Left Bank on the Hudson

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The New York Sun

A decaying industrial building in Hoboken, N.J., isn’t where you’d look for the offices of the American publisher for France’s literary and political elite. Yet it is where Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, founders of Melville House Books, have set up shop.


They have already published two books by France’s superstar philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and another by the Le Monde editor who penned the “We Are All Americans” headline the day after September 11. Last month they brought out “Toward a New World,” a compilation of speeches by France’s former foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who discreetly publicized the book with an appearance on “Charlie Rose” and with a talk on terrorism and French-American relations at the New York Public Library.


In effect, Mr. Johnson, 46, and Ms. Merians, 42, who are married, have 1003 2081 1086 2093created a small but enticing American boutique, in which some of the biggest names in the French literary world can market their goods. On a recent trip to Paris, they were deluged with requests for meetings and received glowing profiles in the local press. In their Hoboken office, a pile of as yet untranslated French works awaits their verdict.


Mr. Johnson and Ms. Merians have only been publishers since 2001. They are primarily artists. Ms. Merians is a poet and sculptor (she keeps a studio in the same building as the Melville House office), and Mr. Johnson is a short-story writer and journalist who created a popular Web site about the book business, Mobylives.com(now back following a lengthy hiatus). He recently published a book of his own, “The Big Chill,” about the protests that took place in Washington, D.C., during the inauguration of President Bush in January 2001.


The Melville House office, which the couple moved into last year, is cramped but homey. Mr. Johnson, a tall, courtly man with a mane of graying hair, wears jeans and black slip-on shoes, while Ms. Merians, a vivacious brunette, is dressed equally casually in a skirt and a blue shirt over a white top. They furnished the office during an afternoon’s shopping at Ikea. Sofas and armchairs are in bold primary colors, and the desk lamps come with bright polka-dot shades. On the wall, four identical clocks keep time for Hoboken, New York, Paris, and Marrakech.


That last clock is there because Mr. Levy maintains a palace in Morocco. While working with the author in France, the couple was flown to Marrakech on a private jet. Airborne with them, says a star-struck Ms. Merians, were “Levy, his magnificent movie star wife, and an entourage of fascinating people – an architect, a designer, a reporter, an editor, and the director of the Comedie Francaise – all French. We had never flown in a Lear jet before! Bernard had designed a beautiful meal for us, sushi at 12,000 feet, magnificent wine – I don’t know how we stood it, really. It’s a good thing Dennis and I are pretty tough customers.”


Mr. Levy’s home didn’t disappoint, either. “It’s literally a palace, right next door to the King of Morocco’s palace,” says Ms. Merians. “But the king is jealous of it. He wants Bernard’s palace, because it’s nicer.”


The couple published their first two books, “Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets” and B.R. Meyers’s “A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose,” out of their Hoboken apartment. Afterward, they began to look around for other books to publish and turned their gaze toward France.


“The whole community of Americans interested in French literature has been feeling as if it’s under assault,” says Mr. Johnson, mournfully but with the air of a man who wants to rectify the situation. “It all kind of stopped after Camus. There are fewer and fewer French books being translated, and unless it’s something written by Michel Houellebecq, you’re probably not going to hear about it. We were looking for a popular modern French writer, and Bernard was an obvious choice. He is the king of France, and it had been a while since anything major of his had been brought out here.”


The neophyte publishers put in an offer to Grasset & Fasquelle, the venerable French publishing house, for Mr. Levy’s “War, Evil and the End of History,” a series of reports and philosophical meditations on the world’s most dangerous and overlooked war zones, including the Sudan, that appeared in France in October 2001.


Had they not decided to get married and spend their honeymoon in Paris, they might never have published the book at all. They decided to drop by Grasset’s office in person. Soon they were negotiating not just for the book they’d come for, but for another Mr. Levy was still working on: “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?,” an investigation into the death of the Wall Street Journal reporter executed by terrorists in Pakistan. “Had we known about the Daniel Pearl book, we would probably have been intimidated, because it was so obviously a hot commercial property,” Mr. Johnson said.


One reason Grasset was interested in Melville House is that most American publishers take so long to bring out a book, largely because of the time it takes to market them. In France, a book can be published three months after the author hands it in. This is partly because, as Ms. Merians says mischievously, the French do less editing and have a higher tolerance for typos. But once she and Mr. Johnson agreed to translate and publish the Pearl book as quickly as possible, mainly because Mr. Levy felt that it was “news,” a bargain was struck and the Paris-Hoboken connection established.


“We’re very proud to have introduced Bernard to the public,” said Mr. Johnson, who chaperoned the French author during a whirlwind U.S. media tour in the fall of last year. “He’s still in demand here, people want him to speak and write op-ed columns, and we receive lots of fan mail, pictures, and cryptic messages.” An example of the latter, he says, is: “You knew my husband in the ’70s in Algeria. I have something to tell you about that time. Please call me.”


Next year, Melville House plans to publish translations of several more French books, including a best-selling roman-a-clef by Mr. Levy’s daughter, Justine, and “The Jewish Prison,” a controversial look at Jewishness by Jean Daniel, the 85-year-old founder of the French magazine le Nouvel Observateur.


Though he had no idea who Mr. Daniel was at the time, Mr. Johnson was persuaded to visit him at his home in Paris. Mr. Johnson began to get a sense of Mr. Daniel’s importance when he noticed a photograph of him with Fidel Castro on the wall. “Is that you with Castro?” Mr. Johnson asked. “Yes,” came the reply. “It was taken about two minutes before he got the phone call that President Kennedy had been shot.”


Another forthcoming Melville House publication is “A Jewish Doctor in Auschwitz,” a memoir written in 1945 by the late Sima Vaisman, just days after she was released from the concentration camp, where she was made to work with Josef Mengele. The book was brought to Melville House by Diane von Furstenberg.


Though tiny in size, Melville House has gotten raves from those who have dealt with it. Lucinda Karter, director of the French Publishers’ Agency, a firm that represents French publishers in the United States, says it is a “wonderful arrival” on the scene.


“I’ve never had the impression I was dealing with a small house,” she says.”I feel like I’m dealing with a group of publicists and a PR team and two excellent editors and a fabulous designer. I tell people in France, ‘Yes, they’re small, but wait till you see what they can do.’ And they proved it with the Pearl book.”


Melville House’s biggest challenge so far was Mr. de Villepin’s book of speeches, many of them delivered at the United Nations during the run-up to the Iraq war. A great deal of sensitivity surrounded his visit, Mr. Johnson says, partly because “there is a lot of animosity toward him here, as well as admiration.”


Mr. Johnson and Ms. Merians are in the admirers’ camp, and hope Americans will be persuaded to pick up the book, which also contains essays and commentary by Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and others. (At least one contributor, Maria Vargas Llosa, comes out for. the war in Iraq.) In any case, says Mr. Johnson, whose first love is the short story and the novel, “The American fiction scene is dead right now. It’s a dead moment.”


So why not spice things up with some choice nonfiction French imports?



Mr. Bernhard is the East Coast correspondent for LA Weekly.


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