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Europa Editions and Edizioni E/O: a brief history (for English speakers)

13 ottobre

Europa Editions is the English-language imprint of Edizioni E/O, one of Europe’s most respected independent publishing houses. At edizioni e/o, we count writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Sebold, Gioconda Belli, Benjamin Tammuz, Christa Wolf, Zakes Mda, Edna O’Brien, Chinua Achebe, Maxine Hong Kingston and Thomas Pynchon among our better-known authors. We now publish quality fiction from all corners of the globe, but our catalogue has not always been so vast and so international. The e/o adventure began almost thirty years ago when my wife, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, and I founded a small publishing house specialized in literature from eastern Europe. At the time, writers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries in the region, were not being published in Italy; or if they were, publication was sporadic and their books did not form part of any long-range editorial vision. Counting on considerable doses of enthusiasm, interest and care we hoped we would be able to bring at least some of these largely ignored but hugely deserving writers from the east to the attention of Italian audiences.

We were joined by other enthusiasts along the way, all of us drawn to eastern Europe, and not only by the explosive political situation in the region, and the literature this was producing, but also by the long, contorted, complex histories that form the entire region’s cultural heritage. More than anything else, though, we were interested in the men and women who lived there, and how they lived, and what they lived for, their private loves and losses, in everything that perhaps cannot be labeled “politics.” We knew we were taking a chance. Many people in Italy with whom we talked about this endeavor told us we were foolish, naïve, that a publishing house specializing in these writers would never work: nobody in Italy, they said, was interested in those writers. It’s funny, this is the same kind of thing we’re hearing now from big publishers in America. They tell us that nobody in America is interested in reading contemporary writing from Europe, The Middle East, Africa, etc. But we tend to believe the opposite: that dialogue between cultures, represented and facilitated by their literatures, has never been more important than now, and that many American readers feel the same.

What was lacking 25 years ago in Italy when it came to writers from the east was not so much a keen readership, but publishers who were willing to commit to a focused, long-range editorial vision.

Young, keen for adventure, perhaps courageous and certainly naïve, we took a chance. Our first trips to Eastern Europe convinced us that we had done the right thing. We met woman and men there who, despite the hardships, the upheavals and the uncertainties, continued to laugh, drink, eat, to fall in and out of love, to live; they went to the cinema, drank wine, discussed films, music, books; they protested, they suffered, and they wrote. These were important experiences for us. We were given the chance to be a part of their lives for a while, to conspire with them, to get drunk with them, to exchange forbidden texts on the sly, and much more. Eastern Europe, at that time, was a place brimming with humanity, solidarity, solidarnosc. We loved those writers, with the kind of intense love typical of youthful infatuations; I will never forget my first encounters with people like Christa Wolf, Bohumil Hrabal, Kazimierz Brandys, Milan Kundera, the poet-photographer, Roman Vishniac.

Whether edizioni e/o turned out to be a financial success or not, the people we met and the experiences afforded us on our initial trips east already seemed like success to me. Fortunately for us, however, there was even more in store. The glum prognosticators who had told us edizioni e/o would never fly were wrong: readers in Italy were indeed interested in literature that recounted the extraordinary experience of Eastern Europe. edizioni e/o grew, and after some years we were even well-enough established to be thirsting after new editorial challenges.

Then, ten years after those initial adventures, with more experience but no less enthusiasm, we “opened up” to the west, publishing several writers from America. Our point of departure was embodied perfectly by Nelson Algren, whose work we had always loved and who turned out to be one of the first American authors published by e/o. His heartfelt identification with those whom society has ignored, reviled, and indicted, gave Algren the kind of dignity that invariably characterizes those who choose to testify on behalf of the downtrodden and reviled. His was an America not of ideas or of overweening ideologies. It was a solid, fleshy America, with all that bold, physical force that can be at once beautiful and ugly, familiar and alien. His was a variegated America whose skin was contemporaneously black, white, yellow, and brown. Algren himself, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joyce Carol Oates: these were the writers who interested us and our readers.

