This Is Independent Publishing
Since its launch in 2006, the Brooklyn Book Festival has grown into one of the country’s premier literary events. Held on a Sunday in September at Brooklyn Borough Hall and surrounding venues, the festival attracts some of the biggest names in contemporary literature. (Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie were among this year’s headliners.) But the readings and panels aren’t confined to the festival’s main stages; clubs, parks, bookstores, theaters, and libraries across the borough host a weeklong series of film screenings, parties, and author appearances. It was at one of these so-called Bookend events this year that I had the pleasure of talking again with Eric Obenauf, the editorial director of Two Dollar Radio, an independent press based in Columbus, Ohio. Obenauf had organized a conversation between novelists Masande Ntshanga and Naomi Jackson—both of whom, readers of this magazine will recall, were featured in First Fiction 2016, in our July/August issue, with Jackson interviewing Ntshanga on the occasion of Two Dollar Radio’s release of his debut, The Reactive—and Obenauf asked me to say a few words of introduction. Afterward, we started talking about the “joys” of travel (Ntshanga had arrived a day earlier, after a twenty-one-hour flight from South Africa), and Obenauf mentioned that he had driven ten or eleven hours from Columbus to be there. I pressed for more details. After spending months working on this, our Independent Publishing Issue, I found Obenauf’s journey to be a perfect demonstration of the enterprising spirit and dedication to great literature that we hope to honor in these pages. And what an image: the humble editor driving his 2010 Ford Focus down the interstate, trunk packed with boxes of books, backseat holding an air mattress and a sleeping bag, stereo blaring the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, on his way to an event that amounts to the World Cup of Literature. The following week, Ntshanga met Obenauf back in Ohio (the author flew, the editor drove, love it), where Obenauf shuttled the novelist to a series of midwestern appearances—in the same 2010 Ford Focus. That, dear readers, is independent publishing. It’s hustle, and it’s drive (often on one’s own dime, always for love of the art), and it results in what Michael Szczerban describes, in his introduction to the Agents & Editors interview with another indie-publishing champion, Tin House editor Rob Spillman, as “some of the most interesting and adventurous work published today.”
