A Voyage to India

A post that's supposedly about Gonçalo Tavares and nonprofit publishing, but might really just be a justification for the existence of this Substack.

Last month, Portuguese author Gonçalo M. Tavares received the Formentor Prize for Literature—an award I had honestly never heard of before seeing it on Deep Vellum’s Instagram announcement. I am quite familiar with Tavares though—been a big fan right from Jerusalem, which came out in 2009, and which we’d had on submission as we were building Open Letter. I’ve met Gonçalo a couple times and edited Daniel Hahn’s translation of A Girl Is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father, Tavares’s most recent novel to appear in English. (Speaking of Danny, his new book, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, just came out, and sounds fascinating.) But I had never read A Voyage to India, Tavares’s ten-canto, 410-page poem that’s frequently cited as one of his best works. An “epic” about a man named Bloom who leaves Lisbon and heads toward India “looking for a woman [. . .] or, wisdom.” And as with every good journey narrative, nothing advances in a straight line, and there are a lot of side-quests and digressions.

Which will also be the case with this post! There is a destination (India), and a starting point (the Instagram announcement about Tavares), but the rest of this piece is going to be pretty circuitous. And, in honor of John O’Brien, who loved any book that was about hotels (Hotel Crystal, Hotel Europa, Heartbreak Hotel), I’m going to kick this off with a story about a hotel—the Hotel Formentor in Mallorca, which was almost the setting for the new season of White Lotus. (They went with Cannes and the south of France instead.)

From the Four Seasons website.

The Hotel Formentor was founded in the 1930s by Adán Diehl, an Argentine “humanist and art enthusiast,” who fell in love with this remote, difficult-to-get-to part of Mallorca, and bought a huge chunk of it, where he built his extravagant hotel. Guests originally had to arrive by boat, but nevertheless, according to this article, it seems to have quickly become a hotspot for artists, writers, musicians, Nobel laureates, etc. Given how luxurious this hotel was though—it had both telephones and hot water!—it also attracted the very wealthy, whose money helped Diehl partially subsidize his more bohemian friends.

There’s not a ton of information online, but from what I was able to find, this place sounds like it was a 1930s version of the Chautauqua Institution or the Hay Festival. (Or, in some ways, like Auroville.) Diehl hosted a “Week of Wisdom,” along with the “Formentor Literary Conversations,” and, given the opulence and the famous intellectuals, this place sounds pretty ideal.

But, as so often happens for these artistic utopias, the money stops working . . . and a grift presents itself.

Despite the outward success of the hotel, Diehl was rapidly running out of money. In desperation, he agreed to let two Dutchmen install a roulette table, as they had done at the Casino Kursaal in San Sebastián, but the games were rigged, which created a huge scandal in Spain and had far-reaching consequences—a story for another day. Diehl had to flee Mallorca and returned penniless to Argentina. The hotel was repossessed and was owned by several banks until a group of Mallorcan entrepreneurs got hold of it in 1953, the year that Adán Diehl died. (Telegraph)

In a nice turn of fate, the new hotel manager, Bartomeu Buadas, is friends with future Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela, and keeps some of Diehl’s spirit alive by first hosting the “Conversaciones Poéticas de Formentor,” a week-long convening for poets from around the world, and then, the following weekend, the “Coloquio Internacional de Novela,” organized by Carlos Barral of Seix Barral, one of Spain’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious publishers.

The “Coloquio” took place over three days, each dedicated to a single topic: “The Novelist and Reality/The Novelist and Society,” “The Novelist and His Art,” and “The Future of the Novel.”¹ Some of the attendees include Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Anthony Kerrigan, and both Juan and Luis Goytisolo. Apparently, over the course of the weekend some aesthetic friction develops around the definition and import of “social realism.” In one camp are Carlos Barral and his Seix Barral authors (including Juan García Hortelano, who will come up again in a minute), who support “social realist” writing as “anti-Franco,” and in the other are Butor and Robbe-Grillet, who emphasize technique, style, and construction as ways to represent reality. Or, to fit in with the rubric I’m trying to build out, on one side you write to achieve a particular result, with the other, you write to represent the ways in which reality is constructed.

