Founded in New York City in 2012, New Vessel Press is dedicated to publishing books “that offer erudition and pleasure, provoke and scintillate, transform and transport.” They specialize in translation of foreign literature in paperback and e-book format. Graphic designer Liana Finck’s beautiful cover art makes the New Vessel Press website a feast for the eyes. I spoke with New Vessel Press co-founders Michael Wise and Ross Ufberg via Skype.
Frances Riddle: How was New Vessel Press born?
Michael Wise: Ross and I met at a spelling bee. My son was in the Manhattan Spelling Bee and Ross was the announcer. He was introduced as a literary translator from Polish and Russian to English and I thought that was pretty fascinating. We met and it turned out we lived close by and we became friends and talked a lot about literature. The press was born out of that love for books.
Ross Ufberg: We both speak and read different languages, the only language we have in common is English. Michael reads and speaks German and French. He lived in Europe for several years. I speak Russian and Polish and also lived in Russia for several years. Over the course of our friendship we’d discussed books we’d read in other languages and the only way to share them with each other was to translate them to English. So that was the motivation and I think we also saw that there were so many great books that had never been translated to English. It’s not because they weren’t good enough, it’s just because there’s been this notorious lack of translated literature. I think we saw that it was a good moment to try to do something about that.
FR: What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced since you started publishing foreign literature in 2012?
MW: Neither of us has any previous experience working in the business end of publishing. We really had to learn to do it all from scratch. We learned quite quickly and we’re really enthusiastic and energetic and we’ve come a long way in just a short time. Our biggest challenge is learning how to connect the books to readers. We’re finding terrific books and translators but the biggest challenge is how to get the word out to the readers. We think our books display a certain distinctiveness, both in terms of the quality of the literature, the writing, and also the way the books look. We have a terrific graphic designer, Liana Finck, and we’re getting a fair amount of attention but we still have a lot of work to do.
RU: Michael and I have been surprised at the sheer volume of books being published each year. Not necessarily books in translation although that has changed; it has gone up each year since we started. There are more books being published in translation than you can read in a year, but in general there’s so much being published that it’s hard to set yourself apart from the pack. And there’s a lot of really good stuff. Nobody can read everything.
FR: How do you discover books from languages you can’t read? How do you decide which books to publish?
MW: German and French give you incredible access to a wide array of literature from around the world because publishers in France and Germany do cast a fairly wide net. For example, we bought the book The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal. I don’t know Spanish well enough to judge the literary quality but it was published in German which I do read. In another instance Ross read an Italian book that had been translated into Russian and I read the same book in French and we both agreed we didn’t like it. So with our four languages we do have quite a range. We’re also working with readers and agents and people whose taste we trust.
RU: There has to be trust, even with the range of languages that we can read. It’s hard to find people who read Chinese, or Arabic, or Malaysian. So you find one or two people who you really trust and you have to rely on their word since you can’t read it. There’s a lot of faith. We published a book that neither of us had read in its entirety. It’s a remarkable novel by Israeli author Shemi Zarhin and someone had recommended him to Michael. It’s a 450 page book and we just read a 20 page translation sample by Yardenne Greenspan and it was a leap of faith. It’s scary, but if you want to expand the range of what you can do, you have to take these risks.
FR: How did you come to the decision to publish both paperbacks and e-books?
RU: To be competitive as a publisher and offer the widest range of options you have to offer both print and digital. People who are the best advocates for books are often booksellers. A large portion of interest in books is driven by booksellers who read books and talk about books. People come into their store, whether it’s 192 Books in New York, or Seminary Co-Op in Chicago, and say “I want a good book about Italy,” or “I want a good piece of literary fiction.” So for driving interest in a book it’s really important to have paperback. And then a lot of people read on their Kindles and it’s only becoming more popular. So we sort of felt like we were going to leave one avenue behind if we did one or the other.
FR: Do e-books represent a large percentage of sales for a given title?
MW: It’s around 40% e-books.
RU: If you’re in Mongolia or Malaysia chances are your local book shop doesn’t stock our New Vessel Press titles, although they should. So you either pay $30 in shipping for a $16 book or you’ll buy an e-book. We have an international catalogue and I think international readers. We can reach more people by making the books easier to get.
FR: Do you think that translated literature will one day have a better foothold in the US publishing industry?
MW: I think there’s growing interest and there are a number of small publishers like us that have been created in just the last few years. So the future looks promising.
RU: The Three Percent spreadsheet shows that there is a growing interest and a growing variety of titles, not just the core European languages that have always been represented like German, French, Italian, Russian. For instance there were about ten Polish books translated last year. And that’s probably more than ever. So you have not only more, but also a wider variety of books being translated to English. As this country becomes more multicultural and as we become more comfortable with looking outside of our borders I hope in the future there’ll be a place for literature in translation.
FR: Can you talk about some of the forthcoming titles we can expect to see soon from New Vessel Press?
RU: In September we have a book coming out that’s translated from German titled I Called Him Necktie by Milena Michiko Flasar. It’s a really beautiful, very poetic short novel that talks about the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori, which is a shut-in. There’s this phenomenon in Japan of young men, according to some counts it’s almost a million young men, who lock themselves in their room and just don’t come out for months or years and it’s generally perceived to be because of societal pressures. This is a really beautiful novel about a young man who was Hikikomori and he’s slowly coming out of his room and slowly coming out of his shell. And he makes friends with a middle-aged man. They sit across from each other in the park every day and they get to talking and through this friendship the reader starts to uncover that they’re both quite wounded characters but they sort of help each other reenter the world. The middle-aged man is a salary man who’s lost his job and through talking to each other they both realize just how much they’ve withdrawn. Together they learn how to reenter society and their families, either their biological families or families of their own choosing.
MW: The author is Austrian but her mother is Japanese and the book is set in Tokyo. She’s very familiar with Japanese culture and the book has a very Japanese feeling to it. That book is very sparely written and we’re publishing another book in October by a Ukrainian writer named Marjana Gaponenko called Who Is Martha?. Gaponenko learned German as young girl when she was living in Ukraine and developed a passion for German language and literature. Her style couldn’t be more different from Milena Michiko Flasar’s. Who Is Martha? is very elaborate, baroque, a really beautiful, beautiful German. Both are beautiful writers but with completely different ways of expressing themselves. Who Is Martha? is about a 96-year-old ornithologist who lives in Odessa. He’s told he’s going to die of cancer and instead of being treated he decides to go to Vienna where he lived as a child. He moves into one of the luxury suites of the Imperial Hotel and he decides to face death in great style. It’s a comic but also very serious book about aging and friendship and someone who’s looking back on his past. He’s lived through two different empires, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and the fall of the Soviet Empire. And the title Who Is Martha? relates to Martha, the last passenger pigeon in the world. The species went extinct when Martha died in 1914 and he feels himself to be the last of a species as well. It’s a book with great historical depth and many layers and it’s a really fantastic novel.