For nearly a year after Jennifer Croft, a translator, sent a submission to Jacques Testard, a publisher in London, in the summer of 2015, the manuscript languished unread. Testard had launched Fitzcarraldo Editions the previous year, with the goal of creating a distinctive list of literary fiction and essays, many in translation. He was only thirty, and fiercely ambitious, but his publishing house was barely more than a one-man operation, and he fell behind on his reading. It wasn’t until after the Brexit referendum of June, 2016, when U.K. citizens voted narrowly to leave the European Union, that Testard reviewed the text that Croft had sent him: a two-hundred-page extract from “Flights,” an expansive novel first published in Polish, in 2007, by Olga Tokarczuk.
Testard, a French citizen who had moved with his family to the U.K. in childhood, hadn’t been eligible to vote in the referendum. But, like many people in his social circle, he’d assumed that Britain would choose to remain part of Europe. Testard was shocked by the result, and horrified by its effective legitimization of hostile attitudes toward European-born residents of the U.K. Testard didn’t feel personally vulnerable: he is effortlessly bilingual, and speaks English with the accent of London’s educated, affluent, cosmopolitan class. But less privileged immigrants were made to feel insecure: “Go Home” graffiti appeared on British streets, and mothers observed speaking to their children in a foreign language were chided. Immigrants from Poland—who, after that country had joined the E.U., in 2004, had become the U.K.’s largest foreign-born cohort—were derided in the right-wing press as “Polish plumbers,” job-stealers from Warsaw or Lodz who’d thrived by maintaining the homes of hapless Londoners.
Various British novelists, including John Lanchester and Rachel Cusk, had combatted this stereotype by including sensitive portrayals of Polish builders in books about life in the U.K. Testard, for his part, decided to add to the diversity of Polish voices in Britain by making Tokarczuk’s work available in translation. Tokarczuk, who was born in 1962, and whose first novel, “The Journey of the Book-People,” was published in her native country in 1993, had become one of Poland’s most heralded intellectuals, with a catalogue of genre-defying novels that draw on history and myth. Although Tokarczuk’s work had been translated into French, German, and several other European languages, none of her novels were in print in English in the U.K.
“Flights,” the book that Croft had partially translated, was an ideal choice for introducing Tokarczuk’s wide-ranging œuvre to the English-speaking world. Composed of fragments, the book contains different strands and stories that cross time and space. A mother and son disappear while vacationing on a Croatian island; the bereaved daughter of a formerly enslaved African seeks the return of his preserved body, which the Emperor of Austria has placed in a cabinet of curiosities. These narratives are interspersed with often whimsical essayistic excursions into the experience of modern travellers, who might fly from Irkutsk to Moscow in a continuous dawn, or buckle into an airplane seat alongside depleted members of a bachelor party, the cabin pungent with their “stench of sweat mixed with the remnants of arousal.” One comic passage in “Flights” pityingly notes the helpless vulnerability of the monoglot English speaker, for whom “all instructions, all the lyrics of the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets—even the buttons in the lift!—are in their private language.” Testard loved Tokarczuk’s cosmopolitan storytelling, which offered a riposte to the narrow perspective of Britons who had voted for the closing of borders.
Testard struck a deal to publish “Flights” in 2017, and also commissioned Croft to translate Tokarczuk’s most recently completed work, “The Books of Jacob,” a historical novel about Jacob Frank, a Kabbalah scholar who led a messianic sect in the borderlands between Poland and Ukraine in the eighteenth century. In 2018, “Flights” won the International Booker Prize, Britain’s most important recognition for literature in translation, with the prize’s chair, Lisa Appignanesi, heralding Tokarczuk as “a writer of wonderful wit, imagination, and literary panache.” Thanks to the Booker win, the author already had an eager readership in English when Fitzcarraldo Editions released that fall a noirish thriller by Tokarczuk, “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. That book has become Fitzcarraldo’s best-selling title, with more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies purchased. In 2019, Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize, an event that primed English-language readers for the formidable “Books of Jacob,” which extends to nearly a thousand pages and appeared in English in 2021. To date, Fitzcarraldo has sold more than three hundred thousand copies of books by Tokarczuk. Four more translations from the author are in the pipeline.
