A number of staff changes have been made at Melville House.
One staff member has received a promotion. Henceforth, Julia Fleischaker will hold the position of director of marketing and publicity.
The company has also recruited several new hires. Chad Felix has been hired to serve as manager of direct sales and library marketing. Ena Brdjanovic has left HarperCollins to take on two roles: director of digital marketing and editor of the MobyLives blog. Kait Howard has been brought on as a publicist.
Melville House will give away the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture to several 2016 presidential race candidates.
Of the sixteen people who have announced their intentions to run in this forthcoming election, only four have spoken out against the act of torture: Governor of Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley, and United States Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders. The team decided to send five copies of the book and a letter to the remaining twelve contenders who have not publicly denounced torture.
According to the press release, the letter reads: “Please accept the enclosed copies of The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, compliments of Melville House. We hope you’ll read and share these copies with your staff and advisers, and that they will help you clarify your position on the legality, morality, and efficacy of torture.”
Indie publishing house Melville House and British music company Rough Trade have formed a new corporate partnership. According to the terms of this new agreement, one section of the Rough Trade NYC store will be dedicated to stocking Melville House-related products.
Some of the items that will be put on sale include front list books, backlist titles, and other merchandise. The shop will also host monthly book club meetings, author appearances, writer talks, and book of the month promotions.
Melville House co-founder Dennis Johnson gave this statement in the press release: “Since the height of the punk era, Rough Trade has been a shining model of how to outwit conglomerate culture—which is, to stay true to your mission to support independent art-making, no matter where it takes you. We’re thrilled to join forces with such a visionary band of renegades.”
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and informative posts that prompt you to read at least a few of these excellent works.
Click here for all past and future posts in this series.
Fiasco by Imre Kertesz, translated by Tim Wilkinson
Language: Hungarian
Country: Hungary
Publisher: Melville House
Why This Book Should Win: Because I introduced Tim Wilkinson to Dennis and Valerie of Melville House outside of the London Review of Books bookstores years ago, and as a result, they published a number of his Kertesz translations. It would be sort of perfect if Wilkinson then won this award . . .
Today’s post is by Christopher Willard, who is the author of Sundre and Garbage Head. He lives in Calgary and teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design.
A man who Kertesz calls the “old boy” muses on the writing and subsequent publisher’s rejection of his early novel as he tries to locate a subject for his next novel. Kertész is most likely recalling an attempt to publish his first novel Fatelessness, based upon his deportation to Auschwitz when he was fourteen years old. In allowing fiction to revive facts, Kertész sets up a dense and masterful analogy: a book detailing one’s experiences may arbitrarily be rejected as lifeless and a person may be rendered lifeless by the whims of a totalitarian authority. This raises the thematic questions Kertész’s old boy struggles with, if one cannot control one’s fate or death, if ultimately death is situated closer to absurdity than rationale, what justifies living, what justifies writing about living? The attempt to answer the questions satisfactorily meets with utter failure. This is the fiasco. Kertész writes, “There was one thing that, perhaps I did not think of: we are never capable of interpreting for ourselves.”
The first third of the book is written in sort of call and response structure reminiscent of Beckett as evidenced in Krapp’s Last Tape. Kertész reflects (and reflects upon) the present and past through series of parenthetical statements. This makes for enjoyably dense reading but one imagines the enormity of the translator’s task in capturing both the accuracy and flow of such writing. For example regarding the old boy’s age, Kertész writes:
In all probability it would be simplest just to say how old he was (if we were not averse to such exceedingly dubious specifics, changing as they do from year to year, day to day, even minute to minute) (and who knows how many years, days and minutes our story will arch) (or what twists and turns that span may span) (as a result of which we might suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we may no longer be able to vouch for our rash assertions).
This ageless old boy exists, and not particularly by his own choosing. His burden seems to be the entire package: life, living, history, remembering, writing, the old novel, the next novel, the novel that makes up the remaining two-thirds of the book. The old boy began writing not to be a writer but to understand an unalterable past, and consequentially he involuntarily became a writer who now feels obliged to continue writing eve
As Melville House releases The Duel novella series, they have added enhanced content to the print books–launching their HybridBook project.
Print readers can can download additional digital content for free using a QR code or URL included inside the print book. These “Melville House Illuminations” will sometimes be longer than the book itself.
Publisher Dennis Johnson explained in the release: ”The Illumination for the HybridBook version of Anton Chekhov’s The Duel contains an essay on dueling by Thomas Paine, poems by Lord Byron, philosophy by Nietzsche, an anti-dueling church sermon, an argument in favor of dueling by a U.S. Senator, and the rules to the game of vint—a game that plays a role in the plot … And there’s so much more—maps, cartoons, recipes, photographs, paintings—to enhance the reader’s experience.”
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The winners of the first annual Indie Booksellers Choice Awards have been announced.
The following five books were selected by independent booksellers: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books), The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s), The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel (Unbridled), Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (Grove/Atlantic), and Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr (Akashic).
The five winning titles will be displayed in participating independent bookstores throughout the country. Comedian David Rees hosted the awards ceremony at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
