New E-Book Venture for Foreign Literature

EJ Van Lanen, formerly of Open Letter Books, announces an interesting new venture. Its first titles will partner with one of Europe’s most interesting presses:

BERLIN/NEW YORK, October 2012—Frisch & Co. today announced the launch of its e-book publishing program, which will publish contemporary foreign fiction in English-language translation for e-book reading devices. For its initial titles, Frisch & Co. is partnering with Berlin-based Suhrkamp Verlag—venerable publisher of Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and many other modern German-language luminaries. The companies will collaborate to select and publish two new titles from Suhrkamp’s list each year. Frisch & Co. is currently seeking partners in other countries.

Frisch & Co.’s first two titles are Anna Kim’s haunting and poetic novel The Anatomy of a Night and Uwe Tellkamp’s award-winning epic The Tower. Both titles will be released for the first time in English in late-Spring 2013 and will be available through online e-book retailers and on Frisch & Co.’s website. . . .

Translated into fifteen languages, Uwe Tellkamp’s bestselling The Tower won the 2008 Deutscher Buchpreis—awarded annually to the best German-language novel—the Deutscher Nationalpreis (2009), and the Literaturpreis der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (2009). The Tower paints an epic panorama of the waning days of the German Democratic Republic.

Suicide is spreading like an epidemic in Anna Kim’s third novel, The Anatomy of a Night, which follows the twists and turns of eleven people’s lives in a poor and largely isolated village in the eastern part of Greenland. Precisely observed and beautifully written, The Anatomy of a Night announces a major new voice in German literature.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. The Market for New Literature This provides a perfect explanation of why commercial publishing will rarely be the first to publish truly innovative fiction. They’re talking about literature-in-translation here, but...
2. Der Turm Review You have to give the Complete Review credit for reviewing a 1,000 page work in the original German. That said, this book is being promoted...
3. Why Cover a Bad Foreign Novel? The Literary Saloon notes that, aside from a few publications, there’s very limited coverage of non-translated books in the traditional English-language books media. They then...
4. We Say Translate This Book!–Foreign Policy Responds Foreign Policy has put together a nice portfolio of untranslated literature for its current issue. It's excellent to see a publication like Foreign Policy giving...
5. Der Turm in English? Last week I mentioned Der Term, the massive, 1,000-page novel of East Germany that recently scooped up the German Book Prize. In that post, I...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.