Other Press

Super Bowl XLVI: Other Press takes on Beacon Press

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In advance of Super Bowl XLVI, which will see the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in Indianapolis on Sunday, New York-based publisher Other Press is pleased to announce a promotion in cooperation with Boston-based Beacon Press: a wager that stakes each press to the fate of their hometown team.

Terrie Akers, Manager of Online Publicity and Social Media for Other Press, says of the wager, “I’m thrilled to be working with our friends at Beacon Press on this promotion. It’s always rewarding to collaborate with other independent presses, and to have a bit of fun at the same time. And it’s particularly rewarding when it’s so painfully obvious that the other team is going to lose.”

If the Giants win on Sunday, Beacon Press agrees to promote two Other Press titles for the following week, utilizing their website, newsletter, and social media channels. In honor of the victor, both presses will promote a giveaway of those two titles, with winners to be selected at random at the end of the week.

“I think it’s great that Beacon is basically volunteering to do my job for me for a week,” says Akers, adding, “Maybe I’ll take a vacation.”

If hell freezes over and the Patriots win, the terms would be reversed.

The wager was born at a dinner during the Digital Book World Conference earlier this month, where Other Press Associate Publisher Paul Kozlowski engaged in some healthy banter about the Big Game with Beacon’s Tom Hallock and Alyssa Hassan. They decided to make things interesting.

Since the internal announcement earlier this week, the Other Press office has been abuzz with talk of the match up. Marketers have become stat analysts. Instead of calling agents and authors, editors are haunting the phone lines of sports talk radio call-in shows. From the production office, chants of “You can’t spell ELITE without ELI!” can be heard. In fact, the publicity team was too busy poring over the latest updates on Rob Gronkowski’s health to write this press release—it was composed by Linda from the insurance office next door. (Ed. note—Thanks, Linda!)

“I thought it was just a friendly bet,” says Kozlowski. “I thought we would maybe wager a cup of chowder, Manhattan vs. New England. The whole thing has spiraled out of control.”

Details of the giveaway will be posted online after the game. In the meantime, follow the conversation on Twitter (with the hashtag #pubbowl) and Facebook.

Other Press is an independent publisher of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from America and around the world—non-fiction and fiction—that explore how psychic, cultural, historical, and literary shifts inform our vision of the world and of each other. Find us on Twitter (@otherpress) and Facebook (facebook.com/otherpress).

Beacon Press is an independent publisher of serious non-fiction and fiction, emphasizing religion, history, current affairs, political science, gay/lesbian/gender studies, education, African-American studies, women’s studies, child and family issues and nature and the environment. Find them on Twitter (@beaconpressbks) and Facebook (facebook.com/beaconpress).

The Perks of Being a Novelist

by Jan-Phillip Sendker

There are many marvelous things about being a novelist. You can daydream all day long and call it a profession. You only need a pen and a piece of paper to work. You can do it wherever you want: in bed, on the beach, in a bar (in my case: mostly in my office at home).

For me, though, one of the best things about being a novelist has been the opportunity to meet some of the most wonderful and interesting people I have ever encountered. These people, like novelists, are dreamers―because they believe in the magical power of the written word.

They are people who work very long hours. People who work very long hours and never complain. People who work very long hours, never complain, and don’t make much money. They have various reasons for being in their line of business. Becoming rich is not one of them.

They are salespeople who care so much about what they sell that they don’t sell everything to everybody. They are salespeople who have a healthy distrust toward things that sell too well.

They travel a lot and rarely leave their hometown. They can talk for hours about characters and places, which only exist in their minds. They can get lost in letters. In letters!

They are booksellers.

I am a writer who does a lot of reading tours in Germany and Switzerland; therefore I have had the privilege of meeting a lot of independent booksellers who have kindly invited me to their stores.

Usually we have wonderful evenings together. They spread the word and thanks to their work, dozens―and sometimes hundreds―of customers come and listen to me instead of staying home. Sometimes the booksellers get caught up in a book so much that they organize a reading during vacation time and wonder why only a few people show up. Or they stage an event on the night of a major soccer game and are surprised and utterly disappointed when they spend the evening alone with the author. It has all happened to me―and I loved it. I have spent so many evenings in their company, had so many after-reading dinners and bottles of wine and enjoyed every second of it, because it doesn’t happen too often that you meet people who are humble but also so passionate about what they do.

