referring to a profile by Janny Scott that ran in the Times in the fall of 1997. 

Several pieces on Mr. Silvers and the Review have appeared in other outlets since then, including one in The Observer by Sheelah Kolhatkar from December 2005 and a lengthy one in New York by James Atlas that appeared in September 2006, shortly after the death of Barbara Epstein, who was Mr. Silver’s co-editor at the Review for 43 years.

Mr. McGrath declined to go into detail about the the piece he's writing, but indicated that he wants to say something "new" about the Review and Mr. Silvers. 

But the visit they remember most vividly when they fly home is the one they pay to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books—not just because it can take up to three hours (your average publicity call usually clocks in around 15 minutes), but because Mr. Silvers, who has been at the helm of the biweekly review of intellectual life since it was founded, in 1963, asks them to work harder than any other editor in town.

When pitching a book to Mr. Silvers, you’d better know precisely what its author is arguing and who in the academy is likely to disagree with it. When you show him your catalog, you’d better be ready to speak at length about the obscure scholarly monograph listed on the last page. And if you haven’t been reading The Review and keeping track of what its contributors have been writing about lately, you might as well just stay home.

“When it’s scheduled on a Monday, it really makes you feel better about the rest of the week, because you’ve gone through the list as thoroughly and meticulously as you’re going to,” said Mark Heineke, who has been visiting Mr. Silvers for six years as the promotions director at the University of Chicago Press. “When it’s on a Friday, it’s always kind of in the back of your mind.”

For many university press publicists—as well as those who work for the more erudite trade houses, like Norton—the Bob Silvers meeting is a rite of passage: a tradition almost as old The Review itself that they hear about from their elders, and a spectacle they sit in on when they’re young, so they know what to expect when the duty falls to them.

Back in the early 1980’s, when he was at Oxford University Press, Jeff Seroy (now the senior VP for marketing and publicity at Farrar, Straus and Giroux) would attend media calls at The Review with his boss. “For him, it was the pilgrimage to Mecca,” Mr. Seroy said.

Meetings take place in a crowded, windowless conference room, overflowing with books and galleys, that is adjacent to the office that Mr. Silvers shares with his army of assistants. Often the publicists will have sent a box of books to the office ahead of time via FedEx. (Mr. Silvers like to see the wares on offer in addition to hearing about them, and this can mean some heavy lifting.) If they have, the box is waiting on the table when they walk in.

Mr. Silvers, when he arrives, is usually accompanied by an assistant, who takes notes and fetches books and articles when they come up in conversation. The assistant remains mostly silent—though occasionally, when it’s a less-than-prominent press, Mr. Silvers lets his underlings conduct the meetings without him—as Mr. Silvers looks through the catalog the publicist has brought him.

When a book catches Mr. Silvers’s interest, he asks the publicist to suggest some possible reviewers—something that is all but unheard of at other publications.

“I remember one time,” said Christian Purdy of Oxford University Press, “I was suggesting a reviewer to him, and he said, ‘But Purdy, that person is dead.’ I was embarrassed and felt so stupid and said, ‘Jeez, no one told me!’ Every time I’ve suggested a reviewer since, I’ve checked.”

Gaffes like that are common enough: When Puja Sangar, a representative for Stanford University Press, suggested that David Brooks review a Stanford book on taxation, Mr. Silvers looked at her skeptically. “It was almost like, ‘Good God! We would never use him.’ That’s what his look implied. He said, ‘Oh, do you think he’s good?’ The Review is very discerning about who writes for them. They have an independent voice, and set the bar very high."”

Worse, perhaps, is when Mr. Silvers asks a question that a publicist cannot answer because he or she has not read the book.

“Occasionally, Bob wanted to know a bit more about a book than was explained in the brief synopsis in the catalog,” said Jon-Jon Goulian, one of Mr. Silvers’ former assistants, in an e-mail. “He would gently press them for more information, and his questions were met with either awkward mumblings or an awkward restatement of the catalog copy or simply a bold, ‘To be honest, I don’t know the answer to that,’ and Bob was always diplomatic about this, never embarrassing them, usually saying something like, ‘Yes, well, one can’t read everything; there just isn’t time,’ and then he would quickly go on to the next book.”

(Though Mr. Silvers declined to comment for this story, he did confirm that he expects a certain level of preparedness from publicists. “It helps to know what’s in the books,” he said.)

