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The New York Times has picked Pamela Paul to serve as the new editor of the Book Review section, replacing Sam Tanenhaus at the post.

If you want to know more about the new editor, you can follow Paul on Twitter. Huffington Post senior media reporter Michael Calderone broke the news, reprinting the full staff memo. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s now Pamela’s turn to take the Book Review in new directions. Her versatility as an editor and writer has strengthened the Book Review and many other sections, including the Magazine, Education Life and Sunday Styles, where she originated the biweekly “Studied” column. Her weekly Q. and A. with authors, “By the Book,” has been a wonderful new addition to the Review, and she has assigned a galaxy of great writers including Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead and Meg Wolitzer, among others. Pamela has also written for The Atlantic, Time, Vogue and The Economist, and she is the author of three books.

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I love the New York Times Book Review conversations with authors—Sam Tanenhaus meets a writer meets a camera.

The current subject is John Irving, now nearing the completion of his twelfth book, Last Night in Twisted River.

What I find extraordinary about this conversation is what Irving reveals about his process. He writes, he says, his novel's last sentence first, and that sentence never changes, not even the slightest grammatical bit. Seven months to a year after finding the book's last sentence, Irving writes the novel's first words, and over a long stretch, then—years—the story develops. The beginning of an Irving novel will go through many iterations. The ending will not.

When I think back on the poems, short stories, memoirs, fables, and novels I've cranked my mind around—the things that I have tried, through the years, to write—I cannot think of a single instance in which I had glimpsed the last sentence before arriving right on the doorstep of that very last sentence. Vastly limited in my ability to look ahead in that way, I begin at the beginning, and I feel my way (often blindly) through. Never do I write so much as a pairing of words that goes unchallenged or unchanged (my books endure upwards of two or three dozen edits, and no sentence is spared). Never do I know, as intensely as Irving knows, enough to declare, This is done, solid, fixed in time and typeset.

(If I were to tell you how many iterations each of my blog posts go through, how they endure changes sometimes days after posting, you would ask yourself if my company is worth keeping.)

It works for Irving—this knowing where he's going. It no doubt works for others. But I never know, and I suppose I need this long bath of uncertainty to keep me rising at 4 AM, to keep me sitting here at my glass desk, to keep me hoping. I want to know, in my books and poems (in these blog posts, even), what is going to happen next, and in tiny fractions every day, my brain cedes bits and pieces.

There are few things more gratifying than successful literary novelists. I myself can't get enough of their stories, their confessions.

It is a lovely thing, therefore, to watch Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times—to hear what this multi-platinum author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex has to say about the work that he has done over the years and the city, Detroit, that has fueled his imagination.

I was intrigued, especially, by the way Eugenides has determinedly evolved his own work—moving, as he says, from a "preoccupation with language" (The Virgin Suicides) toward a focus on plotting (Middlesex) toward what he describes as an emphasis on deeper characterization and psychological portraiture—the "deepening realism" that marks his current work. I loved his overt commitment not just to changing form, but to raising the stakes.

At the moment I am deeply engaged in the early research and writing of a novel for adults. It's not as if I have not tried to write novels for adults in the past; I have written many that have failed. I wasn't ready. I needed to take the cross-wise steps that years spent writing memoir, poetry, history, fable, criticism, and young adult novels ultimately yielded. To learn to trust language, in memoir. To learn to break it apart, in poetry. To pursue the almost impossible detail through historical research. To tell a story through YA novels. To bend a story, through fable. To sustain a certain vulnerability through the blog. Having never taken a writing course (as an adult, I attended three summer workshops), I have had to teach myself to write, and the road that I've traveled has often stumped out, looped back, and confused.

But it has also brought me here. It has given me both foundation and framework. Tools with which to work against an idea I can't quite yet contain.