| Founded | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Jill Schoolman |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Brooklyn, New York |
| Nonfiction topics | Essays |
| Fiction genres | Fiction in translation |
| Official website | www.archipelagobooks.org |
Archipelago Books is an American not-for-profit literary publisher dedicated to promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation. Located Brooklyn, New York, it publishes small to mid-size runs of international fiction, poetry, and literary essays. The press was founded in 2003 by Jill Schoolman out of an urgent need to make world literature available to American readers. Archipelago has since published over fifty books, translated from more than twenty languages into English. It is distributed in the United States and Canada by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution and in the United Kingdom and Europe by Turnaround Publisher Services.
Archipelago is the 2008 winner of the Miriam Bass award for excellence in independent publishing.[1]
Archipelago Books focuses on publishing books of exceptional literary merit and social importance, particularly works of literature that represent voices and demographics that may not otherwise be available in English. Archipelago publishes both contemporary and classic works and strives to introduce authors that larger, for-profit presses have passed on because of low commercial viability. Archipelago publishes between ten and twelve books per year. Archipelago avoids focusing narrowly on a single region, time period, or genre, instead choosing books of a shared "sensibility." Jill Schoolman describes this sensibility as "the region where poetry meets prose, where visual art meets language, where politics and humanism meet philosophy and dream. Style is as important as soul, but one cannot survive without the other. It's true, we are equally passionate about undiscovered classics as we are about unique voices of our time with stories to tell. I don't think it will be necessary to narrow our focus, our vision—although difficult to articulate— is clear."[2]
Archipelago's best known authors include Elias Khoury, Julio Cortázar, Mahmoud Darwish, Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness, Breyten Breytenbach, Karl Ove Knausgård, Louis Couperus, Heinrich Heine, Novalis, Hugo Claus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich von Kleist, and Jacques Poulin.