Still, despite Mr. Silvers’ forgiving nature, many publicists fear the meetings the same way they feared oral exams back in college—which is to say, they study for them.

“I tried to read as much of the front list as I could, which is hugely daunting,” said one former book publicist, who met with Mr. Silvers regularly for over five years during the 1990’s. “I grilled the editors of the books mercilessly about their content, I looked at all the other presses’ catalogs, I went through back issues of The New York Review. … If we tried to bluff our way through something, he would just look at us really suspiciously. He could always tell. Eventually you’d just have to say, ‘I don’t know.’”

If you could “remotely hold your own with him,” this publicist said, you were doing a good job, because Mr. Silvers is an unparalleled polymath who is not only fascinated by every topic under the sun but usually an expert on it.

“Especially when they were new on the job, [the publicists] were always taken aback at Bob’s interest in the Forthcoming Monographs listed in the back of the catalogue,” said Mr. Goulian. “These were highly specialized works, often former dissertations, primarily intended for scholars, and presumably of little interest to a more general readership. Also, they were often still in the manuscript stage, not due out for many months, little more than a mess of paper on an academic’s desk. ‘Uh, I don’t think you’d be interested in those, Mr. Silvers,’ [the publicist would say. And he’d respond,] ‘On the contrary! Everything is of interest. For instance I see here you have a book coming out on Walter Benjamin, and we have a piece on Benjamin in the works. When can we get it?’”

Often, if he finds a book that relates to a Review assignment in progress, Mr. Silvers takes out a sheet of letterhead, scribbles a note to the writer and has an assistant FedEx the galley with the note. For publicists, this is a great victory, and the mission is considered a success even if ultimately the book sc
ores only a footnote in the eventual piece.

There is good reason for this, considering that The Review—with its astonishing circulation of 137,450—tends to give more space to academic writing than any other popular publication. “The stakes are very high, because you know that getting a review in there will matter a lot to the author, to the editor, to everyone,” said New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, who worked as Mr. Silvers’ assistant for a year in the late 90’s. “It also is a place where the editors genuinely care about the books and understand them. My impression was that it was a high point for [the publicists], but also the most demanding performance that they would probably have to give.”

It’s a morbid question, to be sure, but one that inevitably comes up when discussing the publication—which has no heir apparent among its staff of editors and assistants. Mr. Silvers seems to like it that way; on Monday, he pointedly refused to answer questions about who might succeed him as editor when he can no longer do the job. “It’s not a question that’s posing itself,” he said.

Still, it is a time of change at The Review—even if Mr. Silvers remains at the helm for eternity.

This March, the paper will relocate its headquarters to a converted factory in the West Village after more than 40 years spent in the heart of midtown. According to Mr. Silvers, The Review’s current home on the fifth floor of 1755 Broadway—where it has been for the past ten years—is being taken over by Universal Music, which occupies a large portion of the rest of the building and holds an option on the fifth floor that they intend to exercise once The Review’s lease runs out early next year.

(“It’s very funny to see Bob in an elevator with hip-hop stars [like Lil Wayne and 50 Cent] studded with a million diamonds. I will miss that,” says Review publicity manager Jenie Hederman.)

The move will mark the second time in The Review’s history that it has had to change homes: Originally, its offices were in the Fisk Building at 250 West 57th Street, around the corner from where they are now.

The Review’s new space, on the third floor of 435 Hudson Street, is much larger than its current quarters, according to Mr. Silvers. “It’s a large, very airy space with very big windows,” he said. “We’ll be able to spread out our books and have big tables for different categories of books.”

And there is another recent, major change at The Review—this one boasts a less rosy cast. David Levine, the 80-year-old artist whose iconic caricatures have filled the pages of the paper since its very first issue, has developed macular degeneration, an eye condition that has severely impaired his ability to draw the kind of piercing, detailed portraits he is known for.

Mr. Levine, who said he has drawn something like 4,000 caricatures for The Review over the course of his life, said he was diagnosed with the condition several months ago, and has not contributed a new drawing to the paper since.

“If I look at somebody’s face, I can’t tell what it really looks like in detail,” he said. “I can see the general layout, the noses and so on, but if you come into a restaurant where I’m sitting and looking towards the door, I can’t tell until the person gets within five feet of me who it is.”

