{"id":96640,"date":"2016-04-07T14:26:24","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T18:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96640"},"modified":"2016-04-07T19:28:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T23:28:05","slug":"what-a-good-book-can-be-an-interview-with-edwin-frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/07\/what-a-good-book-can-be-an-interview-with-edwin-frank\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Good Book Can Be: An Interview with Edwin Frank"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 1999, Edwin Frank founded New York Review Books<\/a> to reintroduce out-of-print works\u2014many in first translations from around the world\u2014to the reading public. \u201cFrom the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue<\/a>,\u201d Frank told the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times last year. \u201cWe set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history.\u201d In the last seventeen years, you\u2019ve likely picked up a New York Review Book\u2014maybe because you were taken with its arresting design, or because you recognized a work you didn\u2019t know by a major author: Walt Whitman\u2019s unexpurgated <\/em>Drum-Taps, say, or unpublished stories by Chekhov, or new versions of Aeschylus and Balzac, Dante and Euripides, or essay collections by Sartre, Lionel Trilling, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm.<\/em><\/p>\n

Since its inception, the series has won dozens of awards for its translations;\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times chose Magda Szab\u00f3\u2019s <\/em>The Door as one of the ten best books of 2015<\/a>. New York Review Books have met not just with critical plaudits but commercial success, which naturally leads the curious reader to wonder: Who is Edwin Frank, anyway? We met in his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn to discuss his process: how he finds the books he publishes and what provokes his interest. Frank has a soft-spoken manner and a reader\u2019s excellent dispatch of vocabulary, but he clearly enjoys regular punctuations of loud laughter, provoked by his knowing, bone-dry sense of humor. <\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve published two books of poetry. Has your background as a poet affected your tastes as an editor?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well you could say that reading and writing poetry saved me from ever being a professional reader or writer. I had a Stegner Fellowship after college, but the main thing I took away from it was a permanent aversion to the world of writing programs, and poetry is also a pretty effective inoculation against commercial publishing. And I was always sure that I wanted to have nothing to do with the academic study of literature. Then again, poetry did in some sense lead me to publishing\u2014a kind of gateway drug\u2014since in the nineties my friend Andy McCord and I started a small press, Alef Books, in which we published Joseph Lease, Ilya Kutik, Melissa Monroe, Michael Ruby. But that was a labor of love. In fact I came to editing very late, in my midthirties, which is unusual in publishing, a business people mostly go into right after college. It was a lucky break. I needed a job and I thought that having put out a handful of books of poems would make me of interest to publishers, which of course was dead wrong.
<\/p>\n

What were your poetic passions?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That same year I discovered Dostoevsky I discovered \u201cPrufrock\u201d and I thought Eliot was utterly electrifying. Wallace Stevens I loved and Yeats and Keats and Auden and Plath and then Robert Lowell, his great dark early rhyming poems like \u201cJonathan Edwards and the Spider\u201d and his book of sonnets History<\/em>, which was among other things an education. I still like Robert Lowell, though he was somebody whose grandiloquent voice and sense of who he was I had to purge at a certain point. I liked the fact that he was a private poet but also a public one. Who invoked the power of poetry in order to challenge power\u2014most famously by refusing LBJ\u2019s invitation to the White House during the Vietnam War, which put him on the front page of the Times<\/em>\u2014hard to imagine now. He was central to American history, American literature, but also he stood at a distance from it, apart certainly from an American cheerleading which was audible enough where I grew up. Then he also had the vulnerability that came with his madness and that came out in his strange keening Southern-accented voice, and that was also undoubtedly appealing to a vulnerable adolescent. The English poet C. H. Sisson made a deep impression on me. And foreign poets too, Montale. The poets who have had the strongest effect on my own poetry are Robert Creeley on the one hand and Geoffrey Hill on the other.<\/p>\n

