Remnick's Reporting

Tina Brown at the helm of the New Yorker seemed unthinkable to many; yet, that's exactly what came to pass. Fortunately, the magazine put that sorry episode behind it and with David Remnick -- former Moscow reporter for the Washington Post -- it seems to have the editor it deserves for the 21st century. He now has a new book out, Reporting, a collection of his magazine profiles, which is praised by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, deputy editor of The Threepenny Review:

"Remnick's subjects exist on the page as themselves and as emblems, as historical actors and folkloric spirits, and this simultaneity is what creates a sort of fabulist urgency. This is not an easy tension for a storyteller to sustain, but Remnick neither depletes his characters' fullness for the sake of abstraction nor tamps down on resonance in pursuit of the particular. "