In memory of Victor Navasky (1932–2023)
Edwin Frank, born in Colorado in 1960, is the editor of New York Review Books and NYRB Classics. Since 1999, he and a handful of colleagues have published more than five hundred titles noteworthy for their excellence, latitude and cosmopolitanism. The series began by excavating out-of-print gems—in literature, history, criticism, travel writing, essays, memoir—but grew to include original work. The books stand out for the caliber of the prose and the geographical variation of the narrative settings: the dusty colonial settlements of eighteenth-century Paraguay; the Paris of Danton and Balzac; the seedy side of 1920s Buenos Aires; the restless streets of prewar Tokyo; the hell of Stalingrad; the Sicilian towns ruled by the Mafia; the heady Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s. NYRB also publishes children’s books, comics and poetry. At a time when Manhattan’s corporate publishers are being swallowed by private equity firms, dispensing with distinguished senior editors and chasing fads, NYRB remains a refuge for the discerning reader. The following conversation was conducted via email, and has been edited for length and style.
—Scott Sherman
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Scott Sherman: You’ve published more than five hundred books. Why, in 1999, did you choose Edmund Wilson’s edition of Chekhov’s late stories as the first book in the series?
Edwin Frank: It was a small nod, a tribute, to Anchor Books, the first trade paperback imprint in the States, founded postwar by Jason Epstein, which had included the book, and a tribute too to the spirit of Edmund Wilson, the legendary critic, who put the selection together to show another Chekhov from the familiar miniature portraitist of the unhappy soul, a Chekhov alert to the social and political questions of his day as well as to the impoverished language with which his characters seek to make sense of the collapse within and without.
SS: My favorite book in the series is by the Belgian polymath and China expert Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. Of Leys’s 1977 book Chinese Shadows, Ian Buruma has written: “It’s a collection of essays in which he totally demolishes the romantic myth of the Maoist experiment. This was especially devastating in France, because Paris was the centre of intellectual Maoism.” The Hall of Uselessness has sections on “Quixotism,” literature, China, the sea, the university and marginalia. It’s a book without a boring page. From his essay “Writers and Money”: “Steinbeck remarked: ‘The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.’” Have you had much success with the Leys?
EF: That’s one of my favorites, too, and it comes with a story attached. The Australian publisher of the book had the rights to sell and sent it to me for consideration. I let her know that I was a longtime reader of Leys and liked his work a lot, but it really was unlikely we’d be able to take on such a big book: 572 pages. Then I started reading—the wonderful demolition of Christopher Hitchens’s superficial book on Mother Teresa, the powerful and discomfiting biographical portrait of Andre Gide—and before long I had decided we couldn’t not publish the book, limited as sales might be. Here we had a writer who could write, who had an extraordinary historical and cultural range and a sensibility all his own and a moral intelligence to match. Not only did we publish the book, we added two essays to it from the French edition—essays on Michaux and Barthes (a savage send-up of his bien-pensant Maoism). We published it and, quite quickly and against all odds, it did very well.
SS: James Salter observed: “Journalists cannot expect their work to last. Even Dreiser’s or Hemingway’s articles are of little interest to us. … Autobiography, though, is another matter, as is memoir.” Those words appeared in Salter’s preface to A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals (1959), a memoir of his student sojourn in Paris in 1926 and 1927. Are you in agreement with Salter?
EF: Well, it does seem to me that everything that makes journalism of the moment conspires against subsequent accessibility. The reader of later years has to come at it with a split focus, willing to know (or not know) what was going on then (this detail of that war, negotiation, etc.), while enjoying the presentation as a feat in its own right. That’s a rarefied kind of reading, close to reading poetry. I’ve been approached a number of times about reprinting Murray Kempton’s columns, but for a reader to understand some of his pieces from the 1950s now would require almost as much annotation as text.
SS: Murray Kempton was a legendary cult figure in New York journalism from the 1950s to the 1990s. As a columnist for various city newspapers, and the New York Review—but never the gray Times—he tried to channel the spirit of Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Quite often he succeeded. When he didn’t, his baroque style dragged him down. In 2004 you republished Kempton’s Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, my favorite book on left-wing American radicalism. In 1973 he published a book about the Black Panthers, The Briar Patch, which I found hard going. Did you ever consider it?
EF: You know, I haven’t read The Briar Patch. He was a fancy writer, at a time when columnists were meant to have depth and character, not just a political line, and you can see the appeal of a style that was, as you say, an improbably baroque contribution to the meat and potatoes of, say, Newsday, where he ended up. But decades later the pieces read like a tissue of lost allusions. I’d be curious how he responded to the Panthers. He published a review of Do the Right Thing when the movie came out that saw it as an affront to the honor of black Americans, associated by Spike Lee, he felt, with layabouts like his main character and boom boxes. Not the way the movie is commonly viewed.
SS: For many years I lived in Istanbul, where the bookshops are full of Turkish-language editions of classic and canonical authors. These books are affordable and stylish, and published by extremely small presses. In the U.S., there seems to be less interest among publishers in rescuing old books. When you started NYRB, who was your competition? And who is your competition now?
EF: Really, there was very little competition then, though some overlap in what I had in mind to do and what New Directions and Dalkey Archive were up to, and to this day I regret bowing out of the tiny bidding war for Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, with Dalkey. The Modern Library was interested as I recall in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica—the book had appeared on a list that their board assembled of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century—but the lovely agent Craig Tenney favored us when we undertook to also publish the two volumes of Hughes’s unfinished trilogy about Hitler and the coming of war. New Directions and Dalkey in any case were focused on modernist and postmodernist books, and ND of course on new work, which at that point we were not doing at all. The Modern Library was slowly sinking into publishing titles for course adoption.
Now things have changed. There are lots of houses big and small doing work old and new in translation and, especially after the pandemic, during which the corporate houses woke up again to the worth of the backlist, lots of interest in reprints and rediscoveries.
SS: This recent interest from other publishers—is it because NYRB showed that it can be done well, and profitably?
EF: They’ve taken note of it. When Penguin in England comes out with Sylvia Townsend Warner in quantity after years of indifference, well, I’m sure they are aware we have been publishing her for awhile.
But the sort of thing NYRB does is a kind of publishing, of older books in new, more portable guises (old wine in new bottles, not what Jesus ordered), that goes back to the Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and the Temple and Oxford Classics, the Modern Library and Anchor Books, which even appropriated Manutius’s logo of dolphin and anchor. That kind of publishing resurfaces regularly, both as a way of trafficking in properties of reliable interest (they have at least the interest of having interested people) and of scanning the horizon of the past for clues about the future.
SS: When you were starting out, did you consider Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics as competition?
EF: Very little, since the last thing I wanted to do was to publish editions of canonical classics like Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Then again, I have always envied Penguin its editions of books like the Rig Veda, and Oxford has a nice series of relatively new Zola translations which I would be happy to publish, and there are wonderful writers like Wilkie Collins who tend to slip in and out of print, as if they disdained to be anything so pedestrian as simply available.
SS: In the early 1990s, I was an assistant in the European history division of Oxford University Press in New York. One afternoon the latest issue of the New Republic arrived, and one of our books was reviewed there! I was 25. It seemed like a world-historical event. Holding the magazine, I dashed into the office of my boss, who hissed at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke: “The New Republic doesn’t sell books. The Nation doesn’t sell books. Only the Times sells books!” These days, my friends in New York publishing tell me that the Times has lost some of its power to sell books. Is that so?
EF: A review in the Times still sells more books than reviews elsewhere. Notable, however, is that the Times has stopped doing regular reviews in the daily paper, and is now running listicles: Fifteen Spring Nonfiction Titles for Every Interest! Fifteen Novels to Read Now! … and the like. This is not criticism—what could it be called? A content alert?—and a climate where the “newspaper of record” no longer deems it worthwhile to feature some remote semblance of criticism is not a good one for literature.
The new attention to categories like “international fiction,” which seems a step forward, is not. It represents exactly the same stereotyping that used to dismiss “books in translation” as the vegetables on the menu.
SS: But some of those airy features in the Times’s book section spotlight your books. A recent quiz cited your author Olivia Manning…
EF: Superficiality has its virtues!
