An Interview with Ethan Nosowsky of Graywolf Press
A selection from our Summer 2023 issue: Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at Graywolf Press, talks with Epiphany’s Editor-in-Chief, Noreen Tomassi. On July 25th, we will be celebrating the launch of this issue at the KGB Bar. Visit our Eventbrite page for more information.
Noreen Tomassi: Can you tell us a little about your decision to become an editor and about your career. You worked for ten years at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and have, with some interruption, worked at Graywolf Press since 2007.
Ethan Nosowsky: Let’s see. The short answer is that I was an escapee from academia but still wanted to find a way to read for a living. The longer answer is that while I was working on a master’s thesis (“The Anarchist Poetics of Kenneth Rexroth”) at UC Berkeley, I had a job working at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I was turned on to SO many books I had never heard of by the used book buyers there, and I realized that I vastly preferred the kind of conversation they were having about books to the conversation I was having in grad school. I had worked very briefly as a publicity assistant at Oxford University Press after college, so decided to go back to New York City and look for a job in publishing. Eventually I found a position as an editorial assistant at FSG, which was still independent at the time, where I worked mostly for John Glusman (now the editor in chief at Norton) but also, one day a week, for Robert Giroux, which was an extraordinary education. I stayed there for ten years, then did a few different things: I was a freelance editor, I helped set up a literature grant at the Creative Capital Foundation, I taught a class in the writing program at Columbia, and I worked for the author Jean Stein on a book project. Eventually I wanted, again, to get back into publishing, and I met Fiona McCrae, which was probably the most fortunate hinge in my career. I worked as an editor at large for Graywolf for four years, then moved to California, still with Graywolf, before being hired by Dave Eggers to run the book division at McSweeney’s. After a year and a half at McSweeney’s, Fiona hired me back as editorial director at Graywolf, focused on the prose list there, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I have always at least STARTED new publishing jobs at independent presses.
How have your outlook and your interests as an editor changed as your career has evolved?
In terms of my outlook: it’s been interesting, but I’d say that the kind of fiction I have acquired or edited has not really changed at all across the three houses I’ve worked for what is now almost thirty years in the industry. However, the nonfiction list at each publisher varies. If I think of two books I was able to edit at McSweeney’s (though I didn’t acquire them), David Byrne’s How Music Works and Hilton Als’s White Girls, FSG and Graywolf would not have published the former, but all three would have published the latter (and in fact FSG was Hilton’s first publisher). If I think about a book I edited at FSG, Scott Weidensaul’s Sleeping on the Wing: Across the Hemisphere with Migrating Birds, a fascinating John McPhee-like natural adventure, it was really a brilliant and fun book but not one that either McSweeney’s or Graywolf would publish. So you always just follow your nonfiction interests at publishers like this, but generally within a sort of range.
I don’t know that my outlook has changed as an editor per se, but I think I have always looked for books that help me understand the world I find myself in, thinking that if it helps me maybe it will help others. So the world changes, and as an editor you want to be responsive to that.
The industry has changed so much during this time . . .
Yes, I have worked through a period of enormous consolidation in publishing, as well as the rise of Amazon, both of which changed the industry radically. Probably the most existentially fraught moment was the period about 15 years or so ago when many people assumed that ebooks would come to completely dominate the market: that we were watching the death of the printed book, which has not turned out to be true.
It seems that in many ways we are in a Golden Age for independent publishers. Do you agree? If so, what do you think are the reasons for this?
I can answer that maybe by telling a story. From the time I was a teenager I idolized New Directions, and when I was an editorial assistant at FSG in maybe the early or mid 90s I was able to see the founder of that press, James Laughlin, speak at the New York Public Library. He took some questions after his talk, and someone tossed him what they figured was a softball about conglomeration and the challenges facing small publishers. He didn’t take it up, and pointed out how many presses were now proliferating compared to when ND had gotten started, how many choices there are out there now for poets and experimental writers. I agree, still, and there is a lot of amazing work being done by many independent publishers. I’d say the problem now, and it is worse than ever, is that the culture is so noisy and the number of books published has ballooned while there are fewer and fewer and fewer ways to get them noticed. Or perhaps not just noticed, but assessed in a real or deep way.
Given that environment, how do you even begin to measure the impact or success of a book?
A question I’m often asked when I’m on publishing panels is, “How many copies does a book need to sell to be successful.” I have seen books sell 6,000 copies that I have thought were wonderful successes worth celebrating, and books that have sold 30,000 copies and are probably considered failures. It really depends on expectations and a publisher’s expenditures on any given book. Personally, I think any book that gets published and that puts you in a position to be able to write and place another one should be considered a success.
Graywolf has built its reputation, not only on its eye for talent, but on the strength of its long-term relationships with its writers. Of course, once your writers are successful, the Big 5 publishers are able to offer big advances to lure them—and that has been the case for years now, but is it increasingly challenging? Thoughts about that?
