About

New York Review Books publishes NYRB Classics, NYRB Kids, New York Review Comics, and NYRB Poets. Download our latest catalogs here.

New York Review Books

The New York Times has called The New York Review of Books “the country’s most successful intellectual journal.” According to the Times, “The secret of its success is this: its editors’ ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas.” New York Review Books brings together some of the finest writing in science, philosophy, history, politics, the arts, and literature from the Review’s contributors along with new fiction and nonfiction from literary and artistic mavericks such as Amit Chaudhuri, Jonathan Buckley, and Celia Paul. Included are volumes by such distinguished writers as Freeman Dyson, Martin Filler, Fritz Stern, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joan Didion, Darryl Pinckney, Renata Adler, and Tim Parks, as well as original works from luminaries such as Isabella Tree, Brian Dillon, and Benedetta Craveri.

NYRB Classics

The NYRB Classics series is dedicated to publishing an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction from different eras and times and of various sorts. The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of. NYRB Classics are, to a large degree, discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.

Literature in translation constitutes a major part of the NYRB Classics series, simply because so much great literature has been left untranslated into English, or translated poorly, or deserves to be translated again, much as any outstanding book asks to be read again.

The series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Aeschylus, Dante, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Chekhov, as well fresh translations of Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Alberto Moravia, Curzio Malaparte, and Jean Giono; fiction by modern and contemporary masters such as Vasily Grossman, Magda Szabó, Walter Kempowski, Tove Jansson, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, William Gaddis, Uwe Johnson, Leonora Carrington, and John Williams; tales of crime and punishment by Kenneth Fearing, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Jean-Patrick Manchette; masterpieces of narrative history and literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, cookbooks, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Iris Origo, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, Lyall Watson's Heaven's Breath, and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Published in handsome uniform trade paperback editions, almost all NYRB Classics feature an introduction by an outstanding writer, scholar, or critic of our day. Taken as a whole, NYRB Classics may be considered a series of books of unrivaled variety and quality for discerning and adventurous readers.

Download Reading Group Guides for NYRB Classics.

What the press has said about NYRB Classics…

“The New York Review Books Classics series is possibly the richest source in the entire world of great books you never heard of.”— Michael Cunningham, The New York Times Book Review

“The series…. specializes in one-offs rather than oeuvres, in pleasures rather than obligations. The classics of NYRB Classics are not classics in the sense that they are canonical; they are classics in the sense that they have no reason for being revived other than that they are somehow still alive, and so constitute a canon all their own.”— Tom Junod, Esquire

“…I would like to have the feeling that I am discovering lost treasures, even though these treasures have been necessarily dug up by someone else…. And that, more than anything is what the NYRB series offers…”— Wendy Lesser, The Guardian

“NYRB Classics— one of the very few happy innovations in contemporary publishing. —Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic

“…amazingly fine in its choice of titles and in the design of the books.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Be grateful for second chances and head to the shore with any one of these slim paperbacks.”—Town and Country

“Congratulations to NYRB Classics … they have been putting out an extraordinarily good list lately, and I have been torn as to which one to choose.” —Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

“We all owe the people at NYRB Classics a great debt of thanks.” —John Garvey, Commonweal

“Sometimes the second time’s the charm in publishing… New York Review Books [is] finding unlikely success in the overcrowded book industry by turning out reprints of decades-old titles. Some are even getting noticed by Hollywood.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The real contribution that New York Review Books makes [is] it helps you to see that the world is more different than you thought. By teaching you what the American novel has been, they teach you what it can be and in turn what the American people have been and can be… When you are in the hands of a reprint series as good as this one, what’s old is made new again.” —D.T. Max, Los Angeles Times

“… picks up on…readerly passion with an eclectic lineup of backlist titles, all prefaced by authors who (for the moment) are better known than the writers they’re introducing… Looking for reading suggestions? Here’s a good place to start.” —Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

“I’ve looked through the NYRB Classics catalogue with close attention and increasing wonder. Whoever picks the titles for this spectacularly eclectic series of stylish-looking reprints of insufficiently remembered books of the past (many but by no means all of which are novels) deserves some sort of prize for good taste… Has there ever been so quirkily adventurous a paperback reissue line? Not in my memory.” —Terry Teachout, commentarymagazine.com

“Overall the collection is faultless. Once you have discovered the series it’s as if you’ve just gained an incredibly well-read friend who consistently lends you obscure yet highly enjoyable books…. Collecting them can become compulsive.” —Vogue

