Simon & Schuster and Chinese publisher Yilin Press have announced a distribution and publishing agreement that will expand the availability of electronic editions of works in Mandarin for readers worldwide.
Under one of the more comprehensive trade deals with a Chinese publishing house, S&S will distribute e-books of a broad cross-section of Yilin Press’s Mandarin language titles, making these works available worldwide to Mandarin readers outside China. The books, which will be available through all major e-book retailers who work with S&S, include Mandarin translations of both modern and classic works, and also many classic Chinese titles.
The project, which will launch with a list of approximately 300 titles in November, includes translations of Life of Pi by Yann Martel; Air Mail by Tomas Transtromer & Robert Bly; The Foxes Comes at Night by Cees Nooteboom; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Underworld by Don DeLillo; The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing; and The Cove by Ron Rash. Also in the first wave of releases are classics by Mary Norton, Amos Oz, and authors of wide-ranging international interest including Julian Assange, Julian Barnes, Mikhail Gorbachev and Michel Foucault.
“We are delighted to enter into this agreement with Yilin Press and its parent, Phoenix Publishing and Media Group,” said S&S president and CEO Carolyn Reidy. “This is an exciting, modern marriage of content and technology that will benefit the many millions of Mandarin readers who live outside China and who will now have easy access to many of the best works of our time, from Chinese and western authors, in Mandarin.”
In addition, the S&S flagship trade imprint has acquired from Yilin world English rights to a select list of books. The list will be comprised of nonfiction titles about Chinese culture and history as well as popular and acclaimed fiction, and will feature major Chinese authors including Shen Congwen, Lu Xun, Bing Xin, Ye Zhaoyan, and Su Tong, some of whom have never before been translated into English. S&S will publish the first list of eight titles in spring 2014.
“With the increasing level of interest in Chinese language, literature, and culture in both the United States and around the world, we believe that the time is right to offer these classic works in electronic editions that will appeal to both the general reader and the educational market,” said Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of the S&S trade imprint.
