Back to Normal
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Martin Riker, who ran the Chicago office, is now camped out in Denver, editing half-time for the center and working on a novel. He says O’Brien, who founded the organization in 1980 in Elmwood Park, “wanted to make Chicago another Minneapolis–the one city in this country that has a bunch of foundations that actually fund literature. Because the center is now the largest nonprofit literary press in the state [with seven full-time employees, a core of graduate student assistants, and an annual budget just under $1 million], we were hoping we could open up the field for literary publishing. But we weren’t getting people stepping up and wanting to be on our board.”
Spurned but moving on, the center and its publications are focusing on books in translation. O’Brien says that in the last 25 years–and especially in the last decade–the number of literary translations from American commercial publishers has dramatically shrunk and now stands at a pathetic 150 titles a year. “Fifteen years ago at least they were publishing the major foreign writers,” he says. “Now Carlos Fuentes’s New York publisher has allowed almost all his books to go out of print.” Fuentes will be reprinted by Dalkey, which puts out about 24 titles annually, and O’Brien’s traveling the globe in search of new voices–not best sellers, but writers who “might have trouble getting published in their own countries because they’re too experimental, too difficult, against the grain.” The center, which gets free housing from ISU (which also pays O’Brien’s salary), now has in-house readers in Vietnamese, French, Russian, Armenian, Serb, Croatian, and Lithuanian. They’re adding staff to cover Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch, and O’Brien’s looking to expand to authors from the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. He says 75 percent of Dalkey Archive’s future titles will be translations and, in a shift from the publisher’s past emphasis, only 10 percent will be reprints.
