What makes Europa stand out from the translated publishing pack?
From the start, we’ve aimed at a more general audience, not so much niche translation aficionados. This idea of publishing with a broader audience in mind—the same that Riverhead, Knopf, Doubleday, and Atria are after—has been interesting. Our big books, and there have been a lot over the years, constitute our quiet achievement.
That’s evident, at least in hindsight, from your first book: Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. What are some other quiet achievements?
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé, the Christelle Dabos books, and Valérie Perrin—these are all 200,000-, 300,000-, 400,000-copy-selling books, and Hedgehog is up near a million. That doesn’t happen very often with translation in this market.
What helped that happen for Europa?
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Winter Institute celebrated its 20th year this year as well. Our first and best friends in the market have always been those independent bookstores. They continue to be so, and they continue to overindex our books, even relative to other independent publishers. Barnes & Noble is a tough nut. I like the new stores, and I like what I hear from Daunt. But they’re cherrypicking our list now, and they’re being very selective. I don’t know if that’s a temporary or permanent situation, but we have to take that into consideration.
What's another way the press has helped shape the business over the past two decades?
Years ago, a friend of mine was opening up a headhunting business in the publishing industry and told me, as they were developing their questionnaire for candidates, they had 20 questions. She told me that one of these questions was, what contribution do you think Europa Editions has made to the American book market? I was like, I’m not sure—maybe the work in translation? Wrong! At the time, she said, the fact that we were publishing these trade paperback originals—a sort of vintage idea—was the real contribution.
What’s a space you're looking to branch into in your next 20 years?
One thing we’ve been trying hard to do is work a little more in the nonfiction space. It became clear a few years ago that the number of fiction titles published in translation was growing, while the number of works of nonfiction in translation were shrinking. It was pretty easy to assume that the attitude of publishing toward books originating in another language was, “Storytelling is fine for those foreigners, but when it comes to facts, we’ve got our own authors to deal with.“ I though that sort of a dangerous idea, an isolationist idea, and also wrong—there’s so much great work in the nonfiction space happening in other languages. It’s been a bit of a slog, because we’re battling this reputation for doing great literary fiction, adult fiction. But I would like to get more nonfiction into the market.
What are some concerns you have at present in the translation market?
I see the situation for work in translation changing in the future thanks to machine translation. Some online retailers may bypass publishers altogether in the future, allowing for things like instant translation of books that are available abroad for audiences that are already developed in other ways, through their community of fantasy readers or genre fiction readers or romantasy readers or whatever. They’ll already know about, say, something great that’s happening in Germany, and I don’t think it’s going to take too long before someone figures out, well, “It may not be a great literary translation, but if you really want to read it, just push here.”
What are your anniversary plans?
We’re reissuing 20 books that have sort of made the Europa story. In some cases, we’re doing new jackets; for the more iconic covers, we’re just revisiting and tweaking a bit. They’ll come out with extra content. That’s very exciting—you certainly do remain attached.