Do you think you have a different sense of language as a poet? Does it affect what you look for as an editor?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I have a habit of reading the last line of a book, or the last paragraph, as a sign of whether the book will be worth reading, and I\u2019m sure that comes from poetry, where the last line is so important. \u201cWho knows but that on other frequencies I speak for you\u201d: you read that and then you read Invisible Man<\/em>. You read the last paragraph of The Goldfinch<\/em> and you put the book down. Then I used to think the interesting sentence was the thing that was the mark of the interest of a book. I don\u2019t think I think that at this point. It\u2019s certainly one of the markers.<\/p>\n

What are some others?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, there are books of straightforwardly documentary interest, something like Vasily Grossman. Documentary isn\u2019t quite fair to Grossman. He\u2019s a much bigger writer than that. But Vasily Grossman is not a writer of particularly brilliant sentences. They are pretty flat and functional sentences. He\u2019s a writer, though, with an incredible empathy for human beings and an incredible troubled sense of history. Very differently, there\u2019s something like Geoffrey Household\u2019s Rogue Male<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s a thriller. It\u2019s also not a book of remarkable sentences, but it\u2019s a perfectly delicious book, perfectly plotted and paced. But in general, a good book revises your sense of what a good book can be. That\u2019s a basic truth that I hope the classics series helps to keep alive.<\/p>\n

How did you become an editor?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was in graduate school at Columbia for many years not getting Ph.D in Art History.\u00a0I was in my midthirties, and I was living not to complete my Ph.D. But I had two kids, so I began to cast around for something to do. Eventually I got a job at something called The Reader\u2019s Catalog<\/a><\/em>\u2014an idea of Jason Epstein\u2019s at the end of the eighties.\u00a0The independent bookstores were already taking the hit they would continue to take for a very long time, and Jason realized that there were huge swaths of the country where you couldn\u2019t get a good book anymore. So the idea was to have a kind of Sears catalog of \u201cthe forty thousand best books in print\u201d and people would be able to order them. The catalog was lightly annotated. It would tell you this is the major novelist of postwar Italy and this was his best book and so on, give the browser a little guidance plus a reason to browse. The catalog sold pretty well, so a second edition was planned in the midnineties, which is when I got involved. At that point the whole catalog had been computerized so that books that had gone out of print were immediately deleted. My first job was to look through the different sections and say, This book shouldn\u2019t be here or, Where is this book, which should be? And a lot of good books, books I loved or books I\u2019d heard about and had always been curious to read\u2014a lot of good books had gone out of print. Based on that, I began to assemble a list of interesting books that we could reprint and a few years later this turned into the classics series.<\/p>\n

What was the first book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We started with Chekhov\u2019s Peasants<\/a><\/em>, a collection of Chekhov\u2019s late long stories edited by Edmund Wilson. Wilson is a supremely sophisticated if at times stubbornly close-minded reader and critic. He was both a total professional and an unrepentant amateur. His work was a model for the editors of the New York Review<\/em>, which he contributed to from the start, and it had also mattered a lot to me. To the Finland Station<\/em> is one of my favorite books, and we later reprinted that. So we started with Peasants<\/em> as a tribute to Wilson and also to Anchor Books, which was the first American trade paperback series and where Peasants <\/em>first appeared.<\/p>\n

This was the fall of 1999. We did ten books in pretty short order in a different design from the one we have now, an unsatisfactory design, with every book numbered boldly on a kind of faux butcher-paper cover, and we soon changed it. One of the books was Richard Hughes\u2019s A High Wind in Jamaica<\/a><\/em>, which had been on a list of the hundred best books of the twentieth century that some distinguished committee had drawn up for Modern Library in anticipation of the new millennium. Most of them were in print, but not Hughes, and our getting it was a coup. It did very well. So did J. R. Ackerley\u2019s My Dog Tulip<\/a><\/em>. It was encouraging. Publishing\u2019s a very fatalistic business, or at least I am very fatalistic. Always assume everything will fail. So it was encouraging.<\/p>\n

