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. . . .

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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.