Posts filed under 'frances riddle'

Publisher Profile: New Directions

April 25, 2016  |  in Publisher Profile  |  by Frances Riddle

"This is going to sound really Pollyanna, but things have gotten better recently."

Frances Riddle: Can you tell us a little bit about how New Directions got started?

Barbara Epler: We were started by James Laughlin in 1936 and he had gone to study with Ezra Pound; he was bored at Harvard and went to study with Gertrude Stein first and then with Ezra. And J.L. always wanted to be a writer. And Pound, seeing a rich kid, probably had an idea, and he said “No, you’ll never be a very good poet, why don’t you do something useful and go home, finish Harvard so that your parents will give you money, and start a publishing company.” Or assassinate the reviewer he hated at the Saturday Review of Literature. But do something useful. So J.L. came back and when he was still in college started New Directions. J.L. passed away in 1997 but he created a trust so that we could not be bought or sold but we have to stay the same size. He didn’t believe in the capital growth thing which I think is correct—that’ll kill a literary company. And we have to publish books of the same quality. READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Ana Pérez Galván of Hispabooks

February 3, 2016  |  in Publisher Profile  |  by Frances Riddle

"The more of us there are, the more readers we’ll engage in reading literature in translation, which is nothing more than just reading good books!"

Frances Riddle: How was Hispabooks born?

Ana Pérez Galván: The two co-founders, my partner Gregorio Doval and myself, had worked many years in publishing in Spain, as editors for other presses (and in Gregorio’s case, as a writer himself too) and we had an urge to create a project of our own. The local market had been plunging for several years (and still hasn’t improved much) so it didn’t seem to make sense to set up just another run-of-the-mill independent press. Instead, after a little research we were amazed to see how very few Spanish literary writers got translated to English. Whilst it was easy to spot translations into French, German, Italian, Serbian . . . of the most relevant Spanish authors, translations into English were conspicuous by their absence. It seemed to make sense to focus our efforts, experience, and expertise in Spanish literary fiction in a project aimed at countering this situation, and that’s how we came up with the idea of Hispabooks.

READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Restless Books

February 10, 2015  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Frances Riddle

"Restless was conceived in a moment when decisive transformations were taking place."

Restless Books is a digital-first publishing initiative spearheaded by Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Stavans is also a writer and cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, and Oxford. We spoke via Skype about his books, which “reflect the restlessness of our multiform lives.”

Frances Riddle: How was Restless Books born?

Ilan Stavans: Restless was conceived in a moment when decisive transformations were taking place. Booksellers were shrinking in size; big publishers were limiting the number of books coming from different countries, from different languages. Restless came out of a response to the limited exposure an American reader has to international fiction. We aim to translate great work from a variety of languages. That was and is our mission—to compensate for the commercial way of thinking the big publishers have in New York City. We are a mid-sized publisher, but our goal is to help internationalize the landscape of American literature as much as possible. The Press aims to publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry dealing with restlessness as a condition.

FR: Was this focus on movement—restlessness—inspired by your own immigrant experience? READ MORE…

Publisher Profile: Berlinica

October 21, 2014  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Frances Riddle

On the trail of a one-woman publishing house

Berlin native Eva Schweitzer learned a lot about the publishing industry from her years of work as a writer and New York correspondent for German newspapers. In 2011, she decided to open her own publishing house, focusing on books related to the city of Berlin. Eva runs Berlinica between New York City and Berlin. I spoke to her via Skype after one of her frequent trans-Atlantic flights.

Frances Riddle: How was Berlinica born?

Eva Schweitzer: I’m an author and nowadays it’s becoming easier to break into the market, even if you’re small. You don’t need so much overhead anymore. You can do print-on-demand and e-books, you can distribute them internationally with Amazon; and I thought why not try and publish books myself? I know how to write a book. How hard can it be to publish a book?

FR: So was it as easy as you thought it would be to open your own publishing house?

ES: No, it turns out it’s a great deal more time-consuming and complicated than you can imagine. READ MORE…