In 1995, the Canadian author Anne Carson published her first poetry collection with New Directions, a small press whose avant-garde roster was packed with literary giants, among them Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams and Pablo Neruda.
She didn’t stick around. The same year, she published a different book with Knopf, a publisher with much deeper pockets, where she remained for years. Despite the snub, her editor, Declan Spring, continued to court Carson — the first author he ever edited — attending jazz shows with her when she came to New York. He was hoping for a moment when the boutique publishing house, tucked away on a cramped, cluttered floor of an Art Deco office building in Chelsea, might win back the business of a literary wonder.
He found his moment a dozen years later, when Carson, reeling from the loss of her brother, had a vision for a book that was more of a scrapbook than a tome. With this project, Spring could offer her something a corporate giant couldn’t: the patience and creative verve to turn an idea into the tribute that became “Nox,” a scroll folded like an accordion and packaged in a box.
New Directions published the book, a contemplation on death and grief, in 2010. While Carson worked occasionally with other presses, and continued to publish with Knopf until 2016, she produced seven more works with New Directions, where she remains today. The press will put out her next book, “Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind,” in February, followed by “Highlights of Colonialism,” another accordion folded poem, in the fall of 2027.
On Wednesday, Carson, 76, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Last year, another New Directions author, Laszlo Krasznahorkai from Hungary, won it. He was edited by Spring, 60, and the New Directions publisher, Barbara Epler. The back-to-back wins come after another New Directions author, the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, won the prize in 2011. All in all, the company has published 14 Nobel laureates in its 90 years in business.
In an era when corporate publishers dominate a rapidly consolidating industry, New Directions has remained independent and continued its long tradition of seeking out and nurturing some of the world’s most seminal authors, delivering, on average, a Nobel Prize winner about every six and a half years. Perhaps even more remarkably, it has held onto those writers — or, in Carson’s case, drawn them back into the fold.
As far as Carson is concerned, the formula is simple: “They’re the nicest people,” she said, according to her literary agent, Nicole Aragi.
On Wednesday afternoon, Carson and her husband, Robert Currie, called the New Directions office from Iceland, where they live half the year, and were promptly put on speakerphone.
“Have a glass of champagne on me,” Epler said.
“It’s a bottle, dear!” Carson replied.
New Directions makes up for what it can’t offer in cash advances and bloated marketing budgets with attention. When authors like Carson stop by the office, for instance, “we all just sort of drop what we’re doing and hang out,” said Spring.
“The books that I’ve had with them — I’m quite confident that a larger publisher, even if they had taken them on, wouldn’t have seen the same kind of attention, sales, reviews and prizes won,” said the literary agent Jonah Straus, who represents John Keene, an author whose 2015 book with New Directions, “Counternarratives,” won several literary prizes. “New Directions understood what they were publishing in a way that a larger house might not have.”
New Directions was founded in 1936 by a Harvard sophomore named James Laughlin, who heeded advice given to him by Ezra Pound: “‘You’re never going to be any good as a poet. Why don’t you take up something useful?’”
Laughlin, whose family had made its fortune in the steel industry, went on to publish titans of literature including Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Dylan Thomas and Pound himself. He was Vladimir Nabokov’s first American publisher, although he turned down “Lolita” because the subject matter was too risqué.
Laughlin fell in love with Carson’s poetry, wooing her to his publishing house in typewritten letters, describing her as an “authentic, new directional genius,” in a letter to a colleague. “He had a crush on her,” Epler, 65, said.
Despite his wealth, Laughlin had a “reputation for thriftiness — paying low salaries and delaying royalties when money was short,” according to his 1997 obituary in The New York Times. As Epler, who joined the company in 1984 as an editorial assistant, put it: “He could have done whatever he wanted, but he preferentially liked to do things in an economically sound way.”
Laughlin was “sad and despondent” at the prospect of losing Carson to Knopf, according to an undated letter he wrote. Yet rather than make Carson, a classics professor, a lucrative offer, “he was flirting with her in Latin and Greek,” Epler said, adding, “He didn’t understand how much she needed money — he just didn’t get it.”
Even in death, Laughlin kept his commitments to literary excellence and tight finances. The company is now controlled wholly by his heirs. He left two $50,000 trusts, one for operating expenses and another to be used to dissolve the business in an orderly fashion should it ever collapse.
In his legacy trust, which ended in 2018, Laughlin stipulated that the company could not be sold nor could the collection be acquired. While his wishes are no longer binding, they still define the company’s ethos.
New Directions has continued to flourish, supported by an enviable backlist of canonical authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Tennessee Williams, unexpected resurgences like Osamu Dazai and Clarice Lispector, as well as more recent successes like the Danish writer Solvej Balle.
Unlike the publishing conglomerates, independent presses have a reputation for holding onto authors who are not immediately commercial hits. “It does take time to build an audience, and that’s something the big publishers are not so good at,” Epler said.
The plucky team collectively agrees on the books they acquire, collaborating on details down to the iconic jacket covers, a defining New Directions feature. “Because we’re small and we don’t have that much money, we need to decide who’s great fast before other people notice,” Epler said. “So we rely a lot on tips from friends, writers, translators, publishers from around the world. We’re constantly asking favors of people in terms of advice.”
Crushing stacks of manuscripts teeter in Epler’s office, part of an endless, and international, quest for the world’s top literary talent — authors who not only test creative boundaries but appeal to younger readers on university campuses and prize juries alike.
“I wouldn’t say they’re chasing Nobels per se, but they are thinking very broadly in their acquisitions,” Straus said.
Krasznahorkai, last year’s Nobel laureate, recalled standing outside a Brooklyn event with Epler, String and Mieke Chew, a senior editor and the publicity director at New Directions, when a young man pushed through the crowd to greet them. Krasznahorkai readied himself to dole out an autograph.
“He wasn’t coming to me at all,” Krasznahorkai recalled. “He went straight to Barbara Epler.”
He wanted to tell her he was a fan.
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