Tina Jordan - The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History

Tina Jordan is the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review. Before joining The Times, Tina was the longtime books editor at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked since the magazines founding.

Noor Qasim is a writer and editor. From 2020 to 2021, she served as the editing fellow of The New York Times Book Review.

The New York Times is dedicated to helping people understand the world through on-the-ground, expert, and deeply reported independent journalism. Their mission is simple: to seek the truth and help people understand the world. This mission is rooted in their belief that great journalism has the power to make each readers life richer and more fulfilling, and all of society stronger and more just. The Times has received 130 Pulitzer Prizes.

Acknowledgments

It takes a village, right? So many people pitched in to help with this book, which would never have come together without their generosity and expertise.

At Clarkson Potter, our savvy, unflappable editor, Angelin Borsics, took our rough ideas and buffed them to a high shine, showing us what worked, what didnt, what needed to be added, what should be cutand, while she was doing all this, repeatedly performed magic with the production schedule. Thanks to everyone else at Clarkson Potter for their full support, especially Ian Dingman, Jan Derevjanik, Stephanie Huntwork, Francis Lam, Mark McCauslin, Kim Tyner and Aaron Wehner.

At The Times, Im especially grateful to Noor Qasim, who dedicated her year-long stint as an editing fellow at the paper to the Book Reviews 125th anniversary. Her thoughtful, incisive editorial judgment helped me shape the books content, and she took on a lot of detail work (like permissions!) that I did not have time for. Without her, this project simply would not have been possible.

Thanks, too, to John Cruickshank, whocalmly, and with great good humorkept this book on track, even when schedules threatened to veer out of control (they never did, thanks to him!), and to Anika Burgess, photo editor extraordinaire, whose gift for excavating remarkable old photographs can be seen on almost every page. Anikas eye for the tiniest detail saved me again and again.

Many thanks to the head of the Books desk, Pamela Paula passionate advocate for the project from the beginningand David Kelly, our managing editor, for his encyclopedic knowledge of Book Review history. Other Books colleaguesJohn Williams, MJ Franklin, Emily Eakin, Gal Beckerman, Elisabeth Egan, Greg Cowles, Jude Biersdorfer, Alexandra Alter and Andrew LaValleegave me excellent advice and, when things got tough, unflagging support.

Also at The Times, thanks to Jeff Roth, who pulled dozens of old Book Review bound volumes from our photo morgue and delivered them to the photo lab, and to William ODonnell and Sonny Figueroa, who painstakingly scanned countless back issues, negatives and prints, many of them old and fragile. Our thanks also go to our art production team, Steve Brown and David Braun, for so deftly handling such a massive amount of material.

Lee Riffaterre, Irina Starkova and Nick Jollymore provided invaluable advice on clearing textual permissions, a process spearheaded by the resourceful Nick Donofrio. Karen Sutorius, Aaron Tejada and Sarah Borell helped clear photo permissions.

A special thanks to Dara Hauser for feedback that helped make this book more accessible.

Finally, this book would never have come about without Binky Urbanwho found the perfect home for itor Jennifer Parrucci, M. Ryan Murphy and David Dunlap, who were all unstinting with their time when I first arrived at the Times and was teaching myself how to use the archives.

TINA JORDAN

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