After all these travels, first to the east, then to the west, edizioni e/o finally came home to the Mediterranean. We have been blessed with the chance to publish fine homegrown talent like Elena Ferrante, Paolo Teobaldi, Massimo Carlotto, and Lia Levi. And we still consider ourselves fortunate to have been involved directly in the individuation and formation of an entire genre, a genre that has proven itself to be of great literary merit and importance. Mediterranean Noir comes to us from the dark side, from society’s underbelly, from the underworld, from the other side of Janus-faced mainstream culture and official history. The Mediterranean Noir novel is by definition a political novel inasmuch as it deals with social tensions, with crime, punishment, retribution. These novels do not always treat crime as an aberration, but often as part and parcel of our common, dappled humanity, a part that erupts to the surface of tough, seductive cities like Marseilles, Naples, and Algiers. They are written by men and women who often draw from their own personal and intimate knowledge of society’s underbelly, and who, as such, also know how to celebrate beauty, light, the sea, the sun, the city’s maddening vitality.

We have been delighted to bring to Italian readers some of the major proponents of this new, exciting, and important genre: Jean-Claude Izzo, Massimo Carlotto, Benjamin Tammuz, Yasmina Khadra. Some of these authors will now appear in English for the first time, published by our US imprint, Europa Editions.

My family has always gone to American to build their futures, seek their fortunes, or hunt adventure. My maternal grandfather was a bricklayer, one of four brothers married to four sisters, all of them from the same small village in the Abruzzi. He moved to New York in the early years of the century. My mother was born in New York not long after the end of WWI. After the Second World War, my father arrived in New York. Some of my family remained while others returned to Europe. I myself was born in Brooklyn, but reared first in Paris and then home in Italy. In some sense, this move to America is a kind of homecoming.

But Europa Editions is about more than simply my satisfying a family trend. Forever sensitive to lacunae in the publishing world and always on the lookout for new challenges, edizioni e/o arrives in America and in doing so embarks on what is perhaps our most adventurous editorial project yet. (At the very least, the plane rides are longer, so it seems more adventurous). We were joined in New York by an exceptional and very professional figure, Kent Carroll. With over thirty years of experience in publishing, first as editor-in-chief at the legendary Grove Press and then as publisher-owner of Carroll & Graf, which he recently sold, he is a great editor and publisher, and was essential to our early successes. Our office in New York is now directed by Editor in Chief, Michael Reynolds, who acquires titles in English and edits many of our titles both in English and in translation. He does an excellent job representing Europa in North America.

When we began talking to people about the idea of opening up a publishing house in The U.S., the chorus of naysayers was quick to respond: What? Books in translation in American? You can’t do that! It’ll never work. This, for better or for worse, has always proved to be our Siren song. We were hooked.

But there is also more to Europa Editions that the cheeky desire to prove the prognosticators wrong. Today, the English language is the principle means by which people communicate all over the world and we are pleased that the books we choose as publishers in Italy now have the possibility of being read by thousands of readers not only in North America, but also in the UK, in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and other countries. We believe now is the time for dialogue between countries, cultures, and peoples whose experience of history has shaped them in different ways and to varying degrees. Literature opens the door to this kind of dialogue, in some sense it is already a form of dialogue. We truly believe that what has been lacking thus far in American publishing is not a readership receptive to this kind of literature, to these marvelous writers with odd names from far off places, but a strong, coherent and courageous publishing initiative.

We hope to remedy this with Europa Editions. I have to be honest: at edizioni e/o we have a tendency to take the road less traveled and a certain predilection for adventure. But we also have a strong sense of what is just and what not. It seemed absurd to us in the late seventies that Italian readers had no access to writers like Christa Wolf, Bohumil Hrabal, and Kazimierz Brandys. Likewise, we now see no reason why readers in English should be deprived the possibility of enjoying marvelous practitioners of the Mediterranean Noir like Massimo Carlotto, Benjamin Tammuz and Jean-Claude Izzo, why American, Australian and British readers should not have the possibility of encountering firsthand a major talent like Elena Ferrante.

Europa Editions was founded without pretension or ostentation, but with the simple conviction that there was space in the American book trade for some of our wonderful writers. Our debut list will be available from September 2005, and will include some of our proven classics, together with several new titles from across Europe and the UK. With this first list we invite English-speaking readers to experience all the color, the exuberance, the violence, the sounds and smells of the Mediterranean.

Sandro Ferri, publisher