Following this gathering, Robbe-Grillet writes many of the essays that become For a New Novel, a defining work of the aesthetic underpinnings of the Nouveau Roman. And Juan García Hortelano writes Summer Storm, a mystery novel set at an exclusive Spanish resort that’s also a send-up of the wealthy upperclass hypocrisy.

After focusing on authors and aesthetics in year one, the second “Coloquio Internacional de Novela” takes place in 1960 and is all about publishing. Only two topics this time around: “The Publisher and the Novelist” and “The Publisher and the Public.” Here’s a description from Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962–1974 that starts out sounding great (“devoted more to artistic than to commercial values”), but ends up sounding like a cabal:

If the 1959 meeting could be read as a showcase for social realism, in 1960 the goal was clearly to promote the idea of what Ángel Rama has described as the “cultural publisher”: publishing houses that invest in new and often demanding literary products and present themselves as devoted more to artistic than to commercial values. With the participation of representatives from six prominent publishers—Gallimard (France), Rowohlt (Germany), Einaudi (Italy), Weidenfeld & Nicholson (United Kingdom), Grove Press (USA), and Seix Barral—the Second International Colloquium on the Novel was not only an occasion for such cultural publishers to discuss their role in establishing literary trade and trends, but also the cornerstone of a larger cultural operation: it was there that the Formentor Group was officially founded thanks to the initiative of Carlos Barral and Giulio Einaudi. The original group was eventually joined in their meetings by other publishers—among them: Bonnier (Sweden), Gylendal (Norway and Denmark), Meulenhoff (Holland), Choukorow-Sha (Japan), and Arcadia (Portugal). It remained active between 1960 and 1968, conceived as an international, large-scale cultural operation that would serve its members to identify, influence, and control the production of the contemporary literary avant-garde.

By the time the third “Coloquio” rolls around, a fracture has formed within the Formentor Group, which results in the establishment of two Formentor Awards: the Prix International for a book that’s already been published, and the Prix Formentor, which was for an unpublished manuscript that the fourteen presses would translate into their own markets with the hopes of creating a global author, by publishing in unison, the same book appearing in over a dozen languages around the same time. One prize that was drawing attention to great works that already exist, the other hoping to create and cash in on the next literary phenomenon.

The more literary award was the Prix International, which was spearheaded by Einaudi, and given out to an already-published book of the highest quality from anywhere in the world, written in any language. In Einaudi’s vision, this prize would be a vehicle for the world’s literary experts to get together and share their knowledge—the sort of information gathering that publishers should invest in.

“The publishers would finance the organization, the costly preparation of candidacies, travel for critics and the media. . . . In exchange for what? For priceless information that would place them in the forefront of all narratives. All the Slavists, Hispanists, Orientalists, etc., working with the major European publishers would combine their efforts and establish a virtual monopoly of literary information—with a wealth of criticism that, thanks to debate, would be vastly superior to the sum of the information provided by their separate reading committees.”

In 1961, the first Prix International is given jointly to Jorge Luis Borges for Ficciones and to Samuel Beckett for Trilogy, and was given in ensuing years to Speculations about Jakob by Uwe Johnson, Acquainted with Grief by Carlo Emilio Gadda, The Golden Fruits by Nathalie Sarraute, Herzog by Saul Bellow, and Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, before ending in 1967.

Meanwhile, the first Prix Formentor went to Juan García Hortelano for Tormenta de verano (Summer Storm). As a result of winning the prize, Summer Storm was to be published by fourteen of the most prestigious publishers of the time, basically guaranteeing financial success and hopefully a lot of international awards. Unfortunately, results were mixed, and Hortelano never broke out.

I’m unfamiliar with the other recipients of the Prix Formentor: Dacia Maraini’s The Age of Malaise,² Jorge Semprún’s Le Grand Voyage, Gisela Elsner’s The Giant Dwarfs, and Stephen Schneck’s The Nightclerk. As with the Prix International, it folded in 1967.

