Stefan Tobler talks with Regan Mies about fifteen years of And Other Stories press, translating Lutz Seiler, and what’s exciting in German lit
Regan Mies: You founded And Other Stories in 2010 and have said that, at the time, it felt rare to find big publishing houses taking risks, especially with translated literature. Over the past 15 years, has your perspective on the publishing scene changed, or do things feel largely the same?
Stefan Tobler: Things feel completely different, actually. It’s astonishing how many interesting publishers of literature there are in English now, it seems, compared to how it used to be. From my perspective, when I started, there weren’t many places in the UK doing the kinds of books I wanted to see published. There were well established great presses in the US: New Directions, Graywolf, and Dalkey Archive Press, for example. In the UK in about 2009, when our plans were brewing, the interesting UK fiction presses that come to mind were few and far between. Off the top of my head: CB editions, Serpent’s Tail and Pushkin. Menard Press and Marion Boyars had stopped publishing new literature by then, as had other earlier greats. Obviously, there were great authors being published in other presses, but maybe those presses weren’t regularly willing to take risks on great authors if the great author wasn’t an English-language writer or, in other ways, a sellable commodity––as well as being a great writer. But now – I haven’t tried to count the number of publishers doing interesting literary stuff in the UK, let alone in the UK and the US, but there must be well over fifty of them.
We like works that are doing new things with the art form and authors we feel are surprising on the level of the sentence as well as perspective. We like things that are funny, we like things that are daring. We try and come to books with an open mind and read them on their terms.
Stefan Toebler
Compared to all these other publishing houses, are there trademarks you feel are specific to And Other Stories titles? When you’re acquiring a title, do you have a checklist of characteristics you always want to tick? Or is it a feeling-based decision?
Good questions, but ones which I struggle a bit to answer. I think a lot of editors would say the same. You try and not use big phrases like, you’re looking for the best, because that’s not very helpful. But if I were to venture a few words… We like works that are doing new things with the art form and authors we feel are surprising on the level of the sentence as well as perspective. We like things that are funny, we like things that are daring. We try and come to books with an open mind and read them on their terms.
I wanted to ask about your ‘putting words first’ approach to the new And Other Stories covers. Could you talk about the decision-making that went on behind the scenes when it came to the redesign?
We knew we wanted to try to use ecological papers but also have a local connection. We came across a lovely, tactile paper made in the Lake District and sold by a paper merchant based in Hull. We arranged good rates only to find out that the bigger, affordable printers thought that’d be too complex, to buy in paper at a special rate just for our books. Then weirdly, even though the paper merchant said all the different colour shades were the same price, the affordable printer had some old agreement whereby two thirds of the colours were a lot more expensive than others. We had this idea of a multicoloured series initially and suddenly it was going to be really difficult cost-wise. That constraint led us to think, well, we’re really taking the insides and putting them on the cover. So why not also match the insides’ cream and black and do cream paper with black foiling? The practical constraint actually was really helpful in taking the last few steps.
Of course, you think you’ve come up with a new idea, but I was just visiting friends in Dresden this summer and talking to a few people after a literature event, including a guy who’s an antiquarian bookseller. He told me that a book design from the Leipzig publishing house Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag did something similar: the Gustav Kiepenheuer Bücherei series in the 1980s, black on white, foregrounded either text about the book or a quote from the book on the front cover. (So not quite the same as our concept of starting the book’s text on the cover.) And no doubt there are more examples. There are no new ideas, after all! Personally, I do much prefer our (Elisa von Randow’s) design to the Kiepenheuer one.
In 2012, you published Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s remained a top seller of yours ever since. Over the past decade, are there any other titles that come to mind as having had a similar impact at And Other Stories?
Actually, I’m curious. I’ll turn it back on you. Do you have a sense of whether there’s a title or two that’s done something similar?
In literary publishing, most books will not sell as well as they deserve, and a few will catch on and sell better than you’d imagined. Then you just hope it all balances out.