As a reader and a book buyer myself, I find that there is something old fashioned and at the same time very reassuring about booksellers: they want you to come to their store, when you could stay home and order online. They want you to talk to them, when you could just press a button instead. They want you to pay the price a book is worth, when you could go and hunt for the deepest discount.

It is said that they are a dying breed. Threatened by extinction.

I don’t think so. Call me a romantic. Call me a dreamer. But I believe in the power of their passion and in the loyalty of their customers. I have met too many independent booksellers who are surviving, even thriving, in a niche they toiled to carve out and sustain.

Now that my book is being published in America, I must count my blessings once again. I look forward to meeting some very interesting people there.

That is one of the wonderful things about being a novelist.

Jan-Phillip Sendker is the author of the novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.

——————-

This article originally appeared in the January 2012 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

‘Lamb’ wins Flaherty-Dunnan Prize

Last night at a ceremony in New York, Bonnie Nadzam was awarded the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize for her debut novel Lamb. The Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize is awarded to the best debut novel of the year. The author of the winning book receives $10,000 and the other shortlisted authors receive $1,000 each. The award is given annually at The Center for Fiction’s Benefit and Awards Dinner. The Prize was originally established in 2005 as the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize. More information about the award, as well as a list of finalist and previous winners, can be found here.

On A Mission

by Judith Gurewich

I always agree with my books. It wouldn’t cross my mind to publish works whose perspectives or stories I can’t embrace. This feels particularly important when it comes to politics, economics, social issues or even philosophy, but fiction is no exception. Publishing is, to me, a very intimate enterprise. My books represent me as much as I represent them.

But there is something else at work that I have become aware of only recently. My books reflect less who I am, as I think I know myself, than they introduce me to who I have become—sometimes behind my own back. I had no idea, for example, that I could be passionate about a book about Cambodia during its direst years. I had to overcome not only my squeamishness, but also my conviction that the banality of evil knows no borders and therefore doesn’t require particular scrutiny. (Horrors are the same everywhere.)  But that is the transformative power of literature: The Elimination, the fascinating autobiography of the Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who escaped the Khmer Rouge camps, is written with such intelligence, sensitivity, and style that it allows you to both bear the worst and surrender to a world you understand nothing about. It made me realize that while the mechanisms of evil are universal, what triggers the awful processes of dehumanization, and the rationale that is constructed to carry it through, are never the same. 

The boundary between what happens around us and inside us is more porous than it ever was; now, more than ever, the personal truly is political, and vice versa. Good books must reflect but also affect this trend, by feeding our souls and enlarging our vision. I, for one, want to believe that quality is not subjective, that even colors and tastes must be discussed, and that critical thought ought to be distinguished from mere opinion (to which, as we well know, everyone is entitled). Paradoxically, the less green I become as a publisher, the more narrow-minded I become. My mission statement today can be reduced to a one-liner: unless a book provides, at some level or another, a real electric shock that reveals something you didn’t know, either about yourself or the world around you, then forget it!

This is not to say that all the books I’m publishing these days must be sad, serious, or full of foreboding. Quite the contrary! Take The Path of Hope by Stephane Hessel (who is ninety years old) and Edgar Morin (ninety-five years old), for example. This is an appetizing menu for a better world, “a political path to national salvation.” In his invigorating foreword to The Path of Hope, Jeff Madrick picks up right away how this little tract provides Occupy Wall Street with the perfect outline to support its cause.

Age, for sure, is no deterrent to a defiant spirit. Take Benoite Groult’s inspiring and lively autobiography My Escape, which covers almost the whole of the twentieth century in France (and a bit of the twenty-first, too). Gorgeous and elegant at ninety-one years old, Benoite tells us how it felt to be a young woman in Paris when you could neither vote nor request custody of your own children, without even realizing that something was wrong. “I am a ‘young’ feminist,” Benoite told me over lunch in Paris, between oysters and white wine. “I started working for the women’s movement only when I was in my fifties.” What a delight this book is!  As a novelist of women’s fiction with a subtle yet highly persuasive feminist message, Benoite Groult has sold millions of copies; and you can be sure that her own story has all the gusto, the intelligence, and the erotic power of her fiction. She is truly a model of feminine resilience, optimism, and perseverance. Without her, France would still think that all lawyers, doctors, and professors are men! (She feminized the language, earning her the damnation of the Academie Francaise.)

