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  • Published: 24 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781681373911
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $40.00

The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics

A Selection




Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the NYRB Classics series, a collection of twenty favorite selections.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of NYRB Classics, a handpicked anthology of selections from the series.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red thread to guide him through the labyrinth, and the Red Thread offers a path through and a way to explore the ins and outs and twists and turns of the celebrated NYRB Classics series, now twenty years old. The collection brings together twenty-five pieces drawn from the more than five hundred books that have come out as NYRB Classics over the last twenty years. Stories, essays, interviews, poems, along with chapters from novels and memoirs and other longer narratives have been selected by Edwin Frank, the series editor, to chart a distinctive, entertaining, and thought-provoking course across the expansive and varied terrain of the Classics series.

  • Published: 24 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781681373911
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $40.00

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Praise for The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics

"A small publisher that is a national treasure, responsible as they are for republishing or translating so many of the most astonishing books over the last two decades" -The New York Times

"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