The university-press book behind "American Fiction"

“All the other houses ran away from it"

I learned last week that Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, which became the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction, was originally published not by Graywolf (which has an edition in print now) but by the University Press of New England. As a university-press booster, I’m always on the lookout for this sort of breakout hit. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces? That’s LSU. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain? A genuine New York Times bestseller for Texas in 2019. I’ve written before about the success we had with Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies when I directed West Virginia University Press. The same year it was a National Book Award finalist in fiction, Ohio State had one in the nonfiction category with Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave and Other Essays. Significant national books all, and published not just by university presses, but by presses attached to public universities away from the big publishing centers rather than, say, by Harvard or Oxford (which have naturally had successes of their own).

Everett talked with Rone Shavers about Erasure’s publishing history, saying it “did well with the University Press of New England, which took a chance with it.” Since Erasure is a book with publishing (in part) as its subject, it’s perhaps not surprising that more traditional publishers didn’t bite. “All the other houses ran away from it because they were afraid of some backlash. It turned out there was no backlash; everybody got in line. I really wanted to piss somebody off.” That seems to be a common theme with successes in this category—they’re books that present risks, whose publication feels consistent with the not-for-profit mission of university presses. University presses are there to serve the public good, which means taking chances.

The bigger risk to university presses may not be that they’re publishing offbeat or challenging books, but that they’re sometimes at the whim of universities that don’t fully value or understand them. University presses are more resilient than many observers imagine, but closures do happen—including at the University Press of New England, which was shut down in 2018. In a more favorable turn of events, Brandeis University Press, a member of the New England consortium, resurrected UPNE in 2021. It’s a move for which they deserve credit, although I’m unsure what the 2018–21 changes ended up meaning in realms like support and staffing. (At the ridiculous extreme, Duquesne University closed its press in 2017 and then claimed the publishing house was being reanimated as a bookshelf.) There’s every reason to hope the Brandeis / UPNE experience is happier, and I wish them luck.

And all of this, maybe, is a reason to keep an eye on who’s publishing what. If you value having a diverse range of books, then a diversity of publishers is urgent—including not just the big commercial houses (I read and enjoy many of their books!) but indies and UPs as well. Riffing over the weekend on New England’s publication of Percival Everett, the writer A.V. Marraccini said: “Remember now which presses are choosing to take real literary risks. In the age of constant precarity, it really matters.”