Readux Books will individually publish short works of (mostly) translated literature. Based in Berlin, our location in the heart of European literary life is one of our great strengths. We will release four teeny books (small format, 32–64 pp.) three times yearly, a bit like a magazine. The books will be available in print and electronically. The first set will be published at the beginning of October 2013.

This is a great moment to work with short-form writing. During my research, I’ve discovered a constellation of organizations dedicated to publishing short texts individually, but Readux is the first to do so with a focus on translation.

Translations from German will play an important and continuing role in our program, because of our special ties to Berlin and to German literature. In our first year, we will also publish translations from Swedish, in partnership with the Swedish publisher whose format is the inspiration for our own. We look forward to many fruitful collaborations with Novellix in the future, as well as with other organizations in Europe and in the United States, which we’re excited to tell you more about in the coming months.

Each group of books will also include one piece by a well-known English-language writer. This person’s piece will also act as a gateway, helping readers discover foreign authors they don’t yet know they love.

Last week she announced the first package of titles to be published by the press:

Two of our little books focus on our ever-fascinating home-city of Berlin: The brilliant writer-translator Franz Hessel’s In Berlin takes an intimate look at turbulent Weimar-era Berlin with two classic 1929 essays.

In City of Rumor: The Compulsion to Write About Berlin, Gideon Lewis-Kraus examines what it is that makes him return to the topic of Berlin again and again.

Francis Nenik’s The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping is a moving and formally virtuosic exploration of talent, fate, and chance in the lives of two twentieth-century poets.

Swedish literary star Malte Persson’s smart, ironic story Fantasy, about the fallout in the wake of a failed Stockholm movie production, investigates the shifting boundaries between fantasy and reality.

More information about how to order—or subscribe, which is what you should do—will be available in the near future. In the meantime, it’s just worth checking out her site. I’m particularly excited about the Gideon Lewis-Kraus book . . .

(Sidebar: I’ll be at the booth most all of the time, except when I’m attending which could well be the coolest MLA panel ever. And one that I might “dress up” for.)

Anyway, as I’ve done every year since Three Percent started, it’s time for our annual reposting of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s 2004 I know this is Gideon’s juvenilia (his first book, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, comes out from Riverhead next May), but it’s just too damn choice to pass up. (And still remarkably on point.)

It makes sense, then, that the last really big event of the conference—#585, “Is Now the Time for Paul de Man?”—feels like a resounding celebration of that communal autonomy and collective idiosyncrasy. Paul de Man was a Yale professor from Belgium whose writings in the seventies and early eighties catapulted deconstruction to the top of the theoretical heap, and launched his reputation as a sort of Gene Simmons of the academy—a little controversial, a little over-the-top, definitely cheesy and overblown in a seventies-ish sort of way, but a quintessential rock star nonetheless. He died in 1983; a few years later, someone dug up some Nazi collaborationist writing he’d done for a Belgian newspaper during the war, and it became a big conflagration. The scandal was used as a way for critics of the academy to dishonor the professoriate. “See?” they sneered. “Being a deconstructionist is one tiny step removed from being a Nazi.” It was the perfect link between professor-as-political-menace and professor-as-hopeless-obfuscator. So it’s not surprising that even now, twenty years after his death and fifteen after the scandal, the MLA is still trying to come to grips with de Man.

The subdivided ballroom is as packed as, well, a rock concert. There are upwards of five hundred people here—easily the most at any single event—all dressed up in their ecru scarves and horn-rims, lined up three-deep along the walls, necks craned and heads nodding furiously; it occurs to me, to take this rock analogy one step further, that the constant nodding (“Oh, but of course, I am understanding you perfectly”) is like a restrained form of headbanging. Everyone looks healthier and more stylish than anyone I’ve seen all weekend. Even the panelists are sartorially impressive: Ian Grant Balfour of York University in Toronto looks as distinguished as his name sounds, with thick black rectangular auteur glasses and a charcoal blazer over a tight black turtleneck. Mark Hansen of Princeton is the tallest man I’ve seen at the whole conference, at least eight or eleven feet tall, and is wearing a neon yellow shirt. Gayatri Spivak is cloaked in a radiant red sari. Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, is sort of short and has neither cool glasses nor a red sari, but he’s a publisher, not an academic.