When it comes to fiction, I deplore the fact that my “narrow” mission statement seems to attract primarily works in translation, as if foreign writers were more in tune with my determination to apply shock therapy. My latest acquisition, The Flowers of War by Chinese author Geling Yan (which has been turned into a movie with Christian Bale), defies the imagination, punctures our prejudices, and teaches us history while at the same time nourishing our primitive craving for romance. We need more books like that in America: novels that reach far inside us while bringing in what has been kept out (often for bad reasons, as I have recently learned), that grab us from the get-go, making us forget we are reading (so often I catch myself watching myself read, not a good sign) while subtly but surely kicking us out of our  comfort zones.

Judith Gurewich is the Publisher of Other Press.

————————-

This article originally appeared in the Holiday 2011 issue of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

‘Lamb’ shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize

Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb has been shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York on December 6.

The Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize is awarded to the best debut novel of the year. The author of the winning book receives $10,000 and the other shortlisted authors receive $1,000 each. The award is given annually at The Center for Fiction’s Benefit and Awards Dinner. The Prize was originally established in 2005 as the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize.

From Art Prophets to Art Profiteers

By Richard Polsky 

My new book, The Art Prophets, is the story of eleven visionary art dealers and tastemakers whose ideas and discoveries helped define the art world as we now know it. Each of these individuals got involved with art primarily because it thrilled them. Prosperity, while obviously welcomed, was of secondary importance; if it happened it happened. With the arrival of the Gagosian Gallery, and their winner-take-all strategy, financial success became the new raison d’être. Now that Larry Gagosian has announced he will show Damien Hirst’s Spot paintings, simultaneously at all eleven of his international outposts, the colossus of art dealers has upped the bar again and invented a new category: the Art Profit.

The roots of the Gagosian’s philosophy can be traced back to the great Leo Castelli. During the early sixties Castelli invented the concept of the “satellite” gallery. Due to growing demand for his top-selling artists—Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella—he was under constant duress from galleries and collectors across the country to make the work available locally and share the wealth. Castelli’s farsighted solution was to set up satellite dealerships around America. Basically, the best gallery in each respective city was offered the “Castelli Franchise.” In real terms, that meant access to his most salable artists. The result was a steady stream of income for Castelli and the further dissemination of his artists in the “provinces”: places like Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis.

Larry Gagosian has carried this paradigm a step further. Rather than allow his cash-cow artists, such as John Currin, Richard Prince, and Ed Ruscha, to hook up with rival dealers across the world, he simply decided to open Gagosian branches in global capitals of culture, ranging from Paris to Rome to London. Not only does this bring in more revenue, but it also satisfies the ambitions of his high-powered artists to increase their international presence. By organizing Hirst shows at each of his spaces, Gagosian has effectively eliminated the middleman.

A byproduct of the new corporate mentality in the art business is the so-called branding of artists as if they were tubes of toothpaste. You’re no longer considered big-time if you don’t have products that reinforce your brand. Takashi Murakami designs expensive ladies’ handbags for Louis Vuitton. Damien Hirst executes T-shirts that reproduce his well-publicized $100-million platinum and diamond-encrusted human skull. And Jeff Koons creates large-edition vases, shaped like his famous giant puppy dog covered in living flowers, that once stole the show at Rockefeller Center.

The trend of artists designing consumer goods goes back to the eighties when street artist Keith Haring created a series of funky watches for Swatch. Chuck Close designed an area rug with his famous self-portrait affixed to its surface. Donald Sultan was commissioned to design a deck of playing cards. Back in the day, these products were created in the spirit of fun and with a sense of humor. Now, it’s all about marketing. With Gagosian controlling most of our major (read expensive) living artists and seemingly opening new spaces like The Gap used to open stores, it really makes you wonder whether the commodification of art and Gagosian’s empire is a house of cards, or are we really looking at the future.

With the publication of The Art Prophets, it’s my hope that readers will pay particular attention to the first chapter on Ivan Karp, Leo Castelli, and Pop art. Just as this chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the stories that follow, Castelli helped create a category of art that can be seen as the origin of the Art Profit.

