Books: Quality in Quantity

NEW AMERICAN REVIEW: NUMBER 1. 288 pages. New American Library. 95¢ (Limited hard-cover edition: $5.)

In the '50s, drugstore racks blossomed with a literary phenomenon: paperback-book magazines—a lively blend of avant-garde fiction and nonfiction, poetry and criticism. In effect, the p.b.m. was a mass-distributed little magazine, a brave effort to sell quality in quantity. Commercially, it soon flopped.

Now the New American Library, which published New World Writing in that era, has revived the paperback-book magazine as a triannual bloom. If the first issue of New American Review is any indication, it is well...

Want the full story?

Subscribe Now

Subscribe
Subscribe

Learn more about the benefits of being a TIME subscriber

If you are already a subscriber sign up — registration is free!