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.
[L]egends come to life in this fine collection and stirring sights from the past are evoked again. The range is diverse . . . and everything is engrossing and piquant in a bite-sized way.
—Paddy Kehoe, RTÉ
[NYRB Classics] is a national treasure, responsible as they are for republishing or translating so many of the most astonishing books over the last two decades. Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, John Williams’s Stoner: These books and others make up a large percentage of my personal canon and that of many writers I know.
—Lauren Groff, The New York Times Book Review
[The NYRB Classics series] is amazingly fine in its choice of titles and in the design of the books.
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
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. . . . What’s old is made new again.
—D.T. Max, Los Angeles Times
New York Review Books Classics [is] acting, yet again, in its capacity as the Savior of Lost Greats.
—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review
