Deep Vellum.

I don’t usually post press releases, but this one from “Deep Vellum & Dalkey Archive” demonstrates such daring and ambition (in a realm that concerns me intimately) that I have to share it:

With the groundbreaking success of Mircea Cartarescu’s SOLENOID—a “towering work” (Dustin Illingworth, New York Times)—Miquel de Palol’s THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TWILIGHTS—“equal parts unwieldy and extraordinary” (Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books)—and Luis Goytisolo’s ANTAGONY— “brilliant…daring” (Colm Tóibín, New York Review of Books)—Deep Vellum, together with the rejuvenated Dalkey Archive Press that merged with Deep Vellum in 2021, has demonstrated its affection for daring work of astonishing literary ambition. In the span of mere months, we published two groundbreaking novels written by living legends and annual Nobel contenders. But those books merely set the stage for what’s in store for 2025 and 2026 (and beyond!): the publication of translated works more ambitious than any that have been published by more traditional houses in decades past.

Starting in 2024, Max Lawton will share his vision and talent with Deep Vellum to translate, edit, and shepherd into English some of the world’s most exciting fiction and to cement the press’ reputation as the champion of maximalist literature in the Anglosphere––of the badass avant-garde masterpieces that would otherwise not be translated or published.

These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages. As a PhD student of comparative literature, he became fascinated by the short reviews of untranslated books in the magazine World Literature Today––by the idea that you could tell the world about a book before it was translated. Andrei therefore dedicated his blog to reviewing significant literary works unavailable in English translation. Last year, he celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Untranslated, the ultimate Anglophone source for reviews of innovative literary works written in or translated into the eight languages other than English that Andrei can read. Deep Vellum owes a debt of gratitude to Andrei for discovering and championing all of these books; he was also instrumental in encouraging Lawton to undertake their translations.

This new era begins with a book like no other: SCHATTENFROH by Michael Lentz, translated by Lawton, edited by Matthias Friedrich, a renowned translator of Nordic and Catalan literature into German, and scheduled for publication in 2025. Peerlessly strange and rich, dense with references and homage, equal parts Hieronymous Bosch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lentz’s novel begins with a writer named Nobody composing the book we’re reading in his mind, which is also a panopticon ruled by his father. The writer leads the reader through realms of history and art, of horror and pain, and of personal reckoning with his father, the titular Schattenfroh. What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible? You’d get something like SCHATTENFROH. As Andrei puts it: SCHATTENFROH is a “baroque and surrealist explosion of a novel [that] belongs to the pantheon of the best works of world literature published in the past two decades.”

We have discussed both The Untranslated (e.g., 2017, 2018) and Max Lawton (e.g., 2022) a number of times; Deep Vellum has been mentioned in connection with their publishing Elina Alter’s translation of Alla Gorbunova. You can read about more projects at the link; it astonishes me (though perhaps it shouldn’t) that in this mercantile, conglomerated world there are still publishers who dare to take on books like these, and I wish them a long and profitable existence.