New York Magazine’s own Michael Idov has been hired as the new editor-in-chief of GQ in Russia. Idov, who is of Russian descent, has been a contributing editor at New York for five and a half years, published the novel Ground Up in 2oo9, and was previously editor of Russia! magazine, a quarterly American publication. His recent feature for the American edition of GQ, “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” about a totalitarian movie director in the Ukraine, was cited as the second best of 2011 by longform.org; his archive of excellent features for New York can be found here. Reached for comment, Idov said: “One of my goals is to do stories that would be reprinted in the West as widely as Western stories are now reprinted in Russia; in this, I am helped invaluably by the fact that things in Moscow are going to get very interesting in the near future. One new thing I’m very excited to try is a proper feature well — right now, the magazine is columnist-driven, in the European fashion. I’ll probably rip off at least a tiny bit from everyone in the U.S. I’ve learned from over the years. And they’ll have no idea, because it will be in Russian.”
