This roundtable discussion, featuring Danielle Dutton, Edwin Frank, and Martin Riker took place at the Gaddis Centenary Conference in St Louis, on October 21st 2022. It has been lightly edited for clarity and was transcribed by Marie Fahd.
Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker founded Dorothy, A Publishing Project, and were both working at Dalkey Archive Press during the time it republished William Gaddis’s novels. Edwin Frank is the founding editor of New York Review Books, and oversaw their 2020 reissues of The Recognitions and J R, and the 2023 updated edition of Gaddis’s Letters.
Martin Riker: Hello everybody! Thanks for coming to our panel on Publishing in the Innovative Tradition. My name is Martin Riker. Next to me are Edwin Frank and Danielle Dutton. We’ll start with why we’re up here and what we are going to talk about. So, when the Gaddis Conference was announced, we considered how we might contribute. It seemed like it would be interesting if Edwin could come into town, because, of course, he has been publishing Gaddis’s work. Edwin is the editor and founding editor of the New York Review Books. There’s a brochure out there of their forthcoming edition of Gaddis’s Letters. Danielle and I both run and cofounded Dorothy, A Publishing Project. Before that, we both worked at Dalkey Archive Press, which produced the previous editions of Gaddis’s first two novels. So, we have in common with one another that we are a somewhat narrow club of people who have reissued J R and The Recognitions. I was at Dalkey Archive Press from 1999 to 2012, with a little time off to do my PhD. And my last thing out the door was this. (Martin Riker presents the Dalkey Archive Press editions of J R and The Recognitions to the audience). Danielle did the cover design for both of these. We also published Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green’s book on Gaddis’s critical reception. This is the re-issue edition. (Martin Riker shows another book to the audience). Steven Moore is in the audience here today and was at Dalkey Archive Press for many years. I am sure, Steven, this was one of your books, since you wrote the introduction. So there is a concentration in this room of people who have reissued William Gaddis’s books. However, we didn’t think that there would be a panel-worth of conversation about that. We thought it might be more productive to have a general conversation about the specific kind of publishing that all three of us have done for many years, publishing work in what I will call the innovative tradition, or work that is not necessarily as commercially viable but has lasting literary value. In short, we thought we’d cast the net wide and talk about publishing the kinds of books we publish. By way of introduction, I thought I would ask both of these people, starting with Edwin, to say how they got into publishing and how the press that they run came into being.
Edwin Frank: I had a very atypical path into publishing. In New York most people start in publishing right after college. After doing a writing fellowship, I basically went to get, or rather not to get – spent a long time not getting – a PhD in Art History. So publishing, actually, was a back-up plan. I was in my thirties, I had two kids, I needed to do something since I was not going to get that PhD. Well, it was in fact a terrible plan. I was not really well-placed to get into publishing because: a) I was way too old, b) I was too opinionated. When it comes to corporate publishing in New York, editors are allowed to have opinions but editorial assistants, hardly. Plus those jobs would never support a family. A well-meaning friend of a friend, a success in the business, also cautioned me that go into publishing you really needed to be interested in doing cat calendars. That’s the name of the game.
Well, my terrible plan panned out somehow, and I ended up with the job I have, about which I can’t complain. What I brought to it was a long, intense life as a reader and a sense going back to when I was a kid, like a child collecting stamps, of the look of books and the publishers of books. Or like a fan: there were teams I liked who published the authors I liked and there were other teams that weren’t mine. At some point, a few years after I started the job and the list had begun to take shape, I realized I was doing what I had done when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I made lists on the back cover of my schoolbinder of books I wanted to read and was saving up my allowance to get. So, I had a list-making impulse and I had a certain sense of the lay of the literary land and a general sense that books past and present went on talking to each other across the abysm of time. And maybe it even helped, for what the series has become, that I spent all that time in Art History. That too gave me a certain sense of how things at a temporal or geographical distance can unexpectedly link up. I remember going to a show that Brice Marden put together at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston combining a few pictures of his with a range of works from the Collection that structured his sense of aesthetic possibility. That sort of thinking made intuitive sense to me.
