Everyone can feel good about this! Non-profiteers, lyric essayists, essayed lyricists, people who care about publishing but don’t live in New York City, New Yorkers (you can afford to be magnanimous! You have all the stuff New York has in it!), everyone who’s mad at Amazon, punching enthusiasts, 41-year-olds, Minnesotans, the scrappy, award winners, and so on:
Graywolf Press, a nonprofit outfit in St. Paul, Minnesota…has been winning for a while. Over the past few years, as publishing conglomerates merged, restructured, and grappled with Amazon, a midwestern press snuck in and found a genuinely new way forward for nonfiction. Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams entered the Times best-seller list at No. 11, while Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a half-versified meditation on racism, stormed post-Ferguson America. Each has sold more than 60,000 copies, putting them in Graywolf’s all-time top five. Citizen just went back to press for a tenth time, putting it close to having 100,000 copies in print. That hardly puts Graywolf in league with Penguin Random House, but neither is it just a scrappy little press punching above its weight. It’s a scrappy little press that harnessed and to some extent generated a revolution in nonfiction, turning the previously unprepossessing genre of the “lyric essay” into a major cultural force.
The term lyric essay was popularized in the ’90s by the writer John D’Agata (a Graywolf author) to describe a hybrid form of nonfiction that accommodates verse, memoir, and criticism. But its origins go back at least as far as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, journalist-critics whose work is magnetically personal. Its present-day progeny is more diverse and more direct, answering to a very modern hunger for well-worded social arguments rooted in identity and experience. It’s a rapidly expanding niche, where Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay can turn painful confessions into powerful exhortations while — in a different mode — Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti can make universal claims out of private stories. On this shifting ground, Graywolf’s poet-critics are punching above every weight class.
The publisher’s very good 2014 wasn’t a fluke but a culmination (and its lyric-essay run continues with this year’s The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s deconstruction of both gender and genre). Publishing just over 30 books a year, Graywolf has had authors win four NBCC awards, a National Book Award, two Pulitzers, and a Nobel Prize — all in the last six years. This year, it will exceed $2 million in sales for the first time. No other independent press, never mind a 41-year-old nonprofit, has come so far so fast. It didn’t happen by accident.
Tags: books, graywolf press, publishing
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Citizen by Claudia Rankine deserves all the hype it’s gotten. Tough read, but excellent.
Punching enthusiast here; could use more punching.
I am also a punching enthusiast, and while I am definitely in favor of Graywolf press and congratulations for all of this, it sounds great, and I will add these books to my reading list, I am not clear specifically how punching obtains in this case.
I think it was a reference to this part of the article? “On this shifting ground, Graywolf’s poet-critics are punching above every weight class.”
I just finished reading Citizen this morning! (Who needs to shower before work, right?) It is amazing, and I will be shoving it into any hands that will take it, because more eyes need to see those pages.
I am pondering which book(s) to buy from this press, just based on the strength of Citizen. If anyone has suggestions?
I’ve been a rep for Graywolf for eight years, and to be honest, I’ve never read anything that wasn’t excellent from them. I’m currently reading an advance of Blackass, which is fantastic (though not due out till March)!
I mean, the Empathy Exams. Actually one of the best books ever.
Totally second this. The Argonauts is also amazing. And basically all the poetry they publish is top-notch.
I would agree–also, somehow I and many of my friends ended up buying that for our mothers and mothers-in-law for Christmas last year. I refuse to think through why that is.
Do you like poems? One of my favorite living poets (D.A. Powell) publishes with them.
I may have to get his Cocktails book… confluence of interests.
My reaction to hearing him read from that book was to be bitterly disappointed that he was mortal and would therefore not be writing poems in perpetuity.
So Claudia Rankine teaches at my son’s college & at parents’ weekend in February I kind of randomly wandered into her reading from Citizen, just – there was time in my schedule before dinner? so how about this thing, it’s nearby? – and emerged an hour later, soul-shook.
