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Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS set the table for the city's left intellectuals for the past 40 years.
But now that Epstein's gone, home is a lot lonelier.
IT'S LATE ON A Friday afternoon in summer, and the city has the deserted feel that it gets just before a weekend. The streets are empty; taxis have their FOR HIRE lights on at the witching hour, the time when they'd normally be headed for the garage. But on the fifth floor of 1755 Broadway, a nondescript office building on the corner of West 56th Street, work-serious work-is in progress. The "Fall Books" issue of The New York Review of Books is being put to bed. "I'll be here all weekend," says Robert Silvers cheerfully.
On my way up in the elevator, I had wondered if Silvers would be wearing a tie: I've never seen him without one. The tie is there but askew, the top button of his white shirt undone. Instead of his usual dark suit, he's got on a red cardigan. For anyone else, this would be like showing up at the office on casual Friday in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans.
It's been a difficult time. In June, Barbara Epstein, Silvers's co-editor at the Review for 4.3 years, died of lung cancer at the age of 77. He has been commuting from Lausanne, Switzerland, where his longtime companion, Grace, Countess of Dudley, is recovering from a serious car accident.
Between us on a table in the windowless conference room is a recent issue: volume LIII, number 13. The cover lists a sampling of its contents: the venerable Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman on three books about American foreign policy; Russell Baker on Roger Angell's memoir, Let Me Finish; and a dispatch from Bolivia by the Latin American journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. It's an eclectic but impressive mix-one that has made The New York Review of Books the premier journal of the American intellectual elite virtually since its inception during the New York newspaper strike of 1963.
Also in this issue are eleven brief tributes to Epstein by such old friends as Larry McMurtry and Gore Vidal. I myself knew her only from literary cocktail parties, but...