As to how the publishing program took shape, well, I began by working at a company affiliated with NYRB called the Reader’s Catalog. The catalog was like the old Sears' catalogs, but for books. It advertised itself as a listing of the 40,000 best books in print. Working on the Catalog, I soon discovered that a lot of books that I thought were among the best books in print were out of print. I made a list of them. Eventually the list turned into the Classics series. These books were out of print partly because the big trade houses had gone corporate and in going corporate, they had started to ignore their backlist. Traditionally, publishers had depended on the breadth of their backlist to turn a profit, but as they went corporate, which is to say became publicly traded with stockholders to satisfy, what had they had to show was not just a reasonable profit but growth, that bane of our speculative age. Publishers put more and more of their money on frontlist books that they hoped would show stratospheric sales, and paid less and less attention to their backlists, letting a lot of books with modest but real sales go. So there was lots of interesting stuff to pick and choose from, bins full of vinyl. It was an opportunity. And it wasn’t all that difficult to get off the ground since books that have been allowed to go out of print because they don’t sell enough are cheap to buy. There were lots of colors to play with and we can talk about how they got mixed later.
Danielle Dutton: How it all started? I got so into that story I forgot what I was supposed to say. Okay, very different story: I finished my PhD. But really the PhD has something to do with it in the sense that being in a graduate program, as so many people here surely know, is like… There is this real feeling of community and camaraderie. There are all these people who want to talk about your obscure passions with you. You start to feel that that might be what the world is like. And then, about a year and a half after I finished my PhD, it became very clear to me that that was not at all what the world was like. Marty and I were living in Illinois working at Dalkey, and, yeah, I was just super lonely. I often felt like I had nobody to talk to despite working at one of the coolest presses in America. There was nobody to talk to about books, or the kind of books I liked. I remember reading something from one of my favorite writers saying something like: “If you want to be invited to the party, start a party.” So I said, all right, it’s time to start a party. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew that I didn’t want to just do something for the sake of doing something. I wanted to figure out what needed to be done and then do that thing. And so we talked for a long time about this. Meanwhile, we got pregnant. I was pregnant and I was making that—a person—and we were coming up with the idea for what Dorothy would be, and a few things sort of fell into place. One is that though I admired Dalkey enormously, it’s just the case that it has, or had, a very male-heavy list. I was aware of that while I was working there. And then also, I was seeing that a lot of what came in over the transom or from agents was overwhelmingly by male authors. Simultaneously, there were a lot of blogs or websites for the experimental writing community and those were also largely male-centric spaces. I’m thinking of places like HTMLGIANT. I was interested in them, I was reading them, but they also didn’t feel quite… I still did not know where I belonged as a woman and an innovative fiction writer. Then, the final piece was that I found out that this writer I really loved, Renee Gladman, had written a series of books, which she said were her first fiction books. She had been a poet and then what she calls “a prose writer.” So the idea for Dorothy started there.
For those of you who don’t know, Dorothy is a feminist press dedicated to innovative fiction and what we call “near fiction,” mostly by women. We publish two books together every fall. Our child was born in 2009 and so was Dorothy. We launched our first two books in the fall of 2010. The idea was to try to create a space in the culture to really spotlight innovative fiction by women. I felt that there was space for poets, like that innovative female poets were doing a lot in the literary culture, but there was no one just looking at and talking about innovative fiction by women. And also, something that happened at the same time, some of you might remember this, the first VIDA Count came out. VIDA was tracking by gender: who are places publishing, who are places reviewing. The answer was it was often overwhelmingly work by men, even though, as I am sure a lot of you know, the people who work in publishing are overwhelmingly female. So I guess I was sensing these things that were happening and then VIDA started counting it and proved it. Also, something they started talking about was how much more likely men seemed, when sending their work out, when they were rejected, to be like: “Hey, thank you for that very friendly rejection. Here is more work by me,” whereas women were not feeling as encouraged to submit or re-submit their work somehow. It didn’t seem very mysterious to me why that was, because I felt not super encouraged by a lot of the conversations happening around me. With Dorothy, I wanted to create a space where women writers felt encouraged to send their work. Marty, is that everything?
Martin Riker: Well, I’m trying to draw together in my head some of what’s been said already. We do have a thesis, not a thesis, but a subject, which is something like: the particularities of publishing formally innovative fiction and how such work enters the culture. My experience rhymes with both of yours. For instance, what you said Edwin about your teens. I worked in my twenties, I was a musician. I had a lot of free time, and spent it reading books by Grove Press, New Directions, and Dalkey Archive. That’s my education in publishing. It’s why I ended up where I was. I didn’t plan to go into publishing, I just wanted to be around the books. I actually started with the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which was covering all these authors who were not being adequately discussed in the culture or at all. Their books were often out of print, so Dalkey Archive started as a book publisher to bring back into print these books that were being covered in the Review.