SS: The New York Times Book Review is a curiosity for a few reasons: 1) When I started reading it, I wondered why writers like Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and James Wolcott were not regular reviewers. Over time, I began to understand the formula: feature the books, not the reviewers. Fine, but think of a chef who prefers commonplace dishes to exceptional culinary creations. 2) The Book Review dreads controversy and aspires to be apolitical. 3) The Book Review tries to appeal to every type of reader, from those who only read poetry to those who only devour bestsellers. By trying to please everyone, it may please few.
But now let us praise the Sulzberger family, and its long-standing commitment to books coverage. If the Times Book Review went to the graveyard—joining many other departed standalone Sunday newspaper book review sections— we would miss it. Also, they’ve been generous to your series.
EF: What you say about the Times and books is I think true and well said. The Book Review still plays something like the role you describe. But all this only underscores why I am so disturbed by the disappearance of daily book reviews and their replacement by the listicles of service journalism. Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb, which Wirecutter, which reviews consumer goods for Times readers, will help you to do, except that books can’t be rated as easily, so you’re just offered a plateful and invited to grab and bite.
SS: Everyone knows that skilled publishers always have a few books that sell well, to subsidize the books that languish. But your list seems to push this formula to an extreme. Last year I read your São Bernardo, a Brazilian novel published in 1934 by Graciliano Ramos and translated by Padma Viswanathan. It’s a brisk, brutal story that in some ways recalls the work of James M. Cain, but the audience for it must be rather limited. Well, bravo to you for trying. You recently republished a book that fits perfectly into your list: Gustave Flaubert’s pungent Letters. But that can’t be an easy sell, either, to American readers, for whom Flaubert’s sensibility is utterly foreign. Am I mistaken about the commercial prospects of Flaubert’s Letters?
EF: I may be overly sanguine, or dead wrong, but I tend to like the chances of the Flaubert. Never has there been more interest in the dynamics of the novel—there may be too much, in fact—and these letters could be described as the workshop in which they were first fully put to the test. Our Balzacs do pretty well—there the interest is the mess of possibilities that the novel can be, the mess of possibilities and impossibilities, of hallucinations and temptations, that modern society is, and Flaubert, well, his artistic rigor is another stage on the road to Calvary we’re still on.
Another way of putting it is that this is not an academic book, thanks not only to Flaubert’s liveliness and crankiness as a letter writer and Francis Steegmuller’s editing, but something for the serious reader to put in her knapsack.
But as I say, perhaps I am all wrong and no one will care. That’s sadly the case with the great late nineteenth-century Spanish novels by Benito Pérez Galdós and Leopoldo Alas we publish. If only some young aspiring writer would take those books as a model, fascinated as they are with the interplay of social ambition and constriction and the distortions of desire! But hardly anyone picks them up at all.
My own sense of what helped the series to get off the ground was its mixture of familiar and unfamiliar books, its—the series’—being a place to go to to find something out at a certain remove from what everybody is busily talking about or that you learned about in school, something actively interesting. It’s not so much this or that book that sustains the series as the series floats a range of books, some of which do very well, others inevitably less so.
SS: I no longer live in the United States. From an international perspective, a striking feature of American publishing is the astounding avalanche of books that appear every year. I once asked a senior editor at W.W. Norton why the press published so many books every year, and if it would perhaps be better (for writers) if Norton did fewer books and published them better—more advertisements, more events. He glared at me. I suppose the model here is the law of averages: if you publish a hundred books a year, perhaps one or two will catch fire?
EF: Yes, the law of averages. It would be hard to publish books in any other way and it reflects the built-in iffiness of the whole business, and not just financial.
To speak like a Marxist, books take a lot of work to write and put together, and at the same time have next to no exchange value and whatever use value they have—this is especially true of literature—is in the eye of the beholder, unlike a towel or a shoe. The only way to publish them is to hedge your bet and hedge it again.
Of course, big publishers don’t just publish a lot of books; they publish a lot of different kinds of books, and cat calendars and so on. If there is range in our series, there is also concentration—perhaps too much on certain subjects. I have often vowed to swear off books about World War II.
SS: Regarding World War II: those of us who grew up with the old New York Review of Books recall that under the lengthy editorship of Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein most issues contained an essay, by a learned expert, about Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. Sometimes it felt like grim overkill, but mainly it was an obsession that was refreshing. Those dark shadows fall across your imprint, in your steady commitment to writers like Andrey Platonov, Victor Serge, Vasily Grossman and Miron Białoszewski. Do you publish these writers for mainly pedagogical reasons, or for artistic reasons as well?
EF: I would say purely artistic. Platonov, who wrote The Foundation Pit, and Białoszewski, author of A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, are first and foremost great writers, doing things with words that show us how we are lived by words, a channel through which they flow, purling or raging in ways we can hardly anticipate except that they find their way and take form through writers. And us too, not with the same intensity, but it’s when we meet words (phrases, etc., language at large), as much as people, that we know ourselves. It’s these words and visions that draw us into humanity and history.
Writers are not truth-tellers, they are witnesses to the event of their own gift, finally impersonal. Which consumes them. Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.
SS: In recent years there has been a welcome focus on translation and translators, who have seldom been more visible. NYRB publishes a great many translations. What languages do you read?
EF: French is the only foreign language I will sit down to read a whole book in, but I can manage in Spanish, Italian and German.
SS: In 2018, Marina Warner reviewed five books about translation for the London Review of Books. She wrote: “The history of translation has developed along two branches, one growing from Augustine, who endorsed precise adherence to the original, the other from Jerome, who believed in adaptation and, to some extent, invention, in order to put the meaning across more effectively.” Where do your own loyalties lie?
EF: Jerome, for sure!
SS: If you encourage your translators to take the Jerome approach, doesn’t that mean those translations are harder to edit?
EF: Is it any harder? The Augustinian view is entirely incoherent. The idea that for every word there is a precisely corresponding word in another language is nonsense, and the same could be said for all the other higher-order semantic modules we make use of, clauses, phrases, idioms, sentences, proverbs, paragraphs, whose syntax (and syntax is also semantic) is more often than not irreproducible. Should a translator from German to English seek to mimic the grammatically ordained placement of verbs in German? Obviously not. All these things must be differently conceived in the different medium that is a different language, and the translator who sets out to do her best to follow the bouncing ball of the original is making a challenging, and if she is talented as a writer of English, possibly interesting decision, but one that is, as a matter of sense and style, altogether arbitrary or at least wilful. If anything, it’s a particularly high-handed approach to translation. We now admire Hölderlin’s translations from classical Greek that do their best to warp German into classical Greek, but we admire them as Hölderlin, not Sophocles.
SS: American readers seem increasingly open to literature in translation, but will this lead to more translations? A friend in New York publishing tells me that, by and large, translations are not economically feasible, unless there is a subsidy—i.e., a novel from Serbia will likely need a subsidy from the Serbian government or a foundation devoted to Serbian culture.
EF: John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive did a piece diagnosing this quandary years ago. Now that part of the reason people read some authors, as Elena Ferrante, is that they are “in translation,” translations may have a better chance of making money themselves than before, or at least as good a chance as all the books not in translation that don’t make money. For my part, the category “in translation” seems as essentially meaningless as, say, “written in the Roman alphabet.” The dearth of books translated into English can be taken as an indication of Anglo-American self-centeredness and complacency, sure, but the increase in them is hardly prophylactic against complacency of another sort, or plain bad taste.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how back in the day Knopf made its reputation to a large degree by publishing work from around the world. And of course, they still continue to publish Orhan Pamuk, and Random House scooped up W.G. Sebald when the time was deemed right, as FSG did Roberto Bolaño and Karl Ove Knausgaard. So there are exceptions. It’s assumed, however, that American readers have limited tolerance for—and are in some sense intimidated by—abroadness, and such assumptions become self-fulfilling prophecies. The other day I was talking to a successful translator who recounted a conversation with a very successful younger author in which the writer had said he considered himself unqualified to review books in translation. What did he know, etc. How extraordinary, I thought, since for more than a hundred years writers around the world have been formed by work in translation—the Russians of course above all; what aspiring short-story writer hasn’t cut their teeth on Chekhov?—but also Kafka and García Márquez, and so on. Not to mention Ferrante! But then I wondered if the MFA programs of the day, and the growth of what is beautifully called Globish, don’t focus budding writers’ attention entirely on the work of contemporaries and, since many students in the programs now come from abroad, on packaging their work in English, which ever more is the royal road to the world. (Ferrante, in a sense, does not come from Italy.) That is the other side of the equation: that foreign readers are in a sense as prejudiced in favor of English as we are.