You once described the process of looking for books with your colleague Sara Kramer as \u201crigorously by whim.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, the other way I put this is to say that I want to mix things up\u2014something old, something new, something whatever color it is, and something blue. Be unpredictable, including to yourself. So there\u2019s the question of how do you go about finding things\u2014or better their finding you? You have to be open to surprise and at the same time assiduous in pursuing the things you are really interested in. You have to be patient. And along the way when you are pursuing things you are confident you want, other things may crop up. Rigorously by whim. One of Sara\u2019s books, for example, is The One-Straw Revolution<\/a><\/em>, a kind of a bible for the green movement. It\u2019s a book about growing rice but it\u2019s also a spiritual autobiography of the author, Masanoba Fukuoka, who was a renegade Japanese agronomist. It\u2019s not a book I would have discovered in a million years, but Sara heard about it and I immediately thought, How interesting. Here\u2019s a book like no other book, a good book, and a book no one would ever expect us to publish. Perfect!<\/p>\n

You also said, \u201cFrom the beginning it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue.\u201d What did you mean by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are existing voices\u2014writers we have a commitment to, like Andrey Platonov or Vasily Grossman\u2014you build on those. And then there are new voices, new kinds of writing, you introduce. I think of the series as having different strands. A carpet rather than a fugue. We started with Moravia and went on to add a number of Italian writers. Pavese, Sciascia, Gadda. There\u2019s an Italian strand and a Russian strand and an American strand, and so on. We started as a reprint series but one of the first \u201cnew\u201d books we did was Cesar Pavese\u2019s The Moon and Bonfires<\/a><\/em>, an unpublished translation by R. W. Flint. He\u2019d done a series for Farrar, Straus and Giroux\u2014a compendium of Pavese\u2019s stuff\u2014and in it he went on and on about how The Moon and the Bonfires<\/em>, though it was Pavese\u2019s best-known book, was perhaps not his most successful. So they decided not to include it. I called him and I said, It\u2019s a pity you didn\u2019t translate The Moon and the Bonfires<\/em>, which is a great book. Your translations are wonderful and the only existing translation of the book is terrible. And he said, Well, actually I did do it, but then I sent it to Roger Straus, who looked at the sales figures and said, Why do I need another fucking book by another fucking Italian communist! So Flint just put it away in his top drawer, but he had it still. A few days later, on onionskin paper, the whole manuscript arrived.\u00a0Did he have a carbon copy, or had he just stuck it in an envelope and mailed it out? In any case, it went on to win a PEN translation prize.<\/p>\n

Have you had moments where you\u2019re sent something and you start reading it and the hairs on the back of your neck begin to rise \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m temperamentally too much of a skeptic, perhaps, but there are moments. I was very interested in the poet James Wright\u2019s translation of Theodor Storm\u2019s The\u00a0<\/em>Rider on the White Horse<\/em><\/a>, for instance. I picked it up and decided to take a bath. It was winter and dark and dreary. And I opened it thinking, A\u00a0novella about a man who\u2019s a dikemaster in northern Germany\u2014nobody\u2019s going to want to read that! But by the time I finished it, I had no question. We had to do it! Then there was the strange Hungarian writer Gyula Kr\u00fady. I had never heard anything like him. I had never heard anything remotely like him, mythic like Bruno Schulz, funny like P. G. Wodehouse, and weirdly sexy with Gypsy violins playing in the background. You never know if others are going to share your enthusiasm, but happily they sometimes do.<\/p>\n