I also appreciate, Edwin, the way you talked about the opportunity of reissuing books, because I think there was a tendency during my time at Dalkey to emphasize and talk about mission, the ethical side of things. But the truth is, a lot of what happens in publishing, even in the kind of earnest publishing we do, is opportunist in the sense that your “mission” is always in response to whatever opportunities come up. So we might focus on translation because we care about translated literature, but there’s also an artistic opportunity. A small publisher of translations can compete for the best books in the world, because commercial publishing generally ignores everything outside of the US. The same is true, I think, with reprints. So, when Dorothy started, I was still working at Dalkey. I was in a behind-the-scenes position for Dorothy at the time. Something I should have said in the intro is that Dorothy is now distributed by New York Review Books, as of just this year. So, for many years, Dalkey and then Dorothy were sort of competing with NYRBooks for reprints. It was always as much a camaraderie as a competition, I think, but now, we are literally on the same team, in the sense that we are in their catalog, which is a lovely place to be. But part of what makes that partnership so nice for Danielle and myself is that Dorothy has so much in common with NYRBook’s project, including that the work we do came into being at least partly in response to what the culture wasn’t doing, which is equally a question of ethics, mission, and of opportunity.
I want to ask about the mission aspect. How do you think about the mission of what you are up to? Or, if that is a weird word, how do you think about your sense of purpose as a publisher, or what you are setting out to add to the project of publishing?
Edwin Frank: Well, it’s funny to be on a panel about innovative publishing because, of course, what we were doing was in a sense the opposite of innovation. I published old books and still to a large degree publish old books. It is worth asking why that should have seemed such new thing, something that afforded a different—new—sense of what a publishing program could be and what books are. Why did what we were doing seem of the moment – that’s an interesting question, too. One thing genuinely new I wanted to do from the beginning was to get involved in translating books that hadn’t been translated into English or that could do with a new translation, and though we started off exclusively doing reprints of out of print books, after about three years I did in fact turn to translation. The first one I did fell into my lap. RW Flint had done a translation of Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires in the 60s for Roger Straus at FSG, and Straus had turned it down because, he said, he didn’t need another book by a “fucking Italian Communist.” Flint was a shy hermit of a man, and he’d put the translation in the top drawer and there it had lain for thirty years, until he mentioned it to me and I asked him to send it and we published it and it won the PEN translation award. So we were off and running with translation, and now newly commissioned translations constitute I’d say at least 50 percent of the titles we publish.
Back to the series. I always wanted to mix things up. I didn’t want to call it the classics series because in America, you know, shoes, cookies are classics. Coke is classic. And in Europe, by contrast, on the continent, classics still suggest the ancients, not the moderns, or only the early moderns through the nineteenth century, at least this was still largely the case a quarter-century ago when we got started. So Classics as a moniker seemed to be an invitation to confusion, plus I wasn’t at all interested in doing a list of books deemed for whatever reason canonical. The really canonical books—Shakespeare, Jane Austen, War and Peace, Mrs Dalloway—are all well-published, after all. And then the whole idea of the canon, which goes back to the Doryphoros, or spearbearer, of the sculptor Polykleitos, whose half step forward and slightly shifted posture was supposed to supply the measure of the ideal man, or at least the ideal statue of a man… Anyway, what I think of myself as being on the lookout for are books that make you think again about what a good book is, and this could be a matter of content or a matter of form, though form is always another form of content, and what counts as content, well, that’s a formal question too. The interplay of those two categories was something I had in mind. I also have an interest in literary history that has led me to focus on neglected books. For example, I’ve ended up publishing a lot of surrealist writers and more than a few socialist realist writers, two literary models that the mainstream of the Anglo-American novel has tended to turn away from with suspicion and disdain. Bringing out different ways of writing and of making books was something I wanted to do. I imagined that minding the past was a way to make people conscious of possibilities in the present that the present is too shortsighted to see.
Danielle Dutton: Mission?
Martin Riker: Yes. The sense of purpose. How it has changed?
Danielle Dutton: Well, I mean I guess I sort of spoke to the mission in my first answer quite a lot. How it has changed?
