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The New York Review of Books
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The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City. It takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. Esquire has called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."
By 2007, the publication had a circulation of approximately 140,000.
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The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City. It takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. Esquire has called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."
By 2007, the publication had a circulation of approximately 140,000. Robert B. Silvers has edited the paper since its founding in 1963, together with Barbara Epstein, until her death in 2006. The Review has been noted for its unique style and point of view for the past 45 years.
History
The New York Review was founded by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, together with publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth and writer Elizabeth Hardwick, and with the backing of Barbara's husband Jason Epstein, a vice president at Random House and editor of Viking Books. It was founded during the New York printing strike of 1963. The first idea was to make Norman Podhoretz editor, but he chose to stay at Commentary magazine. The group then turned to Silvers, who had been an editor at The Paris Review and Harper's. The first issue was published on February 1, 1963. Silvers says of the editors' philosophy, "We felt you had to have a political analysis of the nature of power in America - who had it, who was affected". The editors also "had one thing in common, it was this feeling of intense admiration for wonderful writers".
The first issues included articles by such writers as Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Truman Capote, Paul Goodman, Lillian Hellman, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahv, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson. The Review pointedly published interviews with political dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. It also featured caricatures by David Levine, who continued to contribute illustrations to the paper until 2007. The public responded by buying up practically all the copies printed and writing thousands of letters to request that the Review continue publication. In 1983, Silvers, Epstein and their partners sold the Review to publisher Rea S. Hederman, who continues to own the paper.
For over 40 years, Silvers and Epstein edited the Review together. In 2006, Epstein died of cancer at the age of 77. In awarding its Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community in 2006, the National Book Foundation stated, "With The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein raised book reviewing to an art and made the discussion of books a lively, provocative and intellectual activity. From Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson to Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, The New York Review of Books has consistently employed the liveliest minds in America to think about, write about, and debate books and the issues they raise."
Since Epstein's death, Silvers has been the sole editor. Asked in December 2007 about who might succeed him as editor, the 78-year-old Silvers demurred, "It's not a question that's posing itself". By 2007, illustrator David Levine's failing eyesight forced the Review to turn to other artists and to increase its use of photographs. Levine had provided a distinctive visual image to the Review since 1963. In 2008, the paper moved its headquarters from Midtown Manhattan to 435 Hudson Street, located in the West Village.
In addition to reviews, interviews and articles, the Review features extensive advertising from publishers promoting newly published books. The Washington Post described the "lively literary disputes" conducted in its letters to the editor colums as "the closest thing the intellectual world has to bare-knuckle boxing". It also includes a popular "personals" section and, in 2008, it began hosting podcasts.
The 45th anniversary edition of the Review (November 20, 2008) begins with a posthumous piece by Edmund Wilson, who wrote for the paper's first issue in 1963. It also features two key topics of the paper's historical focus: First, an analysis by Yale University professor David Bromwich of the vice presidency of Dick Cheney; and second, British author Zadie Smith's essay that "dismantles the status quo in the form of a review of two new novels -Netherland and Remainder - that she holds up as representing where the novel's been and where it's going". On November 10, 2008, the Review celebrated its 45th anniversary with a panel discussion at the New York Public Library, moderated by Silvers, discussing "What Happens Now" in America after the 2008 presidential election. Panelists included Review contributors such as Didion, novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney, political commentator Michael Tomasky, historian Garry Wills, and Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco.
Critical reaction
The Washington Post calls the Review "a journal of ideas that has helped define intellectual discourse in the English-speaking world for the past four decades.... By publishing long, thoughtful articles on politics, books and culture, [the editors] defied trends toward glibness, superficiality and the cult of celebrity". In a 2006 New York magazine feature, James Atlas stated: "It's an eclectic but impressive mix [of articles] that has made The New York Review of Books the premier journal of the American intellectual elite". In celebrating the 35th birthday of the Review, The New York Times commented, "The N.Y.R. gives off rogue intimations of being fun to put out. It hasn't lost its sneaky nip of mischief".
In 2008, Britain's The Guardian deemed the Review "scholarly without being pedantic, scrupulous without being dry". The same newspaper wrote in 2004, "The... issues of the Review to date provide a history of the cultural life of the east coast since 1963. It manages to be scrupulous without pedantry, and serious with a fierce democratic edge.... It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays... and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour - even the letters to the editor are footnoted - with great clarity of language." According to the website of the consulate general of the United States in China, the Review is a "kind of magazine... in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time would discuss current books and issues in depth... a literary and critical journal based on the assumption that the discussion of important books was itself an indispensable literary activity."
Known throughout its history as a left-liberal journal—what Tom Wolfe called "the chief theoretical organ of radical chic"—the Review has published pieces by such notable writers and thinkers as Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, Noam Chomsky, Frederick Crews, Ronald Dworkin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Jay Gould, Murray Kempton, Richard Lewontin, Alison Lurie, Daniel Mendelsohn, V. S. Naipaul, John Searle, I. F. Stone, Desmond Tutu, John Updike. Steven Weinberg and Garry Wills. The Review has, perhaps, had its most effective voice in wartime. According to a 2004 feature in The Nation,
- "One suspects they yearn for the day when they can return to their normal publishing routine –that gentlemanly pastiche of philosophy, art, classical music, photography, German and Russian history, East European politics, literary fiction--unencumbered by political duties of a confrontational or oppositional nature. That day has not yet arrived. If and when it does, let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books... was there when we needed it most."
As editor Bob Silvers noted in 2004, "The pieces we have published by such writers as Brian Urquhart, Thomas Powers, Mark Danner and Ronald Dworkin have been reactions to a genuine crisis concerning American destructiveness, American relations with its allies, American protections of its traditions of liberties.... The aura of patriotic defiance cultivated by the Administration, in a fearful atmosphere, had the effect of muffling dissent."
Sometimes accused of insularity, the Review has been called "The New York Review of Each Other's Books". Philip Nobile voiced a mordant criticism along these lines in his book Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books. The Guardian called these accusations "sour grapes".
Other publications
The Review also publishes an Italian edition, la Rivista dei Libri. Under the New York Review Books imprint, with 'Classics' and 'Contemporary' series, it also reissues many books that have gone out of print in the United States, translations of classics, and articles or collections of articles from regular contributors.
See also
External links
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