RICHMOND, Calif. — From the street, Adam and Ashley Nelson Levy’s house in the hills here above the San Francisco Bay looks like a house. When I visited last Friday afternoon, a team of workers was noisily applying new stucco to the exterior walls, but the driveway was just a driveway, the door a door. Could this really be the headquarters of Transit Books, the American publisher of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in literature the day before?
Even in this age of publishing industry consolidation, we still sometimes speak of publishing “houses,” but the term is obviously a holdover from an earlier era. Transit Books, which now releases about a dozen titles a year, having slowly ramped up since its founding in 2015, may be the only Nobel-adjacent American publishing “house” that is like any other on its street.
On Oct. 5, the Levys, a married couple who are Transit’s founders and co-publishers, woke up at 4 a.m., the way they had on one early-October morning every year starting in 2020, not long after they released their first translation of Fosse’s work, “The Other Name.” With the lean, recreational-cyclist physiques of so many in the Bay Area, and two young children to care for, the couple seem like habitual early risers, but not that early. For three years, they’d checked their phones and then gone back to sleep: Louise Glück, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux.
Then, in 2023: Jon Fosse, “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.” The texts and congratulations started to flood their phones. What followed was, Adam told me, “the craziest day of my publishing life, for sure” — but they’d seen it coming. “We just had a feeling,” Adam said. (Some notable critics did, too; Fosse has been an increasingly popular Nobel candidate among insiders, even if he had remained largely unknown to the larger reading public.)
The white walls of the Levys’ living room were bare (they’d just been repainted), but there was still evidence of human habitation: a children’s playset, family photographs. But the overspilling evidence of professional life was hard to ignore: 32 copies, by my count, of the thick new paperback edition of Fosse’s novel “Septology” in the living room alone. On another shelf, 40 copies of his newly translated novella, “A Shining,” which arrives in stores later this month. It’s a much slimmer book (you could read it over your morning coffee), narrated by a man who inexplicably walks into a forest and has a series of haunting, and possibly haunted, encounters. Adam regularly proposes “A Shining” as a way into Fosse’s oeuvre, to Ashley’s genial disapproval. “Why not start with the masterwork?” she counters. Meaning “Septology.”
“I’ve been saying to our distributor at every sales conference … this is the year he wins the Nobel,” Adam told me. The prospect seemed so real to them that they’d planned their publishing schedules around it, releasing the hardcover version of “Septology” to coincide with the 2022 awards and timing the release of the paperback edition, as well as “A Shining,” to this year’s announcement. “You often hear, like, Small press caught unawares with big demand, but we have decent print runs in both of these, the paperbacks and the new book.”
Or they had decent print runs, anyway. By that Friday, Transit had sold every copy of “Septology” and “A Shining” they’d printed. Even the copies in their house were accounted for: Every one had been purchased through the Transit website, and Adam would be mailing them out personally in the days ahead, as he always did. But more orders were coming in hourly than they could possibly ship immediately.
“Some people are going to have to wait,” Adam said.
“We have a really good relationship with our mailman,” Ashley added.
Still, the number of books leaving their house was, Adam said, “insignificant” compared with the volume moving through their distributor, Consortium Books. Barnes & Noble alone had ordered about 1,500 copies — a gigantic number for a 600-page book by a writer most American readers hadn’t even heard of a week before — and many other stores’ orders would have to be accounted for fast. Transit is so small that it doesn’t have access to BookScan, a service that provides granular data about book sales, so it’s reliant on the figures Consortium provides. Adam has always had his own intuitions about the topic, though, even before the Nobel.
“I usually take whatever numbers they’re giving us and I’ll just double them, because it just tends to be historically true for us,” he said. “We’re a small house, but we have, I think, often the best sense of what will sell.”
Transit has to take quick advantage of the Nobel-generated interest. The fastest option is digital printing, which allows them to meet demand much more quickly than traditional offset printing. Where offset takes four to six weeks to get to the warehouse, digitally printed copies can arrive in a single week. But it’s also much more expensive: Digital printing costs the publisher about $7 for each copy of the paperback edition of “Septology,” roughly $3 more than printing an offset copy of a book that most retailers will ultimately sell for $22.95. All told, Transit plans to publish an additional 10,000 copies each of “Septology” and “A Shining,” with digital runs of both already in process, which should ensure that there aren’t any gaps in their availability.
There are also design issues to address: If you’ve picked up a book by Ernaux in the past year, it probably had a seal printed somewhere on the cover that reads: “The Nobel Prize 2022.” Before we spoke, the Levys were working with their designer to incorporate that detail on the new copies they were rushing into the world. Sometimes that meant tiny fixes (say, a line or two redrawn), but the details were still critical.
To their surprise, one element of that redesign process proved easier than they’d expected. “The Nobel people just sent us all the stickers out of the blue,” Adam said. “The National Book Awards is much more complicated, because they actually license you the stickers, which is a huge problem for small presses, because you have to pay for it. You pay for every copy that has a sticker.” (The National Book Awards charge even for the digital use of their seal on a physical book, with rates starting at $100 per 1,000 paperback books.)
In theory, much of this work happens out of the Levys’ home office, which has two cluttered wooden desks, one with a small air purifier and a mountain of books, the other with a laptop and a Dymo LabelWriter 4XL (Adam swears by the printer for shipping labels). I spotted a busy-looking but neatly organized to-do list, as well, on which most of the tasks filed under “Nobel” were still waiting to be crossed off.
“We’ve arranged our lives over the past 10 years to try and make a moment like this happen for one of our authors,” Ashley, who is herself a novelist, wrote to me in an email after my visit. “We joke about working from home, about working multiple jobs to sustain both the press and our family, but in truth it’s been the accumulation of years of early mornings, weekends, late nights, vacation days. I say all of this not to romanticize it but just to clarify that the press has never been just a job for us, it couldn’t be in order for it to survive. It’s the output of our marriage, really: the list reflects how our tastes work together.”
There’s a clear testament to the evolving intersection of working life and family life in some of what they publish, especially if you look beyond their newly anointed laureate. They’ve recently begun to publish charming, beautiful children’s books in translation — first from Danish, and with Korean and French titles coming soon — taking inspiration in part from their 4-year-old son, who is, Ashley jokes, the “executive editor” of the line.
“Our son was asking to read this book I have on submission, a picture book,” Adam said. “He’s getting to this age where he learned the word ‘boring.’ I don’t think he really knows what it means, but if he asks to read one of our books, and he’s like, ‘Ugh, Dad, that book is so boring,’ it cuts me! It’s really so hard.”
Last Friday, more welcome feedback arrived in the form of an email from Fosse himself. It was, Adam said, the longest the newly minted laureate (who writes to the couple in excellent English) had ever taken to respond to a note. Never mind his sometimes mordant prose; the Norwegian master was happy.
“He said, ‘See you in Stockholm,’” Adam told me, alluding to the Nobel award ceremony in December. “Which is, I think, as excited as he’s going to get over it.”
For the Levys, though, there are many, many other things to do first — books to edit, orders to fulfill, children to wrangle, a whole publishing house to maintain. And next week, the Frankfurt Book Fair to prepare for, travel to which might bring an unusual opportunity to revel in Transit’s unlikely, but not entirely unanticipated, success. They’re hoping, just maybe, to someday glimpse one of their books in the wild as they hurry from gate to gate. Maybe not on this trip, but soon.
“We were joking about this last night,” Ashley told me. “That’s the dream. To make it in an airport bookstore.”
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