Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.

The literary journal attracted great names. Its issues sold well. And then it was over — a fate that offers insight into the tenuous place of literary magazines in the American publishing landscape.

By Kate Dwyer

Published Dec. 3, 2022 / Updated Dec. 5, 2022, 1:15 p.m. ET

From the start, Astra Magazine was unusual.

The literary journal, which published its first issue in April, had the backing of Astra Publishing House, the U.S. arm of the Chinese publishing conglomerate Thinkingdom Media Group. It was not intended as a moneymaking operation, but as a prestige vehicle for the publishing house, said Nadja Spiegelman, who was hired in 2021 to be its founding editor in chief.

The financial security afforded Astra great creative freedom and the ability to pursue the loftiest of goals: to promote literature in translation in the English-reading world. It also allowed Spiegelman to hire full-time staff members and to appropriately compensate writers and translators, often a challenge at fledgling literary publications.

The first issue, “Ecstasy,” was presented to great fanfare in the spring with contributions from literary celebrities such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Leslie Jamison, Terrance Hayes and the U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, plus internationally recognized voices in translation, including Fernanda Melchor, Sayaka Murata, and Forough Farrokhzad. Its 9,000 copies nearly sold out. So did the 8,000 copies of the second issue, “Filth.”

But on Monday, Spiegelman emailed her network of contributors with news of the magazine’s closure, citing “a business decision in a difficult year for publishing.” The third issue, tentatively titled “Broke,” will not go to print, the website will cease publishing and the staff — including deputy editor Samuel Rutter and poetry editor Aria Aber — will be out of work.

Astra Magazine, Spiegelman said, was “both unusual and exciting, a glamorous and subversive literary project, a breath of fresh air and hope.” And then it was over, leaving fewer places in the United States to publish and read new fiction. Its short existence offers insight both into what is possible for a literary magazine to accomplish and into the tenuous place such publications occupy in the American publishing landscape.

Historically, literary magazines have functioned as sites of experimentation and real-time documentation of a moment’s sensibility. . . .

Read more

Publishing-in-Transit

Publishing-in-Transit: Copper Canyon Press

Featuring Michael Wiegers, Ryo Yamaguchi, and Cole Swensen, with Christopher Soto

Copper Canyon Press Executive Editor Michael Wiegers and Publicist Ryo Yamaguchi join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading from Christopher Soto.

(Cole Swensen will be giving a talk on campus at U of Warwick on 21 November.)

Register here (free):

https://brooklynrail.org/events/2022/11/03/publishing-in-transit-copper-canyon-press/

Small Publishers Fair 2022

The Small Publishers Fair is the the annual gathering of books by writers, artists, poets, composers, book designers and their publishers.

Small Publishers Fair 2022 will take place on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October at the historic Conway Hall, the centre of humanism and literary Bloomsbury.

Read on to to find out about the sixty nine UK and international small press publishers taking part and the exhibition Bibliopoe: books by Steven J Fowler.

Can’t make it to Conway Hall? Use this site for research and to buy books. Support small press publishing!

How a Tiny British Publisher Became the Home of Nobel Laureates

Fitzcarraldo Editions is not yet 10 years old and has only six full-time staff members. Since its founding, three of its authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

LONDON — When Jacques Testard started his own publishing company in 2014, he wanted a name that suggested a crazy endeavor. Testard called the imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions, a reference to ‌the 1982 Werner Herzog movie in which a rubber baron tries to haul a 320-ton steamboat over a hill in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

“It was not a very subtle metaphor on the stupidity of setting up a publishing house,” Testard, 37, recalled recently. Publishing often “feels like you’re just digging a hole in the ground and chucking money into it,” he added.

Eight years later, Fitzcarraldo Editions seems far from a madman’s folly. It is one of Britain’s most talked-about publishing houses, with a reputation as the English-language imprint of choice for Nobel laureates. When the French writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 literature prize last week, she became Fitzcarraldo’s third author to gain the honor since the house’s founding, after Olga Tokarczuk, of Poland, in 2019, and Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and writer, in 2015. Fitzcarraldo Editions is also the British publisher for Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright, who is regularly among bookmakers’ favorites for the award. (It has also published one book by Elfriede Jelinek, although she received the Nobel in 2004, a decade before Fitzcarraldo began.)