We have had a range of experiences here. First of all, while obviously we have lost many authors to larger publishers over the years, it’s worth pointing out that not all of them leave when they become successful. We made concerted efforts to hang on to new books by both Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson (neither of whom, it’s worth saying, were first published by Graywolf, though they each broke out with us). We have also always said that it’s not our job to stand between our authors and life changing money. We try to make it worth their while to stay, but sometimes that’s just not the game we play or should be playing. Another thing to keep in mind is that we have made a decision at several key moments over the years not to expand the number of books we publish by a significant or even moderate amount. So we do need some authors to move on (even if we don’t want them to) to create space for debut or emerging authors who are new to our list. And sometimes that works out beautifully: we were really sad to lose David Szalay after we’d had some success with his ingenious novel All That Man Is, which was a Booker Prize finalist, and we’d been saving a slot for his new book of stories, but when that landed elsewhere and we suddenly had an immediate opening, we filled it with Anna Burns’s Milkman, which of course went on to win the Booker. Publishing is always full of surprises, and sometimes they are nice surprises.
How do you balance what you acquire? Do you aim for certain amounts of work in translation, fiction, poetry, non-fiction?
We publish 30-33 books each year, and we generally aim to keep it fairly evenly split among poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The poetry list, under Jeff Shotts’s brilliant leadership, almost always holds steady at 1/3 of our output, but the prose sloshes around a bit. And also, sometimes some of our fiction reads essayistically and some of our nonfiction functions almost novelistically. We generally cap the number of translations we publish at 6 per year, or 2 per list.
What drives Graywolf’s choices? And how do you seek out new work? Through agents? Writing programs? Lit mags? Over the transom?
We’re always looking for work that feels fresh to us, which is what most any literary editor would say, but I guess I’d describe it like this: either it says something old in a new way or tells us something that feels entirely new in a more conventional way (or an unconventional way). Maybe it tells us something we didn’t know we knew, or something we just didn’t know at all. We all sort of recognize a Graywolf book, and while each of the editors at Graywolf have differing tastes around the edges, we meet in a zone that spells Graywolf. One thing that’s important to us when we think about offering on a manuscript: does this book need Graywolf? Can it be published just as well by another press? Is there something we can do, either editorially or in the way we position it, that might make it stand out in a particular way?
And is marketability a consideration? If not, what would you say you are looking for? (And I know this varies across genres.)
Graywolf is a nonprofit press, so the most significant thing is that a book aligns with our mission statement, and that we think it is saying something culturally valuable or relevant. We start there, and what people often don’t understand is that even though we’re a nonprofit organization, we exist in a market. So we do have to understand the market and make decisions about what kind of an advance a book can support. But generally, if we love something we will find a way to publish it and do our best to help that book succeed on its own terms.
The shuttering of Catapult’s online magazine and Astra magazine after only two issues have been worrying to the literary community—and especially to emerging writers and other lit mags. Are literary magazines less important to publishers now? What do you see as their importance?
It’s an unmitigated disaster. Writers need places to publish their shorter work, to learn to write, to learn to work with an editor, to build a readership, to try small things out before embarking on a big thing. I first read many, many of the writers I’ve published in literary magazines before I ended up acquiring their work. But I assume, maybe naively, that things will bloom in the wreckage because many magazine or book publishers simply start by meeting a need that isn’t being served. But it sucks to be in that period of wreckage before new things start.
You once said in an interview that editing is essentially an act of listening. Can you elaborate on that?
Sure. First, I’d say that editing for a book publisher and editing for a magazine are different things. A magazine editor has to be sure that the issue as a whole is coherent and that each piece fits the magazine’s overall sensibility or style. My job as a book editor is to try to figure out what an author was trying to do and then help get them closer to what that thing is. So first I’m just sort of putting my ear against the thing and trying to discern its heartbeat, what structures it, what it’s about or wants to be about. I think I may have also said at some point that editing is a species of acting, and so when I actually get in there with a pencil, I’m just trying to inhabit the characters in a piece of fiction THROUGH the author, trying to get in touch with what they were trying to do with them. Really what it’s all about is reading slowly. When it comes to taste in fiction, which is so subjective, I don’t think that one’s response to a novel is any more sophisticated as an adult than it was when we were kids and were like, “meh, I didn’t like that so much” or “oh my god, favorite book ever.” What changes when you become a professional reader, which is what an editor is, is that you learn to articulate why you had that response back to the writer. It starts and ends with reading very slowly and just marking your reactions to what you’re reading.
What is the ideal relationship between writer and editor for you? What do you see as the editor’s responsibilities/role in forging that relationship?
First and foremost, I aspire for it to be a trusting one. I want a writer to trust that I get the work and know how to talk about it with others, and that if I’m pushing them to make changes that it is in the interests of the work and not in the interests of the market or convention, and not overly affected by my own background or shortcomings or sensibility. But functionally, an editor is also the author’s advocate within the publisher they work for, and for the author externally, beating the bushes for opportunities.
What do you like least about your work?
Oh gosh, I hate disappointing people. There is so much to read, and I don’t get to it all, or I don’t give it the time I would ideally like to give it. But most of all: I absolutely hate seeing deserving books fail to get the attention they deserve. It happens so often, but it is never not heartbreaking.
Like most?
I love discovering something that turns me around, that rewires my brain. And I love being able to share work that does that with a wide bunch of readers who might feel the same about it. And it is an absolute joy to work to get to work with and learn from so many brilliant colleagues along the way. But turning the pages of a manuscript that has just arrived and that gets the antennae buzzing—that’s the unmatchable feeling.