Richard Polsky is the author of I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon), I Bought Andy Warhol, and The Art Market Guide (1995–1998). He began his professional career in the art world thirty-two years ago and in 1984 founded Acme Art, where he showed the work of such artists as Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Bill Traylor. Since 1989 he has been a private dealer specializing in works by postwar artists, with an emphasis on Pop Art. He lives in Sausalito, California.

——————————————-

This article originally appeared in the October 2011 edition of the Other Press Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

At Balzac’s Table

By Anka Muhlstein

For months at a time, Balzac worked sixteen hours a day. He would go to bed at seven, get up at midnight, and work till early afternoon without a break.  During these periods, he hardly ate: a few pears perhaps (he had a passion for pears), a chicken wing, and of course very black coffee in huge quantities, which allowed “his ideas to get marching like the battalions of Napoleon’s army before a battle.” He was convinced—and he repeated this over and over again—that abstemiousness was essential for the creative artist. In his rather bizarre medical thinking, he considered that the effort of digestion wore out the brain. (I should add that he also thought it essential not to go too long without a woman lest the same brain go soft.) But let’s go back to food. Balzac the man did not eat, but Balzac the author was obsessed with food—a first in French literature. I wondered why the topic never came up before Balzac, and to find out the reason I started reading and rereading his novels and ended up with a book of my own.

I realized that restaurants hardly existed in Paris before Balzac’s time, but by the time he was writing his masterpieces they numbered in the thousands. Suddenly everybody discussed food. What were the best places to meet for dinner became a question of the utmost interest, and food became a literary subject. All sorts of restaurant guides appeared. In my view, the best one of the era is The Human Comedy. Balzac was a regular at some forty restaurants, and he sends off his characters into the most refined establishments as well as into the most lowly ones. He lingers over the menu and never neglects the element of coziness or cost in rating them. The result is an ideal Michelin Guide of gastronomical delights or disasters in nineteenth-century Paris.

Balzac himself was an early devotee of authentic cuisine. His gastronomical ideal consisted of fresh ingredients with no added spices, and no complicated sauces. He wanted vegetables picked straight out of the garden, poultry raised in the backyard, stock simmered for hours and thickened only by the gelatin extracted from the bones. Needless to say, he did not think much of Parisian cooks. True gastronomes lived in the provinces, where a simple dish of haricots verts could be exquisite and a modest omelette divine. Still the omelette had to be done carefully, and Balzac deems that of Dr. Rougon, one of his gourmand characters, sufficiently worthy to be the only recipe to appear in his work.

“An omelette is more delicate when the whites and yolks of the egg are not beaten together with the brutality that cooks usually put into that operation. According to the doctor, the white should be beaten until it resembles foam, and the yolk introduced a little at a time, and you should not use a frying pan but a cagnard made of porcelain or earthenware. The cagnard is a sort of platter with four feet so that, when it is put on the stove, the air circulates underneath and prevents the heat from cracking it.” Even if you do not have a cagnard, try it. It is delectable and proof that Balzac was a genius!

Anka Muhlstein was born in Paris in 1935. She has published biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Cavelier de La Salle, and Astolphe de Custine, a study on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria, and a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart. She is currently writing a volume on Proust as a reader. She has won two prizes from the Académie Française and the Goncourt Prize for Biography. She and her husband, Louis Begley, have written a book on Venice, Venice for Lovers. They live in New York.

—————————————————

This article was originally published in the October 2011 issue of the Other Press Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Other Press Night at Greenlight Bookstore

On October 24 at 7:30pm, join Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich and authors Sarah Bakewell, Lawrence Douglas, and Bonnie Nadzam for readings and a wine reception at Greenlight Bookstore.

Sarah Bakewell, author of the NBCC Award-winning How to Live, was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogs rare book collections for the National Trust.

Lawrence Douglas, author of The Vices, teaches at Amherst College. He is the author of The Catastrophist, The Memory of Judgment, and coauthor of a book of humor, Sense and Nonsensibility. His writing has appeared in the The New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and Harper’s. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Douglas lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Bonnie Nadzam, author of the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize finalist Lamb, studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned her PhD from the University of Southern California. She taught and served for two years as the Daehler Fellow in Creative Writing at Colorado College. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review,  Story Quarterly, and others.

