Nobel Prize Is a Boon for Three Small Houses
By Michael Coffey -- Publishers Weekly, 10/9/2008 1:49:00 PM
When the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced Thursday, even the most literate of Americans must have said, qui? The winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, the 68-year-old French novelist, though well-known in Europe, has been little known here. Though some of his work from the 1960s and ‘70s was published in English by Atheneum, those books are now out of print. Today, two small houses and a university press are the sole outposts for Le Clezio's works in English in the U.S.
David R. Godine published The Prospector in 1993. An ebullient Godine recalled a walk among the booths at Frankfurt, where, he said, he asks the same question of most foreign publishes each year: Who are your great writers who aren’t in English? “Anne-Marie Solange, at Gallimard—she’s always bitching that Americans don’t read French writers. So I asked her the question. She gave me three names—Sylvie Germain, Patrick Modiano and J.M.G. Le Clezio. I published all three, and for the right reasons. And now one pays off!”
Godine said, “I must’ve been on drugs” when he discovered he originally printed 6,000 copies of The Prospector, but was happy to find he had 500 copies in stock—all of them spoken for in a matter of hours after the Nobel announcement. The Boston-based house will go back to press for a paperback version, and has another Le Clezio book already in the works, Le Desert, due next year.
Curbstone Press of Willimantic, Conn., published Le Clézio's novel Wandering Star in November 2004. "We've sold 1,500 copies to date,” said publisher Judith Doyle—half the first printing. “I suspect that's about to change," she said when reached only hours after the Nobel announcement. "I've always been very fond of this particular book,” she added. "It's beautifully written and beautifully translated." Curbstone expects to go back to press.
University of Nebraska Press has two Le Clezio titles on its list—Onitsha (1997) and The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts (2002). Marketing director Rhonda Winchell said they are working hard to fill orders—“especially from our European accounts,” and like the other houses, are planning return trips to press.
Godine, who is well-known in the industry for questioning the sanity of doing what his press does—publish high-end, literary works—was, uncharacteristically, flushed with exoneration. “We took a risk 15 yeas ago—god knows why?—and we stuck with it. And today the phone won’t stop ringing.”
