The New York Review of Books

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The New York Review of Books
Editor	Robert B. Silvers
Categories	literature, culture, current affairs
Frequency	fortnightly
Circulation	125,000
Publisher	Rea S. Hederman
First Issue	1963
Country	United States
Language	American English
Website	www.nybooks.com
ISSN	0028-7504

The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. As of 2003, the publication had a circulation of over 125,000.

The New York Review was founded by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, together with A. Whitney Ellsworth, the publisher, 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 publishing strike of 1963. Silvers had been an editor at Vanity Fair and Harper's. [1] The Review's first issues included articles by such writers as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, Robert Penn Warren, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Truman Capote, William Styron, and Mary McCarthy. The public responded by buying up practically all the copies printed and writing thousands of letters to request that the Review continue publication.

The Review has continued publishing reviews by such notable authors and thinkers as Noam Chomsky, Richard Lewontin, John Searle, Steven Weinberg, and Paul Krugman.

The Review publishes many books that have gone out of print in the United States as well as articles or collections of articles from regular contributors under the imprint NYRB.

The Review has sometimes been nicknamed "The New York Review of Each Others' Books" (e.g. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons : The New York Intellectuals and Their World, Oxford University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-19-505177-7; p. 329).

Philip Nobile first voiced a mordant critique along these lines in his book Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and The New York Review of Books. [2]