I first encountered Fitzcarraldo Editions in the summer of 2017, while browsing in the London Review Bookshop, near the British Museum. I came across a slim paperback volume with a plain cover in International Klein Blue. In white lettering was a single-word title, “Pond,” and the name of the author, Claire-Louise Bennett, along with the name of the publisher and its insignia (a bell inscribed in a circle). The aesthetic was alluringly reminiscent of the wares in a Parisian bookstore, down to the folding French flaps on the cover. I settled in a sunny spot in St. James’s Park and nearly finished the book in one sitting, feeling that I had made a discovery. Behind the reticent cover unfolded an interlocked series of funny, peculiar short stories conveying the inner life of a reclusive young woman living in the Irish countryside. The subjects the narrator dilated on ranged from literature and “the essential brutality of love” to the inadvisability of postponing breakfast so late that her porridge strikes her as “a gloomy repast from the underworld.” The book was plotless and meandering, but the over-all effect was one of delightful originality.
Having been first picked up by the Stinging Fly, a small press in Ireland, where Bennett, who comes from the southwest of England, has lived for the past two decades, “Pond” had been submitted unsuccessfully to several British publishers. “I remember getting various feedback about it, such as it needed more work—it needed a story, it needed more characters, all this kind of thing, which was not at all what it was about,” Bennett told me recently. Testard, however, refrained from suggesting that Bennett turn an odd, beguiling book into something more immediately accessible, and published it, in 2015, as it was. “Pond” was rapturously reviewed, and was short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, for young authors. The book is now in its thirteenth printing. “Jacques doesn’t just chase after stuff that might be trending, or that he thinks might really catch fire,” Bennett explained. “He’s directed by what he’s really into.”
What Testard is really into is chronicled by Fitzcarraldo’s catalogue, which, as the house prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary, includes more than a hundred books, by seventy-eight authors. About half the titles are in translation, and Testard’s list is divided more or less evenly between works of fiction, which share the same blue cover as “Pond,” and nonfiction books, for which the color scheme is inverted: blue lettering on white covers. The striking visual presentation is the work of Ray O’Meara, an Irish graphic designer, who also designed an original serif typeface for the books and keeps a close watch over their stylistic consistency, with much thought given to how the density of the ink, contrasting with the white space of the margins, grants a bracing severity to each page. The uniformity of appearance means that a first-time fiction writer such as Bennett becomes, visually, a peer of a Nobel Prize winner.
Impressively, four of the writers who have been named Nobel laureates in the past decade are on Fitzcarraldo’s roster. In addition to Tokarczuk, the house publishes the work of Svetlana Alexievich, of Belarus (2015); Annie Ernaux, of France (2022); and Jon Fosse, of Norway (2023). The house’s range, in terms of subject matter and style, extends from “Animalia,” an unrelenting saga of rural poverty and violence by the French novelist Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, to “Suppose a Sentence,” the scholar Brian Dillon’s musings on individual sentences from works by such writers as George Eliot and Roland Barthes.
Although Fitzcarraldo now turns a profit, Testard cannot match mainstream commercial publishers financially, and for the most part he can afford to pay advances only in the low four digits. For some writers, being offered a bigger advance elsewhere after a Fitzcarraldo-instigated success is an opportunity that would be reckless to turn down. Bennett was wooed by the publisher Cape for her follow-up, the 2021 novel “Checkout 19.” Bennett said, “It wasn’t a decision I made lightly at all. There were a few tears involved.” Testard told me, “We couldn’t compete on the money, and she needed money, and that’s fine.” To writers who stick with Fitzcarraldo, Testard offers the opportunity of being impeccably published, and being seen in esteemed editorial company. Tynan Kogane, a senior editor at New Directions, in New York, said of Testard, “He’s gotten this very strange reputation as a Nobel whisperer.” Testard is also known for being committed to nurturing a writer through an entire career. He told me, “If you come to me with your first book, and I believe in you as an author, and I believe in the writing, and it doesn’t work and it sells five hundred copies, we will still do the next one, and the next one, because it takes time.”
