fwriction

Laura Brown, fwriction : review’s Poetry Editor, also serves as an intern for New Directions, one the most wonderful publishers around. In this week’s The Book Bench, get a glimpse of just how splendid they are, care of an interview with Barbara Epler, regarding Roberto Bolaño, whose fiction “Labyrinth” is featured in the current issue of The New Yorker.

New Directions has published Roberto Bolaño since “By Night in Chile,” which came out in 2003. How did you come to publish him?

Over drinks, my friend Francisco Goldman started chewing my ear off about Roberto Bolaño, and, oddly, just a few days after our date, a pal at another, larger publishing house asked me which new authors I might be stalking, and I mentioned Bolaño, along with a few other writers from abroad. And that friend said, “Oh, I saw a Harvill galley of a novel by Roberto Bolaño floating around our office.” So I called Christopher MacLehose, the great English editor, and asked for a galley. (As a small publisher with not very deep pockets, we are often not first in line.) I read “By Night in Chile” the night it arrived, and told my boss Peggy Fox we had to buy it: I was bowled over, Bolaño was a genius, and I explained that other houses had the galley, too, so we had to move fast, and she said: “O.K.” I realized a few days later that I’d once read a Bolaño story in Grand Street, and I looked it up (“Telephone Calls”) and read it again, and it was very different from “By Night in Chile,” and that was very intriguing. When Harvill asked that we commit to three books (to also buy “Distant Star” and “Last Evenings on Earth”), we said, “Yes.”