The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of important books is an indispensable literary activity. Esquire called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language". In 1970, writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic".
The Review publishes long-form reviews and essays, often by well-known writers, original poetry, and has letters and personals advertising sections that had attracted critical comment. In 1979 the magazine founded the London Review of Books, which soon became independent. In 1990 it founded an Italian edition, la Rivista dei Libri, published until 2010. The Review has a book publishing division, established in 1999, called New York Review Books, which publishes reprints of classics, as well as collections and children's books. Since 2010, the journal has hosted a blog written by its contributors. The Review celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. A Martin Scorsese film called The 50 Year Argument documents the history and influence of the paper over its first half century.
Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein edited the paper together from its founding in 1963 until Epstein's death in 2006. From then until his death in 2017, Silvers was the sole editor. Ian Buruma became editor in September 2017 and left the post in September 2018. Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Emily Greenhouse became co-editors in February 2019; in February 2021 Greenhouse was made editor.
Contents
History and description
Early years
The New York Review was founded by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, together with publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth and writer Elizabeth Hardwick. They were backed and encouraged by Epstein's husband, Jason Epstein, a vice president at Random House and editor of Vintage Books, and Hardwick's husband, poet Robert Lowell. In 1959 Hardwick had published an essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing", in Harper's, where Silvers was then an editor, in a special issue that he edited called "Writing in America". Her essay was an indictment of American book reviews of the time, "light, little article[s]" that she decried as "lobotomized", passionless praise and denounced as "blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally." The group was inspired to found a new magazine to publish thoughtful, probing, lively reviews featuring what Hardwick called "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting".
During the 1962–1963 New York City newspaper strike, when The New York Times and several other newspapers suspended publication, Hardwick, Lowell and the Epsteins seized the chance to establish the sort of vigorous book review that Hardwick had imagined. Jason Epstein knew that book publishers would advertise their books in the new publication, since they had no other outlet for promoting new books. The group turned to the Epsteins' friend Silvers, who had been an editor at The Paris Review and was still at Harper's, to edit the publication, and Silvers asked Barbara Epstein to co-edit with him. She was known as the editor at Doubleday of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, among other books, and then worked at Dutton, McGraw-Hill and Partisan Review. Silvers and Epstein sent books to "the writers we knew and admired most. ... We asked for three thousand words in three weeks in order to show what a book review should be, and practically everyone came through. No one mentioned money." The first issue of the Review was published on February 1, 1963, and sold out its printing of 100,000 copies. It prompted nearly 1,000 letters to the editors asking for the Review to continue. The New Yorker called it "surely the best first issue of any magazine ever."
Salon later commented that the list of contributors in the first issue "represented a 'shock and awe' demonstration of the intellectual firepower available for deployment in mid-century America, and, almost equally impressive, of the art of editorial networking and jawboning. This was the party everyone who was anyone wanted to attend, the Black and White Ball of the critical elite." The Review "announced the arrival of a particular sensibility ... the engaged, literary, post-war progressive intellectual, who was concerned with civil rights and feminism as well as fiction and poetry and theater. The first issue projected "a confidence in the unquestioned rightness of the liberal consensus, in the centrality of literature and its power to convey meaning, in the solubility of our problems through the application of intelligence and good will, and in the coherence and clear hierarchy of the intellectual world". After the success of the first issue, the editors assembled a second issue to demonstrate that "the Review was not a one-shot affair". The founders then collected investments from a circle of friends and acquaintances, and Ellsworth joined as publisher. The Review began regular biweekly publication in November 1963.
Since 1979
During the year-long lockout at The Times in London in 1979, the Review founded a daughter publication, the London Review of Books. For the first six months this journal appeared as an insert in the New York Review of Books, but it became an independent publication in 1980. In 1990 the Review founded an Italian edition, la Rivista dei Libri. It was published for two decades until May 2010.
For over 40 years, Silvers and Epstein edited the Review together. In 1984, Silvers, Epstein and their partners sold the Review to publisher Rea S. Hederman, who still owns the paper, but the two continued as its editors. In 2006, Epstein died of cancer at the age of 77. In awarding to Epstein and Silvers its 2006 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, 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."
After Epstein's death, Silvers was the sole editor until his own death in 2017. Asked about who might succeed him as editor, Silvers told The New York Times, "I can think of several people who would be marvelous editors. Some of them work here, some used to work here, and some are just people we know. I think they would put out a terrific paper, but it would be different." In 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 the United States after the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president. Panelists included Review contributors such as Joan Didion, Garry Wills, novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney, political commentator Michael Tomasky, and Columbia University professor and contributor Andrew Delbanco. The 45th anniversary edition of the Review (November 20, 2008) began with a posthumous piece by Edmund Wilson, who wrote for the paper's first issue in 1963.