In fact, only one of Fitzcarraldo’s titles has sold fewer than a thousand copies, and many have sold far more. For literary writers, the prospect of such old-school loyalty from a publisher allows for a freedom of imagination that might be impossible elsewhere. Dan Fox, an art critic whose second book with Fitzcarraldo, “Limbo,” is about experiencing a creative block, told me, “It’s a bit of a mess of a book—I don’t think it really works. I have often thought that I’d quite like to do a ‘Limbo 2,’ and ‘Limbo 3,’ that’s the same book, gradually reworked or retooled, so that it would never be a resolved book. I mentioned that to Jacques at one point, and to his credit he seemed to think, Oh, yeah, that would be quite a nice idea.” (“I would gladly publish a ‘Limbo 2’ or ‘Limbo 3,’ if that’s what Dan wanted to do,” Testard told me.)
Testard’s bilingualism gives him an advantage in a publishing industry in which the ability to read languages other than English is surprisingly uncommon. Not only does he read many French authors before they are translated into English; as a French reader, he is also introduced early to authors in various other languages, because French publishers tend to be far quicker than British or American ones to issue translations. Testard read Svetlana Alexievich in French before seeking to acquire “Second-hand Time,” an oral history of post-Soviet Russia, in 2014, during his first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual gathering where international rights are sold.
“I was walking around with one blue book and one white book,” he recalled of the fair. That year, the Frankfurt conference coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize, and Alexievich was considered one of the front-runners to win. He recalled, “I was basically told, ‘You’ve got no chance.’ ” When Patrick Modiano was named the winner, the heat went out of the competition for “Second-hand Time”; within a week, Testard had acquired the rights to Alexievich’s book, for what was for him the huge sum of thirty-five hundred pounds. The next year, she won the Nobel, and the English-language translation that Testard had commissioned, from Bela Shayevich, was sold to a U.S. publisher for a quarter of a million dollars.
When introducing an established author in translation to an Anglophone reading public, Testard has savvy instincts about how to position his product. After he bought the rights to publish the works of Annie Ernaux—the French writer whose œuvre, in one slim volume after another, has consisted of a ceaseless reworking of the experiences of her own life—he began not with her most recent book at the time, “A Girl’s Story,” which appeared in France in 2016; instead, he chose “The Years,” from 2008, in which Ernaux took the framework of her life to tell an impersonal autobiography of French womanhood from 1941 to the present. Edmund White wrote a galvanizing review of “The Years” in the New York Times, calling it “a ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ for our age of media domination and consumerism.”
When Testard promotes his books, he is as aggressive as a soft-spoken, cerebral man can be. Several times he has submitted books from his Essays series for the International Booker, a prize intended for works of fiction, under the rationale that—despite Fitzcarraldo’s own binary division between white and blue—only a small-minded judge would fail to understand how, say, the nonfiction works of Ernaux should be in the running alongside self-declared works of fiction. (Sometimes he succeeds: “The Years,” translated by Alison L. Strayer, was short-listed for the International Booker in 2019.) In another Booker bid, Testard sought to submit Jon Fosse’s complete “Septology” in a single edition, in 2022, despite its having been submitted in installments in previous years, with “Septology VI-VII” short-listed. “They said no, which is fine—I guess,” Testard said. “I know I’m not the only person who checks in about the rules.”
Peter Straus, a prominent literary agent in London, said of Testard, “He never stops thinking about how he can sell books,” adding, “You need that strength of belief, but also that stubbornness. And the other thing you need, which he’s got, is an unquenchable belief that he is an excellent publisher.” Barbara Epler, the publisher and editorial director of New Directions, the storied American house, founded in 1936, that has issued seminal translations of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and others, told me, “Jacques reminds me of James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions—they want to make publishing houses homes for writers to a degree that I don’t think is typical.”