Monday, October 24, 7:30 PM

Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton Street (at South Portland), Brooklyn, NY 11217

Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

Join us at the Brooklyn Book Festival at Brooklyn Borough Hall on Sunday, September 18! For the full schedule and more information, visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org.

Other Press booth #134

Stop by our booth and meet the Other Press team! Peruse a selection of books, totebags, and more. Booths are open from 10am to 6pm.

“Water, Water, Everywhere” featuring Michael Crummey
Noon, in the Borough Hall Community Room

A source of sustenance, a way to travel, or a force of isolation and destruction? Michael Crummey (Galore), Gillian Royes (The Goat Woman of Largo Bay), and Martha Southgate (The Taste of Salt) read and discuss their novels where water plays a major part in the setting and also contributes to the failures and successes of the characters.

Call and Response

Setting a Story in Motion

by Bonnie Nadzam

Midway through writing Lamb, my heart misgave me. I knew, could feel as a sort of misaligned bone in my rib cage, that there was something wrongheaded if not dark-hearted in the way I was writing it. In fact, I was not unlike Lamb’s manipulative and deluded protagonist, who tells stories to convince himself and others that abducting an eleven-year-old girl is in her best interest. There was violence in my initial impulse—a thinly disguised attempt to protect and polish my ego. The draft I was working on was misleading, and in a very particular and insidious way. It was, at that time, a version of Lamb that pointed many fingers at questionable human behavior, never acknowledging my own capacity for and history of speaking and acting in the ways David Lamb, Tommie, and Linnie often do. I put the manuscript away for a summer and didn’t write a word. These were days of sitting still, of talking to friends and family, of trying not to flinch when peering into my own heart.

If you can’t learn about an author’s personality by the formal elements of the novels he or she writes, you can perhaps read, indirectly, something of the author by the novel’s implied author (a term coined by Wayne Booth that is distinctive from author and narrator and by which he means the persona and values we attribute to a real-life author, based on the literature itself). In fact, I would even argue that you can sometimes tell what an author wants his or her implied author to look like. Not a bad way to establish a cult following, to sell books, or to unconsciously reinforce the person you wish you were, rather than the person you are. The former may be particular to a contemporary market, but the latter motive is, I suspect, fairly timeless.

There are so many ways to play each other and ourselves false. What exactly was I attempting to do by writing Lamb? Whom or what was I serving as I wrote? I want to believe that whatever my aim, it had little or nothing to do with any of the ways stories can be told to hurt and destroy. Such is the practice that David Lamb, Linnie, and Tommie spend a tremendous amount of time and energy learning to master. They are each so good at it. And it’s a talent that seems to spread like fire.

The following September, I threw away that entire first draft of Lamb. It was hundreds of pages. And by “threw away” I mean deleted permanently from the world and all computers. But what became increasingly clear to me as I worked on a new manuscript, with a “new” approach, was the slyness of that ego, the endless opportunity in three hundred pages to deliberately and then unconsciously sneak in an adjective, a single word, here or there, suggesting worlds of authorial backstory reinforcing the story I’ve long told myself about who I am. Cultural values, religious beliefs, political opinions, special knowledge, eating habits…

I’m not quite sure what the difference is between this matter of consciously and unconsciously creating an implied author as I describe it, and the perfected aesthetic objectivity some attribute to, for example, Shakespeare. Perhaps there is none. But there seems to me some subtle and significant difference between the two. I’m not thinking so much here about artistic skill, but, more broadly,  what it is we’re aiming for in this neverending dialogue of and about literature, and how we get in our own way. After all, all kinds of things are set in motion when a person tells and/or responds to a story—some willfully, others more mysteriously. Especially when we’re telling stories without noticing we’re doing so.

Bonnie Nadzam was born in Cleveland, went to high school in suburban Chicago, and has moved continually westward since then. She studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned an MA and PhD from the University of Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Callaloo, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She taught at Colorado College, where she served for two years as the Daehler Fellowin Creative Writing. She is married to her childhood love and lives with him in the Rocky Mountains.

___________________________________________

This article originally appeared in the September 2011 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.