Forty-four years later, in 2011, the Formentor Prize was reestablished and has picked up the spirit of the Prix International, awarding the prize to some of the most talented authors of our time for their body of work. The complete list of winners in order of year awarded: Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Calasso, Alberto Manguel, Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, Annie Ernaux, Cees Nooteboom, César Aira, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Pascal Quignard, László Krasznahorkai, Hélène Cixous, and Gonçalo Tavares.

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According to the data I have available from my time with Dalkey Archive Press, Tavares’s A Voyage to India (tr. Rhett McNeil) has sold around 350 total copies since its release in 2016. Of the other five Tavares titles Dalkey Archive has published to date, Jerusalem (tr. Anna Kushner) has done the best with over 2,600 net copies sold, with sales for the other books in “The Kingdom” series—Joseph Walser’s Machine (tr. Rhett McNeil), Klaus Klump: A Man (tr. Rhett McNeil), and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (tr. Daniel Hahn)—falling off considerably. All told, combined sales for all six books Dalkey has published—the five above and A Girl Is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father (tr. Daniel Hahn)—totals well under 10,000 net units.

Which, to be fair, isn’t at all unusual for quality literature in translation, especially not these days. (And nothing anyone should be ashamed of. Sales are not the final arbiter of literary value.) Not only were there four million titles published last year—640,000 of which were from traditional publishing houses—but this was alongside 20,000,000 minutes of new content added to YouTube every day, not to mention some 30,000,000 TikToks. The point has been made many many times—we’re drowning in content, and there’s only so much any one person can consume.

People used to razz John O’Brien for not caring about Dalkey’s sales, for openly joking about how bad the numbers would be for the new batch of translations he was signing on. Gallows humor was standard at Dalkey, but there was a deeper truth to John’s jokes. As discussed on the recent Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast with Ted McDermott, John did care about sales, and would ride our asses if the month or year wasn’t going well, but his focus was a bit askew. On the podcast, Ted uses the example of John grumbling about how some obscure book from half a dozen years ago was only selling 7 copies in a quarter—a number John thought should be higher.

His obsession was with the average sales per backlist title. I’ve written about this before, but if you have a substantial backlist (Dalkey’s was almost 1,000 when he passed), and can average 100 sales per title, per year, you have created a working endowment. Your backlist sales provide the base for the press to take risks, and to publish books motivated by editorial curiosity. Every publisher would love to see one of their new books break containment and sell tens (or hundreds) of thousands of copies, but there’s only one I Who Have Never Known Men a decade—everything else requires patience.

John’s belief was in the long-selling book over the fast-selling. You do the best you can for a book when it first comes out, sure, but the goal is to keep it in print forever, and, by reintroducing these “complicated” authors and books to readers over and over again, the life to date sales numbers will reach respectability and, most importantly, you’ll have brought this book to the attention of multiple generations of readers. That was Dalkey’s stated mission as a nonprofit press.

The key to this strategy is making the backlist visible over and over again. There’s no simple set of steps to making this happen—every book is different. But, I truly believe that there are three steps to this process: reading and knowing the books, having the knowledge to talk about titles in relationship to the rest of world literature, and having the wherewithal to leverage opportunities to bring attention to a book or author—or create your own.

These two key elements of John’s nonprofit publishing strategy—value books for their artistic merit, not whether they’ll sell out of the gate, and marketing can be more than just moving a product—have always underpinned the spirit of Open Letter. Rather than try and compete with all the other publishers—nonprofit and for—for the next big global author, or to be the biggest press of whatever subcategory you choose, we would rather do all we can to provide readers with entryways to books that might not end up selling all that well, but that we value. And whether we’re the ones to publish them or not.

I’ve always wanted Open Letter to function in the spirit akin to Einaudi’s description above. We started the Best Translated Book Award in order to convene experts in international literature (translators, critics, booksellers) to survey the entire field and highlight the “best” thirty-five works of fiction and poetry that came out the previous year, regardless of language, when the book was originally written, or who published it. Aside from the sales boost we got when our titles were selected, Open Letter never financially gained from that award—all of the money donated for the BTBA went to the winning authors and translators, and the judges. We donated our staff time to this because we thought it was good for the field as a whole.