Fitzcarraldo’s services extend beyond the editorial. In May, Sheila Heti, the Canadian author, travelled to London to promote “Alphabetical Diaries,” her poignant compilation of sentences drawn from her journals and arranged from A to Z—a project that Testard had been discussing with her for a decade. She asked him to accompany her to a clothing store, where she sought his tasteful counsel about which of three tweed jackets she should buy. He gave a lilac one the nod. “I sensed that it was the answer she wanted,” he told me, mildly. “It also looked the best.”
Testard and his editorial staff—he now has seven colleagues—like to talk about Fitzcarraldo authors and books as forming constellations, with one title leading a curious reader to another, with which it shares a kinship, and then to yet another. Someone who, like me, starts with “Pond” might be attracted next to the work of the German writer Esther Kinsky, whose richly observational novel “River” features an unnamed narrator who lives alongside the River Lea, in London’s outlying wetlands. Reading Kinsky might, in turn, lead to the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, whose essay “In Memory of Memory” concerns the survival of several generations of her family in the twentieth-century Soviet Union. Enjoyment of Stepanova’s work might encourage a reader to try another modern text about the Soviet experiment, such as Alexievich’s “Second-hand Time.” The constellation concept helps to guide Fitzcarraldo’s staff when they consider which authors might fit next in their roster. But they do nothing as crude as clutter the books’ back covers with “if you loved this, try this” urgings. The refined, distinctive covers are recommendation enough.
It’s no coincidence that many Fitzcarraldo books share a preoccupation with history and memory: Testard was considering undertaking a Ph.D. in history at Oxford University before he went into publishing. Many titles are also distinguished by a degree of self-conscious literary difficulty. The first fiction title that Testard published, in 2014, was “Zone,” by Mathias Énard, a five-hundred-and-twenty-one-page novel written in a single swoon of a sentence. The narrator, who is making a five-hundred-and-twenty-one-kilometre train journey from Milan to Rome, reflects on his own history and that of modern Europe. The book was hailed as a propulsive, profound masterpiece in some quarters, including the book pages of the New York Times, and as quite possibly intellectually fraudulent in others. (“Stuffing a book with deep, dark things and invocations of Homer does not necessarily make it deep and dark and Homeric,” a skeptical Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian.) Publishing “Zone” as his first outing, Testard told me, was “a mission statement of sorts—here was a small press that was going to be publishing ambitious writing that was perceived to be too difficult for the mainstream.”
Fitzcarraldo’s first nonfiction offering, also in 2014, was the British philosopher Simon Critchley’s “Memory Theatre,” an unreliable narration in which the author, while sorting through a box of papers that had belonged to a late colleague, reflects on his own journey to an elevated life of the mind, and on the baser indignities of the life of the body. (“Sleep would softly descend . . . only to be interrupted by that vague alien-like pressure in the lower abdomen. Do I need to piss or don’t I?”) The manuscript, Critchley told me, “was this weird little book which I wasn’t at all confident about, to say the least.” He agreed to publish it with Testard, with the expectation that the result would resemble “a small fanzine or something.” Being linked with Fitzcarraldo’s origin story, he told me, now looks like a far cleverer decision than he can properly lay claim to. When I asked Critchley how he’d characterize a Fitzcarraldo title, he offered, “They are books of high literary and intellectual worth that no one else is going to publish. Cool and weird, and probably quite good.”