The actual papers delivered are so bizarre and freakish and sodden with jargon as to make them utterly incomprehensible. But it is a truly virtuosic incomprehensibility that makes sense only as a kind of poetic performance. It is an incomprehensibility that defies all notions of accessibility to outsiders, a gala event high up in the penthouse of the ivory tower. It’s an incomprehensibility that affirms the professors’ power to decide for themselves what counts and what is meaningful in their world, an incomprehensibility that reclaims de Man as someone important to them for their own private reasons. The de Man they remember was de Man the scholar, not de Man the Nazi, and they thus reinscribe in thick confident lines the boundaries of who they are. Those boundaries declare that de Man the scholar was not and will never be accountable as a scholar for what he said and did in the political sphere, just as de Man the citizen was not and will never be held accountable in politics for what he wrote in the scholarly sphere. To the general public, the panelists assert: you may hold us accountable when we write op-ed pieces, and you may obviously hold us accountable as teachers, but when we write for other scholars we answer only to other scholars. To the right-wing critics: you may hold us accountable for our political views as citizens and as educators, but our political views and our scholarly arts may not for your purposes be wedded.

The night before, I had spoken with one grad student who studies Hawthorne. When he tells people that, they say, “Oh, sure, I read The Scarlet Letter in tenth grade.” “It’s no wonder,” he said, “that deconstruction and other fashionable theories have caught on so hard in nineteenth-century American lit. It takes a subject that everyone thinks they know everything about and makes it sexier, gives a new and exciting way to read it.” In other words, it makes it their own again. It’s not as though they have some exclusive ecclesial privilege over the material, it’s just that they’ve spent years and years reading everything that’s ever been written about Hawthorne, so, yes, in some unmagical and undivine way, it is very much theirs. The fact that we all speak English doesn’t mean that they’re doing something any of us could pick up casually in our spare time.

So as much as I want to grab the panelists by their modish lapels and shake them and demand to know exactly what the hell they’re talking about, it is not my right to do so, for I am not there by invitation, I am not a member of their community, and I have no right to expect that their words should mean anything to me. I still think their tortured, overwrought sentences are for the most part patently absurd, and when Mark Hansen refers to the film Memento as an example of “retentional finitude in a particularly acute form”—which is immediately before he talks about “the breakdown of cinema as a temporal object”—I recoil. But I don’t recoil because I think they are maiming the English language or making a big deal out of stupid things. I recoil because their absurdities no longer seem sublime: I no longer think their argot is cool, their community Olympian, their idiosyncrasies magisterial. Their language isn’t jargon, it’s slang. Their pursuits are neither irrelevant nor transcendent, they’re peculiar—and fantastic, in the true sense of the word. The mood around me is triumphant.

MLA isn’t necessarily the most uplifting of conventions, although as with anything else that’s social, I love the opportunity to meet and talk with people, convince them to teach our books, etc. and etc. And if anything interesting happens, I’ll try and blog about it. (Unlike last year, this time our �����Թ�/Open Letter party won’t get busted by the hotel security. Yeah, we’re rock stars like that.)

Anyway, as I’ve done in the past, I feel compelled to post about back in the day. It’s still relevant, and still effing hilarious. And gives anyone who hasn’t been to MLA (which mostly consists of a herd of very nervous grad students interviewing for a scarcity of jobs), a sense of what it’s like.

Enjoy!

Mary Pratt, the current president of the MLA, introduces the panel: Masao Miyoshi of U.C. San Diego, Ferial Ghazoul of the American University of Cairo, and Gayatri Spivak of Columbia University; the latter, whom Pratt calls “our most conspicuous traveling theorist,” is a guru of what’s called “postcolonial theory” and current academic megastar and the only one I’ve heard of, although apparently—according to Charlie—all three panelists pack some serious scholarly credentials.

