While a number of once distinguished literary magazines have cut back on story length and filled space with gossip and titillating photos, there is still one publication that remains above the slag and scum and sediment that poses for rigorous thinking today.

Perhaps you've heard of us?

You have three complimentary issues

reserved in your name?

May we send them to you

without any risk or obligation to subscribe?

Dear Intellectual Dinosaur,

It's the periodical where Vaclav Havel secreted articles via the Czech underground while locked in prison.

It's the publication Andrei Sakharov faxed his political views while under house arrest in the former Soviet Union.

It's the literary journal V.S. Naipaul writes for when he wants to expose the rise of neo-conservatism at the Republican National Convention; where Joan Didion turns to lay bare the unseemliness of California's water wars; where John Updike, Susan Sontag, Stephen Jay Gould, George Keenan, or Gary Wills appear when they wish to spark debate and outrage among the intellectual cognoscenti.

It is, in short, the English language's preeminent journal of belletristic discourse -- where you can park yourself amidst the swirling vortex of ideas and engage in a spirited debate with the world's most esteemed writers, artists, and political figures.

Now, the Publishers would like to hand you three incendiary issues -- on the house.

The question of the hour is ... will you accept?

Hello and welcome to THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS -- something of a misnomer since more than half of each issue serves up comprehensive essays on art, politics, science, literature, and ideas by distinguished scholars and authors in fields flung farther than our little grotto in Manhattan.

For over 30 years The Review has stubbornly ignored the public's trend to ever bouncier imitations of television and stuck to its intellectual knitting -- in-depth pieces that shake the dust and cover off an issue -- be it Robert Dartan's fascinating review of the golden age of French pornography or Brian Urquhart's assessment as to whether the UN can ever really work.

Indeed, back issues of The Review are often quoted and coveted as intellectual bell-weathers of our times:  Mary McCarthy's legendary reporting from Vietnam where she made the deadly Ho Chi Minh Trail seem like the Yellow Brick Road;  Edmund Wilson's provocative challenge to Vladimir Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin (putting the cabash on that friendship!);  Ralph Nadar's historic manifesto for consumer justice;  Noam Chomsky and Andrew Kopkind's searing exposition of a Whitehouse in disarray.

Today's Review is no less a barometer of the current intellectual climate.  Recently, you may have found yourself stirred by Misha Glenny's emotional filings from Bosnia; disturbed by Timothy Garton Ash's prophetic reporting as the Communist bloc disintrigated; enlightened by Anita Desai's eye-opening account of Jews in India; exercised by Mario Cuomo's ruminations on the morality of abortion; and amused by the illustrative genius of our own madman, David Levine.

The New York Review of Books is, if you will, the watering hole for intellectual dinosaurs. 

"...the best literary-intellectual journal in America," says Esquire. 

"The Review's brittle, literate letters-to-the-editor are the closest thing the intellectual world has to bare-knuckle boxing," says The Washington Post.

The enclosed Certificate is all we need to send you a complimentary, three-issue "mini-subscription" so you can see what all the bustle is about.  Won't you return it today?