Susan Harris was working a temp job last month the day the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. She heard about it from a friend, then checked the Internet. Sure enough: the prize had gone to Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz–stunning news to the former editor. Northwestern University Press, where Harris worked for nearly 17 years, most recently as its director and editor in chief, is Kertesz’s only publisher in English. Now the struggling little press was being celebrated worldwide for its discerning eye and perseverance, and orders for the books would be pouring in. It should have been a heady moment, but Harris might as well have been hearing the news on the moon. She was fired from her job at Northwestern last March. Her major offense, she says, was publishing writers like Kertesz.
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“My first thought was how heartbreaking it was to have something every editor dreams of at the first point in 17 years when I wouldn’t be able to enjoy [it],” Harris says. “Then I thought, I’m so glad we still have the rights to the books.” Northwestern has published two of Kertesz’s autobiographical Holocaust novels: Fateless, in 1992, and Kaddish for a Child Not Born, in 1997. They were part of a mission to publish eastern European literature in translation that goes back to the 1980s. Launched by then director Jonathan Brent, this initiative was a key element in Northwestern’s growing reputation as a publisher of more than the usual academic monographs. In the early 90s, Brent left for Yale University Press, where he’s now editorial director; his successor, Nicholas Weir-Williams, arrived in 1992 and took the commercial publishing Brent had initiated to a new level.
One of the candidates for Harris’s still-vacant job is acting director Donna Shear, hired two years ago as director of finance and operations. She says the press has a staff of 14, an annual budget of about $2 million, and sales of $1.5 to $1.8 million. Though it published as many as 100 books a year at its peak, the number will now be kept to 50–roughly 60 percent trade and 40 percent scholarly. The deficit, which ballooned to about $850,000 for 2001 (from $470,000 the previous year), was due primarily to “inventory write-downs,” Shear explains. Translation: eating the cost of books that remain unsold three years after they’re issued. Although the Kertesz books were “out of stock within five minutes of the Nobel being announced” (bookstores should be restocked this week), Shear says in the future, literature in translation “will not be a major thrust.”
