ForeWord This Week

August 8, 2013



Sergio De La Pava

Sergio De La Pava is simply a lawyer who had a story to tell. So, back in 2008, he told it. All 678 pages of it. He self-published A Naked Singularity, his labyrinthine tale of a New York public defender, crime, immigration, boxing, the media, scatology, and other assorted topics. He got the book out of his system, tossed it out into the world via print-on-demand, and then went back to his life and heavy caseload in Manhattan.

Then, something happened that most self-published authors dream of but rarely find: discovery, success, critical acclaim, a devoted following. This occurred as a result of two other unusual things. The promotions director (somebody not normally in charge of discovering books) at the University of Chicago Press (rarely a publisher of fiction) picked up the book and published it. Now, it’s been shortlisted for a PEN award and is enjoying its third printing.

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Levi Stahl

This self-publishing/university publishing success story caught our attention, since we specialize in discovering these kinds of indie books and authors. ForeWord This Week caught up with Levi Stahl, the University of Chicago Press publicity man who made the discovery, to find out how this happened.

Sergio De La Pava was not expecting anyone to take notice of his book. How and when did you discover his work? What made him stand out?

It’s actually a fun story. Way back in December of 2010 I read a rave review of the self-published version in The Quarterly Conversation, an online literary magazine for whom, at the time, I was editing poetry reviews. Scott Bryan Wilson, who wrote the review, basically said he couldn’t believe he started reading a self-published book and couldn’t believe it was that good. He said it was one of the best things he had read all year, maybe all decade.

I got a copy and spent my Christmas holidays reading it and was astonished at how good it was. I started agitating internally to publish it. I started talking to people here, and from the very start, as a marketing person, I knew how we could make this work. Credit to his wife, who is also a public defender and who served as his agent. She did reach out to people, and as I started looking into this, talking to friends on the online literature world, I realized she had gotten the book into the hands of the right people.

How difficult was it for you to sell this internally? University of Chicago Press does not ordinarily do fiction.

On the one hand it was tough because, of course, what I was asking people to do was take a chance on a debut novel that no other publisher had wanted, that was almost 700 pages long, and that was kind of hard to describe. On the other hand, I think the people here deserve credit. They were willing to listen and willing to talk about what we could do with this book. When we sent it out to a couple of outside readers—in this case they were people with some literary credentials—the reports came back strong. Suddenly it became a question of if we thought this would be viable as a project, and people jumped in. They really made it work. It was a fun process.

This is the kind of book that critics either love or hate. Why do you think that is?

I think it was the Slate reviewer that said it’s a joy to see someone come out with something unapologetically maximalist. You have to be willing to accept that he is just going all out. He is going to go after you on every register. There’s linguist humor and philosophical digressions that are kind of like dorm room bull sessions, and there’s scat humor. There are all sorts of everything in this book. There’s a reasonable argument to be made that there are critics who don’t like it, who would say there are better ways. You don’t have to put everything in there. For those of us that do find that it works, it’s incredible.

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It’s about the ride it takes you on.

The other thing I should say actually: from the very start, when I started reading it and started thinking about how we could market it, I knew too that if I could just convince people to open it ... Those first 50 pages or so where Casi is meeting his clients at night court, and they’re going through what they are charged with and what their defenses are, the voice is so powerful and so funny and unusual. I was really confident that if I could just get people to read 30 pages, I could get review editors to assign it, and I could get our sales director to get bookstore buyers to bring in copies.

Do you think this is the beginning of a trend for University of Chicago Press? Are you going to deal with more fiction?

I did essentially have to promise that I wouldn’t do this again. That’s not entirely fair. We are actually publishing Sergio’s second book in September. Way back when we were negotiating with him about the first book he popped up with a second book, which he’d self-published as well.

Can you give us a little preview of what his second book is about?

It’s called Personae, and it’s very much a great title for it because it’s about shifting perspectives, and it changes voices, scenes, and settings throughout. It couldn’t be more different from A Naked Singularity in a lot of ways. It’s 400-500 pages shorter; it’s slim, and it feels, to me, almost claustrophobic. The opening section, for example, is about a woman who’s a detective that’s going to murder, and she’s got some sort of psychic abilities, but she’s also clearly damaged. You’re just locked into her hyperlogical thought process, and it is intense, wearing, and impressive.

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Tell me a little more of the role of university presses in general. When you think of them, you think about serious academic scholarship—histories, biographies, and science. Are university presses changing at all?

I think if you look through university press catalogues you will see a wide variety of publishing strategies and publishing ideas. You’ll see some that are very clearly still focused on hardcore scholarship in some sense. All of us have a substantial part of our our resources tied up in serious scholarship aimed at fairly narrow slices of the academic market. On the other hand almost every university press at this point is also doing some books aimed at the general market. Until A Naked Singularity, our big fiction book we published was A River Runs Through It and Other Stories in 1976.

What advice do you have for other debut self-published authors who want to get your attention?

The key with Sergio was he wrote a good book. It’s a really powerful book that reaches out and grabs you. It’s kind of silly to give the advice to write a good book, but that’s a basic thing. It was someone who really had talent and was making good use of it, and that’s what made the difference.

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Pioneers

We’ve seen a number of great independently published books this past week, many of them about people or ideas that push back various frontiers. Among them:

Travel: Fresh Wind and Strange Fire: One Man's Adventures in Primal Mexico, by Lyn Fuchs, who writes about the Mexico you will not find in your average travel guidebook. “An American in Mexico takes the risks necessary to truly immerse himself into Mexican life and culture,” writes our reviewer Lori A. May.

Technology: Digital State: How the Internet Is Changing Everything, by Simon Pont, a compilation that “is a thought-provoking, ‘big picture’ view of the digital state,” writes ForeWord’s Maria Siano.

Drugs: And for those who want to read about a pioneer of a different sort, there’s Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD, by Lucius Werthmuller. “Not quite a chemistry textbook,” writes our reviewer Melissa Wuske, “this look at LSD’s discoverer delves also into what this particular formula meant for society.”

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