Miyoshi stands up to speak first, and from a distance it looks like he’s actually sporting elbow patches. He hadn’t been sure until that morning, he announces, where exactly he would be speaking, whom he would be addressing, or what he was supposed to be talking about, so please forgive him. He looks a little befuddled but also sure of himself, like a celebrity who has forgotten which clip he brought to show the audience on Letterman. With that caveat and apology, what follows is 95 percent unintelligible. What I get out of it is this: The university is veering toward a business style of management. Funds are being redirected away from the humanities and toward the applied sciences. There’s an increasingly corporate-tinged emphasis on the production of useful knowledge—physics, biochemistry—which leads us to ask this question: is humanistic study becoming “irrelevant, inconsequential, or just incomprehensible?” These pockets of sense-making sentences, however, are occluded deep within a whole lot of non-sense-making about the relation between the humanities and something called “environmental biojustice.”

I just can’t concentrate on the substance of his talk, however, because something about his delivery seems off-kilter; I decide it’s just me. After a few minutes, Charlie elbows me and whispers, “I think that his lips are out of sync with his words.” I laugh. Then I realize it’s true: his mouth is actually making the wrong shapes, as though he’s starring in a poorly dubbed kung fu movie. Charlie and I look at each other, struck dumb. Then, to add to the blazing surreality of the moment, Miyoshi refers to the twentieth century’s three world wars. “Did he just say three world wars?” Charlie asks. “Yes,” I say. Charlie is sweating. He really likes his job and his profession—in a heartrendingly noble and admirable way—and here, at event number one, is his profession at its most cartoonish. I really like Charlie and I have already noticed that most journalists are unnecessarily unkind to academics, so I start sweating, too.

Finally, Charlie’s face flushes and he turns to me. “_There’s a mike delay!_” he blurts out, maybe a little too loudly. It’s just a mike delay, and both of us are embarrassed that we thought it was something more uncanny or sinister. With that crisis of confidence safely behind us, we return to the largely fruitless attempt to parse Miyoshi’s sentences. Then, midthought, Miyoshi abandons a clause, thanks the audience, and takes his seat. Charlie apologizes for him. “I saw him speak on post-1945 Japanese art once, and he was brilliant. I think he was just a little flustered. He must have written that on the plane here this morning.”

“I’m pretty sure he teaches in San Diego,” I say, looking at the program. Charlie looks crestfallen, like he just watched his dad strike out at the family-reunion softball game. This opening experience has done nothing but confirm practically every negative stereotype about the MLA. I can see he’s trying to decide whether there’s a way to save face. He decides to admit that there isn’t. “Well, I guess you can safely ridicule _that._”

If Miyoshi nailed the English-prof-as-space-cadet caricature, the next speaker, Ferial Ghazoul, comes across as the stuffy, supercilious poseur. She speaks as though she has cultivated a robust head cold; exquisitely calibrated sinus pressure steamrolls her vowels, so she holds the middle syllable of “university” for a full two seconds. Her words sound extruded rather than spoken. She gives a fairly standard “tasks of the university” talk: to aid critical reflection, to add to global knowledge, to promote multicultural awareness and cross-pollination, and to be a “laboratory exploring the self and the Other in a humanist framework.” Humanities professors should help “oppose imperialist hegemony” with a “dynamic strategy of bringing subalterns into alliance.”

Then, after twenty minutes of talk about what a university is for, she comes to a melodramatic crescendo. There’s a very long pause. She looks out at the thinning crowd and says, “What we do not ask ourselves is: what for is a university?”

What for is a university? Aside from the fact that she has just asked that question literally two minutes before in the normal put-the-damn-preposition-at-the-end sort of way, what floors me is that this question and its chief syntactic variant—what is a university for?—are asked at the conference with astonishing frequency. If the MLA conference organizers made sloganed T-shirts, the front would read: “MLA Convention, San Diego: ‘What for are we in 2003?’” And the back: “What are we for in 2004?”

