Bay Area and beyond
In 2014, Adam and Ashley Nelson Levy left New York and headed to the Bay Area. The couple had met in the graduate writing program at Columbia University, had recently gotten married and were somewhat dissatisfied with the New York publishing world within which they were professionally, and successfully, enmeshed.
They were unemployed but had a percolating desire: to create a space that produced the exciting literature that existed beyond the limitations of what they saw in New York.
“The big houses have just become increasingly riskaverse,” Adam says from their home in Oakland. “You see that they’re not willing to take on that book that might just be a little unfamiliar or a little strange or a little bit too challenging.”
And so the Levys — out of their Oakland apartment — launched Transit Books, a nonprofit publishing press that focuses on international works of literature translated into English.
Publishing foreign and translated books might be a rare template for a small press, but Transit Books has in its less than three-year history nevertheless established itself quickly and successfully. Each book it has published (four thus far, with six coming in 2018, its biggest year yet), has gone on to receive favorable coverage here and abroad. One of its titles, “Swallowing Mercury,” a fiction debut by Polish author Wioletta Greg, was long-listed for last year’s Man Booker International Prize.
The paths these works have taken have fit within Transit’s original mission: The books initially fell under the radar, in the U.S. at the least, only to gather a receptive readership after finding a home with Transit. While many dominant publishing houses have become more creatively myopic, Transit Books, the Levys say, intends to publish worthy work that otherwise would struggle to find a platform, especially an American one.
“Kintu,” Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s historical Ugandan epic originally published in Kenya, became an overnight sensation, only to find no publisher in Britain or the U.S. — it was deemed “too African.” Spanish author Andrés Barba’s novel “Such Small Hands,” about a young girl’s violent games in an orphanage, was considered too short in length and too morbid.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of the kinds of books that were being passed up by major houses,” says Adam, who grew up in New York City and worked as a literary translator in Hungary after college. “And one of the reasons why we formed as we did, as a nonprofit, was that we really wanted to be a visiondriven organization and have that mission inform our editorial decisions. That really allows us, I think, to take risks on projects that larger houses would otherwise pass up.”
Translated literature, Adam adds, fall into that category. “It’s often viewed as either being too difficult or too inaccessible, or maybe it just doesn’t sell. And I think it’s really important for us to make sure that our books transcend that translation divide, that they aren’t sort of put in a corner.”
And the audience for such work is indeed out there, the Levys maintain. Translated books, in fact, got a big boost when the National Book Foundation announced Jan. 31 that it had established a National Book Award for Translated Literature.
“Americans, like anyone else, I think, are really interested in storytelling and innovative forms of storytelling,” Adam says, “and you just need the right kind of exposure.”
The Levys, who are both 32, have been inspired by other small houses that publish translated works. Among them are Two Lines Press in San Francisco (“They’re good friends,” says Adam), Deep Vellum in Dallas, and Open Letter and New Vessel Press in New York.
Transit Books also strives to be, says Ashley, “the kind of press where a reader will pick up the book and say, ‘Oh, Transit put this out, it ought to be good.’ Because we definitely feel that way about several small presses, anything from Graywolf or Coffeehouse, and we know we’re going to love it, because we love them. So that’s what we’d like to be.”
Despite the notion that literature has the power to expand worldviews, international works, with a few exceptions, rarely find their way into American hands. When they do, though, they should be regarded as more than a representation of where they came from, says Ashley, who was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Petaluma after age 6.
“We talk a lot about great books from other countries serving as an anthropological type of text,” Ashley says. “And while there’s never been a better time for more people to be reading about political and historical and cultural landscapes outside of their own, to us these books are more than that. They’re these works of great art that we want to share. They deserve to be shared.”
But the foreign identity of a book still demands recognition. The Levys, who have day jobs at nonprofit arts organizations, work closely with their books’ translators, who sometimes introduce them to the books in the first place, and always attribute their names on the covers.
“In those sort of competing theories of translation — between domesticating a text and foreign-izing it — a major publishing house always errs on the side of domesticating it, making it seem as though what you’re reading was written in English,” says Adam. “In both our editing and in our marketing of a translation, we are keen to make the translator visible and to make the foreignness of a text visible.”
To be sure, the Levys have no vendetta against American writing: There is domestic literature taking “interesting risks,” Adam says, and consequently being overlooked. Transit Books — whose forthcoming releases include Noémi Lefebvre’s French novel “Blue Self-Portrait” and David Hayden’s Irish book of short stories, “Darker With the Lights On” — will look to publish American works that push literary boundaries.
Yet the core mission remains the same in ensuring that the mainstream conversation around literature constitutes a more expansive global tapestry. The source of that more inclusive conversation, the Levys hope, can in some part be traced to the Bay Area and Oakland — or even specifically out of one Oakland apartment.
“There’s an incredibly rich tradition of publishing here,” Adam says. “But I would like for it to be that people really consider this a really first-class city for international literature. And I think in that way we do have big ambitions for the publishing house.”