Have you heard about the gorgeous new magazine? It says “Kirkus Reviews” on the cover, but it certainly doesn’t look anything like the publication that’s reliably shown up in mailboxes twice a month for decades.

That’s right—Kirkus Reviews has undergone a redesign, from top to bottom. Not many nonagenarians—yes, we turned 90 this year—have the opportunity for such a makeover. To help us develop our new look, we tapped art director and graphic designer Christine Bower-Wright. We first met with her back in February, and since then we’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to bring you the issue that comes out today—clean, elegant, economical, and refreshed.

I say “economical” because there’s a lot of editorial content in Kirkus Reviews—sometimes upward of 400 reviews in a single issue—and we wanted every one of them to be readable as well as pleasing to the eye. We wanted our starred reviews to announce themselves—and now they really do. (For those just joining us, the editors award a Kirkus star to books of special distinction, roughly 10% of all the titles we review.) We also wanted to bring into print some of the many stories we run daily on our website; sprinkled throughout the sections you’ll now find such short features as Seen & Heard, Book to Screen, and In the News, along with the author interviews we’ve always published. And we’ve imported one of the most popular web features—our editors’ carefully curated booklists—into our pages as well. There’s more to read in each issue of Kirkus Reviews than ever before.

One of the first—and most striking—changes you’ll notice is our cover. On the Sept. 1 issue we feature novelist James McBride, author of The Color of Water, The Good Lord Bird, and Deacon King Kong; he’s been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, winner of a National Book Award, and recipient of a National Humanities Medal. In a review of his latest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead, Aug. 8), our critic proposes McBride for the (as-yet-uncreated) position of America’s “storyteller-in-chief,” and you’ll get no argument from fiction editor Laurie Muchnick, who interviewed the author. For the cover, McBride has been depicted by illustrator Eric Scott Anderson, whose portrait captures the writer’s likeness as well as his spirit. (That jaunty beret!) If you’re a James McBride fan—and who isn’t?—it’s an issue you’ll want to keep. Future covers will feature work by a variety of contemporary artists.

We hope you’ll collect all the issues of Kirkus Reviews to come, whether you’re a librarian who relies on our critical assessments when ordering for your collections, a bookseller staying on top of forthcoming releases, or simply a passionate reader who needs to know about all the books. We redesigned the magazine for you, and we think you’ll enjoy it, whether you’ve been subscribing for decades or just discovering us for the first time (learn more about subscriptions here). Happy reading!

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.