Were you surprised by how successful the series has been?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The point of the series should be to get the books out there, spread the news, and to pay its way. It does pay its way. You could say the series started at a difficult but also opportune moment in a still ongoing crisis in publishing, a difficult business. Because this last decade has been a time when more than ever books are getting pushed aside by other kinds of entertainments and sources of information, and that has been a challenge for publishers and contributed to the decline of the independent bookstore that went on for so long and seemed inevitable. But in fact it\u2019s changed. The decline has not only stopped but been reversed, and I imagine that\u2019s because with books and literature under siege people who really care about books and literature care about them all the more. They want to defend them and seeing them as something you have to defend can put them in new light, makes you think again. What is it I love about these things? What difference do they make? And then again for people growing up with all the gadgets, perhaps the book offers a very specific respite, a place apart, a welcomingly unsocial medium, you could say. That may be going on, too. In any case, this ancient space of books has been changed by the new economy and the new technology. It doesn\u2019t feel the way it used to feel\u2014it feels threatened in some ways\u2014but you can feel it all the more and feel it\u2019s there to explore precisely because it can\u2019t be taken for granted. Old as it is it feels different and in fact new and I think that may help to account for the new independent bookstores opening up, as well as for the success of our series and adventurous publishers like Archipelago.<\/p>\n

What do you think explains the success of John Williams\u2019s Stoner<\/a><\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, it\u2019s just very well written and put together, and when you get down to it, it\u2019s a tour de force, taking this non-story of a man\u2019s sad and ever-more circumscribed life and making you feel it so keenly. It also has a certain kind of Edward Hopper, long-shadowed American loneliness, which I think has a certain appeal both at home and abroad. The book\u2019s got clean lines. And finally, it\u2019s a book about reading and the meaning of reading at a time when, as I was just saying, people are are preoccupied with that question. In that way, it becomes a kind of talismanic book for people. It\u2019s our best-selling book. It\u2019s been a best-seller all over the world!\u00a0In Holland it was only knocked off the top of the list by Dan Brown.<\/p>\n

How did\u00a0Magda Szab\u00f3\u2019s The Door<\/a><\/em>\u00a0come to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

After I discovered Krudy, I got interested in Hungarian literature, wondering if other Hungarian writers were as wild and woolly as he was, and was it something perhaps about the linguistic isolation of Hungarian? In any case, The Door<\/em> was suggested to me by Adam Freudenheim, the publisher of Pushkin Press. Vintage had published it in the UK and Adam, who was at Penguin then, told me how good it was, and how he wished he\u2019d brought it out. So I went and read it and admired it and bought the U.S. rights. Szab\u00f3 is very different from Krudy. She\u2019s a Communist-era writer and though she had a vexed relationship to the regime she basically was able to have a career. Tense relationships, power struggles, especially between women\u2014she writes about those things. By the way, that\u2019s another strand of the series, writers who were anathematized in the West and especially the U.S. for political reasons during the Cold War. Writers like Grossman, who were misread or given a very reductive reading as dissident writers and, accordingly, the minute the Wall came down, were allowed to go out of print. We\u2019d won that war, so why bother with the losers, even the ones who\u2019d been useful to us? Look at Anna Seghers, whose Seventh Cross<\/em>, a prison break book that offered a shocking inside view of Nazi Germany in the thirties, was a best-seller when it came out in the U. S. After the war, Seghers, who was a Communist, went to East Germany, and there were no more American publications.<\/p>\n

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Photo: booksonthepark, via Instagram.<\/p><\/div>\n