And this is the weird thing: they don’t even mean “what for is a university?”—they mean “what for are English professors?” There are tons of answers to the first question: to teach students, to examine political configurations and economic policies, to study earthquakes and tsunamis, and of course to help build fighter jets or antigravity rooms or more muscular bionic arms. But what are English professors for? They teach, of course, but they don’t help out with economic policy, they have little to say about natural disasters, and they can’t build futuristic prostheses. And the better the applied sciences get at answering these lurking purpose-questions—“Hey, check out this new laser-equipped invisibility frock we just made in the lab”—the more their colleagues over in the English building seem like starry-eyed, impractical romantics, or, less charitably, anachronistic buffoons. Despite her clotted jargon and fustian grammar, Ghazoul is making a serious point: more and more people are wondering what the hell English professors are doing and why they should be allowed to keep doing it, and they need to reformulate their answers.

Hells yeah.

Whole article Thanks, Gideon. Thanks, Believer.

As is evident from the title—“The Last Book Party”—Gideon’s piece is more about the people, the social aspects, the scene of the Frankfurt Book Fair than anything else. (For anyone who doesn’t know, in October, thousands of publishing people descend on Frankfurt, Germany to spend five days buying and selling—or at least talking about buying and selling—rights to books. We usually come back with four-plus linear feet of catalogs, samples, promotional books, etc., that we slowly read through over the ensuing twelve months before the practice starts all over again . . .) And this plays to Gideon’s strengths as a writer—he’s great at depicting these sorts of events, making them make sense to a newcomer, and making the overly familiar step back and see these ritualized occurrences in a slightly odder light.

And he’s great at describing people and getting excellent quotes. Especially from the always on and always entertaining Ira Silverberg:

Ira, in a bracingly Windsor-knotted pink tie and smart blue sports jacket, just stepped off the red-eye from New York but looks as though he just stepped out of an extravagant shower. His gray curls, shot through with some black still, are swept back from his forehead in a way that seems both distinguished and boyish. Credited with looking like a Jewish Richard Gere, he is finer-hewn than that, his features sharper, more clever. [. . .]

“Our roots are in literary books,” Ira says. (When Ira was a teenager he went on a pilgrimage to see Burroughs.) “They’re not our day-to-day business; our day-to-day business is disgusting. You’ll be hearing a lot about vampire year. But here is where we can at least remember what we think differentiates us from widget salesmen.”

Thankfully the piece doesn’t devolve into a look at how publishing people spend all their time drinking, screwing around, and pretending they live glamorous lives once they get out from behind their desks. Instead he poignantly pokes fun at this:

It’s getting later and drunker, and one young foreign-rights agent pointedly asks me how the late-night scene at the Frankfurter Hof could possibly be relevant to my purposes. Motoko [Rich of the New York Times, I say, told me I should hang out here. The agent says it makes her and everyone else uncomfortable that I’m hanging around when everybody’s drunk, that maybe what I’m jotting down is that someone is flirting and then leaving with a married person. I’m pretty sure I know the flirtatious pair she’s referring to, from the previous evening, though I certainly didn’t know until now that they’d left together; I couldn’t care less. Her pointing this out seems less defensive than insistent, as if she wants to make sure I register that despite the crisis in the industry, married people in Frankfurt are still sleeping with people to whom they happen not to be married. I take out my notebook and write, “Motoko useful again.”

What Gideon starts to develop in the piece is an interesting model of the ultimate publisher/editor/agent: someone who has both aesthetic and commercial chops. A person who loves real literature, and knows how to pick a commercial success. It’s an interesting idea that shuffles aside a lot of the reasons why a particular book becomes a worldwide hit, but is useful way of looking at the big names in the publishing world.

One of the people Gideon centers on is Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, who represents writers like Italo Calvino and (now) Robert Bolano, and is also known for his vicious nature and for creating nasty bidding wars. (The bit about Gideon hedging on translating the title of the German article for Wylie—the title refers to the super-agent as the “greediest” man at Frankfurt—is hysterical.)

The is pretty entertaining, and worth checking out to get a sense of what the Frankfurt Book Fair is like.