Testard chose the name for his company while browsing his own bookshelf. His eye fell on a book, by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, in which Carrère discusses an interview that he conducted in the early eighties with Werner Herzog, the filmmaker. Herzog’s 1982 epic, “Fitzcarraldo,” about an opera aficionado and would-be rubber baron who attempts to transport a steamship from one tributary of the Amazon to another by lugging it over a steep pinnacle in the Peruvian jungle, has become a byword for an exorbitant, doomed adventure. Testard told me that his choice was “a not very subtle metaphor about the stupidity of setting up a publishing house.” When Herzog’s recent memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,” was being offered to publishers, Testard wrote to Herzog’s German publisher with, he told me, “a publishing maneuver which I may have invented because it’s so stupid—a lowball preëmpt.” He went on, “I put in this impassioned pitch, with the biggest sum I could offer at that point, and ended the letter saying, ‘If Werner Herzog has a sense of humor, he will say yes to this.’ And then, obviously, he went somewhere else, for quite a lot of money.” Testard quickly added, “I don’t think Werner Herzog does not have a sense of humor. I think he definitely does.” (Herzog told me, in an e-mail, “I do not mind at all there was never any contact between me and Jacques Testard about him taking the name ‘Fitzcarraldo’ for his publishing house. He is welcome, since he seems to publish very fine books.”)
An alternative possible name had been Pale Fire Editions. But Nabokov’s title ended up being adopted by Testard’s wife, Rowena Morgan-Cox, for her own company, which designs stylish lamps made from recycled paper. The couple’s handsome apartment, in South East London, has a number of the lamps, and two more decorate Fitzcarraldo’s light-filled, open-plan office, in a renovated carburetor factory on the same side of the Thames. Crittall steel-framed windows maintain an industrial atmosphere, and there’s a craft-coffee shop on the ground floor.
Every week at Fitzcarraldo starts with a staff meeting, and one morning in May I joined the team at a round conference table on which were scattered a handful of blue and white books, with more titles arranged on shelves and bookcases. The Fitzcarraldo color combination is such a powerful trademark that, after I had been exposed to it for a while, even ordinary objects in the same hues—a blue bowl for washing dishes; a denim-dress-and-white-T-shirt outfit worn by one of the editors—started to seem like deliberate acts of branding.
First on the agenda were books that were currently in the works. These included “Dysphoria Mundi,” by Paul B. Preciado, a Spanish philosopher and curator whose earlier books include “Can the Monster Speak?,” an essay about the pathologization of transgender people by the psychoanalytic profession. Testard, who brushes his brown hair forward over his temples, like a Romantic poet, reads Spanish in addition to French and English. “I’m slowly working my way through our version, and Paul has accepted most of the edits, which I wasn’t expecting,” he remarked.
The group then discussed Lucy Mercer, a poet, who would soon be publicly named the winner of this year’s Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, an award, bestowed annually since 2016, for a proposal for a nonfiction work in progress by an unpublished writer. The recipient receives three thousand pounds; a residency of up to three months at the Mahler and LeWitt Studios, in Spoleto, Italy; and a contract to be published by Fitzcarraldo. Mercer won the award for an essay, tentatively titled “Afterlife,” about mortality and wax. (In the loose Fitzcarraldo mode, the essay touches on everything from candlelight vigils to Madame Tussauds.)
The talk around the table then turned to Clemens Meyer, the German novelist, whose début novel, “While We Were Dreaming,” about a group of youths going off the rails in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was first published in 2007 in his native country. A Fitzcarraldo translation of “Dreaming,” by Katy Derbyshire, was long-listed for the International Booker, as was “Bricks and Mortar,” a novel about the rise of a soccer hooligan turned pimp. “I’ve got Clemens’s new novel—it’s longer than ‘The Books of Jacob,’ ” Testard announced, matter-of-factly. “I need to put together an offer and work out how we are going to fund the translation. It’s going to be a ’26 or ’27 book—it’s going to take a year to translate.” The cost of translating a Fitzcarraldo book can be considerably higher than the advance given to an author. Meyer, Testard later told me, would be receiving an advance in the low four figures for the new book, a nonlinear historical novel about film, war, and masculinity called “The Projectionist”; Derbyshire would be paid about thirty-seven thousand dollars to render it in English. Fitzcarraldo often applies for funding from cultural institutions within the writers’ native countries to help defray the translation costs. Rachael Allen, a poetry editor whom Fitzcarraldo hired last year, spoke of attending an event this spring, in Manchester, about poetry in translation, where she’d discussed potential acquisitions for a new poetry series, which is scheduled to launch next year. (Ray O’Meara has been working on a closely guarded design scheme.)
