Based in
New York City,
New York, the magazine was launched in 1994 as a literary supplement to
Artforum. Originally published biannually, it became a quarterly in 1998, and since 2005,
Bookforum has published five times a year in February, April, June, September, and December. Describing the magazine to
The Village Voice in 2003, former editor (2003–2008) Eric Banks said that the magazine targets a demographic "like the ''New York Review's
but much younger. I think there is an audience of intellectual readers between 25 and 40 out there the kind of person who buys The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books'', but doesn't have an allegiance to a particular publication." In addition to publishing book reviews, essays and current-events columns, the magazine regularly features interviews with authors, including: •
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie •
Martin Amis •
John Ashbery •
John Barth •
A. S. Byatt •
Jerome Charyn •
Lydia Davis •
Umberto Eco •
Mary Gaitskill •
Nadine Gordimer •
Aleksandar Hemon •
Amy Hempel •
John Irving •
Jhumpa Lahiri •
Doris Lessing •
Bernard-Henri Lévy •
Alan Moore •
Lorrie Moore •
Haruki Murakami •
Cees Nooteboom •
Joyce Carol Oates •
Michael Ondaatje •
Alain Robbe-Grillet •
Salman Rushdie •
Vikram Seth •
Susan Sontag •
Muriel Spark •
Robert Stone •
Gore Vidal •
William T. Vollmann In 2009, the magazine's website was redesigned to include a nationwide literary-events calendar, internet exclusive book reviews, two blogs —
Paper Trail and
Omnivore — and a section called Syllabi, which features reading lists written by authors and critics. On December 12, 2022,
Bookforum announced that it would cease publication following the purchase of its companion magazine
Artforum by
Penske Media Corporation (PMC) earlier that month. ==Notable contributors==