The Company They Kept Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

Now in paperback Many of the illustrious contributors toThe New York Review of Bookshave had deep and abiding relationshipsboth personal and intellectualwith other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature.The Company They Keptis a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendshipsmost of them undeniably fraught with "idiosyncratic complexities." From Anna Akhmatova's dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky's account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have madeThe New York Review of Booksinto whatEsquiremagazine calls "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."

Robert Silvers is the editor of The New York Review of Books.

Barbara Epstein (1928—2006) was a founding co-editor of The New York Review of Books.