Melville House Publishing - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Melville House Publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians in Hoboken, New Jersey

Hoboken, New Jersey

Hoboken is a city in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population was 50,005. The city is part of the New York metropolitan area and contains Hoboken Terminal, a major transportation hub for the region...

, a location Johnson jokingly called "the Left Bank" of New York City. In 2007, they were named by the Association of American Publishers

Association of American Publishers

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly...

as the winner of the 2007 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing, popularly known as the "indie publisher of the year" award.

Melville House has published a variety of authors including Andre Schiffrin

André Schiffrin

André Schiffrin is a European-born American author, publisher and socialist.- Life :Schiffrin is the son of Jacques Schiffrin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to France and briefly enjoyed success there as publisher of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which he founded, and which was bought by...

, Celia Farber

Celia Farber

Celia Ingrid Farber is an American print journalist and author, best known for her part in the campaign which denies that AIDS is an infectious disease...

, Stephen Dixon, Frank O'Connor

Frank O'Connor

Frank O’Connor was an Irish author of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs.-Early life:...

, Régis Debray

Régis Debray

Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...

, Renata Adler

Renata Adler

Renata Adler is an American author, journalist and film critic.-Background and education:Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A...

, Mark Danner

Mark Danner

Mark David Danner is a prominent American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written extensively on Haiti, Central America,...

, Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Raised in a rural community in North Carolina, Kenan has focused his fiction on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Among his books is the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was...

, Lewis Lapham

Lewis Lapham

Lewis Henry Lapham was an American entrepreneur who made a fortune consolidating smaller business in the leather industry. He was also one of the founders of Texaco Oil Company....

, French (then-)Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin

Dominique de Villepin

Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin is a French politician who served as the Prime Minister of France from 31 May 2005 to 17 May 2007....

, T Cooper

T Cooper

T Cooper is a FTM American novelist. He is the author of three novels, The Beaufort Diaries , Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes , and Some of the Parts...

, Tao Lin

Tao Lin

Tao Lin is an American writer. He was born of Taiwanese parents and grew up on the East Coast of the USA.He is the author of two novels, Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates ; a novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel ; a short story collection, Bed ; and two poetry collections, you are a little...

, Lee Rourke

Lee Rourke

Lee Rourke is a writer and editor. He is the author of the short story collection Everyday and the novel The Canal published by Melville House Publishing...

and others. The company has been adept at attracting well-known authors away from larger establishment presses. In late 2007, Johnson announced the company had lured Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz

Imre Kertész

Imre Kertész is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history"....

away from his long-time publisher, Knopf, with a three book deal. Soon after, he announced Paul Berman

Paul Berman

Paul Berman is an American writer. His articles have been published in numerous periodicals, such as: The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate...

had left Norton to publish with Melville House.

The company is particularly noted for its books of leftist political reportage, French titles in translation, and avant-garde fiction. Among its most notable books are its 2003 bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French public intellectual, philosopher and journalist. Often referred to today, in France, simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" movement in 1976.-Early life:...

, the first book to disclose the illegal trading of nuclear technology by U.S. ally Pakistan, and Torture Taxi
Torture Taxi
Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights is a 2006 book by A.C. Thompson and Trevor Paglen documenting the CIA's extraordinary rendition program....

, by Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author.He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher.Paglen is the author of three books...

and A.C. Thompson, the first book on the CIA's rendition program. More recently, Melville House published Collusion, by Carlo Bonini, the Italian journalist who uncovered the "Niger-gate

Plame affair

The Plame Affair involved the identification of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer. Mrs. Wilson's relationship with the CIA was formerly classified information...

" hoax behind the U.S. justification for going to war in Iraq; and Learning to Live Finally, the final book by Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

.

Melville House has also gained a reputation for its attention to book design, and has won several AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artist) awards for its cover and interior designs. Unlike most small publishers, Melville House has an in-house designer. Until 2007, Dave Konopka

Dave Konopka

Dave Konopka is an American musician who is best known as the guitarist-bassist in Battles. Prior to joining Battles, he was in the Boston-based math rock band Lynx. The band had released their self-titled album on Box Factory Records in 2000....

designed all of the company's books. He left Melville House when his band, Battles

Battles (band)

Battles is an American experimental rock group, founded in 2002 in New York City, comprising guitarists Ian Williams and Dave Konopka , and drummer John Stanier .-Biography:...

, grew in popularity. Currently, the position is held by the design team of Kelly Blair and Carol Hayes.

The rapid rise of the company has been notable in that neither Johnson or Merians had any background in publishing. Johnson was a short story writer who had won numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize

Pushcart Prize

The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured....

, but had never published a book; he was probably best known for founding one of the earliest book blogs, MobyLives.com. Merians was a sculptor who showed her work at several notable New York galleries, including the Margaret Thatcher Gallery in Chelsea

Chelsea, Manhattan

Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas and...

, and the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, and although she studied poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop, her work, too, had never been collected in a book. In an early interview, Merians told The New York Times that the company was formed as an impromptu reaction to the political climate of the moment that she thought would amount to no more than "an out-of-the-back-of-the-car kind of thing."

In 2008 Melville House moved to DUMBO, Brooklyn

DUMBO, Brooklyn

Dumbo, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It encompasses two sections: one located between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, which connect Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River, and another that continues...

, to a location that combines a glass-wall bookstore with their offices, which are behind revolving bookshelves. The opening was on January 19, 2008.

External links

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