Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog recently sang the praises of the smart and lovely NYRB Classics series, and spoke to its editorial director, Edwin Frank:

Amazon: What is it about a book that says to you (or you hope says to readers) that it’s an NYRB book?

Frank: Frankly, my sense of what an NYRB Classic is keeps changing as new, unexpected books (One Straw Revolution is a perfect example) turn up. Or you could say, that what draws me to a book is its being unexpected. The book should be something that shifts your perception of writing or of the world, that fills in a gap — or possibly opens one. (Maude Hutchins’s Victorine, for example, makes you think very differently about the literature of the 1950s than, say, Revolutionary Road.)