SS: In 2013 Roberto Calasso, the late publisher of Adelphi Edizioni in Milan, published a slim book entitled The Art of the Publisher. Calasso revealed his preference for a “singular book”—“one in which it is clear that something has happened to the author and has been put into writing.” That is intriguing. Consider Dostoevsky in Siberia, Martha Gellhorn in the Spanish Civil War, Primo Levi at Auschwitz, Vasily Grossman at Stalingrad, Doris Lessing in the Communist Party, Wole Soyinka in a Nigerian prison, Norman Rush in Botswana… On the other hand, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote The Beginning of Spring—her quirky 1988 novel about an English family in Moscow in 1913—after just one trip to Russia in 1975. There are countless examples on both sides. Does Calasso’s assertion resonate with you?
EF: I love The Beginning of Spring, so I have to agree with you that what Calasso is saying can hardly be taken as a rule. I do, however, think that in the last century much of the most powerful fiction was shaped by trying to find a form in which to respond to the enormous unforeseen, often appalling eventualities the century brought, forms that were, you could say, condemned by circumstances to be new. There is a way in which Fitzgerald’s wonderful late-century fictions mine history to find radiant little twentieth-century novels in the waste of what was. By the time she is writing, the century has in a sense come into harbor—though god knows what harbor—and has itself become history instead of the ongoing emergency it for so long was. Like W.G. Sebald, she writes in retrospect.
SS: In 2022, one of your novels won the Pulitzer Prize—The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Cohen had written three books for Random House, but they rejected The Netanyahus. He submitted the manuscript to fifteen publishers, all of whom passed on it. How did it reach you, and what did you think the first time you read it?
EF: It came to me from his English publisher, Jacques Testard, of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I didn’t know about all the rejections, but then I was under no illusion that I was the first editor to see the book. (I was puzzled that Random House, who had published his last two novels in the States, was apparently not interested. For political reasons? I wondered.) I thought it was an amazing, transfixing performance, juggling genres and full of slapstick humor, while adding up to a quite nuanced book about the logic and the limits of identity politics, in which the main character, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, serves both as a cautionary monster and prophet. I read it and soon after I bought it.
SS: When Saul Bellow published Herzog in 1964, it sold 142,000 copies in hardcover. Herzog is a dense novel that makes demands on its readers, many of whom, in the 1960s, were Jewish. You’ve sold around forty thousand copies of The Netanyahus—an impressive figure today for a literary novel, but much less than Herzog. Are American Jews reading less ambitiously?
EF: Bellow’s book was written at a very different historical and literary moment. The book—as an object—was still central to educated taste, and the centrality of the book in the Jewish tradition goes without saying. It was a time when Jews were assuming a new visibility and importance in American life, and Herzog as a character was very much a product of that whole moment, a way of reflecting on what it means—as Herzog the character does, at length.
We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste.
SS: Are corporate publishers dumping writers more frequently than in the past? Not long ago, the novelist William Boyd remarked in the Guardian: “The mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written twelve novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80 percent.” I see a lot of first novels getting published. One wonders if those writers will have truncated careers.
EF: I don’t have any hard figures, but I get a fair number of submissions for second books, which would tend to suggest that it’s true. In fact, people have been lamenting the disappearance of the mid-list—and the inflationary expectations for (and costs of) first novels—almost as long as I’ve been involved in publishing, and our ebooks-only venture of a decade or so ago, NYRB Lit, abortive in the end, was partly premised on the availability of books by proven but underappreciated writers. Poetry started having more support for first books as far back as the Eighties, and poetry can be seen as the canary in the coal mine of literature in general.
Curious, isn’t it, how the market for the fresh and new, for all those books the Times is “excited about” and wants you to “read right now,” coexists with the appetite for reissues. Readers are casting about, I guess.
SS: Hundreds of articles have been written about book publishing in the digital age, but Calasso suggested that not much has changed from the nineteenth century: “It’s sufficient to read the correspondence between Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers and their publisher Michel Lévy, from around 1860, to see that exactly the same things were discussed then between author and publisher as are discussed today: first of all contracts (where the publisher and the author alternately assume the role of thief), then proof errors, inadequate publicity, bookshop window displays, attempts to get certain reviews, slow production schedules, the prospect of an award … and the chronic lethargy of the public.” What is your response to that?
EF: That’s just right.
SS: Robert Gottlieb, the former editor of Knopf and the New Yorker, once said: “The first thing writers want—and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world—is a quick response. Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.” Do you give quick responses to writers?
EF: Yes, I know that quote, its claws hardly sheathed, quite well. I wish I were able to act on it. Of course, many writers I publish are no longer as concerned or as able to express their concern about the publication of their books, and there can be a question too of waiting for the right moment or of finding the ears to hear or a truly persuasive advocate for a work. I’ve enjoyed the luxury of repenting at leisure for my first impressions of certain books. I wish I were more efficient and simply decisive. I am sorry to have kept people waiting.
SS: In your forthcoming book, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, you refer to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as “the most beautiful book of the twentieth century.” Your series offers rich offerings for Proustians, including Józef Czapski’s unusual and moving Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Last year you published for the first time in the U.S. a translation of Swann’s Way by the late James Grieve, even though at the time there were already two translations of Swann’s Way in print, both of which—by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis—are highly regarded. Where does Grieve excel, and where does Davis fall short?
EF: I think Lydia is a remarkable translator, a distinctive stylist, like Scott Moncrieff, if, like him, a highly mannered one. Her Proust is angular and uncomfortable where Scott Moncrieff’s is enamelled and art nouveau, and the uncertainty she brings out is certainly an aspect of the work. But Proust is also deft and agile, fluent and swift—his long sentences continually making all sorts of surprising connections—and this is something that is not so evident in her version. Proust is the rare novelist whose work can be heard almost as variously as a poet’s.
SS: Volume seven of the new Penguin translation of Proust—Finding Time Again—appeared in the U.S. in 2023. Alas, it is strewn with typos. Are you surprised that a book of this stature contains typos? Have editing standards fallen at New York publishing houses?
EF: You know, typos are in the “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof” category for publishers. They happen no matter what, and when a book has a lot there may be some complicated production story behind the scenes.
SS: My least favorite pages in Proust are those featuring his Jewish characters. But then again, almost every nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novel I’ve read is stained by anti-Semitic language. Two glorious exceptions are Moby-Dick and Ulysses. How do you think about anti-Semitism in literature?
EF: Anti-Semitism is an inexpungible feature of the literature of the past and, I imagine, present. I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s The Years, encountering a long passage about the grossness of having to share a bathtub with a Jew. He deals in tallow candles. He leaves a greasy ring, etc. This from a woman whose husband was Jewish! But there it is. What’s that great line of Isaac Babel’s? Take away the right to write badly and you take away the right to write at all.
SS: Your books have received acclaim for their covers. Apropos of covers, Calasso wrote: “An image has to be offered that will intrigue and encourage unknown people to pick up an object about which they know nothing except the name of the author (a name they are often seeing for the first time), the title, the name of the publisher, and the words on the cover flap … But at the same time the cover image must look right even after these unknown people have read the book.” Do you agree with this?
EF: What he says is quite true, though it perhaps underestimates the aleatoric power of a good cover if the cover works as a cover, whether or not it illustrates or responds relatively directly to some particular aspect of the book. The chief thing is that the cover catch and hold the eye, and if it does, it may well make a sense of its own in relation to the book. A cover is in its way a piece of criticism. Of course, there is a limit to this effect, and covers also have to observe, like dressing for a dinner party, certain protocols about the kind of cover for the kind of book it is. Good manners.
We have no art director. Together with my colleague Sara Kramer, I’ve been responsible for the cover art of all the books we’ve published over the last twenty years. It’s been one way of putting my otherwise pointless training as an art historian to use. It’s an enjoyable part of the job, even though the cover template for the Classics is a demanding, or really, forbidding one, since the cartouche reserved for the title and author squats in the middle of whatever image we choose, and finding an image that will hold its own is not always easy.
