- Graywolf Press
You know how “publishing is dead” is such a frequently used phrase it’s become meaningless, like a word like “freedom” or “justice” in the mouth of Donald Trump? Well, it turns out that not every small press is struggling. And one, Minnesota’s Graywolf Press, is actually… kinda doing okay? As big publishing houses waste pages with more and more cute-animal-blog-turned-book projects and you’re daily reminded that books are dead, here’s Vulture on how great a little press that could is doing:
Graywolf’s nonfiction hybrids don’t just defy publishing categories; they also offer subtler takes on issues like race (in Citizen) and gender (in The Argonauts) than some publishers might prefer. They are difficult to summarize in tweets. Yet Graywolf uses Twitter to great effect; it has more than twice the followers of FSG and almost as many as Knopf, which is six times its size. That’s a serious asset for a house with a surfeit of distinctive voices but a limited marketing budget. “You don’t have to pay for cyberspace,” says McCrae. “It’s equalizing in that way.”
The publisher’s oddest source of free publicity was its working with debut poet James Franco. The polymath gadfly name-checked Graywolf on Jimmy Fallon last year while promoting his collection, Directing Herbert White, which referenced his own short-film adaptation of poems by Frank Bidart. It was Bidart who brought Franco’s work to Graywolf’s attention. “It was a risk, sure, as a first book of poetry can be,” says Shotts, Franco’s editor, “and one written by someone under public scrutiny. Graywolf published it in a pretty subtle way. It was an opportunity to reach readers who don’t normally come to poetry.” He hastens to add that Franco was paid a standard poetry advance and has never donated to the house.
It’s absolutely true that Graywolf’s been killing it. This year, especially, they’ve been publishing a strong mix of socially engaged, formally innovative work. I was concerned when they chose to enable degree-collector James Franco with his latest poetry collection. I needn’t have worried. There’s a reason we’ve covered many of Graywolf’s recent offerings—so many that I’m sort of surprised—including Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and Eula Biss’ On Immunity: An Inoculation.