A midcentury novel going viral on BookTok five decades after its publication? It’s a minor vindication for Edwin Frank, who’s been giving long-forgotten masterworks and international voices their due at New York Review Books (the literary magazine’s publishing arm) since 1999. His NYRB Classics series has become a shorthand for the discerning reader everywhere.
What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?
When there’s nothing else, there’s always Wallace Stevens.
What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?
I’m glad to have helped bring the work of the great Soviet writer Andrei Platonov into English. He is a writer who emerged from and recorded the determination and desperation and devastation of revolution to capture the tenderness and brutality and vertigo of a moment when living in the world becomes an open question, terrible and beautiful.
What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?
How can this be done better? When can I stop?
Where do you feel most at home?
Looking at a painting.
When you were little, what were you known for?
Arguing and dreaming.
What would you like the headline of your obituary to be?
“Publisher of the Dead Joins Them.”
What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?
Lucking into it.
What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?
In the early ’70s, Penguin, then a British publisher, went through a moment of publishing paperbacks—then still the core of the publishing house’s business—in bold, stark designs with the most matter-of-fact and minimal copy and quite often no blurbs of any kind.
There was, for example, an edition of Sartre’s memoir, Words, whose unillustrated cover read, “I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it,” Words by Jean-Paul Sartre—the background bright white, the quote in red, the title in black, the author credit in orange (Penguin’s identifying color then). All the words were justified left and set (the title a discrete exception) in the same font, all running freely one after the other. In the upper right corner, the Penguin logo.
The cover caught your eye and held your attention. It was semantically clear and visually attractive. It hit home. It was even smart about the book, since it dramatized the question the book’s title implicitly raises about the place of words in life and in writing a life: always central, suspect, the author’s above all. It was direct, elegant, unapologetic, and completely free of the hype that covers books and fills book reviews these days. How good that was.
What’s your biggest vice? Your greatest virtue?
Sloth/taking my time. “Nothing,” as Henry James beautifully put it, “is my last word about anything.”
What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?
I always wear the same thing.
What are you looking forward to this year?
Finishing the book I’m working on.
To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.
in your life?