SS: Over the years, I’ve read that women (in the U.S. and the U.K.) are far more likely to buy and read literary novels than men. When you acquire books, are you doing so with a specifically female readership in mind?
EF: No, I’ve never targeted a book in that way, though you become aware that, for example, Renata Adler is of great interest to a certain group of young women, and of course Renata is of great interest. Women have been the chief audience for the novel since the form got off the ground in the eighteenth century. To that extent, the imaginative horizon of the modern world is female.
SS: You’ve revived the work of many neglected women writers—Elizabeth Hardwick, Eve Babitz, Mavis Gallant, Eileen Chang, to name just a few. Of them, is there one who stands out for you, from whose republication you draw special pride?
EF: Getting to know Mavis Gallant a bit was one of the happy surprises of my career. She was very sharp and very funny and did not tolerate fools gladly. She would have despised that dull cutesy movie by Wes Anderson about a journal in Paris that supposedly she helped to inspire. And her best stories are as wide as novels, and the wideness is all the more surprising and disconcerting because they are stories.
SS: Do you look kindly on MFA programs for writers? The New York Times Magazine recently profiled Sigrid Nunez, who has taught writing for many years. The comments section came alive: “MFA programs are killing literature. It’s a self-serving guild system managed by careerists…” “MFA programs have had a depleting effect on all the arts over the last decade or two.”
EF: The jeremiads have grown over-familiar and anyway have had no effect on “practice” (a grotesque word that MFAs and Ph.D.s have conspired to foist upon the world). I’m not sure there’s much point in fulminating further. But it’s certainly true that MFAs have done nothing to counter, in fact have encouraged, the dreary presentism of the arts in a presentist age, and this seems to me to go against what is the greatest challenge for the arts these days, which, in a nutshell, is that close to two hundred years after the avant-garde is born, avant-gardism is no longer a matter of transgression but of tradition. But how to conceive of that tradition and its relation to the worldly powers that are always holding art’s hand and breathing down its neck?
SS: What do you mean by “presentism”? How does it relate to the problem of avant-gardism having become traditional?
EF: Certain artistic moves, pioneered between, say, 1860 and 1920, which then underwent additional elaboration through, say, about 1970, have become standard in the arts—you acquire them when you acquire an MFA. In the visual arts, we’re talking about things like collage, readymades, installations, pop, minimalism, free figuration, leaving the drips on the canvas, the light flares at the edge of the photo, all those forms of formalization that raise the what is art? question that was so central to art in the last century. What’s new now is the situation where all the purportedly new moves are in fact old moves—like the autofiction craze of the last few years, autofiction being as old as Frederick Exley, as Henry Miller, as Jean Rhys, as Andre Gide, as Rousseau.
Well, it’s a stagnant period and so it goes, or perhaps you could say it’s a time that is rejecting the whole idea of art as an independent activity, replacing it with the concern for audience that is turning museums into shopping malls and theme parks. As to MFAs, perhaps they are above all sad because they leave so many writers with nothing but an audience of students.
SS: Do you encourage young people to go into publishing?
EF: Yes, I hope bright and imaginative young people will go into it, and it’s possible that the corporate consolidation of the business is leaving smaller, fertile spaces to be cultivated on its margins. Story of my life, after all.
SS: Would you encourage them to work for existing publishers, or to start their own publishing house? The Guardian recently reported that Jacques Testard launched Fitzcarraldo Editions —which has risen to great heights by publishing four Nobel Prize winners—with a loan of seventy thousand pounds from his family after he couldn’t find a job in publishing.
EF: If you have the money, and imagination, to start your own, do it! How much room there will be in corporate and trade publishing for real literary exploration is an open question. One can always hope that whatever it is that draws readers to books is wayward and intangible enough to frustrate the financiers.
SS: Your forthcoming book has a chapter on Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, in which you note that readers may be defeated by the complexities of Perec’s novelistic architecture. Many American novelists have admitted in interviews that they can’t finish Joyce’s Ulysses. Do you have any advice on how to read difficult books?
EF: In general, when it comes to hard books, which are basically books that demand undivided attention, what I do is simple. I sit down to read them for an hour or two each morning until they are done. In this way you can get through almost anything that you don’t find utterly indigestible or idiotic or—well, there are some things that for any of us are just uninteresting or impossible. And maybe you’ll get into it. Ulysses is a place and climate and you have to allow yourself to live there to get a real sense of it. That’s one of the ways it’s essentially different from, say, Mrs. Dalloway, which remains a representation of experience, something that exists at an appreciable, ponderable remove. Ulysses by contrast is an experience in its own right and like experience remains in many ways private, to the author, to the reader: it’s not there to be made sense of entirely, though it is certainly there to enjoy and wonder at. Notoriously, Woolf hated the book—she thought it was, I’m pretty sure this is her word, “underbred,” pointlessly dirty and showy. Woolf thought it was offensive among other things that Joyce imposed his privacy on his audience. Pun intended.
A piece of advice I took to heart years ago came from the critic and poet Donald Davie, who said about Pound’s Cantos: Read them fast. Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur. Don’t nail down the references and try to add them all up.
SS: Some of us warmly recall the literary magazine Grand Street, which flourished in the 1980s under the editorship of Ben Sonnenberg. Sonnenberg’s father was very wealthy and owned a mansion on Gramercy Park. In his youth, Ben—as he recounts in his memoir Lost Property, which you recently reissued—was a rake and wastrel, but later he used his inheritance to launch Grand Street, which, over the 35 issues he edited, published Samuel Beckett, Edward Said, Anne Carson, Jose Saramago, William Trevor, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Munro and many others. He belonged to that rare breed: literary patron. I gather that Sonnenberg was an advisor when you started the imprint.
EF: Ben was the rare person who was entirely true to his own sensibility. At least, he became that person. Lost Property is ingenious and individual and witty and cagey, like Ben, but suggests also a good old-fashioned story of wrong turns providentially made right.
Then there was Ben’s heroic endurance of his devastating multiple sclerosis, the generosity and charm and sly wisdom with which he offered lunch, bon mots, reminiscences and good advice. He wasn’t an adviser at the start. Sometime in the mid-aughts he invited me over for lunch and then it became a regular custom.
SS: Gore Vidal was asked in 2008: “Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days?” He replied: “Like everyone else, no, I don’t.” Who would you like to see win the Nobel Prize in literature?
EF: Your question makes me think how unconversant I am with world literature these days. Two writers who seem to me extraordinary are Ibrahim al-Koni, from Libya, and the South African Marlene van Niekerk. His body of work (all too much of it, however, poorly translated in English) and her novel Agaat—a flat-out great book—both merit that recognition. What I have read of Mia Couto is also impressive, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Kairos are wonderful.
SS: Many years ago, a publicist at the left-wing publisher Verso told me that, at the main office in London, there is a letter in the files to Gárcia Márquez from 1969: “Dear Mr. Márquez: thank you for submitting your manuscript, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to us. We do not publish fiction.” This story may be apocryphal. For you, is there one book that got away?
EF: I often regret letting Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—along with the Viktor Shklovsky I mentioned—slip my grasp. Giorgio Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina: those too.
SS: Are you optimistic about the future of serious writing? Don DeLillo once remarked: “If the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.” Something perhaps like the jazz milieu, which is modestly sized, but vibrant. Capitalism leaves jazz alone to do as it wishes.
EF: Optimistic? The book in one form or another we will always have with us, I have no doubt, though will the novel continue to have the sort of authority and popularity it came to enjoy over the course of the last two centuries, probably not. It will become an object of old if devoted observance, I suspect, widely practiced still, but among a select circle, like those late Roman aristocrats who continued to perform pagan rites after Constantine. And then, thinking of No Country for Old Men (or the movie; telling, isn’t it, that I haven’t read the book) and then “the candle went out.” Then again, I sometimes imagine that these distracted times where we are all linked to our devices may see a revival of short forms: poetry, the essay. Finally, apart from literature, it’s worth remembering that among Evangelists and Islamists and Talmudists the book itself is as powerful as ever. To indulge in some academic jargon, what’s known as intensive reading continues to drive huge parts of the world, even as extensive readers grow thin on the ground. And I myself as I grow older prefer to go back to Dante and Shakespeare, a not dissimilar practice.
Who knows how the story turns out?