In 2008, the paper moved its headquarters from Midtown Manhattan to 435 Hudson Street located in the West Village. In 2010, it launched a blog section of its website that The New York Times called "lively and opinionated", and it hosts podcasts. Asked in 2013 how social media might affect the subject matter of the Review, Silvers commented: "I might imagine [a] witty, aphoristic, almost Oscar Wildean [anthology of] remarks, drawn from the millions and millions of tweets. Or from comments that follow on blogs. ... Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. ... And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words ... growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence."
Description
The Review has been described as 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." Each issue includes a broad range of subject matter, including "articles on art, science, politics and literature." Early on, the editors decided that the Review would "be interested in everything ... no subject would be excluded. Someone is writing a piece about Nascar racing for us; another is working on Veronese." The Review has focused, however, on political topics; as Silvers commented 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 [Bush] Administration, in a fearful atmosphere, had the effect of muffling dissent." Silvers told The New York Times: "The great political issues of power and its abuses have always been natural questions for us."
The Nation gave its view of the political focus of the New York Review of Books in 2004:
The Review took a vocal role in contesting the Vietnam War. ... Around 1970, a sturdy liberalism began to supplant left-wing radicalism at the paper. As Philip Nobile observed in ... 1974 ... the Review returned to its roots and became "a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion." ... The publication has always been erudite and authoritative – and because of its analytical rigor and seriousness, frequently essential – but it hasn't always been lively, pungent and readable. ... But the election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the Review's temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. ... Prominent [writers for] the Review ... charged into battle not only against the White House but against the lethargic press corps and the "liberal hawk" intellectuals. ... In stark contrast to The New Yorker ... or The New York Times Magazine ..., the Review opposed the Iraq War in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified.
The Review also devotes space in most issues to poetry, and has featured the work of such poets as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, and Czesław Miłosz. For writers, the "depth [of the articles], and the quality of the people writing for it, has made a Review byline a résumé definer. If one wishes to be thought of as a certain type of writer – of heft, style and a certain gravitas – a Review byline is pretty much the gold standard." In editing a piece, Silvers said that he asked himself "if [the point in any sentence could] be clearer, while also respecting the writer's voice and tone. You have to listen carefully to the tone of the writer's prose and try to adapt to it, but only up to a point. [No change was made without the writers' permission.] ... Writers deserve the final word about their prose."
Reception
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". The Chicago Tribune praised the paper as "one of the few venues in American life that takes ideas seriously. And it pays readers the ultimate compliment of assuming that we do too." Esquire termed it "the most respected intellectual journal in the English language" and "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language". Similarly, 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". The Atlantic commented in 2011 that the Review is written with "a freshness of perspective", and "much of it shapes our most sophisticated public discourse". In celebrating the 35th birthday of the Review in 1998, 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 ... 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. In New York magazine, in February 2011, Oliver Sacks stated that the Review is "one of the great institutions of intellectual life here or anywhere". In 2012, The New York Times described the Review as "elegant, well mannered, immensely learned, a little formal at times, obsessive about clarity and factual correctness and passionately interested in human rights and the way governments violate them".
Throughout its history, the Review has been known generally as a left-liberal journal, what Tom Wolfe called "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic". A 1997 New York Times article, however, accused the paper of having become "establishmentarian". The paper has, perhaps, had its most effective voice in wartime. According to a 2004 feature in The Nation,
Book-publishing arm
The book-publishing arm of the Review is New York Review Books. Established in 1999, it has several imprints: New York Review Books, NYRB Classics, The New York Review Children's Collection, New York Review Comics, NYRB Poets, NYRB Lit and the Calligrams. NYRB Collections publishes collections of articles from frequent Review contributors. The Classics imprint reissues books that have gone out of print in the US, as well as translations of classic books. It has been called "a marvellous literary imprint ... that has put hundreds of wonderful books back on our shelves."
The Robert B. Silvers Foundation
The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established in 2017 by a bequest of the late Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books. Its annual activities include the Silvers Grants for Work in Progress, given in support of long-form non-fiction projects within the fields cultivated by Silvers as editor of the Review, and the Silvers-Dudley Prizes, awarded for notable achievements in journalism, criticism, and cultural commentary.
Archives
The New York Public Library purchased the NYRB archives in 2015.