We weren't there but our sources tell us that the New Yorker had a party last week to celebrate the relaunch of Book Bench, its book blog, to the now aptly named Page-Turner. We wish we had gotten an invite but alas we had to hear about it through our trusted sources.  We just visited the site and it is in fact different and it looks as though they've been re-strategizing and bringing in new energy to their team. A couple months back, Michael Agger of Slate joined the team and is now heading up the New Yorker's online cultural coverage.  

Sasha Weiss, editor at the New Yorker's Culture Desk, introduced the new blog with these words, "building on the work of the Book Bench blog, and expanding on it. We'll debate about books under-noticed or too much noticed, and celebrate writers we've returned to again and again. We'll look to works in translation and at the politics of literary scenes beyond the English-speaking world. We'll think about technology and the reading life. We'll recommend and we'll theorize. Daily essays will be the blog's mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment." 

For serious reviews and news on books including this headline, Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" that we just saw on the blog and which got our bibliophile brains salivating (I'm sure brains salivate, btw). You should open the link but in case you don't here's what we just found out: Egan who is the author of the Pulitzer winning, "A Visit from the Goon Squad" and the "Invisible Circus" will have her short story "Black Box" serialized on Twitter by the New Yorker. Egan wrote the 140-character inspired story on a Japanese notebook with eight rectangles on each page. How cool!  (Note to selves: we must try this when we finally get to writing our very own Pulitzer winning book)

You can get the story on Twitter or on the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog. Can't think of a better way to inaugurate the new blog. But still an invitation to the launch party would have been nice. Maybe next time they relaunch.