George Plimpton made a lucrative career playing a sports dilettante, but his true profession was editor of one of the country's most important literary publications, the Paris Review.

He had been editing it since its birth in 1953, and when he died in 2003, the review was cast adrift.

Published by Drue Heinz, widow of H.J. Heinz II and Pittsburgh literary benefactor, the quarterly elevated its 31-year-old managing editor, Brigid Hughes, to Plimpton's post, but she barely lasted a year.

Philip Gourevitch, 43, a New Yorker writer and nonfiction book author, took over the review this year with a promise to make changes but hold the quarterly magazine to its original purpose -- a showcase for fine literary writers old and new.

Gourevitch called Heinz "one of the great undersung contributors to literature. She works hard to make it visible."

From E.M. Forster to Jonathan Franzen, the Paris Review has published an international cast of major authors. In Gourevitch's first edition will be Salman Rushdie as well as two emerging novelists, Damon Galgut of South Africa and Etgar Keret of Israel.

One of the first changes was to move the review's headquarters from Plimpton's apartment building to a Tribeca office, but "Mrs. Plimpton contributed some furniture," Gourevitch, 43, admitted.

"With a legacy this great, I'm determined to live up to it," he said. He was hired, he said, to "revitalize and reinvigorate the magazine."

Gourevitch is the author of "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda" (1998) and "A Cold Case" (2001). His reporting has covered stories in Africa, Asia and Europe.

"Since it was started, the magazine has managed to always stay fresh," he said, "and that's the challenge -- to remain timeless and timely. One way to do this is to keep our eye on excellence, really look for the broadest range of writing that both excites and delights. I like to say that we publish the newest work of the best and the best work of the new."

Gourevitch said that since his appointment, subscriptions and submissions have been rising. "There's clearly a lot of energy here in the last few months. The manuscripts have been rolling in, and there are more subscribers.

The Paris Review has a modest subscription base approaching 25,000, but Gourevitch believes it's being read by 100,000.

"Literature is getting harder and harder to find in magazines," he said, referring to the Atlantic Monthly's recent decision to drop its monthly fiction pieces. "Fiction is not part of mainstream outlets anymore, and in this globalized world, the reality also is that less and less fiction is being translated into other languages."

Gourevitch hopes to make the Paris Review a publication "for people with a longer attention span. It's the 'anti-blog,' publishing writing in the long form, stuff that's worth your time."

The centerpiece of the review has been its regular interviews with authors. Called "Writers at Work," the feature started with Forster, who had never been interviewed before, and included Faulkner, Nabokov, Hemingway, Ellison, Foote and DeLillo. Writers at Work pieces are not typical interviews, but are edited by the subjects themselves ("honed," says Gourevitch) into a polished form.

"We don't do 'gotcha journalism,'" he said. "We aren't going to confront writers with questions about their private lives. The interviews are about the craft and art of writing.

"The result are masterful essays. Together, they make a kind of apprenticeship for young writers, an exciting and liberating way to understand the process, to learn the way the masters do it."

Gourevitch also emphasized that the review is not interested in literary criticism, but "the literature itself."

Rushdie, whose new novel, "Shalimar the Clown," will be published next month, is the interview subject in the next edition. Gourevitch calls it a "very sustained conversation" by the India-born novelist who lived for years under a fatwa, or religious decree, by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, calling for Rushdie's death.

Rushdie will be in town at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Byham Theater for a reading and discussion. It's a Pittsburgh Cultural Trust program. For details: www.pgharts.org or 412-456-6666.

The new edition also contains images of Elizabeth Bishop's original drafts of unfinished poems and a feature on Laio Yiwu, a Chinese dissident called the "Studs Terkel of China" for his interviews with the poor.