Martin Riker: For example I think that the environment that Dorothy was started in has changed a lot. When it first started, it was definitely the case that… I mean, the success of the press proves that it was the case, that if you created the space for experimental or formally strange work by women, there was work out there waiting to fill that space. But when you were starting, it wasn’t a guarantee that there would be writers to fill that space. There was a kind of a Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come” quality to it. And they did. I think that the mission has changed a little bit because the culture has changed. I think Dorothy isn’t responsible for the change in the culture but has had a part. For example, about 80% of the writers that we debuted have gone on to have a second book with a commercial publishing house. We built a space for those writers and now they have an audience. Well, that must affect about how you think about all this, right?
Danielle Dutton: Well, yes, that’s true. That has happened. But I do think one result is that we had to… We had one book that really took off, I think it was in our fourth year, and there was this impulse where people were… I think people just thought that was what we’d been trying to do all along. So, we had been publishing sort of weird “small” books and then suddenly in the fourth year one of the writers just made a big splash. It was her debut book and she was fifty-years-old. There was a New Yorker profile of her within six months of her book coming out, a really big deal. Suddenly, people who hadn’t known us before knew about the press and would come up to us at conferences or different places and be like: “Oh, you’re the press that publishes that book? You must be excited that now you can be a bigger press!” The implication was that our intention had always been to be more commercially successful. So, we had a bunch of conversations about it and the next year we very purposefully published two of our quietest and weirdest books, just to make it super clear that that had not been the intention. I do think because a lot of our authors went on to be picked up by agents or published by FSG or whatever – we turned even slightly weirder in a way, because that was what the press was always there to do. It’s almost like cultural tastes moved slightly to the weird, and we had to go weirder to make it clear what our mission was?
Martin Riker: I think we’ve always had a reaction against acceptability, and whenever we sort of back into it, we find another exit to go in a different direction, which makes me want to ask my next question, about the list and the formation of the list. We have already started to talk about one of the forces that shapes the way Dorothy’s list has come about. Edwin, you mentioned not thinking canonically, but because we are all dealing in reprints, translations, and original titles, we are inevitably building a space for a certain kind of book. I’m interested in how you think about the list. It is not a canon. Is it a map of something? Is there a tradition it represents? Are there many traditions it represents? Are you interested in those questions at all?
Edwin Frank: Yes, I mean I think about it all the time. One thing it does not represent is the modernist and post-modernist vein that Dalkey Archive mined so vigorously and that New Directions helped to discover in the first place. Or rather the series doesn’t represent that lineage exclusively as those two other houses tend to. Though in another sense my own touchstones—Pound’s “make it new,” which paradoxically took him back to the Anglo-Saxons, to Cathay; Eliot’s reformulation of that in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—are directly linked to those projects. But practically speaking… I like a surprise and I like to surprise others: a book I’ve never heard of, a book that nobody expects us to do, those are books we are interested in. Then there are certain authors that I have developed commitments to: the Soviet writer Platonov, whose major works we are translating, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Taubes. The rekindled interest in Renata Adler, Hardwick, Sylvia Townsend Warner… that reflects the change of climate you’ve mentioned, the new interest in women writers. Once Hardwick was just the distaff side of Robert Lowell. Now she’s admired both as a brilliant critic and as a writer herself, her sensibility so intense on the page. Anyway, I try to keep the different pieces moving, to keep going, to keep adding voices, hoping voices combine in new ways, hoping to steer clear of mere eclecticism.
Danielle Dutton: Yes, that makes so much sense to me too. Now that we are being distributed by NYRBooks, we have a much stricter timeline. We have to actually know what our books are more than a year in advance. Prior to that, sometimes we would be like “Ack, what are we doing next?” because with less than twelve months to go we would still be figuring it out. But there is still this thing, this spontaneity in constantly responding to the list. If we feel like the list is drifting too far in one direction, we start trying to pull it back in another, like we’ll think, “There have been a few too many surrealist short story collections, so now we need to come back this other way.” So, the list feels like a sort of organic community that we are kind of shepherding along.