Mr. Levine said there is no cure for the condition—which, according to the National Eye Institute, is a leading cause of blindness among the elderly—but that he has been working with doctors to regain some of his abilities.

“It didn’t stop [Edgar] Degas,” Mr. Levine said, noting that the Impressionist also suffered from the condition. “He went on to change his way of seeing. He just moved into a rhythm of color and bigger generalities in the way he saw things like hands or faces. … I’m open to that. I’m searching.”

One option Mr. Levine has been exploring is switching from pen and ink to pencil, which would allow him to erase things if he doesn’t nail them right away.

“[My drawings] won’t look so different,” he said. “The details will be handled slightly differently.”

In the meantime, The Review has had to turn elsewhere for its illustrations. Although many of Mr. Levine’s old caricatures still show up—his rendering of Philip Roth graced the cover of the Dec. 6 issue, and he had five more drawings inside—Mr. Silvers said he has been publishing work by other artists, such as Pancho and John Springs, as well as using photographs more frequently than he used to.

Still, with nearly a half-decade of re-publishable work for The Review behind Mr. Levine, and Mr. Silvers running the show, the paper will surely look and feel pretty much the same, even as things, inevitably, change.

Later this month, Mr. Silvers will turn 76. His tenure at The New York Review of Books represents one of the longest editorial collaborations in the literary world: He has edited The Review alongside Barbara Epstein since its founding in the winter of 1963. The Review has experienced a recent surge in significance since the Iraq war began, and remains one of the most revered literary and journalistic enterprises in publishing today—even as it is sometimes also seen as a tad musty. Mr. Silvers—a compulsively curious man—is an old-school editor in the truest sense of the word: Every sentence means something to him; every idea, be it about war or opera, must be handled with precision.

But even more than that, Mr. Silvers—and The Review by extension—is a memory bank of American intellectual life. The magazine and its galaxy of friends and contributors is one of the last connections to a bygone era—to Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, to a time when ideas mattered and the smart people and the beautiful ones enjoyed a natural affinity.

Unlike some of his peers—say, the David Remnicks, who write their own stories and whose names are well-known, or the Katrina vanden Heuvels, who work the media circuit as advocates—Mr. Silvers remains behind the curtain. He and Ms. Epstein do almost everything themselves, from assigning and editing pieces to the outline of the cover designs, so The Review is seen as a place for bright young people to pass through. There is no way to move up, as everyone knows that Mr. Silvers (and his co-editor) don’t yield the real editing to anyone. The thought of a Review without Mr. Silvers is basically inconceivable.

“My expectation is that he will still be editing The Review when he’s 120,” Mark Danner, a contributor to The Review and a former Silvers assistant, said. “It’s hard for me to imagine Bob and The Review as separate entities.”

Said another former Review employee: “I feel like he’s gonna die in his chair.”

Imagining who could possibly step in for him is a bit of a game in literary and media circles. Mr. Silvers won’t discuss retirement. “We can’t do enough!” he said in response to a question on the subject. “I’d like to do more. I feel there are a huge amount of things we should be doing.”

Mr. Silvers has dark, gleaming eyes, a slightly waggish face, and seems younger than he actually is (this is possibly due to his devoted vegetarianism, which is said to have taken hold after he edited the animal-rights ethicist Peter Singer). On a recent Wednesday afternoon, he was wearing what is apparently a fairly typical workday outfit: a gray chalk-stripe suit, white dress shirt with starched collar, and a blue-and-white hound’s-tooth check tie—only he’d replaced the suit jacket with a navy cardigan streaked with stains, and the tie was shoved over to one side, as if he’d tried to yank it off.

Many of the subjects that The Review deals with, from art and literature to science and politics, reflect Mr. Silvers’ own intellectual voracity. He turns up at The Review’s midtown offices every day—walking, sometimes, from his apartment at 68th and Park—and often stays late into the night, fixated on shaping, clarifying and improving the dense critical essays and reported pieces that fill the pages of The Review every other week. He has four assistants who operate as his remote brains, helping to track the heaps of books that travel in and out each month. His office functions as a kind of nerve center: a vast, bright room, where he sits at a desk a few feet away from his quartet of helpers, with towers of books on every surface serving as substitute cubicle partitions. The atmosphere is intense and slightly hermetic.

