Small Presses Win Big Awards

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature went to Norwegian author Jon Fosse. I haven’t read him yet, but I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I’ll be able to read him in English translation thanks to two small presses: Dalkey Archive and Transit Books.

Founded in Illinois in 1984, Dalkey Archive is a nonprofit publisher of modernist and postmodernist literature, named for the novel by the Irish writer Flann O’Brien. I’m grateful to Dalkey Archive (the press) for keeping avant-garde classics in print and publishing English translations of works originally written in many languages including Korean, Russian, Spanish, and more. Search “Dalkey Archive” in our catalog to see which of their books we have in our collection.

Transit Books, Fosse’s other American publisher, is also a nonprofit press, and was founded in 2015 in Oakland, CA. They publish a small and carefully curated list of literary fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Their list has many award-winners, including The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, “a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present,” which was long-listed for the International Booker Prize.

Annie Ernaux won 2022’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and the French author is accessible to us English-readers thanks to the small press Seven Stories. Founded in 1995 in New York, Seven Stories publishes, by its own description, “works of the human imagination—sometimes in the form of fiction and literature, sometimes in the form of political nonfiction and sometimes in a hybrid form that has elements of both. Our books may be written originally in English or in other languages—as much as 25% of our list in any given season may be works in translation from the French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Korean, or Vietnamese among other languages—or, as is true of many of the works of Ariel Dorfman, written in two languages simultaneously…” Intrigued by Ariel Dorfman? Try Darwin’s Ghosts: “the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him, leading him to uncover his ancestors' involvement in the sordid story behind 19th century human zoos in Europe.” Want to start with Annie Ernaux? My favorite is Simple Passion, which “documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.”

A few more special small presses:

Dorothy, A Publishing Project was founded by writers Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker in St. Louis, and publishes just two books a year. The press is named after Dutton’s great aunt, a librarian and bookmobile driver. In October, they published The Long Form by Kate Briggs, a meditation on motherhood, time, and the novel; and The New Animals by Pip Adams, a novel of a single night in the Auckland, NZ fashion industry.

Just looking at a shelf, I can recognize the distinctive and attractive books published by Seattle-based poetry press Wave Books. I recently read Mary Ruefle’s The Book, a collection of prose poems that I wish hadn’t ended. You can also find a good number of their titles as eBooks and eAudiobooks in hoopla: I recommend Underworld Lit by Srikanth Reddy: a “multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead [,] [c]ouched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality.”

Finally, closer to home, meet New Jersey-based Sagging Meniscus Press. Sagging Meniscus publishes “noncomformist” literature – “books that want to be themselves.” From our collection, I’ll highlight Dawn Raffel’s evocative and somewhat uncategorizable book, Boundless as the Sky: Fables and Tales, Some of Them True, a diptych with one part a response to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the second part a multivocal narrative of a single day in 1933 at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Small, independent publishers are saviors of the overlooked, champions of the strange, and advocates for diverse perspectives. If you want to read something daring, original, or idiosyncratic, something originally written in another language, and something that might just win a major award, add some small press titles to your reading list.

Here are the books that were mentioned!

Trilogy by Jon Fosse

Trilogy is Jon Fosse’s critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption.

A Shining by Jon Fosse

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde).

The other name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse

I is another: Septology III-V by Jon Fosse

A new name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. The three volumes of Jon Fosse's Septology—The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name—collected in for the first time in this limited hardcover edition, are a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience—incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events. 

Darwin’s Ghosts by Ariel Dorfman

The latest novel from one of Latin America's greatest living writers tells the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him, leading him to uncover his ancestors' involvement in the sordid story behind 19th century human zoos in Europe. From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world, comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him, leading him to uncover his ancestors' involvement in the sordid story behind 19th century human zoos in Europe.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs 

This is the story of a young mother, Helen, awake with her baby. Together they are moving through a morning routine that is in one sense entirely ordinary--resting, feeding, pacing. Yet in the closeness of their rented flat, such everyday acts take on epic scope, thoughts and objects made newly alive in the light of their shared attention. Then the rhythm of their morning is interrupted: a delivery person arrives with a used copy of Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, which Helen has ordered online. She begins to read, and attention shifts. As their day unfolds, the intimate space Helen shares with her baby becomes entwined with Fielding's novel, with other books and ideas, and with questions about class and privilege, housing and caregiving, and the support structures that underlie durational forms of codependency, both social and artistic.

The Book by Mary Ruefle

True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle's legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) 'the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.' With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle's prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. 'It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,' she writes. 'Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?' In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

Underworld Lit by Srikanth Reddy

Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond--testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

Boundless as the Sky: Fables and Tales, Some of Them True by Dawn Raffel

The first of its two parts, stories of real and invented cities, some ancient, some dystopian, is a response to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The second part comes together into one narrative, taking place in a single city-Chicago-on a single day in 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the arrival of a "roaring armada of goodwill" in the form of twenty-four seaplanes flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini's wingman Italo Balbo to Chicago's "Century of Progress" World's Fair. The 7000-mile flight from Rome to Chicago was lauded by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Hitler, at a time when aviation made banner headlines across the US, and news of the Nazis was often in a side column. 

- by Corina, West Windsor Branch