And I do think it is absolutely a community to us. A lot of the writers that we’ve published, not all but quite a hefty number are living American writers, and so we actually know these people and they become friends of a sort. For example, we just launched our most recent two books, these right here. (Danielle Dutton presents the books to the audience). We just had our launch event on Tuesday. This is A Horse at Night, our second book by Amina Cain, who we also published in 2013. Some of Them Will Carry Me is a debut collection by a young writer named Giada Scodellaro. We did this event moderated by Renee Gladman, whom we’ve published four books by. She was actually our inaugural author back in 2010 and she is a really big figure for me as a writer. And so, Renee was moderating it, and Amina was there with her second Dorothy book, Giada was there with her first book. There was just something lovely about it, the way that some of the Dorothy writers are recurring now, they are like our anchors to the list, and then we keep adding new voices. Amina said that before Dorothy existed, she never felt she had a community in fiction. I can’t imagine a better thing that she could say about Dorothy. I do really feel like it is a family, or a community. We think a lot about what we let in to that community and how it might change things in exciting ways but also not make it a total confusion. It’s so interesting to me when someone says: “This is such a Dorothy book.” I’m like, “What do you mean? Can you articulate that to me?” Because it’s hard for me to put it into words, even though I obviously have a feel for it.
Martin Riker: We are talking about the additive quality of building a list. But one thing that’s interesting about the kind of publishing that all of us do, is that you actually also build a list backwards, into time. Our lists have substantial numbers of reprints and in fact we share two authors in common with NYRBooks: Barbara Comyns and Leonora Carrington. Publishing backwards, for me—I won’t speak for you Edwin—has always added an element not of canon, because that implies a limit, but of lineage, a narrative of a literary project that persists over time, an impulse towards a kind of writing. Steven Moore‘s wonderful The Novel: An Alternative History revisits all these works that are outside of mainstream ideas about what literature is, because there are of course countless traditions, that is, countless ideas of what literature is. I myself teach a class here at WashU called “Experimental Traditions,” which is about the impulse towards experiment and the impulse towards tradition, a conversation between those two ideas. We look at things like Menippean satire, which is a literary tradition that is more than 2000 years old and generally exists in relation to whatever the dominant form is at the time, and is subversive to that form. We pair ancient examples with very modern examples, and the result is a literary historical conversation.
At Dalkey, one way that we would build the tradition backwards from the very beginning was getting certain authors on the list who represented those traditions. Now, I think you are totally right that Dalkey has a predominantly modernist/postmodernist aesthetics. But it was always very important to get certain writers. William Gaddis was a major example of a writer that you wanted to have on the list, for one thing because the work is genius and you want to publish it, but for another because it creates a context into which you can publish all your other work. Dorothy has never published a book that we didn’t want to publish foremost for its own value. Our Marguerite Duras book, our Leonora Carrington book, or Rosmarie Waldrop’s novel, all created a context in which we can give the world a Giada Scodellaro book, a voice they’ve never heard of, and they can say: “It’s coming out from Dorothy who does Carrington and Duras and Comyns. So, I don’t know what it is going to be. In fact, I know it is going to be something that isn’t what I think it is going to be because every book they do is going to be something different.” But it’s meaningful that we’re saying it belongs on the same list.
Edwin Frank: I am just happy to see, by the way, that Amina Cain talks about a good deal about Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes which is one of the first books that we did. Sylvia Townsend Warner is an author who had effectively vanished from the American conversation about literature at that point.
Danielle Dutton: Everyone needs to read Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It is one of my top five favorite books. It’s about this spinster aunt who just pleases everyone for forty or so years and then moves to the country to worship Satan and listen to the violets and be alone. It is amazing.
Martin Riker: And it moves so strangely.
Edwin Frank: At the end, she washes her hands of Satan too. She goes to an even stranger farther away stage.
Martin Riker: If I had to say what all the books that we do have in common, I might say that all of them move strangely. None of them feel like they are within a formula that I can predict. I think that it is something that I always look for.
I wanted to talk about the different kinds of book we publish, specifically reprints, new original translations, and original authors in English. Bringing them together in our lists, we are saying that they have something to say to one another, but they all present their own sorts of challenges in marketing and in editorial. If you could talk about the different types, how those three categories are working together for you, and how you think about them differently or similarly?
Edwin Frank: The three categories being…
Martin Riker: Reprints, new translations, and original works in English. I noticed that lately NYRBooks is doing more of the latter.
