Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic

“I was walking around with one blue book and one white book,” he recalled of the fair. That year, the Frankfurt conference coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize, and Alexievich was considered one of the front-runners to win. He recalled, “I was basically told, ‘You’ve got no chance.’ ” When Patrick Modiano was named the winner, the heat went out of the competition for “Second-hand Time”; within a week, Testard had acquired the rights to Alexievich’s book, for what was for him the huge sum of thirty-five hundred pounds. The next year, she won the Nobel, and the English-language translation that Testard had commissioned, from Bela Shayevich, was sold to a U.S. publisher for a quarter of a million dollars.

When introducing an established author in translation to an Anglophone reading public, Testard has savvy instincts about how to position his product. After he bought the rights to publish the works of Annie Ernaux—the French writer whose œuvre, in one slim volume after another, has consisted of a ceaseless reworking of the experiences of her own life—he began not with her most recent book at the time, “A Girl’s Story,” which appeared in France in 2src16; instead, he chose “The Years,” from 2srcsrc8, in which Ernaux took the framework of her life to tell an impersonal autobiography of French womanhood from 1941 to the present. Edmund White wrote a galvanizing review of “The Years” in the New York Times, calling it “a ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ for our age of media domination and consumerism.”

When Testard promotes his books, he is as aggressive as a soft-spoken, cerebral man can be. Several times he has submitted books from his Essays series for the International Booker, a prize intended for works of fiction, under the rationale that—despite Fitzcarraldo’s own binary division between white and blue—only a small-minded judge would fail to understand how, say, the nonfiction works of Ernaux should be in the running alongside self-declared works of fiction. (Sometimes he succeeds: “The Years,” translated by Alison L. Strayer, was short-listed for the International Booker in 2src19.) In another Booker bid, Testard sought to submit Jon Fosse’s complete “Septology” in a single edition, in 2src22, despite its having been submitted in installments in previous years, with “Septology VI-VII” short-listed. “They said no, which is fine—I guess,” Testard said. “I know I’m not the only person who checks in about the rules.”

Peter Straus, a prominent literary agent in London, said of Testard, “He never stops thinking about how he can sell books,” adding, “You need that strength of belief, but also that stubbornness. And the other thing you need, which he’s got, is an unquenchable belief that he is an excellent publisher.” Barbara Epler, the publisher and editorial director of New Directions, the storied American house, founded in 1936, that has issued seminal translations of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and others, told me, “Jacques reminds me of James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions—they want to make publishing houses homes for writers to a degree that I don’t think is typical.”

Fitzcarraldo’s services extend beyond the editorial. In May, Sheila Heti, the Canadian author, travelled to London to promote “Alphabetical Diaries,” her poignant compilation of sentences drawn from her journals and arranged from A to Z—a project that Testard had been discussing with her for a decade. She asked him to accompany her to a clothing store, where she sought his tasteful counsel about which of three tweed jackets she should buy. He gave a lilac one the nod. “I sensed that it was the answer she wanted,” he told me, mildly. “It also looked the best.”

Testard and his editorial staff—he now has seven colleagues—like to talk about Fitzcarraldo authors and books as forming constellations, with one title leading a curious reader to another, with which it shares a kinship, and then to yet another. Someone who, like me, starts with “Pond” might be attracted next to the work of the German writer Esther Kinsky, whose richly observational novel “River” features an unnamed narrator who lives alongside the River Lea, in London’s outlying wetlands. Reading Kinsky might, in turn, lead to the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, whose essay “In Memory of Memory” concerns the survival of several generations of her family in the twentieth-century Soviet Union. Enjoyment of Stepanova’s work might encourage a reader to try another modern text about the Soviet experiment, such as Alexievich’s “Second-hand Time.” The constellation concept helps to guide Fitzcarraldo’s staff when they consider which authors might fit next in their roster. But they do nothing as crude as clutter the books’ back covers with “if you loved this, try this” urgings. The refined, distinctive covers are recommendation enough.

It’s no coincidence that many Fitzcarraldo books share a preoccupation with history and memory: Testard was considering undertaking a Ph.D. in history at Oxford University before he went into publishing. Many titles are also distinguished by a degree of self-conscious literary difficulty. The first fiction title that Testard published, in 2src14, was “Zone,” by Mathias Énard, a five-hundred-and-twenty-one-page novel written in a single swoon of a sentence. The narrator, who is making a five-hundred-and-twenty-one-kilometre train journey from Milan to Rome, reflects on his own history and that of modern Europe. The book was hailed as a propulsive, profound masterpiece in some quarters, including the book pages of the New York Times, and as quite possibly intellectually fraudulent in others. (“Stuffing a book with deep, dark things and invocations of Homer does not necessarily make it deep and dark and Homeric,” a skeptical Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian.) Publishing “Zone” as his first outing, Testard told me, was “a mission statement of sorts—here was a small press that was going to be publishing ambitious writing that was perceived to be too difficult for the mainstream.”

