We all love world literature, don’t we? We love to read translated literature that crosses oceans, cultures, norms, and expectations. But it hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when we stuck our heads in the sand and ignored all but a few foreign writers: Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens…etc. Even the so-called European High-Modernism of the 20th century was popularized by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, three Americans who wrote in English. Now we know how myopic we were. The world is full of incredible writers not writing in English. I’m glad we live in a shrinking world where we have that wonderful invention which Jorge Luis Borges predicted and Al Gore created: the internet. Now it’s easy to find a list of African writers. Two clicks and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong O’, Ben Okri, and Naruddin Farah show up in front of me. And while it’s wonderful to celebrate the ease of our options, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always like this. Japan, until midway through the 20th century was an isolated literary treasure chest. Then in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature and America began noticing.

According to Jason Pinter, in his illuminating article on The Huffington Post, women have taken over the publishing industry and have stopped publishing books for men. Men don’t read, he observes, because nobody is making good man-based books. Tragedy. The number one culprit in the phasing out of male readers is Random House and their women. In 2010 we’ll see new fiction from Julie Orringer, Jennifer Egan, and Aimee Bender. What’s a man to do when he walks into BookPeople and finds new works by these three phenomenally talented and interesting writers, but knows that he can’t read them? They’re written by women for goodness sakes!

I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth mentioning again: I judge books by their spine. Meaning, the company that publishes a title can tell me a lot about what I might find inside the book. Finding a new publisher is like finding a new friend. It’s awkward at first, there’s almost too much to learn about each other, but, in the end, the vagaries and missteps can lead to a lifelong partnership that you can’t imagine living without. I was recently introduced to Other Press by a friend of mine, and I’m quickly forming a strong attachment.