Edwin Frank: Yes, well, above and beyond the Classics NYRB has started publishing new fiction and non-fiction. Well, obviously any reader’s life is poised between the reader one is and the reader one wants to be. We all dream and read across the generic boundaries. We read new things and old things and non-fiction and fiction, and behind the notion of the list I have a notion of an ideally curious reader. I never thought of the list as being a list of the books I happen to like. Of course, there are books I like very much on it. There are also books I actually find intensely disagreeable, but if they are books that are worth arguing with, then they are books that should be in print.
As to new books, in the Classics series I’ve always been open to new work by living writers who enjoy a reputation in their own language but have not made their way into English. This was the case with Vladimir Sorokin when we first published him. More recently, I assumed responsibility for the list that Bob Silvers, the editor of the Review, had largely dedicated to publishing collections of picked-up pieces by contributors to the magazine. I’ve tried to make that list more expansive in conception, taking on a number of English writers whose work hadn’t found American publishers (it’s interesting how deep a canyon the Atlantic Ocean is!). Books like Ruth Scurr’s brilliantly inventive biography of John Aubrey, a collage in essence, contemporary but also fashioned out of 17th century Jacobean prose, which links it to authors in the Classics series, Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy which William Gass wrote a great introduction to. That’s a book that we almost didn’t do—after all it is more than 1400 pages long—but at the time it was under consideration I happened to go to Paris where it had just been published, complete, in a new translation. I thought: “If the French can publish it in translation, we have to try in English!” The book did very well, as sometimes happens when you trust your instincts. So the Scurr book has a connection to Burton and also to The Secret Commonwealth, another 17th century book, similarly situated in the gray zone between science and imagination. I like those undefined spaces. I brought out a book that sadly absolutely nobody bought called Gaslight, a wonderful essay on the twilight zone of the 19th century by a German scholar.
Danielle Dutton: Regarding the three things, I thought you answered it before, Marty, when you were saying what was sort of making the context…
Martin Riker: I would even say something like: “Sometimes you just need a break from living authors.” And then sometimes you go away from living authors for too long and you need them back. There is a different kind of liveliness to the experience of publishing someone who is going to give readings and so on versus an author from the past whose legacy you need to revitalize in some way. It’s a whole different experience. The activity of publishing even new translations is quite different from new American writers. I value that variety quite a lot. There are all kinds of aesthetic reasons why I think keeping the list’s variety is important, but also publishing is what we do with our lives. It is how we spend our time.
Danielle Dutton: I think we have said no more French books for a while? Editing translations can be just a huge amount of work, hugely time-consuming, and satisfying too. But because this is a thing that Marty and I do in our spare time, we will sometimes just feel like “No, no more translations for like two years or something.” And then inevitably someone sends us an amazing translation that we have to do.
Martin Riker: Dorothy only does two books a year. That is actually a very interesting constraint because not only does it mean that we can’t publish everything we would like to, but it means that we have to think in terms of: “We can’t do anymore French books for a while.” The list is so small that it would start to feel like a French list, and we don’t want it to feel that narrow, which is probably not an issue you face, Edwin, because you publish so many more books.
Danielle Dutton: In fact, I will even add, coming out of working at Dalkey… Sorry to interrupt. Just to say that something I felt at that moment in time was that New Directions was mostly doing translations and Dalkey was mostly doing translations and then there was the NYRB Classics series. And these were my favorite publishers, so I was like, “Where am I supposed to publish a book?” And so, it is very important for me that Dorothy is regularly doing debuts by younger American writers, and that that space is held open.
Edwin Frank: It is hard work!
Danielle Dutton: It is exciting!
Edwin Frank: Yes, very exciting!
Martin Riker: Should we see if people have questions?
Audience Question: It is all very hard work. I was wondering, given what some people say regarding the future of literature, what are the processes and attitudes and your personal theories about digital literature?
Martin Riker: Edwin, do you want to take a stab at that?
Edwin Frank: Well, there was the point where it seems that nobody knew what was going to happen with eBooks. For a while, we had a series where we were doing actually new books as eBooks. It didn’t have a particular success. Soon enough, it became clear that eBooks were pretty much limited to books that people liked to read compulsively and/or did not want other people to see that they were reading. We have one wonderful book, another of our outliers. It is a Swedish book by Frans Bengtsson called Röde Orm—in English The Long Ships—a historical novel about the Vikings but with a great sense of comedy along with all the drinking and swording. That book, introduced by Michael Chabon, has done very well as an eBook. But though the eBook market is limited it is not negligible. It’s crucial to buy e-rights and not leave them to the likes of Open Road, not least because it’s hard copies that get reviewed, which means that when you publish a title without having the e-rights effectively you are serving as the publicist for whoever does have them, who siphons off your sales.