This wasn’t the only scheme of this nature. Until working on this essay, I had totally forgotten about ReadThisNext.org, a crazy idea we had to highlight one title per week with a short overview, a longer, more detailed review, an interview with the author/translator, and a sample. We did promote Open Letter titles through this, but by volume, the vast majority of featured titles were from other presses—mostly small ones, especially nonprofits. We even included Tavares’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique in this, and ran an interview with Danny Hahn conducted by one of our interns. (Hmm . . . maybe that’s something we could incorporate into the Next Context relaunch . . .)

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All this aside, I think we’re ready to get into A Voyage to India, which, as is alluded to above, has a pretty simple logline: Bloom has left Lisbon and is traveling to India “looking for a woman [. . .] or, wisdom.”

Which isn’t exactly true . . . As we find out in the third canto, Bloom is on the run: after his dad killed Bloom’s lover, Mary, Bloom killed his father in an act of revenge and fled Lisbon. What better time to go on a spiritual trip to India?

I’m not going to go too deep into A Voyage to India right now—I think it will serve as a companion piece to the upcoming posts and podcasts about my own aesthetic journey into Indian literature, kicked off by working on Fortress of the Forgotten Ones and then Auroville: A City of Dreams, and now becoming a borderline obsession.³ Besides, I want to reread Tavares’s epic properly: not in bed with a fever and COVID brain, but in a setting where I can spend the time looking at this against Camões’s The Lusiads, and hopefully figure out if there’s some kind of code to interpreting these charts at the back of the book:

What I can tell you about these is that the number across the top refers to the particular stanza that the words below appear in. For instance, in stanza 64 of the first canto, Bloom, “in London, alone and penniless,” provides a different explanation for why he’s heading to India:

Bloom said that he’d departed from Lisbon

and that he was on a voyage to India. On the other side of the world

he sought a new joy

or, if possible, many new ones. Joy that combined the pleasures

of a domestic animal that is fed out of a bowl

with those of a wild, brute animal that feeds

itself from spontaneous attacks on the weakest victims

in the forest. A surprising boredom,

that’s what Bloom was seeking. How to find it?

I bolded “surprising boredom” not just because it’s a great phrase, but because it corresponds to “tédio surpreendente,” which appears above in Tavares’s visual representation of the first canto.

That all makes sense, I guess, but why are these particular words picked out? Is there a theme or pattern? Why aren’t they translated into English? Is there a reason why some stanzas are marked and not others? Jacques Roubaud has translated some of Tavares’s stories into French—is there an Oulipian construct behind this? Does it correspond to the ten cantos of Camões’s The Lusiads, or the Odyssey?

I’m not sure we’ll do it, but what would be really fun is a ten-part Two Month Review season about just this poem. That would give us a chance to really live inside of it, and provide the opportunity to discuss Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago (who predicted Tavares would win the Nobel Prize), international seafaring epics, parody and the poetic form, so on and forth. There’s also a ton of great lines to share, like “we’re born to listen to people tell stories, / everything else is just a profession”), or this stanza that references the Bhagavad Gita, and could be unpacked for an episode:

Between Proust and the Bhagavad Gita

there are, perhaps, more significant differences

that there are between Paris and Kolkata. Given that cities

are material, concrete things, there is less room

for inventions and lies. Literature

is at greater liberty to lie at will,

and two lies always move further away from each other

than two truths.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Two Month Review is some serious nonprofit shit. We receive no funding for this program, but I will selfishly hold on to this endeavor for as long as I can. In part because I’m lonely and like talking with my friends about books, but also because it’s the right thing to do—in my opinion, the best nonprofit presses take a page from the Bhagavad Gita and perform activities based on their desire to benefit the world, not because of what rewards these actions might bring:

Though the unwise cling to their action,

watching for results, the wise

are free of attachments, and act

for the well-being of the whole world.

—Bhagavad Gita, Stephen Mitchell translation

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It was almost a year ago that the National Endowment for the Arts was DOGEd and all its fundees received a termination or withdrawal letter for our open grants, including Open Letter (for our $30,000 grant). Although the entire literary staff left the NEA as a result of this, the agency still exists, boasting a wild new set of priorities—such as supporting MAHA and AI training—and, much to my surprise, also handing out thirteen Translation Fellowships.

