debut novel

When the Booker Prize longlist was recently announced, it included a book with the memorable title “May We Feed the King.” The debut novel by British author Rebecca Perry isn’t yet available in the U.S., and when it does hit shelves, it will be coming from Transit Books, a small Bay Area publisher run by the husband-and-wife team Adam Z. Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy.

Cited by the Booker committee as “a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling” about a curator and a king, the book “has been an early favorite with indie booksellers,” Ashley says.

“May We Feed the King” by Rebecca Perry

(Transit)

“We knew the book was special when we acquired it,” Adam adds. “Ever since, we’ve been crossing our fingers and knocking on wood and sending up flares to the Booker gods, and sent the book to the printer a little earlier than usual just in case.”

Transit, known for publishing intelligent international fiction, began about a decade ago, when Ashley and Adam were convinced that great works of literature were being passed over by New York publishers, and that those books should have a place in America.

There were, Adam says, “really great authors who might have incredible reputations elsewhere not finding publishing houses here that are able to champion them in a way that gets them to access to a broader readership.”

The two were working full-time jobs while talking about their literary dreams over the dining room table. They had met at Columbia in New York and both worked in publishing there before moving to California, where Ashley is from.

Adam Z. Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy, co-publishers of the Bay Area nonprofit publisher Transit Books.

(Jennifer Baquing)

They carefully set out to connect with the international literary community and went through the slow process of launching Transit as a nonprofit. They now have a small staff, an office in Berkeley and count a Nobel Prizewinner, Jon Fosse, among their authors.

At the same time Transit was starting out in Northern California, a pair of not-married friends in Los Angeles saw the same possibilities. Chris Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith were convinced that they could begin a publishing house, starting with international noir.

Smith, who is now a senior editor at Simon & Schuster and lives in Germany, recalled those early days for me over Zoom. “We launched it at a time when it was almost the golden age of independent, small publishing, a lot of which was translation-focused,” she says.

They jumped right in, came up with a name, Ricochet, and a logo. Then they got a cease-and-desist letter — a small poetry press was also starting as Ricochet. “We had to change names,” Heiser says. “We were literally unnamed.” That’s how they launched Unnamed Press.

“A Certain Hunger” by Chelsea G. Summers

(Unnamed Press)

“I’m very grateful to the litigious poets who forced us to change our name,” Heiser adds. Their original crime-fiction focus rapidly expanded. Science fiction? Nonfiction? Feminist cannibal fiction? Yes, yes, yes.

That last was “A Certain Hunger” by Chelsea Summers, which Smith acquired. “I really loved that it is violent and intense and so visceral,” Smith said. “The prose is incredible and it absolutely was a cut above. Not to use a cannibalistic meat pun.” To date, the 2021 novel has been Unnamed Press’ biggest seller.

Where many literary novels from small presses sell fewer than 2,500 copies, “A Certain Hunger” has sold close to 200,000. “We’re a hits-driven business, you know — you have to have a book that does well enough to keep you going,” Heiser says.

Heiser remains with Unnamed as its publisher, and continues to guide it to unpredictable destinations. In 2022, the press opened North Figueroa Bookshop in Highland Park with fellow L.A. publisher Rare Bird Books — it stocks all publishers’ titles, not just their own.

Guests gather at the North Figueroa gallery for Unnamed Press’ launch of “Four Nose Jobs a Day,” a poetry book with an accompanying vinyl album by Devendra Banhart, center.

(Hoda Mallone)

And next door is the gallery they opened late last year. In June they held a gala launch for Devendra Banhart’s new collection of poems, “Four Nose Jobs a Day” in the North Figueroa gallery, published by Unnamed as both book and record album. The party was a little livelier than your typical book launch: Heiser says it “featured a reading backed by an excellent jazz trio, ceramic noses, a scent-maker, mimes and speed therapy, among many other things.”

Where Unnamed often makes unexpected turns, Transit has stuck close to its original mission: to translate a handful of books a year, often works of translation themselves, with a certain aesthetic.

For readers in sync with Transit’s sensibility — literary, bold and with an edge that feels fresh — they offer subscriptions. Their biggest swerve was adding children’s books. “The quality of the writing is really important, first and foremost,” Ashley said on a Zoom call with Adam and their executive editor, Lizzie Davis.

“We’re really attracted to literature that takes risks on the page,” Adam said. They began publishing acclaimed Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s work three years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Transit is the American home of Fosse’s big and bold “Septology,” translated into English by Damion Searls.

“Septology 1-VII,” by Jon Fosse

(Transit Books)

Despite years of a cohort within the publishing community advocating for international literature, such as the National Book Awards’ translated literature prize being relaunched in 2018, translated works remain only 3% of the U.S. publishing market. Transit has remained committed to publishing works in translation, and has had genuine success.

Small publishers can be caught in a catch-22 when they have a sudden success. They have to pay to print books and get them distributed, then wait months before the profits (or unsold returns) come back. An author winning the Nobel Prize in literature is about as big a bonanza of demand as you can imagine.

When Fosse won the Nobel in 2023, that meant publishing a big run of his almost 700-page masterwork. “It was a bit of a cash crunch for us,” Adam admits, “but I think we were also lucky in a lot of ways.” The year before they had published “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian novelist who died 20 years before — hardly a guaranteed success.

“Stories, Like Illnesses” by James Elkins

(Unnamed Press)

The publishers themselves can’t fully describe what happened — it was well-reviewed, it went viral, it kept selling, it went viral again. Now, the novel has sold more than 450,000 copies. “I feel like for a small press you really need to, not just catch a break, but catch a break every time,” Adam said, “if you want to last.” Those two pillars — the Fosse and Harpman — allowed the Levys to open their office in Oakland in 2024.