In memory of Victor Navasky (1932–2023)
Edwin Frank, born in Colorado in 1960, is the editor of New York Review Books and NYRB Classics. Since 1999, he and a handful of colleagues have published more than five hundred titles noteworthy for their excellence, latitude and cosmopolitanism. The series began by excavating out-of-print gems—in literature, history, criticism, travel writing, essays, memoir—but grew to include original work. The books stand out for the caliber of the prose and the geographical variation of the narrative settings: the dusty colonial settlements of eighteenth-century Paraguay; the Paris of Danton and Balzac; the seedy side of 1920s Buenos Aires; the restless streets of prewar Tokyo; the hell of Stalingrad; the Sicilian towns ruled by the Mafia; the heady Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s. NYRB also publishes children’s books, comics and poetry. At a time when Manhattan’s corporate publishers are being swallowed by private equity firms, dispensing with distinguished senior editors and chasing fads, NYRB remains a refuge for the discerning reader. The following conversation was conducted via email, and has been edited for length and style.
—Scott Sherman
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Scott Sherman: You’ve published more than five hundred books. Why, in 1999, did you choose Edmund Wilson’s edition of Chekhov’s late stories as the first book in the series?
Edwin Frank: It was a small nod, a tribute, to Anchor Books, the first trade paperback imprint in the States, founded postwar by Jason Epstein, which had included the book, and a tribute too to the spirit of Edmund Wilson, the legendary critic, who put the selection together to show another Chekhov from the familiar miniature portraitist of the unhappy soul, a Chekhov alert to the social and political questions of his day as well as to the impoverished language with which his characters seek to make sense of the collapse within and without.
SS: My favorite book in the series is by the Belgian polymath and China expert Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. Of Leys’s 1977 book Chinese Shadows, Ian Buruma has written: “It’s a collection of essays in which he totally demolishes the romantic myth of the Maoist experiment. This was especially devastating in France, because Paris was the centre of intellectual Maoism.” The Hall of Uselessness has sections on “Quixotism,” literature, China, the sea, the university and marginalia. It’s a book without a boring page. From his essay “Writers and Money”: “Steinbeck remarked: ‘The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.’” Have you had much success with the Leys?
EF: That’s one of my favorites, too, and it comes with a story attached. The Australian publisher of the book had the rights to sell and sent it to me for consideration. I let her know that I was a longtime reader of Leys and liked his work a lot, but it really was unlikely we’d be able to take on such a big book: 572 pages. Then I started reading—the wonderful demolition of Christopher Hitchens’s superficial book on Mother Teresa, the powerful and discomfiting biographical portrait of Andre Gide—and before long I had decided we couldn’t not publish the book, limited as sales might be. Here we had a writer who could write, who had an extraordinary historical and cultural range and a sensibility all his own and a moral intelligence to match. Not only did we publish the book, we added two essays to it from the French edition—essays on Michaux and Barthes (a savage send-up of his bien-pensant Maoism). We published it and, quite quickly and against all odds, it did very well.
SS: James Salter observed: “Journalists cannot expect their work to last. Even Dreiser’s or Hemingway’s articles are of little interest to us. … Autobiography, though, is another matter, as is memoir.” Those words appeared in Salter’s preface to A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals (1959), a memoir of his student sojourn in Paris in 1926 and 1927. Are you in agreement with Salter?
EF: Well, it does seem to me that everything that makes journalism of the moment conspires against subsequent accessibility. The reader of later years has to come at it with a split focus, willing to know (or not know) what was going on then (this detail of that war, negotiation, etc.), while enjoying the presentation as a feat in its own right. That’s a rarefied kind of reading, close to reading poetry. I’ve been approached a number of times about reprinting Murray Kempton’s columns, but for a reader to understand some of his pieces from the 1950s now would require almost as much annotation as text.
SS: Murray Kempton was a legendary cult figure in New York journalism from the 1950s to the 1990s. As a columnist for various city newspapers, and the New York Review—but never the gray Times—he tried to channel the spirit of Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Quite often he succeeded. When he didn’t, his baroque style dragged him down. In 2004 you republished Kempton’s Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, my favorite book on left-wing American radicalism. In 1973 he published a book about the Black Panthers, The Briar Patch, which I found hard going. Did you ever consider it?
EF: You know, I haven’t read The Briar Patch. He was a fancy writer, at a time when columnists were meant to have depth and character, not just a political line, and you can see the appeal of a style that was, as you say, an improbably baroque contribution to the meat and potatoes of, say, Newsday, where he ended up. But decades later the pieces read like a tissue of lost allusions. I’d be curious how he responded to the Panthers. He published a review of Do the Right Thing when the movie came out that saw it as an affront to the honor of black Americans, associated by Spike Lee, he felt, with layabouts like his main character and boom boxes. Not the way the movie is commonly viewed.
SS: For many years I lived in Istanbul, where the bookshops are full of Turkish-language editions of classic and canonical authors. These books are affordable and stylish, and published by extremely small presses. In the U.S., there seems to be less interest among publishers in rescuing old books. When you started NYRB, who was your competition? And who is your competition now?
EF: Really, there was very little competition then, though some overlap in what I had in mind to do and what New Directions and Dalkey Archive were up to, and to this day I regret bowing out of the tiny bidding war for Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, with Dalkey. The Modern Library was interested as I recall in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica—the book had appeared on a list that their board assembled of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century—but the lovely agent Craig Tenney favored us when we undertook to also publish the two volumes of Hughes’s unfinished trilogy about Hitler and the coming of war. New Directions and Dalkey in any case were focused on modernist and postmodernist books, and ND of course on new work, which at that point we were not doing at all. The Modern Library was slowly sinking into publishing titles for course adoption.
Now things have changed. There are lots of houses big and small doing work old and new in translation and, especially after the pandemic, during which the corporate houses woke up again to the worth of the backlist, lots of interest in reprints and rediscoveries.
SS: This recent interest from other publishers—is it because NYRB showed that it can be done well, and profitably?
EF: They’ve taken note of it. When Penguin in England comes out with Sylvia Townsend Warner in quantity after years of indifference, well, I’m sure they are aware we have been publishing her for awhile.
But the sort of thing NYRB does is a kind of publishing, of older books in new, more portable guises (old wine in new bottles, not what Jesus ordered), that goes back to the Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and the Temple and Oxford Classics, the Modern Library and Anchor Books, which even appropriated Manutius’s logo of dolphin and anchor. That kind of publishing resurfaces regularly, both as a way of trafficking in properties of reliable interest (they have at least the interest of having interested people) and of scanning the horizon of the past for clues about the future.
SS: When you were starting out, did you consider Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics as competition?
EF: Very little, since the last thing I wanted to do was to publish editions of canonical classics like Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Then again, I have always envied Penguin its editions of books like the Rig Veda, and Oxford has a nice series of relatively new Zola translations which I would be happy to publish, and there are wonderful writers like Wilkie Collins who tend to slip in and out of print, as if they disdained to be anything so pedestrian as simply available.
SS: In the early 1990s, I was an assistant in the European history division of Oxford University Press in New York. One afternoon the latest issue of the New Republic arrived, and one of our books was reviewed there! I was 25. It seemed like a world-historical event. Holding the magazine, I dashed into the office of my boss, who hissed at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke: “The New Republic doesn’t sell books. The Nation doesn’t sell books. Only the Times sells books!” These days, my friends in New York publishing tell me that the Times has lost some of its power to sell books. Is that so?
EF: A review in the Times still sells more books than reviews elsewhere. Notable, however, is that the Times has stopped doing regular reviews in the daily paper, and is now running listicles: Fifteen Spring Nonfiction Titles for Every Interest! Fifteen Novels to Read Now! … and the like. This is not criticism—what could it be called? A content alert?—and a climate where the “newspaper of record” no longer deems it worthwhile to feature some remote semblance of criticism is not a good one for literature.
The new attention to categories like “international fiction,” which seems a step forward, is not. It represents exactly the same stereotyping that used to dismiss “books in translation” as the vegetables on the menu.
SS: But some of those airy features in the Times’s book section spotlight your books. A recent quiz cited your author Olivia Manning…
EF: Superficiality has its virtues!
