I don't usually like to take credit for anything, but I take credit for Hurry Down Sunshine,” says Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich, who views Michael Greenberg's account of his daughter's descent into madness as both a personal and professional turning point.
Named one of the best books of 2008 by Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon and Library Journal, Greenberg's memoir was translated into 16 languages and went on to become a #2 bestseller in Spain and #12 in Italy. Vintage bought paperback rights for $300,000 and is reissuing it in September as one of its lead titles. The success of Hurry Down Sunshine coupled with Other Press's shift in distribution to Random House last spring resulted in a 40% increase in sales for the second half of last year. According to Gurewich, the 10-year-old press continues to grow and is on track for a 10% increase in 2009 despite the recession.
Gurewich's background is different from most U.S. publishers, including that, for her, English is a second language. Born in Canada and reared in Belgium, Gurewich holds a degree in law from Belgium as well as a master's of law from Columbia University and a doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University. A Lacanian analyst who still sees patients 10 hours a week, Gurewich says, “I can't give up my practice. This is where I learn the work it takes to get to the truth.” She taught a popular seminar on Lacan at Harvard University for a dozen years before starting the Other Press with analyst Michael Moskowitz, who has since left. Originally established to publish professional analytical titles, Other Press has since moved to a mostly trade focus, releasing fiction and narrative nonfiction.
“Judith has the great advantage of being an outsider. As a publisher, she's completely an autodidact and does it in her own way,” comments Greenberg, who is publishing a second selection of autobiographical writing, Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life, with Other Press this September. “She was such a driving force behind Hurry Down Sunshine and so supportive. I don't think a bigger press could have done a better job.” Other writers, like Sheila Kohler, who published four novels with Other Press, praise Gurewich's generosity and enthusiasm. She often invites her writers to stay at her home in Cambridge, Mass., and works closely with them on the editing of their book.
For her part, Gurewich credits Greenberg with making her rethink her work. “Michael taught me not to theorize life,” she says. “Editing his book and working closely with him, I completely gave up my obsession with interpretation. He really describes life and emotion as they occur.” She also says that Greenberg set her more firmly on a path first taken five years ago, when she began moving Other Press in a trade direction. She is in the midst of editing Paul Stepansky's Psychoanalysis in the Margin, about psychoanalytic publishing, which she says will be her last new book on the subject. Currently, Other Press has just over 200 backlist titles, including 79 on psychoanalysis.
Some agents, like Lane Zachary of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, view Gurewich as having a European sensibility. Other Press's lists regularly include several translations, like the just published Ninni Holmqvist novel The Unit, translated from Swedish, which is a B&N Discover Great New Writers selection. “Judith comes from Europe, the way a lot of the best publishers in the 1930s and '40s did,” says Zachary. “Other Press reminds me of what it must have been like in the early days of publishing. They spend a lot of time on editing, on the cover and on the marketing of each book.”
Gurewich is equally unstinting of her time and uncompromising in selecting the 25 books the press publishes annually. “I refuse to cater to the unreflective side of the reader,” she says. “I'm not interested in what will sell. What I ask from writers is that they push themselves to the limit. It may seem obvious, yet so many writers forget that to produce a meaningful piece of writing cannot go without passion or pain. If there's anything left from my skill as an analyst, it has to be this: writing a book is giving a pound of flesh.”
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