Stefan Toebler
I’ve really been noticing the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s trilogy over the past few years: Permafrost, Boulder, and now Mammoth. I feel like I’ve been seeing them pop up all over the place; so those are titles of yours that have definitely continued to catch my attention.
Yeah, the first book Permafrost had a great launch. Then the second Boulder got onto the International Booker shortlist, which really has helped more people find out about Eva Baltasar. In recent years, it’s been great to see people get very excited about her books, beautifully translated by Julia Sanches. But, after Deborah Levy, I guess the book that really helped to change our fortunes was Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World in Lisa Dillman’s translation. It’s been an amazing word-of-mouth success. It made The Guardian’s Best 100 Books of the 21st Century list alongside the Ishiguros and Rushdies, but it was successful particularly in the US, where it’s been adopted for college courses quite a lot — or put on programs for incoming years to read. And it continues to sell incredible amounts. Just last year, it sold 13,000 copies. It’s been wonderful for the author of the book. In literary publishing, most books will not sell as well as they deserve, and a few will catch on and sell better than you’d imagined. Then you just hope it all balances out.
One advantage of translations is that you can spend a long time deciding or finding the time to read a title, because there are fewer other people looking!
Stefan Toebler
Six of the books you published in 2023 were originally written in English, and the other eight were either translated from German, Arabic, Italian or Spanish. I’m curious how you navigate the balance between publishing English originals or translated works.
We don’t say, we must publish a certain number of English-language titles, but we always are aware that we want to have English-language authors as a part of the mix. We want to publish translations but not be a translation press: to us, it’s about crossing borders, as literature always has. It’s also nice to have authors that are not living quite so far away, to be part of the local literature scene in the UK and US. Sometimes it’s hard to publish as many English-language authors because there are all the other presses reading these writers as well as us. One advantage of translations is that you can spend a long time deciding or finding the time to read a title, because there are fewer other people looking!
You’ve been a translator—from German and Portuguese––longer than you’ve been a publisher. I’d love to hear how your work as a translator has influenced your work as a publisher and editor. Are there any unexpected skills or experiences as a translator that carry over to what you’re doing now?
I don’t know that it’d be surprising to anyone but, certainly as a translator, you have to work closely with word choice and language, which is very similar to what an editor needs to do. You have to have that appreciation for the differences in people’s styles. Working as a translator first also helped me to learn about proofreading and working to a house style. It gave me an understanding of the kinds of questions that can come up in translations. If a translation’s not quite reading right, what might be behind it? Even if you can’t read the original, you understand the kinds of shifts that can happen or the options that might be available.
I should say that I thank my translation career, such as it is, to NBG. When the brilliant Rebecca Morrison was NBG’s editor, she found she didn’t have time for three travel books she’d said she’d translate for Haus Publishing. She recommended me, and suddenly I had three books to do.
How do you like working with translators at And Other Stories? Are you open to translators reaching out with pitches directly?
We are. On our website, we have an About Us tab and a tab there for submissions, which gives a few guidelines. (The temporary stop on some submissions does not apply to those from translators.) But basically, if you think it’s a book that would fit on our list, we’re very open to ideas. Of course none of us in the team has a universal knowledge of any language’s literatures. There are so many blind spots, so we’re always keen to hear from people. Even if it’s an author that had been on our radar, sometimes knowing other people are excited about them is a good push.
I’d love to transition into German literature specifically, and your new translations of Lutz Seiler. And Other Stories recently published his novel Star 111, an essay collection titled In Case of Loss, and the poetry collection Pitch & Glint, the last of which you translated personally. How do you balance being an editor, publisher, and translator? Logistically, what does that look like––where does your time go?
I think the missing thing in the equation there is also being a dad. If I wasn’t a dad––or if I had kids that weren’t little, I think I would end up doing more translations on the weekend. Obviously, that isn’t so doable when you’ve got little kids who aren’t self-sufficient, so I don’t translate as much these days. There were a couple of books of Clarice Lispector’s that I did on odd Saturday mornings when my wife and I had fewer than three little kids, and even that was a bit of a push.