He insists that he isn’t a workaholic, but that he’s motivated by “a feeling of the greatest urgency to deal with the manuscripts and the books and the things that we’re doing.”

Unless he has a particular engagement in the evening—perhaps a dinner party or a visit to Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera—he’ll just stay at his desk as long as he can. Sometimes, he’ll dart out to the aforementioned party and then return for a few more hours. (He also has a lady friend, Grace, Countess of Dudley, whom he affectionately calls “Youngie.”) He said that he only needs four or five hours of sleep, and he often does his reading—books and “dozens” of periodicals and newspapers, which he scours in search of writers who he thinks are special—late at night.

Editing was the natural thing for him to do, Mr. Silvers said. He attended the University of Chicago and started (and quit) Yale Law School, then was stationed in Paris while serving in the Army. He remained in Paris during the 1950’s and became a chum of George Plimpton, who made him an editor of The Paris Review (he is still a member of the Paris Review Foundation board and had a heavy hand in selecting that magazine’s new editor). He returned to the U.S. a few years later and worked as an editor at Harper’s.

A hint of obsessive compulsion creeps in when he discusses his work. “It is almost an uncontainable impulse, to make such suggestions in the prose. In a way, you can’t help it,” Mr. Silvers said of the editing process. “And you would feel terrible if you published something that you felt could be better, and you hadn’t tried to do something to improve it, or to suggest something to improve it. And that, I think, is what, in a way, editing is—it’s something you can’t help.” Mr. Silvers cited Elizabeth Hardwick and Joan Didion as two Review writers that he rarely needs to touch.

The Review was launched during the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63, which had put The New York Times Book Review out of commission. Jason Epstein, who was then at Random House, where he continues to edit the occasional book (and who established the paperback lines both there and at Doubleday), conspired with Ms. Epstein (his wife at the time), Ms. Hardwick and Robert Lowell (who were then married to each other) about the idea for a new literary review. They invited Mr. Silvers to serve as co-editor and published a first issue that featured Mary McCarthy, W.H. Auden, Philip Rahv and Norman Mailer, among other writers.

One of their priorities was to maintain control over their editorial content. “There was no publisher, no foundation, no person who, because they were rich, could tell us what to do,” Mr. Silvers said.

Since 1984, The Review has been owned by Rea Hederman, who is regarded as a benevolent and hands-off publisher. Paid circulation stands at the improbably large figure of 127,000 and increased 10 percent over the last five years, according to Jenie Hederman, Mr. Hederman’s daughter, who works at The Review. The journal has for many years made a profit.

It was in the late 1960’s, during the most heated time of the Vietnam War, that The Review started printing anti-war pieces by McCarthy, Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone, in addition to high-quality literary criticism, often sparking outrage and intellectual splits that persist to this day. The present conflict in Iraq has infused The Review with a similar sort of political purpose.

“There are obvious similarities,” Mr. Silvers said, contrasting the Vietnam days with the current. “The country is at war. It’s a highly controversial war. And there are people dying, and there’s an element now which I think we in the paper have felt very strongly about, which is this common use of torture.”

Mr. Silvers and The Review commissioned and published many pieces that were critical of the Bush administration’s conduct in the war and other matters early on. Mr. Silvers said that it “nags” at him that some of his writers have had “insights and perceptions about international power and the war that are very important, that should have but haven’t got the attention they deserve.” He shuffled through a folder of recent stories, pointing out Frances FitzGerald’s September 2002 interview with Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor to George Bush senior, who was opposed to the Iraq invasion; Brian Urquhart’s coverage of Hans Blix and the aborted Iraqi weapons inspections; Michael Massing’s critical stories about the press and reporting on W.M.D.; and Mr. Danner’s pieces on torture and Abu Ghraib as some examples.

However, Mr. Silvers said that he doesn’t believe that articles in The Review can have an impact in any concrete way, and that he felt the same way during the Vietnam War. When asked why he thought it was important for The Review to address such issues if that was the case, Mr. Silvers said: “I think it’s a question of historical truth about life-and-death matters.

“We started this paper in a great fit of intense hope …. And ever since then, I have been constantly trying to keep up,” Mr. Silvers said. “I feel it’s a fantastic opportunity—because of the freedom of it, because of the sense that there are marvelous, intensely interesting, important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an interesting way. That’s an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you’d be crazy not to try and make the most of it.”

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."