New York Magazine's Vulture blog is reporting that the magazine's television critic, John Leonard, has died.

In addition to writing weekly for that magazine (last week he wrote about returning dramas), Mr. Leonard, who was 69-years-old, wrote a monthly books column for Harper's. He also served as a contributing editor for The Nation, contributed to The New York Review of Books and wrote regularly for The New York Times Book Review, where he had previously been an editor.

In the November issue of Vanity Fair, David Margolick profiles the artist David Levine, whose pen and pencil work has been a cornerstone of The New York Review of Books for decades. Mr. Levine, who's 82 years old, has begun to lose his sight from macular degeneration and, as Mr. Margolick reports, his role at the Review has been greatly diminished.

Writes Mr. Margolick:

Levine believes the Review has fired him. In fact, for the rest of the year he remains under contract with the publication, which pays him around $4,800 a month (down from the more than $12,000 he once earned), essentially for the use of his old drawings.  read more »

The New York Review of Books is officially moving out of 1755 Broadway, joining in the stream of media firms to Hudson Square. The 45-year-old biweekly has signed a lease for 15,049 square feet at Trinity Real Estate’s 435 Hudson Street, at the northern reaches of the district.

The Review has been bumped out of its current space as fellow tenant Universal Music had expansion options built into its contract.

Our colleague Leon Neyfakh reported the pending move in December.  read more »

Last week, The New York Review of Books, the biweekly chronicle of American intellectual life that will turn 45 next year, lost one of its founding editors when Elizabeth Hardwick passed away at the age of 91. It was a deeply sad moment for The Review, which had lost another beloved editor, Barbara Epstein, just a year and a half ago.  read more »

Elizabeth Hardwick, the author and critic who fulfilled her dream of becoming a "New York intellectual," died in her sleep Sunday night at Roosevelt Hospital, according to Catherine Tice, associate publisher of the New York Review of Books, which Hardwick helped found in 1963. She had been hospitalized with a minor infection. She was 91 years old.

Associated Press reports:  read more »

As the Observer's Leon Neyfakh wrote this summer, the new (and old) translations of War and Peace are causing a raucous among the Russian literary elite. But the New York Review of Books' Orlando Figes writes in his review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new version of Tolstoy's classic that hating on translators is nothing new.

No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett (1862– 1946), who translated into graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy, six of Herzen, seventeen of Chekhov, and books by Goncharov and Ostrovsky.

...  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/russians-still-brooding-over-translations#comments O2 Leo Tolstoy New York Review of Books War and Peace Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:15:53 -0400 Gillian Reagan 59800 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2007/berman-and-buruma-face-new-york-review

The November 8th issue of The New York Review of Books is online, and among other things, it features a sharply worded exchange between Paul Berman and Ian Buruma. The back-and-forth is only the latest installment in an ongiong feud between the two thinkers, which The Observer reported on earlier this month.

Mr. Berman, a self-described liberal who believes the intellectual left has abandoned its core principles, kicked off this round by submitting a letter to NYRB editor Bob Silvers in response to a review Mr. Buruma wrote in September of Norman Podhoretz's World War IV.  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2007/berman-and-buruma-face-new-york-review#comments Media Ian Buruma New York Review of Books Paul Berman Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:58:39 -0400 Leon Neyfakh 59139 at http://www.observer.com