SS: The New York Times Book Review is a curiosity for a few reasons: 1) When I started reading it, I wondered why writers like Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and James Wolcott were not regular reviewers. Over time, I began to understand the formula: feature the books, not the reviewers. Fine, but think of a chef who prefers commonplace dishes to exceptional culinary creations. 2) The Book Review dreads controversy and aspires to be apolitical. 3) The Book Review tries to appeal to every type of reader, from those who only read poetry to those who only devour bestsellers. By trying to please everyone, it may please few.
But now let us praise the Sulzberger family, and its long-standing commitment to books coverage. If the Times Book Review went to the graveyard—joining many other departed standalone Sunday newspaper book review sections— we would miss it. Also, they’ve been generous to your series.
EF: What you say about the Times and books is I think true and well said. The Book Review still plays something like the role you describe. But all this only underscores why I am so disturbed by the disappearance of daily book reviews and their replacement by the listicles of service journalism. Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb, which Wirecutter, which reviews consumer goods for Times readers, will help you to do, except that books can’t be rated as easily, so you’re just offered a plateful and invited to grab and bite.
SS: Everyone knows that skilled publishers always have a few books that sell well, to subsidize the books that languish. But your list seems to push this formula to an extreme. Last year I read your São Bernardo, a Brazilian novel published in 1934 by Graciliano Ramos and translated by Padma Viswanathan. It’s a brisk, brutal story that in some ways recalls the work of James M. Cain, but the audience for it must be rather limited. Well, bravo to you for trying. You recently republished a book that fits perfectly into your list: Gustave Flaubert’s pungent Letters. But that can’t be an easy sell, either, to American readers, for whom Flaubert’s sensibility is utterly foreign. Am I mistaken about the commercial prospects of Flaubert’s Letters?
EF: I may be overly sanguine, or dead wrong, but I tend to like the chances of the Flaubert. Never has there been more interest in the dynamics of the novel—there may be too much, in fact—and these letters could be described as the workshop in which they were first fully put to the test. Our Balzacs do pretty well—there the interest is the mess of possibilities that the novel can be, the mess of possibilities and impossibilities, of hallucinations and temptations, that modern society is, and Flaubert, well, his artistic rigor is another stage on the road to Calvary we’re still on.
Another way of putting it is that this is not an academic book, thanks not only to Flaubert’s liveliness and crankiness as a letter writer and Francis Steegmuller’s editing, but something for the serious reader to put in her knapsack.
But as I say, perhaps I am all wrong and no one will care. That’s sadly the case with the great late nineteenth-century Spanish novels by Benito Pérez Galdós and Leopoldo Alas we publish. If only some young aspiring writer would take those books as a model, fascinated as they are with the interplay of social ambition and constriction and the distortions of desire! But hardly anyone picks them up at all.
My own sense of what helped the series to get off the ground was its mixture of familiar and unfamiliar books, its—the series’—being a place to go to to find something out at a certain remove from what everybody is busily talking about or that you learned about in school, something actively interesting. It’s not so much this or that book that sustains the series as the series floats a range of books, some of which do very well, others inevitably less so.
SS: I no longer live in the United States. From an international perspective, a striking feature of American publishing is the astounding avalanche of books that appear every year. I once asked a senior editor at W.W. Norton why the press published so many books every year, and if it would perhaps be better (for writers) if Norton did fewer books and published them better—more advertisements, more events. He glared at me. I suppose the model here is the law of averages: if you publish a hundred books a year, perhaps one or two will catch fire?
EF: Yes, the law of averages. It would be hard to publish books in any other way and it reflects the built-in iffiness of the whole business, and not just financial.
To speak like a Marxist, books take a lot of work to write and put together, and at the same time have next to no exchange value and whatever use value they have—this is especially true of literature—is in the eye of the beholder, unlike a towel or a shoe. The only way to publish them is to hedge your bet and hedge it again.
Of course, big publishers don’t just publish a lot of books; they publish a lot of different kinds of books, and cat calendars and so on. If there is range in our series, there is also concentration—perhaps too much on certain subjects. I have often vowed to swear off books about World War II.
SS: Regarding World War II: those of us who grew up with the old New York Review of Books recall that under the lengthy editorship of Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein most issues contained an essay, by a learned expert, about Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. Sometimes it felt like grim overkill, but mainly it was an obsession that was refreshing. Those dark shadows fall across your imprint, in your steady commitment to writers like Andrey Platonov, Victor Serge, Vasily Grossman and Miron Białoszewski. Do you publish these writers for mainly pedagogical reasons, or for artistic reasons as well?
EF: I would say purely artistic. Platonov, who wrote The Foundation Pit, and Białoszewski, author of A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, are first and foremost great writers, doing things with words that show us how we are lived by words, a channel through which they flow, purling or raging in ways we can hardly anticipate except that they find their way and take form through writers. And us too, not with the same intensity, but it’s when we meet words (phrases, etc., language at large), as much as people, that we know ourselves. It’s these words and visions that draw us into humanity and history.
Writers are not truth-tellers, they are witnesses to the event of their own gift, finally impersonal. Which consumes them. Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.
SS: In recent years there has been a welcome focus on translation and translators, who have seldom been more visible. NYRB publishes a great many translations. What languages do you read?
EF: French is the only foreign language I will sit down to read a whole book in, but I can manage in Spanish, Italian and German.
SS: In 2018, Marina Warner reviewed five books about translation for the London Review of Books. She wrote: “The history of translation has developed along two branches, one growing from Augustine, who endorsed precise adherence to the original, the other from Jerome, who believed in adaptation and, to some extent, invention, in order to put the meaning across more effectively.” Where do your own loyalties lie?
EF: Jerome, for sure!
SS: If you encourage your translators to take the Jerome approach, doesn’t that mean those translations are harder to edit?
EF: Is it any harder? The Augustinian view is entirely incoherent. The idea that for every word there is a precisely corresponding word in another language is nonsense, and the same could be said for all the other higher-order semantic modules we make use of, clauses, phrases, idioms, sentences, proverbs, paragraphs, whose syntax (and syntax is also semantic) is more often than not irreproducible. Should a translator from German to English seek to mimic the grammatically ordained placement of verbs in German? Obviously not. All these things must be differently conceived in the different medium that is a different language, and the translator who sets out to do her best to follow the bouncing ball of the original is making a challenging, and if she is talented as a writer of English, possibly interesting decision, but one that is, as a matter of sense and style, altogether arbitrary or at least wilful. If anything, it’s a particularly high-handed approach to translation. We now admire Hölderlin’s translations from classical Greek that do their best to warp German into classical Greek, but we admire them as Hölderlin, not Sophocles.
SS: American readers seem increasingly open to literature in translation, but will this lead to more translations? A friend in New York publishing tells me that, by and large, translations are not economically feasible, unless there is a subsidy—i.e., a novel from Serbia will likely need a subsidy from the Serbian government or a foundation devoted to Serbian culture.
EF: John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive did a piece diagnosing this quandary years ago. Now that part of the reason people read some authors, as Elena Ferrante, is that they are “in translation,” translations may have a better chance of making money themselves than before, or at least as good a chance as all the books not in translation that don’t make money. For my part, the category “in translation” seems as essentially meaningless as, say, “written in the Roman alphabet.” The dearth of books translated into English can be taken as an indication of Anglo-American self-centeredness and complacency, sure, but the increase in them is hardly prophylactic against complacency of another sort, or plain bad taste.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how back in the day Knopf made its reputation to a large degree by publishing work from around the world. And of course, they still continue to publish Orhan Pamuk, and Random House scooped up W.G. Sebald when the time was deemed right, as FSG did Roberto Bolaño and Karl Ove Knausgaard. So there are exceptions. It’s assumed, however, that American readers have limited tolerance for—and are in some sense intimidated by—abroadness, and such assumptions become self-fulfilling prophecies. The other day I was talking to a successful translator who recounted a conversation with a very successful younger author in which the writer had said he considered himself unqualified to review books in translation. What did he know, etc. How extraordinary, I thought, since for more than a hundred years writers around the world have been formed by work in translation—the Russians of course above all; what aspiring short-story writer hasn’t cut their teeth on Chekhov?—but also Kafka and García Márquez, and so on. Not to mention Ferrante! But then I wondered if the MFA programs of the day, and the growth of what is beautifully called Globish, don’t focus budding writers’ attention entirely on the work of contemporaries and, since many students in the programs now come from abroad, on packaging their work in English, which ever more is the royal road to the world. (Ferrante, in a sense, does not come from Italy.) That is the other side of the equation: that foreign readers are in a sense as prejudiced in favor of English as we are.