Fitzcarraldo’s first nonfiction offering, also in 2src14, was the British philosopher Simon Critchley’s “Memory Theatre,” an unreliable narration in which the author, while sorting through a box of papers that had belonged to a late colleague, reflects on his own journey to an elevated life of the mind, and on the baser indignities of the life of the body. (“Sleep would softly descend . . . only to be interrupted by that vague alien-like pressure in the lower abdomen. Do I need to piss or don’t I?”) The manuscript, Critchley told me, “was this weird little book which I wasn’t at all confident about, to say the least.” He agreed to publish it with Testard, with the expectation that the result would resemble “a small fanzine or something.” Being linked with Fitzcarraldo’s origin story, he told me, now looks like a far cleverer decision than he can properly lay claim to. When I asked Critchley how he’d characterize a Fitzcarraldo title, he offered, “They are books of high literary and intellectual worth that no one else is going to publish. Cool and weird, and probably quite good.”

Testard chose the name for his company while browsing his own bookshelf. His eye fell on a book, by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, in which Carrère discusses an interview that he conducted in the early eighties with Werner Herzog, the filmmaker. Herzog’s 1982 epic, “Fitzcarraldo,” about an opera aficionado and would-be rubber baron who attempts to transport a steamship from one tributary of the Amazon to another by lugging it over a steep pinnacle in the Peruvian jungle, has become a byword for an exorbitant, doomed adventure. Testard told me that his choice was “a not very subtle metaphor about the stupidity of setting up a publishing house.” When Herzog’s recent memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,” was being offered to publishers, Testard wrote to Herzog’s German publisher with, he told me, “a publishing maneuver which I may have invented because it’s so stupid—a lowball preëmpt.” He went on, “I put in this impassioned pitch, with the biggest sum I could offer at that point, and ended the letter saying, ‘If Werner Herzog has a sense of humor, he will say yes to this.’ And then, obviously, he went somewhere else, for quite a lot of money.” Testard quickly added, “I don’t think Werner Herzog does not have a sense of humor. I think he definitely does.” (Herzog told me, in an e-mail, “I do not mind at all there was never any contact between me and Jacques Testard about him taking the name ‘Fitzcarraldo’ for his publishing house. He is welcome, since he seems to publish very fine books.”)

An alternative possible name had been Pale Fire Editions. But Nabokov’s title ended up being adopted by Testard’s wife, Rowena Morgan-Cox, for her own company, which designs stylish lamps made from recycled paper. The couple’s handsome apartment, in South East London, has a number of the lamps, and two more decorate Fitzcarraldo’s light-filled, open-plan office, in a renovated carburetor factory on the same side of the Thames. Crittall steel-framed windows maintain an industrial atmosphere, and there’s a craft-coffee shop on the ground floor.

Every week at Fitzcarraldo starts with a staff meeting, and one morning in May I joined the team at a round conference table on which were scattered a handful of blue and white books, with more titles arranged on shelves and bookcases. The Fitzcarraldo color combination is such a powerful trademark that, after I had been exposed to it for a while, even ordinary objects in the same hues—a blue bowl for washing dishes; a denim-dress-and-white-T-shirt outfit worn by one of the editors—started to seem like deliberate acts of branding.

First on the agenda were books that were currently in the works. These included “Dysphoria Mundi,” by Paul B. Preciado, a Spanish philosopher and curator whose earlier books include “Can the Monster Speak?,” an essay about the pathologization of transgender people by the psychoanalytic profession. Testard, who brushes his brown hair forward over his temples, like a Romantic poet, reads Spanish in addition to French and English. “I’m slowly working my way through our version, and Paul has accepted most of the edits, which I wasn’t expecting,” he remarked.

The group then discussed Lucy Mercer, a poet, who would soon be publicly named the winner of this year’s Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, an award, bestowed annually since 2src16, for a proposal for a nonfiction work in progress by an unpublished writer. The recipient receives three thousand pounds; a residency of up to three months at the Mahler and LeWitt Studios, in Spoleto, Italy; and a contract to be published by Fitzcarraldo. Mercer won the award for an essay, tentatively titled “Afterlife,” about mortality and wax. (In the loose Fitzcarraldo mode, the essay touches on everything from candlelight vigils to Madame Tussauds.)

