Archive for May 8th, 2009:

Another small independent publisher doing exciting things with literature in translation (among other genres) is Brooklyn-based Melville House Press . Founded in 2001 by husband-and-wife team Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, the company has achieved something of a meteoric rise, winning the Association of American Publishers’  2007 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing.

Many things about Melville House are inspiring:

• It’s run by artists (Johnson is a short-story writer, Merians a sculptor) who proudly position themselves outside the so-called “Bermuda Triangle of American intellectualism.”

• The editors maintain a slush pile (”something the big houses don’t even have anymore“), read these submissions, and sometimes even publish them.

• They work out of offices behind revolving bookshelves (!) in this glass-walled storefront at 145 Plymouth St.

                                                                           

 

Melville House is republishing the novels of Hans Fallada (pen name of Rudolph Ditzen), one of the most popular writers of the Weimar Republic, who declined the opportunity to flee Nazi Germany, was incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane, and died of a morphine overdose in 1946—only to fall into deep obscurity. (See Nathan Ihara’s LA Weekly profile for some of the amazing details.)

Upon discovering Fallada’s novels (on a tip from fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg), Johnson felt compelled to get them back into print and also to “right a literary injustice” where the author’s reputation was concerned. (See the recent interview on Charlie Rose).

This year Melville House has published three Fallada novels: Little Man, What Now?; The Drinker; and Every Man Dies Alone. The first two titles were both previously translated and published in the United States in 1933 and 1952, respectively.  It is Every Man Dies Alone—for which Melville House has provided the first English-language translation, by Michael Hoffman—that has created a literary sensation.

Based on an actual Gestapo file, it is the true story of a German couple’s doomed underground postcard campaign against the Nazis. Fallada wrote it in just 24 days and died before it was published. A thriller and a love story about regular people speaking truth to power: we need more stories—and publishers—like this.

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