François von Hurter is one of the three founding partners of London-based Bitter Lemon Press, which launched its first titles last year.
PW: Why did you and your partners start Bitter Lemon Press?
We wanted to publish fiction from abroad, books that expose the darker side of countries you're likely to visit (if only as an armchair traveler), written by strong local authors. Quality foreign books that have been overlooked by the U.S. and U.K. publishers aren't in short supply, given a general reticence to publish from translation.
Where did you get the name Bitter Lemon?
From Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons, a wonderful travel book about Cyprus. The name is meant to evoke the fun of exotic travel as well as the nasty, bitter yet sexy underworld to be discovered.
How do you select your titles?
We look for novels that have done well in their home market, won prizes and, if possible, been well-accepted in translation in places like France or Germany. We read French, German and Italian, and can thus get a taste of Turkish, Mexican or Japanese novels for example, albeit a bit indirectly. Our input in the selection process is to try to assess whether these titles can "travel" to the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. Tastes are obviously very different, both in content and appearance of the books.
What mystery authors have impressed you?
I've been reading mystery and noir fiction for decades. I started with U.S. authors and have kept a soft spot for Daniel Woodrell, James Crumley and George V. Higgins. Higgins and Elmore Leonard, a more recent love, I admire most for their use of dialogue. They need little else to portray their characters and whole scenes, sometimes the whole story. Woodrell's work is tough, funny and degenerate at the same time, a fine mix. Abroad, some of the writers I prefer tend to use the mystery genre as a way to explore the shortcomings of the society around them, yet keep you firmly glued to their books.
Why hasn't an acclaimed German crime novel like Jörg Fauser's The Snowman [click here to read the review] not been published in English before now?
Some of the neglect of a writer like Fauser might be due to the fact that New York and London publishers aren't generally comfortable with German. The French market has been well combed over—almost every publisher here in London claims fluency in French and some fondly remembered formative years spent in France—but the Austrian, Swiss and German authors have generally been left out in the cold.
What will be your biggest challenge?
Getting on the tables in the bookstores. We need to be patient, to build some following for our authors and also build some awareness of our brand/list. Where possible, we've chosen authors who have written a series of books with the same hero or at least in the same genre. We are small, and can't spend much on marketing, but we're investing in publicity and are keenly aware of the importance of reviews in the specialty press and elsewhere and also of the impact of independent bookstores across the U.S. for specialized imprints like ours. Now that Random House has bought Harvill we'll be watching, with joy, the support they give to Harvill's extraordinary mystery list—every penny they spend making the buying public aware of foreign literature should benefit imprints like ours.
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