What would you say is your greatest rediscovery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For me, the Chinese writer Eileen Chang, who did her best work when she was young in the 1940s\u2014we\u2019ve published some of that in a book called Love in a Fallen City<\/a><\/em>. That at least has been the general view, but it may change because a lot of unpublished manuscripts have come to light since her death in the nineties. She\u2019d fled the mainland and come to the U.S. and become a recluse. She\u2019s immense, a cult figure in Taiwan and also in the PRC, but she certainly wasn\u2019t well known in English. I discovered her in a footnote to a reference book, The Oxford Book of Literature in English Translation<\/em>, in which she was said to have\u00a0written a novella that was the equal of Death in Venice.\u00a0<\/em>Well, Death in Venice<\/em> has for some reason become the inescapable yardstick for novellas, so that was pretty meaningless, but what caught my eye was that Chang had translated her own work and, it was said, spectacularly well. Writers who can write well in two languages are few and far between\u2014Nabokov, Beckett. Chang is great on, as she put it, \u201cthe little things that happen between men and women,\u201d ruthless little things, and she\u2019s also got an extraordinarily vivid, almost disorienting, visual imagination.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also especially fond of\u00a0The Root and the Flower<\/a><\/em> by L. H. Myers, though no one else seems to be, apart from Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote the introduction.\u00a0It\u2019s a historical novel set in Mughal India, or it purports to be, but it\u2019s really an India of the mind. The mind\u2019s India. It\u2019s a calm, almost Olympian book full of crazy extremes, psychological collapse, sex games, political conspiracies, murder, Buddhist enlightenment, beautiful descriptions of landscapes. It\u2019s a really wonderful book, a kind of private myth that I find completely convincing but perhaps it\u2019s too much off any of the existing maps of literature for anyone to find his way to it, though you know Fitzgerald is such a fine and unlikely novelist\u2014perhaps the best English novelist of her generation\u2014 that you\u2019d think her advocacy would count for something.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s\u00a0Mr. Fortune\u2019s Maggot<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0an immaculate and heartbreaking book and another straggler, unfortunately, perhaps because of its odd title. That\u2019s by Sylvia Townsend Warner, a fascinating figure, a completely modern writer but in no way a modernist writer, with a love of the bizarre and uncanny which she shares with a number of other British writers, John Cowper Powys, for example. T.H. White.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s it about?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A maggot is an Elizabethan term for a quirky or whimsical piece of music. Warner worked on a seminal gathering of English church music and was meant to study composition with Schoenberg\u2014she was only nineteen or so\u2014when World War I broke out and that was that. But then she set up as a writer. Mr. Fortune is a bank clerk and a devout Methodist who quits his job and goes to Polynesia to convert the heathen and then falls in love with a young man there. He doesn\u2019t know what to make of the new emotional, sensual world he finds himself in. He is in love and completely displaced and the book brings out both the wonder and finally the tragedy of that. And it is a musical book. Elizabethan keyboard and lute music is full of these lovely sad offbeat and dissonant dances and the book has that feel, too.<\/p>\n

When was it published?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the mid 1920s.<\/p>\n

How was it received at the time? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, there\u2019s no sex, but it\u2019s pretty clear what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s not as if the book was seen as a shocker, though Warner was in fact gay. It is not so much a love story as a book about love, a sad and profound one. Like Swann in Love, <\/em>though very different of course. It was Warner\u2019s second novel. Before it she wrote a novel called Lolly Willowes<\/a>\u2014<\/em>we publish that, too\u2014which was in a way more overtly subversive and was quite a success. It was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club in the U. S. It\u2019s about a spinster who breaks with her proper middle-class family and becomes a witch\u2014a cute story and that may explain some of its popularity. At the end, it turns seriously strange, though. The devil says to Lolly, I\u2019ll marry you\u2014quite a compliment!\u2014but she refuses him. She leaves the devil behind and wanders off, perhaps, it\u2019s suggested, to die in a ditch. She leaves everything behind, not just proper society, but the whole distinction between bourgeois and bohemian, right and wrong, all that, and Warner makes that complete and total forsaking very imaginable and attractive. The spinster and witch has moved on to a kind of transcendent nihilism.<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s like a lot of other authors in the series. She didn\u2019t fit the mold of what a modern writer was supposed to be, so she got left out of the story, as it gets told and retold in the academy, in book reviews, of the literature of the last century, the story of modernism, whatever that was or is.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re writing a book about the twentieth-century novel. Did your work on the series lead you to it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, encountering writers like Warner and Chang and Krudy and, oh, Ernst K\u00e4stner, who Walter Benjamin dismissed as a purveyor of \u201cleft-wing melancholy,\u201d made me think about the literature of the last century differently. Although I was surprised to find myself turning into a critic. It grew out of a thought experiment I had one night while doing the dishes. I was thinking about Alex Ross\u2019s book about classical music in the twentieth century, which had just come out, where he starts from a basic assumption that the formal characteristics and changes in music can be very directly related to the history of the twentieth century, its political convulsions, technological advances. I was sympathetic to that way of looking at the question and I thought, Could you do that for the novel? Write a book like that, I mean. My immediate thought was absolutely not. There are too many novels in too many languages for one thing. What kind of net could hold them all? Then I thought, no maybe you could. Sure, literature is broken up by languages, but then again a central fact about twentieth century literature and almost all twentieth century writers is that they read across languages. In translation, of course, or mostly, but that\u2019s the point. The twentieth century novel is born of translation, is, you could almost say written, even in its native tongue, in translation. Here the Russians are central, the fascination exerted by the Russian nineteenth-century giants and the very rapid dissemination of their books all over the world. By 1880, Dostoevsky is being translated and published everywhere. Japanese writers are picking up on the signal. What made the Russians matter so much so far away from home? Well, these are writers who are on the one hand latecomers to the novel with a world of their own, quite different from the European world that the novel grew up in, a troubled world, and they have to find a way to describe it for the first time. They bring everything they can to that problem and in a way that problem becomes what their books are about. Then in the twentieth century that problem became everybody\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n

