The late Ted Solotaroff--one of the most important literary editors of the '60s and '70s--visited us in 2003. He had recently published his very frank memoir, First Loves. He had been an editor of Commentary and the editor of Bookweek before he founded the influential literary journal New American Review. He is the author of The Red-Hot Vacuum, A Few Good Voices in My Head, and First Loves: A Memoir. He taught at the University of Chicago, Yale, Columbia, the City College of New York, and the University of California at Berkeley. He lived in East Quogue, Long Island, and in Paris. It was in the pages of the New American Review where I found Max Apple's amazing short fiction for the first time. Even then, as I handled the paperback-sized magazine for the first time, I had a sense of Solotaroff's editorial presence. It was strong and clear somehow.
[] Solotaroff at the Writers House: LINK
[] audio recording of his talk: LINK
[] New York Times obit: LINK
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