Martin Riker: eBooks are not really a new thing anymore. We do eBooks with all of our books. In a class I teach on publishing, I had a student from the Middle-East who made a very good argument on the value of eBooks. She said growing up the only way she could get access to the books she wanted to read was electronically. Ever since she said this, I have been pro-eBooks even though I don’t read them.
Danielle Dutton: Why is there no way to make them not ugly? I don’t understand.
Martin Riker: There are other issues with the digital universe. One of them being that books are now files that can be digitally printed or electronically read, so they don’t have to go out of print anymore. I would like to think that all of us are dynamic enough in our publishing practice that what we publish and how we publish could respond to changes in the world. But it does become a question, what does it really mean to keep a book in print. Does it just mean to have a copy on a shelf somewhere in a library that nobody knows exists? Or does it mean that you are actually building an audience for that book? Obviously I hope it means the latter. But what it legally means matters to anyone building a backlist, for example.
In terms of format, audiobook is a much more recent pressure. Audiobooks have been around for many decades, but it is only in the last couple of years that audio rights have gone crazy. I found that out the hard way because I had not included audio rights in our contract, and suddenly, two of our authors had agents inform me that their audiobooks were coming out the same time as our print. And unlike eBooks, which we have the rights to, the audiobook is a competing edition. Somebody that is going to buy that audiobook is not going to buy our book, or at least that is my opinion. But this is a whole other topic.
Audience Question: I am a fan of Erika Wurth. I don’t know if you are familiar with her writing. She is a Native American writer and she writes a very kind of aggressive novel. I think that there are a lot of backlashes from publishers because they don’t know how to sell that. There is also a backlash from the perspective of the book critics because they are not sure how to talk about it. So, I am curious, as we are a room full of scholars and critics. How has the conversation around innovative female literature evolved or shifted over the past maybe ten years, not only with Dorothy but as an entire ecosystem? Do you see more innovative female voices being picked up by scholars and being written about in the same way that Gaddis and Gass are being praised and written about?
Danielle Dutton: That is such a good question. I actually know more about this from serving on academic search committees than from being a publisher. I would say right now no, they are not being picked up, with some specific exceptions. So, when I’m serving on search committees, we see all these applications come through and we see what younger scholars are writing about. There seems to be a very serious contemporary canon, which really bugs me. I feel like there shouldn’t be a canon of the contemporary. If you are a scholar of the contemporary, there should be more fluid or dynamic action in what you’re looking at or where you’re looking. You should be seeking out people on margins of all sorts, including the margins of the publishing world. On these committees, I feel like you see the same ten contemporary books being constantly written about or dissertated about. At least in fiction, based on my experience. But every once in a while, there will be a scholar who is not doing that, which is always extremely exciting. Or what happens is that there will be the one innovative female writer that we take up and that’s the only one and everyone talks about that one person. There’s one “small press” or “innovative” writer who gets to be talked about, when really there is a healthy ecosystem of independent presses publishing an almost scary amount of really exciting work right now. So speaking only about the contemporary, and fiction, I feel like… it could happen, that conversation could be more wide-ranging? And it would be great. I have hope.
Audience Question: Thanks for the cool panel. You talked a lot about communities of writers. Who did the readers turn out to be that maybe were different from the readers you imagined? Who are the readers you want to read that are not yet reading? How do you imagine the communities of readers in relationship to the practice of the communities of writers that you imagined? By the way, Vikings are fun!
Martin Riker: I would say that one interesting development in the time – two decades – that I have been in publishing is that we went from complaining that publishers never hear from readers to complaining that we hear too much! I mean all the Amazon reviews and so on, which can be as dispiriting for a publisher as for a writer. Of course that’s only one aspect of our newly visible world. On the other hand, our experience of being able to be in touch with Dorothy’s devoted readers has been wonderful. Dorothy’s readers are really smart and interested, and the feeling of community we have with them is a large part of why we keep publishing.
Danielle Dutton: I actually think you still don’t know who your readers are as a writer or a publisher, really. Such a small percentage of people are going on places like Goodreads or Amazon to write a review. I think it’s one of the fun things about publishing. It’s kind of a complete mystery where books travel to.
