Shelf Life.(Brief Article)

For the past four decades, The New York Review of Books has tirelessly championed liberal causes. It comes, therefore, as a welcome surprise that the magazine's new book-publishing imprint-New York Review Books Classics-is performing a nonpartisan service, excellently.

The NYRB Classics imprint is dedicated to making available, in inexpensive paperback format, neglected literary treasures of the past. Last year came the three-volume uniform edition of the fiction of once- renowned New Yorker writer J. F. Powers-winner of the National Book Award for his novel Morte D'Urban in 1963, but since fallen into unmerited obscurity. This year's list includes otherwise unavailable titles by Turgenev and Colette, and a few important classics from the early part of the 20th century.

Max Beerbohm was once a widely beloved satirist, and his elegant parodies have kept alive his literary status (as, at least, a cult figure) in recent decades. NYRB is republishing his Seven Men (208 pp., $12.95), a collection of five longish short stories about the literary life. The best is "'Savonarola' Brown," about a spectacularly awful dramatist who is killed before being able to complete his five-act play about the impassioned 15th-century Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola; the story allows Beerbohm to let loose with a clever, funny, and sustained 37-page parody of Shakespeare. He captures exactly the sound of Shakespearean wordplay, as it might be practiced by an untalented playwright: "I thank thee, Brother, yet / I thank thee not, for that my thankfulness / (An such there be) gives thanks to Heaven alone." Beerbohm's fictional playwright is also spot-on in his murdering of other Shakespearean conventions, such as the act-closing rhyming couplet: "'Tis time that I were going. Farewell, Monk, / But I'll ...