What was your pathway to publishing?

Unusual. I spent many years in academe, more than enough to learn that what I wanted was out, and then found my way into publishing in my mid-thirties through a freelance gig with a mail-order bookselling enterprise. The books that people might want but couldn’t get because they were out of print were the books we decided to make available again. That was the birth of NYRB Classics.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Over forty among our various imprints. Twenty-five or so of those are Classics.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Many of them, yes.

What qualities do you look for in authors?

Intense engagement with the page at the level of content and form. (Form, after all, is only another form of content.) Originality of vision and originality of expression.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

Oh dear, most of my authors are dead. The answer to your question, I suppose, is, for better or for worse, their being alive!

Do you write yourself? If so, how has it informed your work as a publisher?

I do, both poetry and prose. In many ways poetry shapes my larger sense of the possibilities of literature, fusing as it does to a greater degree voice and form and vision, but then one of the ways it has affected me is to make me, over the years, ever more alert to the qualities of genres, the novel above all, that are sloppier in their behaviour, and telling in different ways.

What kinds of books do you most enjoy reading?

I am very fond of books about things I don’t in the least understand, like math and music.

Which editors/publishers do you most admire?

There are the great houses of the last century, like Gallimard and Hogarth and Faber (in the days of T.S. Eliot), that were overseen by writers. Adelphi is a more recent instance. New Directions has been and continues to be a wonderful publisher, as does Carcanet in the United Kingdom. Archipelago Books provides the vividest outlook on the world of literature of perhaps any house anywhere now.

What advice would you give an aspiring publisher?

Slave away and don’t count on anything. Try to enjoy it, too.

How significant, in a protean age, are book reviews?

They still matter, and the absence and debasement of them to the most perfunctory puffery in the major newspapers and weeklies of the world matters, perhaps, even more. That is, book reviews count and the absence of them is a disaster.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

Our highly competitive market is really a shrinking market, one with less and less room for the unusual. That is the situation today, but small presses pay attention where the big machines grind on.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

It will find a way and a form, though I can certainly imagine a time when the ample inclusive exploratory engaging reflective wonder that the novel has proven itself to be over the past three hundred years will seem as distant as ancient tragedy.