“For the past four decades, The New York Review of Books has tirelessly championed liberal causes. It comes, therefore, as a welcome surprise that the magazine’s new book-publishing imprint—New York Review Books Classics—is performing a nonpartisan service, excellently.” —The National Review

“The New York Review of Books Classics Series is one of the most exciting recent developments in publishing…. Simply reading through the list from beginning to end would provide a rare education.” —The Boston Phoenix

“New York Review Books… has found a thriving niche by reissuing forgotten classics.”—Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times

NYRB Kids

New York Review Books started a children’s book publishing program in 2003 in an attempt to reward readers who have long wished for the return of their favorite titles and to introduce those books to a new generation of readers. NYRB Kids publishes picture books for preschoolers through to chapter books and novels for older children. Praised for their elegant design and sturdy bindings, these books set a new standard for the definition of a “classic.” Among the titles you will find Wee Gillis, a Caldecott Honor Book by the creators of The Story of Ferdinand; Esther Averill’s time-honored Jenny and the Cat Club series; several titles by the award-winning team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, including their Book of Norse Myths and Book of Animals; Otfried Preussler’s chapter books The Little Witch and The Little Water-Sprite; Meet Monster by Ellen Blance and Ann Cook with illustrations by the great Quentin Blake; and Maira Kalman's books about Max the Dog.

Not to be missed are Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories, a perfect introduction to the bard for young readers; three titles from the great Roger Duvoisin, Donkey-donkey, The Frog in the Well, and The House of Four Seasons; Madhur Jaffrey’s Seasons of Splendour: Tales, Myths and Legends of India with illustrations by Michael Foreman; and The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales.

In 2015 we added line of paperback editions designed to be especially attractive to young readers, with both brand-new volumes and titles from our hardcover list. Portable and affordable, these are books with enough depth, humor, and pure artistry to rival any so-called “adult” literature. In the series you’ll discover great works of many sorts: tales of daring and adventure like Jan Terlouw’s Winter in Wartime and Sheila Burnford’s Bel Ria: Dog of War; yarns of magic and whimsy like Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music; and stories of bravery and resistance like Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War and Anita Desai’s The Village By the Sea.

Praise for The New York Review Children’s Collection and NYRB Kids…

New York Review Comics

NYRC publishes comics of all sorts, from intimate memoirs to absurdist gags, lyrical graphic novels to dizzying experiments, united in their affirmation of the strange and wonderful things that only comics can do. Some are in paperback, some in hardcover, and trim sizes vary. The series launched in 2016 with Mark Beyer’s Agony, a darkly humorous depiction of urban despair originally published in 1987, now with an introduction by super-fan Colson Whitehead. It was followed by the beautiful historical saga Peplum, by the acclaimed French cartoonist Blutch, in a new translation by Edward Gauvin; and Almost Completely Baxter, a judicious collection of new and selected work by the beloved, inimitably hilarious artist Glen Baxter. It continued with Soft City, a majestically surreal tour of an office dystopia by Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner, drawn and then lost in the early 1970s, with a new introduction by Chris Ware; Belgian artist Dominique Goblet’s searing experimental memoir Pretending Is Lying, translated from the French by Sophie Yanow—Goblet’s first book to appear in English; and What Am I Doing Here?, a long out-of-print collection by postwar America’s forgotten master of the existential gag, Abner Dean. There are now nearly two dozen books in the series. A few recent highlights include Marion Fayolle's gorgeous allegorical memoir, The Tenderness of Stones; a collection of eccentric romance comics by a mid-twentieth-century oddball, Return to Romance: The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney; and Yoshiharu Tsuge's contemplative, dismally humorous manga, The Man Without Talent.

NYRB Poets

The NYRB Poets series continues the eclectic, adventurous spirit of NYRB Classics with a focus on the most vital, various, and universal form of literature: poetry. Featuring the work of poets from around the world, classical and modern, ancient and contemporary, in elegant, pocket-size editions, the series demonstrates the countless different shapes that poetry can assume, from simplest song to lyrical essay to visual image to scientific treatise, among much else. Poetry explores the boundaries of feeling, knowledge, and expression like no other art. NYRB Poets offers an unparalleled opportunity for readers to explore poetry’s limitless possibilities, through collections by outstanding poets such as Pierre Reverdy, Alexander Vvedensky, Sakutarō Hagiwara, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Willis, Najwan Darwish, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raúl Zurita, Silvina Ocampo, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Denise Riley.