SS: In 2013 Roberto Calasso, the late publisher of Adelphi Edizioni in Milan, published a slim book entitled The Art of the Publisher. Calasso revealed his preference for a “singular book”—“one in which it is clear that something has happened to the author and has been put into writing.” That is intriguing. Consider Dostoevsky in Siberia, Martha Gellhorn in the Spanish Civil War, Primo Levi at Auschwitz, Vasily Grossman at Stalingrad, Doris Lessing in the Communist Party, Wole Soyinka in a Nigerian prison, Norman Rush in Botswana… On the other hand, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote The Beginning of Spring—her quirky 1988 novel about an English family in Moscow in 1913—after just one trip to Russia in 1975. There are countless examples on both sides. Does Calasso’s assertion resonate with you?
EF: I love The Beginning of Spring, so I have to agree with you that what Calasso is saying can hardly be taken as a rule. I do, however, think that in the last century much of the most powerful fiction was shaped by trying to find a form in which to respond to the enormous unforeseen, often appalling eventualities the century brought, forms that were, you could say, condemned by circumstances to be new. There is a way in which Fitzgerald’s wonderful late-century fictions mine history to find radiant little twentieth-century novels in the waste of what was. By the time she is writing, the century has in a sense come into harbor—though god knows what harbor—and has itself become history instead of the ongoing emergency it for so long was. Like W.G. Sebald, she writes in retrospect.
SS: In 2022, one of your novels won the Pulitzer Prize—The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. Cohen had written three books for Random House, but they rejected The Netanyahus. He submitted the manuscript to fifteen publishers, all of whom passed on it. How did it reach you, and what did you think the first time you read it?
EF: It came to me from his English publisher, Jacques Testard, of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I didn’t know about all the rejections, but then I was under no illusion that I was the first editor to see the book. (I was puzzled that Random House, who had published his last two novels in the States, was apparently not interested. For political reasons? I wondered.) I thought it was an amazing, transfixing performance, juggling genres and full of slapstick humor, while adding up to a quite nuanced book about the logic and the limits of identity politics, in which the main character, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, serves both as a cautionary monster and prophet. I read it and soon after I bought it.
SS: When Saul Bellow published Herzog in 1964, it sold 142,000 copies in hardcover. Herzog is a dense novel that makes demands on its readers, many of whom, in the 1960s, were Jewish. You’ve sold around forty thousand copies of The Netanyahus—an impressive figure today for a literary novel, but much less than Herzog. Are American Jews reading less ambitiously?
EF: Bellow’s book was written at a very different historical and literary moment. The book—as an object—was still central to educated taste, and the centrality of the book in the Jewish tradition goes without saying. It was a time when Jews were assuming a new visibility and importance in American life, and Herzog as a character was very much a product of that whole moment, a way of reflecting on what it means—as Herzog the character does, at length.
We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste.
SS: Are corporate publishers dumping writers more frequently than in the past? Not long ago, the novelist William Boyd remarked in the Guardian: “The mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written twelve novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80 percent.” I see a lot of first novels getting published. One wonders if those writers will have truncated careers.
EF: I don’t have any hard figures, but I get a fair number of submissions for second books, which would tend to suggest that it’s true. In fact, people have been lamenting the disappearance of the mid-list—and the inflationary expectations for (and costs of) first novels—almost as long as I’ve been involved in publishing, and our ebooks-only venture of a decade or so ago, NYRB Lit, abortive in the end, was partly premised on the availability of books by proven but underappreciated writers. Poetry started having more support for first books as far back as the Eighties, and poetry can be seen as the canary in the coal mine of literature in general.
Curious, isn’t it, how the market for the fresh and new, for all those books the Times is “excited about” and wants you to “read right now,” coexists with the appetite for reissues. Readers are casting about, I guess.
SS: Hundreds of articles have been written about book publishing in the digital age, but Calasso suggested that not much has changed from the nineteenth century: “It’s sufficient to read the correspondence between Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers and their publisher Michel Lévy, from around 1860, to see that exactly the same things were discussed then between author and publisher as are discussed today: first of all contracts (where the publisher and the author alternately assume the role of thief), then proof errors, inadequate publicity, bookshop window displays, attempts to get certain reviews, slow production schedules, the prospect of an award … and the chronic lethargy of the public.” What is your response to that?
EF: That’s just right.
SS: Robert Gottlieb, the former editor of Knopf and the New Yorker, once said: “The first thing writers want—and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world—is a quick response. Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.” Do you give quick responses to writers?
EF: Yes, I know that quote, its claws hardly sheathed, quite well. I wish I were able to act on it. Of course, many writers I publish are no longer as concerned or as able to express their concern about the publication of their books, and there can be a question too of waiting for the right moment or of finding the ears to hear or a truly persuasive advocate for a work. I’ve enjoyed the luxury of repenting at leisure for my first impressions of certain books. I wish I were more efficient and simply decisive. I am sorry to have kept people waiting.
SS: In your forthcoming book, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, you refer to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as “the most beautiful book of the twentieth century.” Your series offers rich offerings for Proustians, including Józef Czapski’s unusual and moving Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Last year you published for the first time in the U.S. a translation of Swann’s Way by the late James Grieve, even though at the time there were already two translations of Swann’s Way in print, both of which—by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis—are highly regarded. Where does Grieve excel, and where does Davis fall short?
EF: I think Lydia is a remarkable translator, a distinctive stylist, like Scott Moncrieff, if, like him, a highly mannered one. Her Proust is angular and uncomfortable where Scott Moncrieff’s is enamelled and art nouveau, and the uncertainty she brings out is certainly an aspect of the work. But Proust is also deft and agile, fluent and swift—his long sentences continually making all sorts of surprising connections—and this is something that is not so evident in her version. Proust is the rare novelist whose work can be heard almost as variously as a poet’s.
SS: Volume seven of the new Penguin translation of Proust—Finding Time Again—appeared in the U.S. in 2023. Alas, it is strewn with typos. Are you surprised that a book of this stature contains typos? Have editing standards fallen at New York publishing houses?
EF: You know, typos are in the “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof” category for publishers. They happen no matter what, and when a book has a lot there may be some complicated production story behind the scenes.
SS: My least favorite pages in Proust are those featuring his Jewish characters. But then again, almost every nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novel I’ve read is stained by anti-Semitic language. Two glorious exceptions are Moby-Dick and Ulysses. How do you think about anti-Semitism in literature?
EF: Anti-Semitism is an inexpungible feature of the literature of the past and, I imagine, present. I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s The Years, encountering a long passage about the grossness of having to share a bathtub with a Jew. He deals in tallow candles. He leaves a greasy ring, etc. This from a woman whose husband was Jewish! But there it is. What’s that great line of Isaac Babel’s? Take away the right to write badly and you take away the right to write at all.
SS: Your books have received acclaim for their covers. Apropos of covers, Calasso wrote: “An image has to be offered that will intrigue and encourage unknown people to pick up an object about which they know nothing except the name of the author (a name they are often seeing for the first time), the title, the name of the publisher, and the words on the cover flap … But at the same time the cover image must look right even after these unknown people have read the book.” Do you agree with this?
EF: What he says is quite true, though it perhaps underestimates the aleatoric power of a good cover if the cover works as a cover, whether or not it illustrates or responds relatively directly to some particular aspect of the book. The chief thing is that the cover catch and hold the eye, and if it does, it may well make a sense of its own in relation to the book. A cover is in its way a piece of criticism. Of course, there is a limit to this effect, and covers also have to observe, like dressing for a dinner party, certain protocols about the kind of cover for the kind of book it is. Good manners.
We have no art director. Together with my colleague Sara Kramer, I’ve been responsible for the cover art of all the books we’ve published over the last twenty years. It’s been one way of putting my otherwise pointless training as an art historian to use. It’s an enjoyable part of the job, even though the cover template for the Classics is a demanding, or really, forbidding one, since the cartouche reserved for the title and author squats in the middle of whatever image we choose, and finding an image that will hold its own is not always easy.