Aside from that link above, there’s no press release on the NEA site about these fellowships. The only grant-related press release in their “news” section is about a “New Round of Grants Celebrating America’s Birthday” which highlights three grants as part of the America250 initiative. There’s also another America250 press release about Usha Vance’s “Bookmark Design Challenge,” but nothing about the translation fellowships or publishing or books at all.

I only found out about the new round of Translation Fellowships after running into poet-translator Vivek Narayanan at the First Living Tamil Literature Festival in NYC earlier this month, who told me about how he was initially convinced that the email informing him that he had received a Translation Fellowship was some sort of con.

Despite the lack of press releases delineating these, the full list of grants for “literary arts” is accessible through the grants database on the NEA’s site. And according to it, a grand total of 43 grants for literary arts were awarded this cycle: 13 to translators and 30 to other organizations. A PDF of the full list is attached below, and if you scan through, you’ll see some of the standards who are always funded by the NEA: Words Without Borders, The Center for Fiction, AWP, but a ton of the usual suspects are missing. There’s no Open Letter, no Center for the Art of Translation, no BOA Editions, no Transit, no Deep Vellum, and no Archipelago.

2026 Literary Arts Grants NEA

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To put this in context, according to the same database, 109 literary organizations were funded in 2024 (see PDF below), including everyone I listed above who didn’t receive a grant in 2026. On top of those grants to organizations, 18 translation fellowships were given out, along with 35 creative writing grants (a program that was officially eliminated this past August). That’s a total of 164 grants, almost four times the number that have been given out so far this fiscal year.

2024 Literary Arts Grants NEA

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Sure, the 2026 granting period isn’t over, but I don’t think we’ll see many more publishers receiving NEA funds this go-around. And no one I’ve spoken to has high hopes for the future—instead, they’re turning toward the Literary Arts Fund, which will announce its first round of grants at the end of May, and to individual donors who want to make sure that the organizations they appreciate can continue to enact their missions.

I know the next chunk of this piece is going to sound like a middle-aged man longing for the past, but back in the old days, John O’Brien would’ve lost his fucking mind over the way Deep Vellum handled the announcement of Tavares winning the Formentor Prize.

First off, their official press release misspells “Carols Fuentes,” another Dalkey Archive author who received the award, and uses the suspiciously AI-sounding phrase about how the award is “an important prelude to the Nobel Prize in Literature.” And although they “congratulate Gonçalo M. Tavares on his enormous achievement,” and “hope that this recognition will continue to spread awareness of and appreciation for his astounding body of work throughout the Anglophone world,” they not only don’t describe a single one of his books, they don’t even link to them—or to the other Dalkey Archive/Deep Vellum authors listed on the press release (Fuentes, Mircea Cărtărescu, Witold Gombrowicz, Ricardo Piglia, Nathalie Sarraute, and Enrique Vila-Matas). In the earliest of the Dalkey days, John would’ve been faxing all the bookstores about this with an order sheet for all related Dalkey books and the encouragement to make a display out of this.

There’s almost nothing you can learn from this press release, it is simply an announcement about an announcement. Which, if you’ll give an old man his space to rant, is what drives me nuts about book marketing in the age of social media. Everything is an announcement—and nothing more. The Publisher’s Marketplace announcement when the book is acquired. The announcement of the pub date. The cover reveal. The post reminding you to preorder. A post announcing a link to a tweet about your book. Prize announcements. Announcement after announcement, frequently Canva-created and entirely forgettable, all designed to get a little bit of your engagement, to boost the metrics, the likes, the retweets, the comments. It becomes a numbers game—“if X% of people who engage with our posts buy the book, we’ll sell Y copies”—which is only encouraged by the digital landscape we live in, in which you can theoretically reach everyone, everywhere, all at once. Going viral is a much faster way to make money than slowly introducing readers, generation by generation, to complex literature.