I hope maybe to carve out one day a week for translation, but it’s hard to limit publishing work. There’s always more you can do for the books, and when you’re in a small press, there are always plenty of jobs that don’t have a specific member of staff to do them. So I do less translation and do it more slowly.
We’re going to do another translation of Seiler’s poetry. For the first one, I was very, as the Germans say, akribisch; I was going into so much detail trying to work out his poetry. Very unlike his fiction or essays, his poetry is quite enigmatic and hermetic. You sense things under the water that you can just barely glimpse but can’t quite see. As a translator, I wanted to make sure that I was giving the right hints, so I wanted to understand what was under the water for the translation process, even though the reader isn’t quite meant to understand. I asked Seiler quite a lot of questions, and I did a lot of research. And then I wanted those hints to come through obliquely and also for the rhythms and sound pattering to be right. It was a slow process, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do another book in the same way. I knew there was a Canadian poet who’s a big fan of Seiler’s called Ken Babstock. By coincidence, I’d read a few of Babstock’s poems in Granta and happened to really love them before I realized he’d translated some of Seiler’s work himself. So we started collaborating on the new book, vierzig kilometer nacht (working title: 40km Night), and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do the whole book that way. I think it will be a quicker, freer translation experience.
I read that you were first introduced to Seiler’s work in a bookshop’s readers and writers’ group in Dresden and wanted to hear more about your journey with Seiler. What compelled you to acquire and work with these titles?
I say a bit in the translator’s note at the end of Pitch & Glint about how he was one of the poets I came across in this readers’ and poets’ group at a bookshop in Dresden called Lesezeichen. I thought he was a really interesting poet, but, you know, time passed, and I moved on until I happened to pick up Stern 111 at the beginning of the pandemic, which I listened to mainly as an audiobook. First of all, I thought, this seems quite slow, and the narrator seems quite slow––and then I realised the narrator was the author. After I got used to the fact that he narrates very differently to the way actors do––actors often ham things up a bit, really––it pulled me in. There was something quiet and contemplative in the story, even though it’s got a lot happening––the first alternative bar in East Berlin, and so on. I wanted to go and look at his other writing and the poetry again, and I found that although his poetry wasn’t the most immediately accessible, once I heard the music of it, I was smitten.
My last question is whether there are any other titles in the And Other Stories list we haven’t talked about yet that you have an especially strong connection to––or any you want to mention that are forthcoming.
I’m excited that we’ve got another poetry title coming up, Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings, which New Directions published in the US, translated by the US poet Don Mee Choi who lives in Berlin. I think Hyesoon has a really incredible voice. I’m excited that next year we’re going to do another book by Alexis Wright, an Australian writer whose Praiseworthy we published last year. It’s a book called Tracker, and it’s a wonderful sort of oral history of an Aboriginal leader, coming out next January. That one’s beautiful, funny, and really close to my heart.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with NBG, Stefan––and for all of your wonderful insights!
Born in Belém, Brazil, to English and Swiss parents, Stefan Tobler is a translator and the founder of And Other Stories. Authors he has translated include Clarice Lispector, Raduan Nassar and Arno Geiger. He grew up in northern Brazil and southern England, and has now made his home in the Dark Peak.
Originally from Minnesota, Regan Mies is currently based in Hamburg, Germany, where she teaches English, writes, and translates with the support of a Fulbright grant. She is also a jury advisor and reader with New Books in German. After graduating with a BA in political science and German from Columbia University, Regan worked as an editorial assistant with the imprints The Overlook Press, Abrams Press, and Cernunnos at Abrams Books in New York. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, and Necessary Fiction, and her short fiction and translations have appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, the Asymptote blog, No Man’s Land, On the Seawall, and elsewhere.
