December Events Update & Press Release: Deep Vellum Publishing Announces Seven New Acquisitions
THANK YOU to every single one of you who made a donation to Deep Vellum yesterday as part of #GivingTuesday. And THANK YOU to everyone who’s subscribed to Deep Vellum. Or who’ve already bought copies of Texas, who’ve asked their bookstores to order copies, thank you ALL!!! You are amazing, and you are helping build a serious movement for serious literature across the world. I am in awe of the support Deep Vellum has received so far, and I have so much work to do to continue to live up to your expectations and goals. Let’s dream big. Including planning some events, like these:
If you are in Dallas tonight, swing by the Wild Detectives to meet the cast of Oral Fixation, whose new show “Outside the Box” will go down December 8th at the Wyly Theatre in the Dallas Arts District and December 10th at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff.
December 10th, Marian Schwartz will be at the Wild Detectives discussing her translation of Anna Karenina, out now from Yale University Press! DFW readers, you don’t want to miss this!!
December 10, 7pm, The Wild Detectives, Dallas, Texas
And here’s a pretty sweet album of pictures posted by Arte Público Press from our awesome event at the Americas Society in New York two weeks ago with Carmen Boullosa and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith in conversation with the founder of Arte Público (which is based at the University of Houston, and bless them for it!), Nicolas Kanellos. This was such an amazing event, I was honored to take part (and this photo was taken in the incredible “Inca Room” in the Americas Society building, a gorgeous 19th century mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan!!):
Below is the press release that went out into the world today to let everyone know what amazing things Deep Vellum has been up to recently, including signing our Fall 2015 list, which will be presented to you soon, but here is information on that list of books early. This is exciting stuff.
Contact
Scott Esposito, Director of Publicity
scott.esposito.dv@gmail.com
December 3, 2014
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—Dallas-based nonprofit publisher of literature in translation Deep Vellum Publishing (recently named by Flavorwire as one of five small publishers who are changing the face of the industry) proudly announces seven new acquisitions. These books complete the press’s 10-title list for 2015 and build the foundation of its lists for 2016 and beyond.
Originally published in six different nations on four continents, these six new novels and one short story collection further extend Deep Vellum’s dedication to publishing the most interesting new literature from all around the globe.
Headlining these acquisitions is the hallucinatory, thrilling Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila (translated by Roland Glasser), from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—shortlisted for both the Le Monde Literary Prize, and the Prix Wepler, and winner of the Société des gens de lettres’ award of the Prix Révélation and the Grand Prix du Premier Roman (grand prize to a debut novel). To be released in September 2015, Tram 83 tells a story of rampant capitalism and exploitation in a vast African city-state amid guerrilla wars of secession with great humor and a unique rhythm that gives the feeling of a jazz novel. It has been lauded as “a real discovery” by the acclaimed French/Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou.
Tram 83 is joined by the intense, tragic, political noir Target in the Night by the widely respected, bestselling Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia (translated by Sergio Waisman). This King Lear–esque family saga centers around a detective who uses his madness to solve crimes, and it was awarded the prestigious Romulo Gallegos Prize and the National Critics Prize plus was named Book for the Year by El País—all awards widely known as honoring the top title in the entire Spanish-speaking world. To be released in November 2015.
Rounding out Deep Vellum’s 2015 titles are Homecoming by Leila S. Chudori (Indonesia; translated by John McGlynn; October 2015) and The Pirate by Jón Gnarr (Iceland; translated by Lytton Smith; December 2015). The Pirate will be the second Gnarr title for Deep Vellum (following Spring 2015’s The Indian), and it is the second work in an autobiographical trilogy following the childhood upbringing of the crossdressing former mayor of Reykjavik.
Homecoming is an epic social and political novel by Indonesia’s best-known, most outspoken journalist, one that expands the focus of Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent blockbuster documentary The Act of Killing and sheds much historical light on the mass killings that marked Suharto’s rise to power in the 1960s. We are particularly proud to announce that Homecoming will be released in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Indonesia will be the 2015 guest of honor.
Beyond 2015, Deep Vellum’s roster only gets deeper, beginning with La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (The Netherlands; translated by Michele Hutchison; February 2016). Winner of the 2013 Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs, The Netherlands’ most important literary prize, and winner of the Tzum Prize for most beautiful Dutch sentence of the year (Pfeijffer is the only author to receive this award twice), La Superba has garnered acclaim both for its breathtakingly beautiful literary quality and for capturing the complexities of 21st-century Europe by detailing the lives of African migrants arriving in Genoa, Italy, the beautiful port city known as La Superba.
Last but not least, Deep Vellum’s new acquisitions are completed by a two-book deal with Morocco’s Fouad Laroui, acquired at the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair. Deep Vellum first publishes Laroui’s 2013 Prix Goncourt Nouvelles–winning short story collection L’Étrange Affaire du pantalon de Dassoukine (to be translated by Emma Ramadan, also translator of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx) and his newest novel, Les Tribulations du Dernier Sijlmassi. Long known in Morocco as a talented journalist and literary light, Laroui’s emergence into English has long been hoped for by, among others, American novelist and Lannan Fellow Laila Lalami, who recently lamented: “As incredible as it sounds, Laroui has never been translated into English.” Deep Vellum is proud to announce that soon this will change.
These new acquisitions join Deep Vellum’s extant list, which includes Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa—just named a top December release by the BBC. She is joined by The Art of Flight by the Cervantes Prize–winning Mexican novelist Sergio Pitol, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories by the Russian novelist (and Nobel Prize candidate) Mikhail Shishkin, Anne Garréta’s genderless love story, Sphinx, the first-ever full-length book by a female member of the Oulipo to be translated into English and a remarkable debut novel by Alisa Ganieva, winner of Russia’s prestigious Debut Prize, The Mountain and the Wall, the first novel ever published in English from Dagestan, the unknown and restive Muslim province in Russia’s Caucasus. Full release information for these titles can be found at deepvellum.org.
Deep Vellum Publishing is a not-for-profit literary publisher that seeks to enhance the open exchange of ideas among cultures and to connect the world’s greatest untranslated contemporary writers of literature and creative nonfiction with English-language readers for the first time through original translations, while facilitating educational opportunities for students of translation in the Dallas community, and promoting a more vibrant literary community in north Texas and beyond. Deep Vellum titles are distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.