She was amazing, and she played a slideshow as she told stories about the cover image and some of the other images, and about hiking up above campus, and how she came to some of the poems she read, and when people in the audience had questions, it seemed like she called on all the brown hands first and one of the white hands was almost frantic about getting her comment in and it was awesome and I was giggling in the back row even as I tried to pull myself back together from the shock-force of being in the same room as her.
that time i worked at a giant publisher & said over and over that all the good books are coming out from smaller presses & no one believed me. and now people come up and say, “have you heard about this small press??” YES. A THOUSAND TIMES YES. because srsly, we don’t need to sit in any more editorial boards and talk about how “no one reads essays” only to make bids on the paperback rights of projects i wasn’t allowed to make an offer on for being too out-there. #cranky
But also, really, good news industry! Thanks for catching on and trusting readers enough to come to difficult works by brilliant writers.
Charles Stross tried to explain it on his blog once but I still don’t really get what publishers are for anymore
As someone who has to deal with a lot of self-published blowhards trying to get their book in our store, I can tell you they definitely serve a purpose, and that’s to keep the majority of shitty fucking prose in the slush pile. Do they also need to seriously examine racism and sexism in the industry? Yes. Do they need to get it together about “genre” fiction etc? Yes. Do they serve no purpose at all? Definitely not.
but that’s tautological. “publishers are important because they’re important,” or more specifically, “publishers are important because they have a store that’s regarded with some prestige.” I for one think we should revel in the new dark age of infinite self-exposure. what’s the reason to keep shitty fucking prose off of a digital bookshelf? Amazon’s search queries aren’t slowing down yet. if someone wants to make six dollars annually off their terrible dinosaur porn, why should someone with prestige be holding the pursestrings on that?
I have no part in this industry on any level, just find paid content curation odd in an internet era
what’s the reason to keep shitty fucking prose off of a digital bookshelf?
Because it keeps a lot of people from reading. “Discoverability” is the single biggest hurdle for ALL authors in a digital age, when the carefully curated tables from well-read booksellers are dwindling. So you know what people do instead because they can’t find anything good? Binge watch Netflix. People who read over 10 books a year read more than ever, but that’s about 10% of all readers. In the last ten years, (i.e. launch of the Kindle) the 50% of all readers who read 2-5 books a year, have dwindled to 0-2 books a year. People don’t want to wade through the crap so they give up.
Well, you don’t really need to sell yourself to a publisher if you’re fine with making six bucks a year; most people can find a way to net that on their own. But if you want to make sure people know about your book and can easily find your book, if you want your work to be polished and marketed, and if you want to hopefully make some money for the work, going the more traditional route still helps. The average reader isn’t going to wade through the entire self-published, self-edited internet to decide what to tuck into their carry-on.
Publishers are like The-Toast moderators. You would NOT BELIEVE. NOT BELIEVE. All. The. Vile. Shit. that gets written, that just doesn’t make it to bookshelves. Also, editing is a real thing.
As a former-editor-turned-agent, it’s so so so so so so in authors’ best interests to actually get their books into the hands of readers through publishers who have distributors. Self-publishing success is such an outlier, whereas traditional publishing…works. The rationale is kind of like big-banks are terrible and problematic so the best thing to do with my money is put it in a cookie jar. Well, sure, someone might save enough that way to buy a house outright that way, but is that actually the best way to do it? I can’t tell you how many big-house authors ditched their publishers in that first wave of self-published ebook success to come crawling back because, in spite of their platform and previous success, it’s mostly a bad venture.
And the beautiful brilliant minds of YAYWOLF (thanks @vmartinipie) are capable of curating authors into seasons that affect the popular consciousness in a way that creates momentum, fosters intelligent zeitgeists and changes in attitudes. That doesn’t happen when books are released one-off and without planning, promotion, set up, etc., without relationship to other books.
I love love love love Graywolf and so does everyone else on the bookstore staff where I work. They’re one of a passel of small presses now where anything they produce, I will at least consider reading, which is DEFINITELY not the case with a lot of others. Yay Graywolf! YAYWOLF
I don’t live anywhere near the twin cities but I’ve been stalking Graywolf for years. GIVE ME A JOB GRAYWOLF
They will never give me a job but they are still the best
A couple Graywolf press poets Toasties might like which you might already know about but just in case not… I heartily recommend and enjoy Graywolf books by Jane Kenyon, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Katie Ford, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lynda Hull, Mary Szybist
Get out your credit card!!! I have spent good $$ on these books with no regrets whatsoever.
so true. you can probly skip Tony Hoagland and James Franco but at least everything else deserves a look!
Tracy K. Smith's LIFE ON MARS is one of my absolute faves of the last 10 years.