Tokarczuk’s next book, I learned, will be a reworking of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” titled “The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story.” Because Tokarczuk has become so eminent, a translation was commissioned immediately after the manuscript’s completion, in Polish. Testard told me, with pride, “Every book is different and can be read on multiple levels—she always messes with the form or complicates it. She is never not surprising.” The Fitzcarraldo team is excited about the commercial potential of “Empusium”—twenty-five thousand copies are being printed—and the sales team at Faber & Faber, with which Fitzcarraldo works on distribution, was determined to attract readers beyond the hard-core Fitzcarraldo customer. Testard turned to O’Meara and said, “I can’t remember if we told you this, but we are going to need to print the subtitle on the cover.” O’Meara let out a low groan.
A doorbell rang. “That will be Jon Fosse’s bookplates!” Testard said. To mark the company’s tenth anniversary, this September, O’Meara has designed the Fitzcarraldo First Decade Collection, a limited-edition series of ten of the house’s most significant titles—including “Pond,” “Flights,” “The Years,” and “Septology”—which will be case-bound in linen cloth, with marbled endpapers and signed, numbered bookplates. Testard had sent each author a box of bookplates along with a black pen; Fosse, who lives in Oslo and has a collection of more than two hundred fountain pens, let it be known that he would be using his own writing implement for the task. After the delivery person dropped off the package, Joely Day, an editor, opened it up to reveal stacks of rectangular bookplates signed by Fosse in a spidery hand, in varying densities of ink. Fosse is not the only author who has deviated from the house aesthetic: “When Annie did ‘Getting Lost,’ they started out black, and then blue, and then pink,” Clare Bogen, Fitzcarraldo’s publicity director, told her colleagues. Each of the books selected to mark the anniversary would be printed in a limited edition of a thousand; owning all ten will set a collector back more than six hundred dollars. For Fitzcarraldo aficionados of lesser means, the online store offers a tote bag, in blue canvas, bearing the company’s name, and, in white, a tote bearing the title of a volume by Dan Fox: “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters.”
Testard moved to the U.K. when he was five, after his father, a management consultant, was transferred from Paris to London. In contrast with many other expat families, his parents sent him to British schools rather than to French-language ones, and he soon became fluent in both the language and the social codes of his English peers. After Brexit, Testard finally applied for British citizenship, for which he was recently approved, having passed the Life in the U.K. test, a series of questions about British customs, institutions, and values. “I didn’t study, out of cockiness, and then actually it was more difficult than I thought,” he admitted. “You get asked questions about the different layers of courts in Scotland, for example.” Not having a full command of the different layers of courts in Scotland could probably be considered a defining characteristic of English citizens of the U.K., but Testard’s confidence lay elsewhere. “I have that first-generation thing of being more British than the British,” he told me.
When he was thirteen, his family returned to Paris; he was enrolled in a local school, where he floundered academically. “We spoke French at home, but I’d never studied in French—I’d never learned French grammar, or done math in French,” he explained. His younger brother, Pierre, was in a better position to adapt; he stayed in Paris and is now a published novelist in French. (Pierre has since moved to Berlin.) After a year in Paris, Testard became a boarder at London’s Westminster School, one of the best private schools in the U.K. Weekends were spent with family friends or the families of friends; by the end of high school, Testard was a familiar, charismatic figure among a roving group of lightly parented teen-agers in London. He went to Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate, where he found a group of friends among whom there was a social cachet to being a serious reader. “In that kind of naïve, slightly pretentious, studenty way, we would all push ourselves to be into books together,” he said. “Nabokov, Joyce, Dostoyevsky.”