It’s my firm belief that a nonprofit publisher should have limited engagement with the dehumanizing part of book marketing. By definition, nonprofit indies are supposed to operate in part outside of the marketplace, so instead of imitating all the commercial presses—both in terms of what types of books to acquire, and how to announce them to readers—they should be creating an alternative space for their readers to engage with the literary aesthetic the organization is supporting. They should be able to allocate time to contextual marketing evaluated for its quality, and the larger benefits it brings to the literary ecosystem, rather than feeling like they’re endlessly chasing sales, in an environment where they have little control over which bookstores stock their books (that’s dependent on their sales reps) or which titles get big glowing reviews in the few remaining book outlets (for the most part, the Big Five controls both of these spaces due to size, money, and the overriding interest in society to support what is already successful).

Conventional publishing runs off of the idea of producing more books quicker and cheaper, buying presses and eliminating redundancies in order to increase the bottom line, in flooding the zone with book after book, announcement after announcement, investing heavily in the few books that break out and subsidize the rest of the press’s list.

A nonprofit press should be an alternative to this. The goal of the best nonprofit presses isn’t to produce great books, it’s to use the books they produce to provoke and encourage literary curiosity among readers—frequently through programs that have a negative financial impact.

Last year, to bring attention to the NEA situation, we produced three podcasts on the subject: one on the history of the NEA, one on the impact of the terminated and withdrawn grants, and one entitled, “Why Fund a Nonprofit Publisher?” All three are excellent, and, to be honest, we should do a more formal follow-up on these at some point in the near future. I’m especially interested in strategies literary arts organizations have developed to replace NEA funding, specifically, what narrative are they pushing to potential donors? Almost every nonprofit press refers to “community building” in their mission statement, but how exactly are they building these communities? What are they actually doing that sets them apart from any other publisher?

In order to best answer those questions, I think it’s worthwhile taking a minute to look at the financial state of nonprofit publishing as a whole. To do this, I collated data from the most recent 990 tax filings of twelve nonprofit publishers: Archipelago Books, Bellevue Literary Press, BOA Editions, Center for the Art of Translation (Two Lines Press), Coffee House Press, Copper Canyon Press, Deep Vellum, Feminist Press, Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, and Transit Books. These were the first twelve that came to mind that publish literature in translation, and which I would consider to be in Open Letter’s peer group. Open Letter doesn’t file its own 990—we’re included in the one for the University of Rochester—which is why our data isn’t included in this meta-analysis, but I do want to take a second to make it clear that we are a 501(c)(3) and are just as dependent on donations as any of the organizations mentioned above. In terms of our budget, about a third comes from the University of Rochester in terms of support for my salary and our office space, a third comes from sales (via Consortium, Turnaround UK, and our website), and a third from grants and individual donations.

Which is more or less in keeping with what I found for our peers by digging into the filings available on ProPublica’s “Nonprofit Explorer.” As has always been the case, nonprofit publishers remain equally screwed and equally resilient. Their balance sheets are precarious, showing giant losses one year followed by significant profits the next, cash poor and asset heavy (mostly prepaid royalties and inventory), a handful with notable investments and rainy day funds, most living month to month with almost no savings.

I’m not a forensic accountant (although if this nonprofit publishing thing doesn’t work out . . .) so I won’t spend too much time on this, but since I doubt most people have a real sense of what a nonprofit press’s finances look like, I thought I’d share a couple things that I found interesting.

First off, as expected, contributed income makes up just over 40% of the total income for these twelve organizations. Donations made up more than 60% of all income for Archipelago, Center for Art of Translation, and Nightboat in 2024; and at the other end of the spectrum, thanks to a sudden dramatic spike in sales, donations were only 16.5% of Transit’s net revenues.

In terms of profit and loss, I looked at 2022–2024 to try and average out some of the natural fluctuations, and if you toss out the two major outliers—Center for the Art of Translation, which made $10,000,000 over this period thanks to massive contributions, and Graywolf, which after having net profits of over $4,000,000 between 2011 and 2021, has lost a combined $1,700,000 over the past three years—the majority of presses showed a profit over this period. The average for these ten remaining presses was $39,000/year, and two of them—Milkweed ($190,210/year) and Feminist Press ($151,020/year)—averaged more than six figures in profit over this span. It’s also noteworthy that, in addition to Graywolf, only three other presses showed losses for this three-year period: Deep Vellum, BOA, and Copper Canyon.