And Fitzcarraldo is making waves outside the Nobel. Since 2017, a dozen of the house’s books, including Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season” and Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory,” have been nominated for the International Booker Prize, one of the highest-profile awards for translated fiction. In 2018, Tokarczuk’s “Flights” won that one, too.

The day after the Ernaux announcement, Testard said that he had ordered the reprinting of 65,000 copies of her books to keep pace with demand, a huge number for Fitzcarraldo, given that it sold around 135,000 books across all its titles in 2021.

Link to full article here.

Codex

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FORUM CONTRIBUTION

Forum

Please post your thoughts, responses, links, or other related material you’d like to share with the workshop here.

READINGS FOR WEEK 3: Little Magazines and Modernism

TBA

READINGS FOR WEEK 2: A Short History of Print Culture: from Gutenberg to Areopagitica / Manifesto workshop

Be sure to have read Richard A. Guthrie, “A History of Books” (from Week 1, see below)

Typography Pocket Essentials (excerpt)
(Ilex, 2014)

Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (excerpts): “Prologue: Changing Experiences 1588, 1642, 1688,” “What is a Pamphlet?,” “‘Stitchers, Binders, Stationers, Hawkers’: printing practices and the book trade,” and from “Printing Revolutions 1641-60” (section on Milton’s Areopagitica, pp. 262-275).
(Cambridge University Press, 2003)

For a concise summary of Areopagitica (optional), you can read this short entry from the Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook (Marshall Grossman).
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

Please read around in this selection of manifestos, from Mary Ann Caws, Manifestos: A Century of Isms. You don’t need to read them all, but read enough to get a sense of the genre, and its range, and read in Caws’s preface, “The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,” for some understanding of the historical context: Oscar Wilde, “Preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’” (1891); Stanislaw Przybyszewski, “Primitivists to the Nations of the World and to Poland” (1920); Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cubism Differs” (1913); Blaise Cendrars, “The ABCs of Cinema” (1917-1921); Raoul Hausmann, “Manifesto of PREsentism” (1920); “Futurist Synthesis of the War” (1914); Valentine de Saint-Point, “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913); Franz Marc, “Aphorisms” (1922-1912), “Der Blaue Reiter” (1912); “Dada Excites Everything” (1921); Francis Picabia, “Is an Imbecile, an Idiot, a Pickpocket!” (1921); Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Modernism” (1914-1919); Mina Loy, “The Artist and the Public” (1917); Mina Loy, “Auto-Facial-Construction” (1919); R. Aldington and others, “Our Vortex” (1914); Wyndham Lewis, “Bless England” (1914-1915); Kurt Schwitters, “Cow Manifesto” (1922); “Declaration of January 27, 1925” (Surrealists); Antonin Artaud, “All Writing is Pigshit” (1965); Salvador Dali, “Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind” (1927); Isidore Isou, “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry” (1942); Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto” (1914); John Cage, “Ban Fist” (1937); Tom Phillips, “The Postcard Vision” (1971).
(University of Nebraska, 2001)

WRITING SUGGESTION

As your first (or maybe second or third) blog post, on your new webblog, draft a manifesto regarding something you feel strongly about, enough to want to address loudly, something that makes you feel a little crazy. Be inventive and borrow from stylistic and formal tricks you’ve noted in the sample manifestos.

 

 

READINGS FOR WEEK 1: Introduction: What is an author? What is a book? What is publication? / Blog workshop

 

PRIMARY

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library”
http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/2138/benjamin.pdf

Roland Barthes, Death of the Author:
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/barthes.death.pdf

Michel Foucault, What is an Author:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Foucault_Author.pdf

Richard A. Guthrie, “A History of Books” in Publishing: Principles & Practice
Available as an e-book through the Library, also on the course reading list:
http://readinglists.warwick.ac.uk/lists/A670C23B-E9AA-E81D-5328-8D896FE202D3.html

SECONDARY

Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, “BookAsMachine”

Keith A. Smith, “BookAsPhysicalObject”

Anne Waldman, “MyLifeABook”