The talk around the table then turned to Clemens Meyer, the German novelist, whose début novel, “While We Were Dreaming,” about a group of youths going off the rails in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was first published in 2srcsrc7 in his native country. A Fitzcarraldo translation of “Dreaming,” by Katy Derbyshire, was long-listed for the International Booker, as was “Bricks and Mortar,” a novel about the rise of a soccer hooligan turned pimp. “I’ve got Clemens’s new novel—it’s longer than ‘The Books of Jacob,’ ” Testard announced, matter-of-factly. “I need to put together an offer and work out how we are going to fund the translation. It’s going to be a ’26 or ’27 book—it’s going to take a year to translate.” The cost of translating a Fitzcarraldo book can be considerably higher than the advance given to an author. Meyer, Testard later told me, would be receiving an advance in the low four figures for the new book, a nonlinear historical novel about film, war, and masculinity called “The Projectionist”; Derbyshire would be paid about thirty-seven thousand dollars to render it in English. Fitzcarraldo often applies for funding from cultural institutions within the writers’ native countries to help defray the translation costs. Rachael Allen, a poetry editor whom Fitzcarraldo hired last year, spoke of attending an event this spring, in Manchester, about poetry in translation, where she’d discussed potential acquisitions for a new poetry series, which is scheduled to launch next year. (Ray O’Meara has been working on a closely guarded design scheme.)

Tokarczuk’s next book, I learned, will be a reworking of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” titled “The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story.” Because Tokarczuk has become so eminent, a translation was commissioned immediately after the manuscript’s completion, in Polish. Testard told me, with pride, “Every book is different and can be read on multiple levels—she always messes with the form or complicates it. She is never not surprising.” The Fitzcarraldo team is excited about the commercial potential of “Empusium”—twenty-five thousand copies are being printed—and the sales team at Faber & Faber, with which Fitzcarraldo works on distribution, was determined to attract readers beyond the hard-core Fitzcarraldo customer. Testard turned to O’Meara and said, “I can’t remember if we told you this, but we are going to need to print the subtitle on the cover.” O’Meara let out a low groan.

A doorbell rang. “That will be Jon Fosse’s bookplates!” Testard said. To mark the company’s tenth anniversary, this September, O’Meara has designed the Fitzcarraldo First Decade Collection, a limited-edition series of ten of the house’s most significant titles—including “Pond,” “Flights,” “The Years,” and “Septology”—which will be case-bound in linen cloth, with marbled endpapers and signed, numbered bookplates. Testard had sent each author a box of bookplates along with a black pen; Fosse, who lives in Oslo and has a collection of more than two hundred fountain pens, let it be known that he would be using his own writing implement for the task. After the delivery person dropped off the package, Joely Day, an editor, opened it up to reveal stacks of rectangular bookplates signed by Fosse in a spidery hand, in varying densities of ink. Fosse is not the only author who has deviated from the house aesthetic: “When Annie did ‘Getting Lost,’ they started out black, and then blue, and then pink,” Clare Bogen, Fitzcarraldo’s publicity director, told her colleagues. Each of the books selected to mark the anniversary would be printed in a limited edition of a thousand; owning all ten will set a collector back more than six hundred dollars. For Fitzcarraldo aficionados of lesser means, the online store offers a tote bag, in blue canvas, bearing the company’s name, and, in white, a tote bearing the title of a volume by Dan Fox: “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters.”

Testard moved to the U.K. when he was five, after his father, a management consultant, was transferred from Paris to London. In contrast with many other expat families, his parents sent him to British schools rather than to French-language ones, and he soon became fluent in both the language and the social codes of his English peers. After Brexit, Testard finally applied for British citizenship, for which he was recently approved, having passed the Life in the U.K. test, a series of questions about British customs, institutions, and values. “I didn’t study, out of cockiness, and then actually it was more difficult than I thought,” he admitted. “You get asked questions about the different layers of courts in Scotland, for example.” Not having a full command of the different layers of courts in Scotland could probably be considered a defining characteristic of English citizens of the U.K., but Testard’s confidence lay elsewhere. “I have that first-generation thing of being more British than the British,” he told me.

When he was thirteen, his family returned to Paris; he was enrolled in a local school, where he floundered academically. “We spoke French at home, but I’d never studied in French—I’d never learned French grammar, or done math in French,” he explained. His younger brother, Pierre, was in a better position to adapt; he stayed in Paris and is now a published novelist in French. (Pierre has since moved to Berlin.) After a year in Paris, Testard became a boarder at London’s Westminster School, one of the best private schools in the U.K. Weekends were spent with family friends or the families of friends; by the end of high school, Testard was a familiar, charismatic figure among a roving group of lightly parented teen-agers in London. He went to Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate, where he found a group of friends among whom there was a social cachet to being a serious reader. “In that kind of naïve, slightly pretentious, studenty way, we would all push ourselves to be into books together,” he said. “Nabokov, Joyce, Dostoyevsky.”