Would it be too much to ask you to give us a brief history of the twentieth-century novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can mention a few basic things, I guess, and perhaps the first is that lots of novels written in the twentieth century are not what I am calling the twentieth-century novel. That novel is a novel written to grapple with the startling new realities of twentieth-century life and history, not just the obvious horrors, but things like electricity, mass education, women voting and in workplace, homosexuality, mass literacy, movies, you name it, all these huge transformations that the century brought, and in that sense the twentieth-century novel was caught in a continuous, unending, struggle to capture all these changes, to respond to them, to achieve realism. Much more so than the nineteenth-century novel, whose vaunted realism I\u2019d describe as judicial rather than mimetic, a question of arriving at a balance between the claims of self and the claims of society, the two poles of the nineteenth-century novel, a balance that does justice to both those claims because, realistically, anyone knows that both claims have to be respected. If one crushes or ignores the other: tragedy. If an accommodation is reached, well that makes for a happy ending or at least ordinary unhappiness. And so the comedy of life goes on. But that balance is upset in the twentieth century. Among other things people set out to upset it.<\/p>\n

Another thing that interests me is the place of the historical novel. In Aspects of the Novel<\/em>, E. M. Forster makes merciless fun of Sir Walter Scott, the historical novelist par excellence, for being ridiculously implausible shuffler of novelistic conventions and tricks, and you could say that if there is a novel that an imaginatively ambitious twentieth-century novelist, whether it\u2019s Colette or Raymond Chandler, didn\u2019t want to write it was Gone with the Wind<\/em>. The twentieth-century moment is too close, too demanding, too threatening and too exciting to ignore, too immediately momentous, and the settled perspective the historical novel calls for\u2014well, that\u2019s a lie. However starting in the sixties that starts to change. You might date the change to the publication of The Leopard<\/em>, which was rejected time and time again and only comes out after Lampedusa\u2019s death. When the author is history. But then it\u2019s a huge success and though The Leopard<\/em> just is a beautiful novel that success also marks a point where once again the historical novel seems to speak to the moment. Then later you get Ragtime<\/em>, J. G. Farrell\u2019s Siege of Krishnapur<\/em>, Hilary Mantel, who in a way finds in the historical novel the sense of uncertainty and urgency that was so much part of the twentieth-century novel, and now publishers\u2019 catalogs all over the world are crammed with historical novels, more often than not about the horrors of twentieth century history, as if born of weird nostalgia for disaster.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very aware that this thing, the twentieth-century novel, I\u2019m writing about is notional. A fiction in some ways. Once I described it as the hero of a picaresque novel.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the most peculiar book you have published?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Probably Maude Hutchins\u2019s Victorine<\/a><\/em>. Hutchin was the wife of Robert Hutchins, the famous president of the University of Chicago, before they had an acrimonious divorce. She scandalized the university by sending out Christmas cards with a nude girl on them. This is in the forties. Anyway, I found this book of hers in a used bookstore in New Orleans in a very attractive edition published by Alan Swallow, an adventurous small press from the midcentury I knew about though I had never heard of Hutchins. So I was curious, and all more so since there was no jacket copy, just a blue-tinted picture of Hutchins staring off into space and a bio note saying she flew airplanes. I opened it and I had never read anything like it. The book is about a pubescent girl and it starts with her watching a farmhand killing chickens and getting aroused. She\u2019s on her way to church. The sentences were stylish but the content was out of control, and I thought at the time, knowing nothing about Hutchins, that it might even count as a outsider literature in the sense of outsider art, art made out of private obsession as much as a conscious artistry. But Hutchins had a fair amount of recognition in her day and was compared to Colette, though she\u2019s much more arch and creepy really and frankly not nearly as good as Colette. But Victorine<\/em> was certainly like nothing else I\u2019d read and being like nothing else is a touchstones for me, though I\u2019d say it can be a treacherous one. Terry Castle wrote the introduction.<\/p>\n