Transit recently released another Harpman book, “We Were Forbidden,” a trio of never-before translated novellas. In September, in addition to Perry’s book, they’ll also be publishing two novels by esteemed French writer Marie Darrieussecq.

Unnamed Press’ fall schedule includes James Elkins’ “Stories, Like Illnesses,” the third installment of a multivolume work called “Five Strange Languages.” Unnamed is publishing in five volumes over five years, “an epic publishing project for any publisher,” Heiser says. Luckily, the first volume got a boost when Jacob Elordi was photographed reading it during a marathon Frankenstein makeup session.

The Levys and Heiser all maintain that there was something about being in California that gave them the creative space to launch their publishing houses.

From their similar visions a decade ago, Transit and Unnamed were born separately, and have taken very different paths to sustainability. The Levys were deliberate and focused; Unnamed spontaneous and evolving. Both are flourishing and show what a little freedom can do.

“Writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion once wrote. She was talking about journalists, but it can be just as true of novelists. Whether the genre is romantasy or autofiction, making up stories often demands making up stories about real people — exploiting them — to serve a narrative purpose.

Cali Adeline’s debut novel, “People Watching in the Desert,” gives this thorny ethical business an impressively complex treatment for a book that comes on like a beach read. Sonny, its hero, has checked into Sanctuary, a spendy Phoenix-area resort, for an extended stay. She’s 25 and unemployed, and it’s unclear at first how she acquired the funds to splurge on an on-site cottage with a pool, 90-minute massages, and various forced-fun adventures. It’s also unclear why she chose a five-star resort for the splurging, given her discomfort with everything from the menu on down. Sitting down for dinner alone, she “discreetly googled some of the words on her phone under the table: cotija, calabacitas, tabbouleh, bisque.”

Adeline lays out a breadcrumb trail that eventually reveals that Sonny has lugged some especially heavy personal baggage to Sanctuary. Her neglectful, addict mom died when she was a child, only to be replaced with a repressive, overprotective grandmother who stomped on her every ambition. Early adulthood has been defined by failed relationships and uninspiring work. People are to be feared: She’d sooner indulge in croquettes at the resort’s cocktail party than make small talk with other vacationers, and when she braves the world outside her cottage it’s usually with a notebook in her hand.

The early pages of “People Watching” weave Sonny’s perspective with brief sketches of her fellow resort-goers, which usually open with godlike authority: “Allana was ten feet tall and beautiful.” “Chloe and Mark had been married for seven blissful years.” “Dale was invisible. He had that way about him.” The odd bluntness of these statements, combined with their touches of surreality (“ten feet tall”?), makes clear that these mini-bios are scribblings from Sonny’s notebook. Terrified of the world, but determined to better understand what she’s been excluded from for so long, she’s determined to imagine her way into reality.

Sonny’s Walter Mitty-like imaginings do some valuable double duty in the novel. For one thing, they offer some necessary conflict in a setting that’s all about relieving tension. Resorts are, almost by definition, boring, but as Sonny hangs out poolside or does yoga or endures a singing bowl, her mind (and the novel) is reeling with imagined infidelities, deaths, gambling debts and other domestic dramas. Second, her sketches serve as character-defining examples of projection on Sonny’s part, as her observations of others reveal her own concerns about love, sex, money and rejection.

And, of course, she’s deflecting, too — better to make up drama about others than confront her own. The memories Sonny eventually surfaces are more potent than anything she makes up. But they’re also crueler, and you can understand why she’ll think and write about anything but. She recalls a time as a child when she was neglected for days on end and braved a trip to a neighbor for help. “The woman asked Sonny when the last time she took a bath or changed her clothes was and Sonny didn’t know the answer. Her only response was, ‘I’m four,’ as she proudly held up five fingers,” Adeline writes. “She was three.”

Remember the words “beach read” up there? It’s not difficult to predict how Sonny’s arc will curve: It’s a Walter Mitty story, but also an Ugly Duckling story. That notebook full of mini-dramas becomes a source of drama in itself. Say, that bartender is pretty cute, isn’t he? And Sonny eventually integrates with a few of her fellow resort-goers, and learns there’s more to them in reality than her imaginings. As one character gently chastises her, “People can surprise you, Sonny, but you have to let them.”

The pat-ness of Sonny’s Sanctuary journey makes her yet another entry in an evolving genre you might call “Is This Character Concussed?” In these novels, the main character has been so absurdly addled by a (late-revealed) trauma that everyday human interactions are wildly aglow with (at first) terror or (later) manic-pixie wonder. Prime examples include Gail Honeyman’s “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine,” Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman,” and multiple characters in the oeuvre of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. (Women are the most common character in these books, but guys can play too: See Fredrik Backman’s “A Man Called Ove.”) Socially awkward characters offer an opportunity for dry humor and deadpan prose. Because these stories have to dramatize a search for normalcy, its leads tend to be awkward in ways that strain credulity.

But you don’t have to wholly buy into the idea of a character like Sonny to find something intriguing about what Adeline is saying about storytelling throughout “People Watching.” In Sonny’s notebook, every observation is a moral choice, a mini-essay about what proper conduct is, what failure is, how you might get past it, and what our responsibilities to others might be. A notebook is a place of wish fulfilment, and a place for vengeance. Sonny explains at one point that she only started to get free of her grandmother’s clutches once she was capable of imagining her violently erased:

“I wrote a story. About her. And how one day while I was at work the house caught fire. Which wasn’t that far-fetched because the whole place really was a fire hazard. And … and … well, she was asleep inside the house, in the story, and didn’t make it out. I didn’t mean it. I was angry. And it was a story.”

Adeline stresses the word “story” three times in one brief passage. Sonny wants to reassure everybody that she was just making it up. But no writer is, not entirely.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”