Meat! Meat! Meat! Or: what you should know about the current international publishing market and your place in it
Here's what I learned at this year's London Book Fair.
I. All they could talk about was Esther, the Butcher. Nearly every meeting Kent and I went to at the London Book Fair this year featured someone who’d just bought Esther, the Butcher or was jealous of people who’d bought Esther, the Butcher or—in the case of our co-agents—simply wanted to marvel with us at what was happening with Esther, the Butcher.
Truly I tell you: it was a Hungry Hungry Hippos situation. Esther, the Butcher—Finnish title: Ester, Teurastaja—got eighteen foreign deals in the run-up to LBF, bringing the total number to twenty-six (and counting). I can’t remember the last time there was such a clear and obvious Book of the Fair.
And what a Book of the Fair. Mariia Niskvaara’s “startling, grotesque, and deeply insightful debut” is a bizarre literary novel about the human meatsack. It follows a strong-thighed, short-skirted woman who (surprise!) works as a butcher in a blood-spattered single-industry town. She longs for a child; meets a professional pig inseminator, who helps rectify that longing; then swells with what is either a baby or a tumor. (I don’t think I’m giving you any plot spoilers when I say I suspect the book encourages one to ask “porque no los dos.”) That’s it; that’s the plot.
In short, Esther is weird. The book came out in Finland to great acclaim last October and doesn’t even exist yet in a full English translation. All these publishers have been offering on a partial manuscript—just a few dozen translated pages. (During a meeting, one of them whispered to us that they’re not even sure how it ends.)
One can explain some—but not all—of this interest by noting that that Peter Blackstock was among the first to get on board. (If you’re not aware, Peter—VP and Deputy Publisher at Grove Atlantic—is our industry’s Lord High Mayor of Spotting the Next Booker Prize Before You Did.) But it’s not like an eleven-way UK auction happens every single time Peter says “boo,” you know? And good Lord: Esther’s already sold in ICELANDIC. Do you know how hard it is to sell rights in that territory?! Over the course of a twenty-year career, I’ve sold books in more than 50 languages—including Faroese, the language spoken by Iceland’s archipelagic neighbors—but Icelandic itself still eludes me. They are such picky Ricardos.
No: there’s something deeper than the usual mimetic desire at work here. But what? What is it?
And once I tell you what it is, how can you use that knowledge to your advantage?