Any new plans? <\/strong><\/p>\n

We are doing something we don\u2019t do very often which is reissuing all of a writer\u2019s work\u2014in this case the novels of Henry Green. I\u2019m also looking forward to Robert Chandler\u2019s translations of Grossman\u2019s Stalingrad<\/em>, in effect the first part of Life and Fate<\/em>, and of Platonov\u2019s Chevengur<\/em>, a very important book. Also Michael Hofmann\u2019s long-awaited version of Doblin\u2019s Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As editor of the series, Do you have a sense of mission, that you are doing something for letters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well I hope so. These are good books and I want them to be available and to find readers. And the whole strange activity of reading and writing, which has taken up so much of my life\u2014I guess I hope to abet it if only because I still wonder what it\u2019s about.<\/p>\n

One last question, the series has some great book titles as we have heard. What is your personal favorite?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Anatomy of Melancholy.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Susannah Hunnewell is publisher of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1999, Edwin Frank founded New York Review Books to reintroduce out-of-print works\u2014many in first translations from around the world\u2014to the reading public. \u201cFrom the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue,\u201d Frank told the\u00a0New York Times last year. \u201cWe set out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":614,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[21860,4738,17,21871,7828,216,135,4991,21850,21859,7002,3968,21861,21854,12552,5865,1807,373,1351,21858,14250,21856,21870,21851,313,4524,21855,19080,16533,21867,21864,4769,15537,21872,630,8270,21865,13111,4760,15781,21869,1711,21862,21866,21857,21863,530,14674,21853,21868,21852,969,75],"class_list":["post-96640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adam-freudenheim","tag-anton-chekhov","tag-books","tag-cesar-pavese","tag-classics","tag-design","tag-editing","tag-edward-hopper","tag-edwin-frank","tag-eileen-cheng","tag-genre-fiction","tag-geoffrey-household","tag-gyula-krudy","tag-high-wind-in-jamaica","tag-historical-fiction","tag-independent-bookstores","tag-jason-epstein","tag-john-williams","tag-jonathan-lethem","tag-l-h-myers","tag-literature-in-translation","tag-lolly-willows","tag-magda-szabo","tag-maude-hutchins","tag-michael-chabon","tag-modernism","tag-mr-fortunes-maggot","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-nineteenth-century-literature","tag-peasants","tag-r-w-flint","tag-raymond-chandler","tag-reissues","tag-richard-hughes","tag-robert-lowell","tag-rogue-male","tag-sara-kramer","tag-sentences","tag-stoner","tag-sylvia-townsend-warner","tag-the-door","tag-the-leopard","tag-the-moon-and-bonfires","tag-the-readers-catalogue","tag-the-root-and-the-flower","tag-the-straw-revolution","tag-translation","tag-translators","tag-twentieth-century-literature","tag-vasily-grossman","tag-victorine","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Art of the Reissue: An Interview with Edwin Frank<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How does New York Review Books choose their excellent classics? 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