Again, this all looks pretty normal, although it’s the Cash Reserve Ratio that’s the most worrisome. To calculate this, I added together “cash: non-interest bearing” and “savings and temporary cash investments” reported on the 990 and divided by 1/12 of the total expenses for 2024—which calculates how many months of expenses each press could cover before its coffers run dry. Cash fluctuates a ton in this business, but the general rule of thumb is that you want enough cash on hand to cover 3 to 6 months of expenses if things suddenly went sideways. Only two presses met this benchmark: Milkweed (14.76 months) and Copper Canyon (3.24). The three most in need of cash injections at the time of their filing are Bellevue (1.07 months), Coffee House (1.03), and Deep Vellum (0.29).

Given the overall amount of money we’re talking about—combined, these twelve presses reported around $8 million of total contributed income for 2024—one billionaire could alter the state of nonprofit publishing for far less than it takes to launch a single rocket. But that sort of angel donor doesn’t seem to be in the offing, so instead, nonprofit presses are pulled in several impossible directions at once: trying to sell as many copies as possible of books that commercial presses can’t afford to take a chance on; trying to fulfill the part of their mission that makes an organization worth supporting, but doesn’t always benefit the bottom line; and trying to find the individuals willing to fund all of this.

To try and tie this all together, let’s actually get to India. Tamil Nadu to be exact.

As I mentioned above, the first Living Tamil Lit Fest took place earlier this month in NYC. It was a two-day convening that brought together forty-three guest speakers, eighteen from North America, and twenty-eight from abroad, including twenty-three from India alone. There were a total of eighteen sessions with titles like “The Advent of Classicism,” “Poetry Now: Rhythm, Resistance, and Reinvention,” “Through Her Lens,” or, the one I was on, “Toward a Contemporary Aesthetics.” All of these were recorded, are being made available one by one on this YouTube channel of the Vishnupuram Literary Circle, whose founder, Soundararajan Varathappan, was one of the main organizers of the whole festival.

I only learned about the Vishnupuram Literary Circle via this festival, but it’s a registered literary nonprofit originally formed in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India on the morning of January 26, 2010 when one of Tamil’s most beloved and prolific authors, Jeyamohan, met up with his readers and friends at a restaurant that morning and then talked the rest of the day. Because the fee for attendees to this initial gathering far exceeded the costs of the event, they used the proceeds to establish a “reader’s association.”

Soundararajan started the US branch in 2021, and according to their “about us” page, they host a series of events across the country, including a virtual discussion every quarter about a particular book or author, and an annual in-person gathering in Boone, NC. They also translate a lot of work into English, either as samples for publishers, or for their website. It’s thanks to their work that there were two anthologies of the festival authors available at the gathering: The Sound of the Eastern Waves and Born with the Southern Wind, both compiled by Jegadeesh Kumar, edited by Hill House Editing, and published by Thiru Publications, one of the festival’s sponsors.

There’s a lot to praise about the Living Tamil Lit Festival—the communal vibe that was created by having all meals catered on site, the inclusion of the next generation of readers in the form of having high school and college students conduct the sessions—but the fact that it was organized in large part by an organization of readers is what feels unique to me. There wasn’t the business vibe you get at publisher-organized gatherings, and it never felt like the presenters were only speaking to each other—the audience of dedicated readers was always included. And there didn’t seem to be a pressure to accomplish anything. Jeyamohan was there along with at least two of his translators—Suchitra (The Abyss, The Daughter of Kumari) and Priyamvada Ramkumar (White Elephant, Stories of the True)—but this wasn’t some sort of launch party for his books, nor was it a concerted attempt to convince American presses to publish more Tamil works. No one would object to that, and I do have a number of manuscripts and translators to follow up with, but that never felt like the point.

Instead, like the South Asian Literature in Translation program did by offering me a grant to travel to Delhi, or the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation did by gathering the experts to select such an excellent work in Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, the Living Tamil Lit Fest did what great nonprofit literary organizations do best: stoked my literary curiosity and provided a context for engaging with the literature they support.

