Literary translator Katie Whittemore and Open Letter Books publisher Chad Post were out at a bar one night in 2019 when Whittemore told Post about the late Spanish writer Aliocha Coll, whose abstruse masterpiece, Attila, had never been brought into English.
Whittemore, who lives in Valencia, Spain, had been tipped off to Coll by Javier Serena, a young Spanish novelist who hoped Whittemore would translate his most recent books—a pair of novels each dramatizing the lives of two writers devoted to their craft—into English. The first centered on Roberto Bolaño, a titan of Chilean literature who “could not have become more successful,” Whittemore says. But the other fictionalized Coll, who was scarcely read even in his native Spain and died in squalor by his own hand shortly after completing Attila, his magnum opus, in 1990. Serena’s 2014 novel, also called Attila, imagines the last months of Coll’s life amid his mad drive to complete his manuscript.
At the bar, the pair googled the enigmatic Coll, learning that Spanish writerJavier Marías eulogized him as a writer with “a verbal talent and sense of rhythm of the first order.” Mega-agent Carmen Balcells— who shepherded many Spanish-language writers to international fame—considered Coll the one author she could never get off the ground, with work too strange, difficult, and dark for a wide audience. This thrilled both Whittemore and Post, a prominent publisher of literature in translation. “This,” he recalls thinking, “ is catnip.”
Now, six years later—and four years since the 2021 release of Last Words on Earth, Serena’s novel about Bolaño—Open Letter is publishing Whittmore’s translations of the two Attilas at once: Coll’s and Serena’s. Both were published on April 1, with respective first print runs of 3,000 and 3,500 copies.
Post, who founded the Rochester, N.Y.–based Open Letter in 2007, is the first to admit that bringing out two distinct novels with the same name on the same day is not many people’s idea of a winning commercial strategy. He recalled that his distributor, Consortium, warned him that even booksellers might be confused by the gambit, and that the books would be difficult to shelve.
Still, the publication of the novels comes at an auspicious time for Open Letter, which last month significantly grew its operational capabilities through a new partnership with a fellow nonprofit, Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing. Open Letter, which publishes 10 titles per year and has a roughly 200-book catalog, also has access to philanthropic donations and state and federal grants that offset, Post estimates, about 40% of the cost of publishing books “that the market is unlikely to sustain.”
Post isn’t concerned about the books’ lack of mainstream appeal—that’s what drew him to them in the first place. “Readers who want these books deserve to have them,” he says. “Even if it’s a relatively small group of readers, they count.”
Daniel Yadin is a bookseller at Book Club Bar in New York City and an associate poetry editor at Asymptote.