After graduating, Testard began his graduate studies in history, at Oxford, but his ambitions for an academic life soon waned. “There was one specific seminar that I was made to attend as part of the course requirements where someone presented their research on the memorial bells and fountains of Oxfordshire, 1847 to 1852,” he said. “I was specifically interested in collective memory, and seeing this guy present his research I realized it was going to be very, very, very narrow for a really long time.” Testard found an internship at Autrement, an independent publisher in Paris, where he typed up e-mails dictated by the company’s founder, who declined to use computers, and did some editing of translations from English to French. “I got this firsthand view of what a publisher does,” he said. After four months, he moved to New York for a further stint of interning, first at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and then at The Paris Review, while living in a shared apartment in Williamsburg. “I learned about the slush pile”—where manuscripts that are submitted without agents end up before being read—“and I learned how to say no to things. I also learned about what it takes to bring something to press—the different passes, checking, proofreading,” he said. “I was really into it, and I wanted to work in this world.”
Upon returning to London, and inspired by the example of The Paris Review, and other small literary magazines in New York, including n+1 and Bomb, Testard and a friend from Trinity, Ben Eastham, launched, in 2011, their own literary periodical, called The White Review. “Jacques idolized publishers, reading their biographies, which is quite a niche thing for a twentysomething to do,” Eastham told me. They enlisted O’Meara as the journal’s designer, and crowdfunded the magazine’s starting budget of about fourteen thousand dollars. The White Review was handsomely produced, with a cover that could be detached, unfolded, and mounted as an art work. The name was a tribute to La Revue Blanche, a nineteenth-century publication edited by the art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon. “There was a political dimension,” Testard explained. “The coalition government had just come in”—an alliance of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament had instigated broad cuts to social services—and “student fees had tripled.” In the world of publishing, e-books and online shopping seemed to be threatening the existence of print. “We wanted to create something that was a book-as-object, and in our small and modest way might say, ‘Books can be really nice, and reading this can be a nice experience.’ ”
If Testard and Eastham didn’t follow Fénéon’s revolutionary example all the way—in 1894, he was charged with conspiracy—they did adopt his name, with its outlaw glamour, for an annual award bestowed by the magazine, which became well known not just for its content but for its parties. “Free drinks go a long way to getting crowds out, whether in a greenhouse in Wapping, a car park in Peckham, a bookshop in Berlin, a gallery in Bristol, or an artist’s studio in Hackney Wick,” Testard and Eastham wrote in an introduction to a 2017 anthology of White Review pieces. (In a blithe aside that might not have survived the scrutiny of a post-#MeToo edit, they added, “In all of these instances, only once has a member of the audience purposefully set his girlfriend’s hair on fire. No lasting damage was done.”)
While working at The White Review, Testard had a day job as an editor at Notting Hill Editions, an independent publishing company, where he brought out the first volume of the British novelist Deborah Levy’s so-called living autobiography, “Things I Don’t Want to Know.” He also commissioned the American novelist Joshua Cohen to write an essay called “Attention!: A (Short) History.” Testard was laid off, amid downsizing, at the end of 2013. He made a list of publishers with whom he felt his taste would mesh: it was vanishingly short, and none were hiring anyway. The offer of a loan from a family member enabled him to set out on his own. “I knew I wanted to edit books,” he said.