Before asking for the galley of Jeyamohan’s The Abyss from Transit Books, I had never read a Tamil novel. Since the festival, I’ve read Salma’s Women Dreaming, translated by Meena Kandasamy, and ordered Kandasamy’s translation of the third part of the Kural (an ancient Tamil collection of aphoristic teachings on ethics, power, and love), entitled The Book of Desire, to read alongside the new translation of the Kural by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma that I bought at the Festival. (I also have Kandasamy’s novel, When I Hit You, or, A Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife, on my to-read shelf.) I’ve also started reading both of the anthologies referenced above (The Sound of the Eastern Waves and Born with the Southern Wind), and am about to start another Jeyamohan book.

And that’s just the books from Tamil! There are also the dozens of Hindi books I brought back from Delhi last year, and all the recommendations that Arunava Sinha gave on the recent podcast we recorded. No matter how much I read and absorb, I’ll still be pretty ignorant on the whole, but as the publisher of two new books related to South Asia—Fortress of the Forgotten Ones by Fahmida Riaz & Sana Chaudhry, Auroville: A City of Dreams by Katarzyna Boni & Mark Ordon—along with two backlist titles by Subimal Misra & V. Ramaswamy, I’d like to use this platform to share my enthusiasm and findings with all of you. Not because I hope these posts and podcasts will sell more copies of our books, or that it’ll result in organization-changing donations, but because, in the spirit of Einaudi’s pitch for the Prix International, it’s just the right thing to do. As a nonprofit struggling to stay afloat, but committed to doing whatever we can to welcome more readers into the wonderful world of international literature.

1. Going to point out right here that almost all my information is coming from Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962-1974 by Mario Santana, which I’m accessing via Internet Archive. (That link should go directly to the chapter on these gatherings.)

2. The Harvard Crimson seems unimpressed both by this book and the scheme itself:

The Age of Malaise, replete with an enticing picture of author Dacia Maraini on the dust jacket, comes highly recommended. Written by an Italian girl in her mid-twenties, this novel of the “young, postwar generation” won the second annual $10,000 Formentor Prize, an award established by thirteen publishers in as many countries to encourage and publicize young writing. Each of the thirteen houses, including Grove Press of the United States, will publish Miss Maraini’s work in its own country.

If this is the best an international cabal of publishing potentates could do, then our young writers had a singularly unproductive year. The Age of Malaise is not a bad book, but it is an uninspired, and uninspiring one. It flits from bedroom to passion-fraught bedroom following the heroine, a 17-year-old stenography student named Enrica, who clearly is searching for something to bring meaning to her darb [sic?] existence.

3. I put together a list on Bookshop.org of the South Asian works listed below that they have available for sale. But since a lot of the books I have on my kitchen table aren’t available on Bookshop.org, I thought I’d just list out all the books and other media I’m engaging with for the semi-planned upcoming series of posts about South Asian literature: the Great Lectures series on “A History of India,” the Empire podcast with Anita Anand and William Dalrymple, Women Dreaming by Salma (tr. from the Tamil by Meena Kandasamy), Basti by Intizar Husain (tr. from Urdu by Frances W. Pritchett), Moustache by S. Hareesh (tr. from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil), One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan (tr. from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan), When I Hit You, or, A Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy, Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi (tr. from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad), The Mozhi Prize: Anthology 1, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels by Subimal Misra, (tr. from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy), The Daughter of Kumari by Jeyamohan (tr. from the Tamil by Suchitra), The Abyss by Jeyamohan (tr. from the Tamil by Suchitra), White Elephant by Jeyamohan (tr. from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar), Stories of the True by Jeyamohan (tr. from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar), Of Men, Women, and Witches by Jeyamohan (tr. from the Tamil by Sangeetha Puthiyedath), Legal Fiction by Chandan Pandey (tr. from the Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari), There’s Gunpowder in the Air by Manoranjan Byapari (tr. from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha), Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, The Laboratory by Rabindranath Tagore (tr. from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha), A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three by Kiran Nagarkar (tr. from the Marathi by Shubha Slee), and many more that I’m forgetting (like the Seagull Press books I have on order from interlibrary loan).