08-05-2025
Karen Durbin obituary: editor of New York's Village Voice
In New York literary circles Karen Durbin was famous for her baroque monologues — great, breathless treatises that could leave her audience (or staff) stunned. When she was appointed editor of the counterculture magazine Village Voice in 1994, her predecessor told her: 'It's crucial to the job to listen'.
An influential feminist commentator, it was fortunate she usually had something to say. 'Words like 'paradigmatic' and references to de Tocqueville are apt to appear in her monologues without the slightest warning,' wrote William Glaberson in a 1994 New York Times profile. 'And evidence of the active mind of a lifelong reader often pops out between puffs of the slim cigarettes she knows she smokes too often.'
Invariably described as a whirlwind, a force and a
