{"id":302456,"date":"2015-09-03T16:22:30","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T16:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/09\/03\/three-articles-on-three-great-indie-presses-graywolf-coffee-house-europa\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:31","slug":"three-articles-on-three-great-indie-presses-graywolf-coffee-house-europa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/09\/03\/three-articles-on-three-great-indie-presses-graywolf-coffee-house-europa\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Articles on Three Great Indie Presses: Graywolf, Coffee House, Europa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I posted a little summary on two great translators,<\/a> so it’s only appropriate that today I post about three great pieces that have come out about three of my favorite presses over the past few days. <\/p>\n

First up was this Vulture<\/em> piece<\/a> by Three Percent favorite Boris Kachka (BORIS<\/span>!!) on Graywolf Press. There’s a lot of great things in this article about how the press has exploded over the past decade, going from a modest-sized nonprofit to one of the most notable and beloved presses in the country.<\/p>\n

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Graywolf has been winning for a while. Over the past few years, as publishing conglomerates merged, restructured, and grappled with Amazon, a midwestern press snuck in and found a genuinely new way forward for nonfiction. Leslie Jamison\u2019s The Empathy Exams<\/em> entered the Times best-seller list at No. 11, while Claudia Rankine\u2019s Citizen<\/em>, a half-versified meditation on racism, stormed post-Ferguson America. Each has sold more than 60,000 copies, putting them in Graywolf\u2019s all-time top five. Citizen<\/em> just went back to press for a tenth time, putting it close to having 100,000 copies in print. That hardly puts Graywolf in league with Penguin Random House, but neither is it just a scrappy little press punching above its weight. It\u2019s a scrappy little press that harnessed and to some extent generated a revolution in nonfiction, turning the previously unprepossessing genre of the \u201clyric essay\u201d into a major cultural force. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In 1999, McCrae won a $1 million grant by promising to take Graywolf to \u201cyet another level.\u201d A couple of years later, they raised another $1 million with a detailed capital plan: a grant for work in translation; a fund to increase author advances; a budget for travel to global book fairs; a New York city outpost; a \u201cnational council\u201d of fund-raisers; and the Literary Nonfiction Prize that would launch Biss and Jamison. Just as important, Graywolf switched its distribution to prestigious Farrar, Straus and Giroux. \u201cThat signaled something,\u201d says Jeff Shotts, Graywolf\u2019s executive editor. \u201cIt put our books in the same conversation with Seamus Heaney.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Graywolf reached its fund-raising goals, and just as McCrae was beginning to get impatient \u2014 \u201cI remember thinking, Where\u2019s the big hit?<\/em>\u201d \u2014 Graywolf\u2019s initiatives came together to help create one: Per Petterson\u2019s 2007 best-seller Out Stealing Horses<\/em>. Acquired and promoted via Graywolf\u2019s new global connections, listed beside giants in FSG\u2019s catalogues, and hand-delivered on a visit to the New York Times, the Norwegian novel won the IMPAC<\/span> Dublin award, scored a Times Book Review cover, and sold 70,000 copies in hardcover. Petterson has spurned corporate advances to remain with Graywolf ever since.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A million dollar grant! That’s one way to move up a level. (If any wealthy patrons are reading this, that’s exactly the sort of money Open Letter could use . . .)<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

Just down the road from Graywolf is Coffee House Press, another favorite of mine (EVERYONE<\/span> SHOULD<\/span> READ<\/span> VALERIA<\/span> LUISELLI<\/span>), who was featured on Minnesota Public Radio<\/a> yesterday:<\/p>\n

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“What we really do is connect readers and writers, and there’s a number of different ways we can do that. Publishing is a tool that we can use, but so are different kinds of programming,” said Chris Fishbach.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Coffee House, of course, still prints books. The small, independent press usually releases 18 titles in a year, including fiction, poetry and essays. But it has also started “putting writers in other contexts.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Most people think of writers working alone at their desks, or speaking into a microphone at a reading, but Coffee House has created a residence program to put writers in new places, like libraries or even on a canoe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also, while we’re talking about fundraising, Coffee House is hosting a Housequake<\/a> event on September 21st at the Fulton Tap Room in Minneapolis. And even if you can’t make it, you can buy an Unticket,<\/a> which, for only $22.09 (weird fee rate) will get you “an exclusive chapbook of poems that you’ll be the first reader for\u2014they’re all previously unpublished.” AND<\/span> your money will go to support some of the best people in the nonprofit publishing world.<\/p>\n

*<\/center><\/p>\n

We haven’t done anything with #FerranteFever yet—although I have been talking about her rise to superstardom in my publishing class—but we probably will at some point. (I’m really behind on these books, having only read volume one.) In the meantime, you have to check out this article from the New York Times Style Magazine<\/em> about Europa’s Objects of Desire:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Even if you haven\u2019t heard of Europa Editions, you\u2019ve probably heard of some of its hits. There\u2019s Muriel Barbery\u2019s The Elegance of the Hedgehog<\/em> (more than a million copies sold); Jane Gardam\u2019s Old Filth<\/em> (now in its 20th printing); and Alexander Maksik\u2019s You Deserve Nothing<\/em> (so far, the biggest title by an American). Like any good branded product, the books have an instantly recognizable visual stamp: stiff paper covers edged with white borders that frame color-drenched matte backgrounds. According to Europa\u2019s Australian-born editor in chief, Michael Reynolds, \u201cWhen you see them all together, they draw you in like a bowl of candy.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But what really distinguishes Europa from other publishers of successful titles is that readers \u2014 and book buyers \u2014 see the house and its authors as equally relevant. Early in 2006, when Europa Editions had been in existence for less than a year, Toby Cox, the owner of Three Lives & Company bookstore in Manhattan\u2019s West Village, noticed that customers were already coming in and asking \u201cWhat\u2019s new from Europa?\u201d The press had succeeded in transforming spinach into chocolate \u2014 that is, in changing the idea of foreign fiction from \u201c\u2009\u2018This is a translation\u2019 to \u2018This is a good story, well told,\u2019\u2009\u201d Cox says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Of course, many eminent houses have published fine paperback fiction with \u00e9clat before Europa \u2014 notably, Penguin and Vintage \u2014 and Reynolds praises the \u201ciconic imprints\u201d New Directions, City Lights and Archipelago, which also specialize in writers from abroad. \u201cI\u2019m proud of the fact that we do work that is literary,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I am even prouder of the fact we are doing works that are entertaining and pleasing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All three of these presses deserve praise like this on a regular basis. (Along with some others, such as New Directions, Archipelago, Deep Vellum, etc.) Congrats to all three! Now go out and read some of their books!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I posted a little summary on two great translators, so it’s only appropriate that today I post about three great pieces that have come out about three of my favorite presses over the past few days. First up was this Vulture piece by Three Percent favorite Boris Kachka (BORIS!!) on Graywolf Press. There’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[59426,8886,12966,1646],"class_list":["post-302456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-coffee-house-press","tag-europa-editions","tag-graywolf-press","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316556,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302456\/revisions\/316556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}