As editor Daniel Slager trolled the halls at Frankfurt two years ago in search of adult literary fiction to acquire for his list at Harcourt, the venerable mid-size New York house, two releases from German houses caught his eye—The Blue Sky, a novel by Galsan Tschinag, and The Summer of the Pike by Jutta Richter, a YA by an award-winning poet and children's book author. But Slager passed on both. "The Blue Sky just didn't fit in with the character of Harcourt's program," he says during a brief lull at his booth at BEA in Washington. "And I wasn't handling any children's or YA books at all."
But Slager no longer calls Harcourt home. Last September he was named editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions, a pioneering nonprofit literary press located in Minneapolis. Late May 2006 finds him at booth 2743, with enlarged cover images for both the Tschinag and the Richter over his shoulder—signs, literally, of how Slager is expanding the press's focus. The Blue Sky and The Summer of the Pike will be published in the coming months by Milkweed, a press known more for publishing literary fiction and nonfiction by emerging American and Native American writers than for European literature in translation. This month, ARCs of both releases are being sent to Book Sense bookstores and distributed at ALA, while the press organizes Tschinag's five-city U.S. tour this fall, the author's first visit to North America.
Translations can be a tough sell, as Slager knows. According to Andrew Grabois, a consultant who compiles market segment reports for Bowker, 4,100 works in translation were published in the U.S. in 2005, a drop of nearly 20% from the year before. Translated titles represent about 4% of the books published in the U.S. "The only country with numbers this low is China at 3%," Grabois declares. Yet Slager didn't hesitate to buy ing up the books he had once passed on. "The more I came to grips with Milkweed's mission, the more I knew they'd fit. The Blue Sky focuses on a native ethnic group and their confrontation with the modern world. And The Summer of the Pike addresses issues that children face all the time and that are often left out of YA books"—but not at Milkweed, which for several years now has published children's book dealing with controversial and taboo topics. The Summer of the Pike, by the Herman Hesse Prize—winning Richter, daringly places a cancer story in a fairy tale setting.
Slager, who holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU, is a fluent speaker of German and a noted translator of Rilke. Such scholarly chops, combined with his background at Harcourt, has given him confidence that Milkweed can succeed in branching into European literature. "I'd learned every aspect of handling works in translation," Slager says.
Several booksellers are already enthusiastic about the two new books. "The Blue Sky's a truly phenomenal story and so well written," says Hans Weyandt, co-owner of St. Paul's Micawber's. Tschinag, a chief of an endangered minority tribe in Mongolia called Tuvan, studied in Leipzig in the 1960s. As a result, he writes prose and poetry in a number of German and Mongolian literary forms. "We're going to have to handsell it," says Weyandt, "but we like to do that here. We're going to run with it."
Linda Bubon, co-owner of Women & Children First in Chicago, predicts that The Summer of the Pike will resonate. "This'll pull YA readers in. It pulled me in," she says. "There isn't much YA literature in translation," Bubon remarks. "Publishing such excellent literature in translation, especially for YA, is a great way for a small press to distinguish itself."
"Twenty years ago, Knopf, Harcourt or FSG would have snapped up the books the small literary presses are publishing today," says Slager. That's not to say he is transforming Milkweed into a Dalkey Archive or Green Integer, two other small literary presses that have distinguished themselves with works in translation. Slager is looking forward to the next book from the house's rising literary star, Seth Kantner, whose Ordinary Wolves was a minor sensation, and he is adding a Bill McKibben title (Hope, Human and Wild) in reprint.
"I'm thinking about mission, but I'm from the for-profit publishing world: I'm also thinking about marketing when I acquire books," Slager says, having already delivered a little of the wider world to the Twin Cities.
