Book Festivals | Vesto PR – Literary Publicity

Oct 27

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Andrea Lawlor profiled in New York Times

By Jeremy Wang-Iverson | Book Festivals, Rescue Press | No Comments

Andrea Lawlor was profiled in the New York Times, with their close friend Jordy Rosenberg:

Lawlor’s debut novel, “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” set in the 1990s and featuring a shape-shifting (and sex-obsessed) protagonist, was published last year by Rescue Press — and received enough attention that Vintage/Anchor and Picador will reissue the book next spring. Rosenberg’s first novel, “Confessions of the Fox,” which reimagines the legend of the 18th century English thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard as that of a transgender man, was put out this summer by One World — a recently relaunched Random House imprint dedicated to diversity — and promptly heaped with praise. (The New Yorker called it “a cunning metafiction of vulpine versatility.”)

It’s been a great pleasure watching Andrea’s continued success since the book’s launch last November. In the photo above, we caught up at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where they were on a panel with Alexander Chee and Rebecca Makkai, moderated by MJ Franklin.

Oct 08

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Zone at the Frankfurt Book Fair

By Jeremy Wang-Iverson | Book Festivals, Zone Books | No Comments

In the next few days, I will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair for Zone Books, meeting the publisher’s dedicated agents and also editors from several countries. Recent publications and catalogs from Zone will be on display at the MIT Press stand, 6.2 B-22. The latest rights guide for Zone can be found here and in the photo above, taken at my stand at the Brooklyn Book Festival, you can see a few international editions of Zone titles: Malpaso’s El pueblo sin atributos [Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos in Spanish, translated by Víctor Altamirano] and Seuil’s Langues obscures [Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Dark Tongues in French, translated by Paul and Françoise Chemla]; in the left corner you can just spot Akal’s Renacimiento anacronista [Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance in Spanish, translated by Francisco López Martín].

Titles published by Zone have been translated into 19 languages; the publisher is also known for translating leading scholars and significant texts into English, including a new title for this fall, Michel Feher’s Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age, translated from the French by Gregory Elliott; Feher’s latest, the fourth edition of the Near Futures series, was first published as Le temps des investis in 2016 by Le Decouverté.

Sep 13

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Vesto at the Brooklyn Book Festival

By Jeremy Wang-Iverson | Book Festivals, Visual Art | No Comments

We look forward to exhibiting at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday 9/16, booth 613, from 10am-6pm. Holly Mitchell and I will be there, with books from our friends and clients Banipal, Rescue Press, West Virginia University Press, and Zone, as described in this blogpost that we placed on Foreword Reviews.

We are also pleased to feature prints that depict each article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a project that I worked on with my wife, Isabel Brito Farré. The prints are linoleum cuts for the images and photopolymer plates for the text, printed on a Vandercook proof press. Each set is 31 articles, and it’s an edition of 20. Isabel made linoleum cuts of the images and I transcribed by hand the article text to make the plates. They were printed at The Arm in Williamsburg. Four examples are below.

For historical background, this year marks the 70th anniversary of the drafting the UDHR, a document that was written to express individual’s rights and prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. Representatives from seventeen nations were on the committee that drafted the document, with Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin, and John Peters Humphrey having key roles in the process. The UDHR was a response to the end of World War II, but in the language that was used, the drafters hoped to keep the document free from ideology, as Johannes Morsink notes in his book The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Penn Press 1999):

Given that World War II was fought to make the world free for democracy, it is certainly odd that the noun “democracy” never occurs in the Declaration at all, not even in the Preamble, and that the adjective “democratic” occurs only once, in Article 29, paragraph 2. The same query arises with respect to the terms fascism and Nazism…Ideologically the Declaration is a very bare document; it mentions neither the winning ideology (democracy) nor the losing one (fascism). The reason for the absence of these terms is that they got caught up in the rhetoric of the Cold War. This rhetoric distorted their meaning and made them unsuitable for use in a document that was designed to be acceptable to all the participating delegations.