SS: Over the years, I’ve read that women (in the U.S. and the U.K.) are far more likely to buy and read literary novels than men. When you acquire books, are you doing so with a specifically female readership in mind?
EF: No, I’ve never targeted a book in that way, though you become aware that, for example, Renata Adler is of great interest to a certain group of young women, and of course Renata is of great interest. Women have been the chief audience for the novel since the form got off the ground in the eighteenth century. To that extent, the imaginative horizon of the modern world is female.
SS: You’ve revived the work of many neglected women writers—Elizabeth Hardwick, Eve Babitz, Mavis Gallant, Eileen Chang, to name just a few. Of them, is there one who stands out for you, from whose republication you draw special pride?
EF: Getting to know Mavis Gallant a bit was one of the happy surprises of my career. She was very sharp and very funny and did not tolerate fools gladly. She would have despised that dull cutesy movie by Wes Anderson about a journal in Paris that supposedly she helped to inspire. And her best stories are as wide as novels, and the wideness is all the more surprising and disconcerting because they are stories.
SS: Do you look kindly on MFA programs for writers? The New York Times Magazine recently profiled Sigrid Nunez, who has taught writing for many years. The comments section came alive: “MFA programs are killing literature. It’s a self-serving guild system managed by careerists…” “MFA programs have had a depleting effect on all the arts over the last decade or two.”
EF: The jeremiads have grown over-familiar and anyway have had no effect on “practice” (a grotesque word that MFAs and Ph.D.s have conspired to foist upon the world). I’m not sure there’s much point in fulminating further. But it’s certainly true that MFAs have done nothing to counter, in fact have encouraged, the dreary presentism of the arts in a presentist age, and this seems to me to go against what is the greatest challenge for the arts these days, which, in a nutshell, is that close to two hundred years after the avant-garde is born, avant-gardism is no longer a matter of transgression but of tradition. But how to conceive of that tradition and its relation to the worldly powers that are always holding art’s hand and breathing down its neck?
SS: What do you mean by “presentism”? How does it relate to the problem of avant-gardism having become traditional?
EF: Certain artistic moves, pioneered between, say, 1860 and 1920, which then underwent additional elaboration through, say, about 1970, have become standard in the arts—you acquire them when you acquire an MFA. In the visual arts, we’re talking about things like collage, readymades, installations, pop, minimalism, free figuration, leaving the drips on the canvas, the light flares at the edge of the photo, all those forms of formalization that raise the what is art? question that was so central to art in the last century. What’s new now is the situation where all the purportedly new moves are in fact old moves—like the autofiction craze of the last few years, autofiction being as old as Frederick Exley, as Henry Miller, as Jean Rhys, as Andre Gide, as Rousseau.
Well, it’s a stagnant period and so it goes, or perhaps you could say it’s a time that is rejecting the whole idea of art as an independent activity, replacing it with the concern for audience that is turning museums into shopping malls and theme parks. As to MFAs, perhaps they are above all sad because they leave so many writers with nothing but an audience of students.
SS: Do you encourage young people to go into publishing?
EF: Yes, I hope bright and imaginative young people will go into it, and it’s possible that the corporate consolidation of the business is leaving smaller, fertile spaces to be cultivated on its margins. Story of my life, after all.
SS: Would you encourage them to work for existing publishers, or to start their own publishing house? The Guardian recently reported that Jacques Testard launched Fitzcarraldo Editions —which has risen to great heights by publishing four Nobel Prize winners—with a loan of seventy thousand pounds from his family after he couldn’t find a job in publishing.
EF: If you have the money, and imagination, to start your own, do it! How much room there will be in corporate and trade publishing for real literary exploration is an open question. One can always hope that whatever it is that draws readers to books is wayward and intangible enough to frustrate the financiers.
SS: Your forthcoming book has a chapter on Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, in which you note that readers may be defeated by the complexities of Perec’s novelistic architecture. Many American novelists have admitted in interviews that they can’t finish Joyce’s Ulysses. Do you have any advice on how to read difficult books?
EF: In general, when it comes to hard books, which are basically books that demand undivided attention, what I do is simple. I sit down to read them for an hour or two each morning until they are done. In this way you can get through almost anything that you don’t find utterly indigestible or idiotic or—well, there are some things that for any of us are just uninteresting or impossible. And maybe you’ll get into it. Ulysses is a place and climate and you have to allow yourself to live there to get a real sense of it. That’s one of the ways it’s essentially different from, say, Mrs. Dalloway, which remains a representation of experience, something that exists at an appreciable, ponderable remove. Ulysses by contrast is an experience in its own right and like experience remains in many ways private, to the author, to the reader: it’s not there to be made sense of entirely, though it is certainly there to enjoy and wonder at. Notoriously, Woolf hated the book—she thought it was, I’m pretty sure this is her word, “underbred,” pointlessly dirty and showy. Woolf thought it was offensive among other things that Joyce imposed his privacy on his audience. Pun intended.
A piece of advice I took to heart years ago came from the critic and poet Donald Davie, who said about Pound’s Cantos: Read them fast. Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur. Don’t nail down the references and try to add them all up.
SS: Some of us warmly recall the literary magazine Grand Street, which flourished in the 1980s under the editorship of Ben Sonnenberg. Sonnenberg’s father was very wealthy and owned a mansion on Gramercy Park. In his youth, Ben—as he recounts in his memoir Lost Property, which you recently reissued—was a rake and wastrel, but later he used his inheritance to launch Grand Street, which, over the 35 issues he edited, published Samuel Beckett, Edward Said, Anne Carson, Jose Saramago, William Trevor, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Munro and many others. He belonged to that rare breed: literary patron. I gather that Sonnenberg was an advisor when you started the imprint.
EF: Ben was the rare person who was entirely true to his own sensibility. At least, he became that person. Lost Property is ingenious and individual and witty and cagey, like Ben, but suggests also a good old-fashioned story of wrong turns providentially made right.
Then there was Ben’s heroic endurance of his devastating multiple sclerosis, the generosity and charm and sly wisdom with which he offered lunch, bon mots, reminiscences and good advice. He wasn’t an adviser at the start. Sometime in the mid-aughts he invited me over for lunch and then it became a regular custom.
SS: Gore Vidal was asked in 2008: “Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days?” He replied: “Like everyone else, no, I don’t.” Who would you like to see win the Nobel Prize in literature?
EF: Your question makes me think how unconversant I am with world literature these days. Two writers who seem to me extraordinary are Ibrahim al-Koni, from Libya, and the South African Marlene van Niekerk. His body of work (all too much of it, however, poorly translated in English) and her novel Agaat—a flat-out great book—both merit that recognition. What I have read of Mia Couto is also impressive, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Kairos are wonderful.
SS: Many years ago, a publicist at the left-wing publisher Verso told me that, at the main office in London, there is a letter in the files to Gárcia Márquez from 1969: “Dear Mr. Márquez: thank you for submitting your manuscript, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to us. We do not publish fiction.” This story may be apocryphal. For you, is there one book that got away?
EF: I often regret letting Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—along with the Viktor Shklovsky I mentioned—slip my grasp. Giorgio Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina: those too.
SS: Are you optimistic about the future of serious writing? Don DeLillo once remarked: “If the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.” Something perhaps like the jazz milieu, which is modestly sized, but vibrant. Capitalism leaves jazz alone to do as it wishes.
EF: Optimistic? The book in one form or another we will always have with us, I have no doubt, though will the novel continue to have the sort of authority and popularity it came to enjoy over the course of the last two centuries, probably not. It will become an object of old if devoted observance, I suspect, widely practiced still, but among a select circle, like those late Roman aristocrats who continued to perform pagan rites after Constantine. And then, thinking of No Country for Old Men (or the movie; telling, isn’t it, that I haven’t read the book) and then “the candle went out.” Then again, I sometimes imagine that these distracted times where we are all linked to our devices may see a revival of short forms: poetry, the essay. Finally, apart from literature, it’s worth remembering that among Evangelists and Islamists and Talmudists the book itself is as powerful as ever. To indulge in some academic jargon, what’s known as intensive reading continues to drive huge parts of the world, even as extensive readers grow thin on the ground. And I myself as I grow older prefer to go back to Dante and Shakespeare, a not dissimilar practice.
Who knows how the story turns out?
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.