Cohen recalled to me, “Jacques had talked to me about his plans to found a publishing house. It’s sort of like men who talk to you about buying bars—you sort of listen to them and say, ‘Sure, sounds like a great idea.’ But he’s the one person of our generation I can think of who truly managed to build something that will last.” The manuscript of Cohen’s most recent novel was rejected by his previous U.S. publisher, Random House, and by two dozen others. The book eventually found a home at Fitzcarraldo (and, in the U.S., at New York Review Books). Cohen’s novel, “The Netanyahus,” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Fitzcarraldo’s annual summer party was held on the solstice, at Bold Tendencies, an arts organization in South London with a pop-up bar atop a converted parking garage. Testard introduced a series of readings to a capacity crowd of three hundred mostly young, and mostly attentive, guests, who sat on folding chairs arranged around a makeshift stage. Marianne Brooker, the winner of the 2022 Essay Prize, read from “Intervals,” a wrenching memoir about her mother’s death from multiple sclerosis, pausing occasionally when a train rattled by on the nearby Overground line. Zarina Muhammad, an art critic, read a lively essay about taking men on dates to Gujarati sports bars, extracted from “London Feeds Itself,” a volume co-published by Fitzcarraldo and Open City.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the translator, asked the crowd, “Who here likes Polish cuisine? At the end, I am going to ask if you still like Polish cuisine.” She then launched into a lurid passage from Tokarczuk’s “Empusium” about the preparation of czernina, a traditional soup made with duck blood. (The description was also part of an excerpt of the novel which was published in this magazine.) Toby Jones, the character actor, read a section from Jon Fosse’s latest book, “A Shining,” about a man stuck on a dead-end trail in a snowy forest; Jones turned Fosse’s bleak narrative into uproarious comedy. Between readings, Testard, who was dressed in a yellow-and-orange three-quarter-length coat by the designer Alex Mullins—a garment Testard wears only once a year, at the summer party—hopped up to the microphone to remind guests that signed books and tote bags could be purchased after the readings, and that, if anyone hadn’t yet read Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow,” an audiobook, read by Lloyd-Jones, was available. Afterward, the audience rushed the cash bar and watched the sun set over the skyline while Testard stood for a moment with his brother and his father, who were visiting.
“He’s a cultural hybrid,” Testard’s father said proudly, before remarking on the ungenerous serving size of the evening’s refreshments: “Un petit verre pour cinq pounds!”
“Welcome to London,” Testard said.
The youthful crowd reminded me of a striking study, released by the Booker Prize Foundation, about who reads literature in translation. Although most fiction in the U.K. is bought by readers older than sixty, works in translation skew much younger: almost half of fiction in translation is bought by readers under thirty-five, with only eight per cent being bought by those of retirement age. Readers of translated fiction are more educated, and far likelier than most other consumers of books to say that they prefer “a challenging read.” Not coincidentally, in the 2016 Brexit referendum, voters younger than thirty-four were overwhelmingly in favor of remaining within the E.U. It’s not fanciful to suggest that, for young, educated, and relatively affluent readers, the blue and white covers of Fitzcarraldo Editions have become a kind of flag of international allegiance, no less than the blue-and-yellow banners of the E.U. were during the referendum period.
Fitzcarraldo is determined to extend its purview beyond the mainly European literature that characterized its earliest offerings. It has published the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s novel “Minor Detail,” about the effects of the Nakba, in a translation from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. In 2023, Testard published “Owlish,” a novel by the Hong Kong author Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese, which was acquired by Tamara Sampey-Jawad, Fitzcarraldo’s associate publisher, who has worked at the house since 2016. Testard said of Tse’s book, “It’s a very dark fairy tale—surreal, uncanny, but also funny and moving at times—as if Angela Carter were doing postcolonial political allegory.”
Last year, he and his colleagues set off in another new direction: the launch of Fitzcarraldo Classics, a series of formerly out-of-print books that mirror and illuminate the Fitzcarraldo list. “We can’t just publish more and more contemporary books, because a point will come where maybe they’d start to compete against each other, which is not desirable,” Testard told me. “And a Classics series seemed interesting from an intellectual point of view.” He went on, “To me, Fitzcarraldo is publishing as an intellectual project.” So far, the Classics series includes the essay “A Very Easy Death,” by Simone de Beauvoir—an influence on Annie Ernaux—and “The Possessed,” a pastiche of the gothic horror genre by the Polish modernist Witold Gombrowicz, made newly relevant by the success of Tokarczuk.
The Classics list, Testard explained, would “go back in time through the affinities and influences of authors we already publish, and trace literary heritages in some way, or imagine an alternative history of twentieth-century literature.” It’s a big ambition, and also a way to stay small. “I feel very strongly about independent publishing, and Fitzcarraldo remaining an independent publisher,” Testard said. “I’m not interested in growth for the sake of growth, and I don’t ever want to have to publish a book for commercial reasons.” Testard allowed that he may not have another Nobel Prize winner in the immediate offing: “We don’t have anyone else who’s quite old enough, to put it bluntly.” He can wait, though. He told me, “I want to do this forever.” ♦