Edwin Frank: One thing I never wanted to do with the series was publish what I thought of as golden oldies, books nostalgically recalled by an older Anglophilic readership. Though then again, there are extraordinarily original writers who have over the years found shelter under the umbrella of Anglophile nostalgia: Sylvia Townsend Warner I mentioned before, but even more Ivy Compton-Burnett who I think is really an intense and important, unappreciated presence, in the history of English literature and modernist literature in general. Nathalie Sarraute writes excitedly about Ivy Compton-Burnett, and a contemporary English writer that I am publishing, Gwendoline Riley, is very much in the tradition of Compton-Burnett. Another English writer of impeccable and astonishing originality is Henry Green, an author who we also share with Dalkey.
As to our readership, I have been happily surprised by how many young people there seem to be, just as I have been surprised at how the idea that an old book can be real news has taken hold. In 2007 or so I recall The Nation devoting the lead article in the back of the issue to our reprint of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley. That sort of thing just hadn’t happened before—that kind of prominence for that kind of book—and it struck me then as representing a qualitative change in the nature of book reviewing. But what is it about? I am still wondering. I usually explain it by saying that as the number of readers has contracted—as more and more people turn to TV and podcasts and so on for information and entertainment—the level of sophistication, of seriousness, of serious readers has risen and such readers are acutely conscious of themselves as readers, as an almost threatened species. They become invested in the tradition of reading, you could say, hoping to sustain it. This is a new thing and it isn’t necessarily an endgame.
Audience Question: In terms of helping the readership understand and be attracted to these books by authors they figured they don’t know; I am curious especially about the way that NYRB chooses who should introduce or write the introductory essay for the books. Are there any particular stories or dynamics around wanting somebody and not being able to get them? Have you had trouble assigning who should be that person? It seems like an interesting negotiation. Even though I don’t think you at Dorothy have introductory essays or other paratextual framing, I am curious about how you make those decisions at NYRBooks.
Edwin Frank: To begin with, the idea was to have the books be introduced by writers. I wanted introductions that would supply the reader with some necessary background information, sure, but more importantly would pull out or point out things in the book that were central and unique to it. The piece wouldn’t have to be exclusively laudatory. Good books can have very bad habits, after all. That’s what gives them the individual presence we look to a book for. What makes them alive. I wanted the introduction to suggest the life of the book, not, as is often the case with introductions written by professors for students, to provide a reading, an interpretation. Better a sighting. Best of all pieces like Gass’s pieces where a great writer responds in full to a work that matters to that writer. As to translations, increasingly I have turned to the translator as the person likely to know and appreciate the work best – the person who can also provide that background information that is so necessary.
Martin Riker: Especially in translation.
Edwin Frank: Yes, in translation and so on.
Martin Riker: We have done a couple of introductions.
Danielle Dutton: Yes, with reprints mostly. I’m even thinking of blurbs being… Take for instance The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink. (Danielle Dutton presents the book to the audience). She’d published nothing before this. The whole lore of this book is that Jonathan Franzen got it published, though Jonathan Franzen had nothing to do with it. It came in over the transom. I still remember the query email. It was like: “I am an obscure writer of truly stunning obscurity.” That was the sentence that she started with. And that sentence alone was so fantastic, I was like, I am instantly looking at this person’s manuscript. She was penpals with Jonathan Franzen because they are both birders and she does environmental work, I think. So we did ask her to ask him for a blurb, and then we published this book by an unknown writer with Jonathan Franzen’s blurb on the cover and that sort of shaped the discussion in a peculiar way, where people were like: “Wait, what is this?”
Martin Riker: Can I tell the other half of the story?
Danielle Dutton: Yes.
Martin Riker: So, the other half is that this cover doesn’t have any copy. It only has blurbs on the front and back. I sent the book to Keith Gessen at n+1 because I thought he would like it. And he liked it and he wrote a blurb that said: “Who the hell is Nell Zink? She claims to be this person…” and went on to say these funny provocative things. And that was really the feeling that we had in reading the manuscript. Like who the hell is this person? So the minute we got that blurb, we decided that would be the entire publicity campaign: “Who the hell is Nell Zink?”
Danielle Dutton: And it worked so well!
Martin Riker: It worked incredibly well. The New Yorker piece was all: “Who the hell is Nell Zink?”
I think we have to wrap up. Thank you all.