Global Village

"Like music and art, literature is the doorway to a country's soul."

– Michel Moushabeck

Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Palestinian Michel Moushabeck traveled to the United States in 1979 to attend New York University. Coming from a country immersed in civil war, Moushabeck calls his exposure to the American values of individual freedom and democracy "life-changing." At the same time, he was amazed at how little people here knew about his country and dismayed at how little interest they showed in learning more.

The desire to change that became the driving passion of Moushabeck's life. In 1987, he and his former wife founded Interlink Publishing in Brooklyn, New York. Their motto: "Changing the way people think about the world." Moushabeck single-handedly unloaded, one carton at a time, the semi that brought their first shipment of books. Today, Interlink (http://interlinkbooks.com) has forklifts and publishes about 50 new titles a year with an active backlist of more than 700 titles.

When I started work at The Urbana Free Library in 1992, one of my assignments was "pub cats," perusing the myriad publisher's catalogs that the library receives on a regular basis. The point of this assignment is to keep us up-to-date in areas of interest that journals fail to review: series, edition updates, esoteric subjects and various other oddities.

Scanning publisher's catalogs can be tedious, hence its delegation to the newest hire. The next new hire came 14 years later and at that point I was unwilling to pass the torch. Independent publishers like Interlink are the reason.

Travel guides have been the "bread and butter" of Interlink Publishing from the beginning. Their success here is due to their coverage of less-frequented destinations, their emphasis on the social, political and cultural context, and the development of a lively and much-lauded series, The Traveller's Histories.

Cookbooks are the second biggest category for Interlink. Here, too, they strive to highlight lesser known cuisines and emphasize the cultural insights often offered at the table. One of their very first titles, "A Taste of Lebanon," by Mary Salloum, published in 1987, is still in print and still being checked out from the library.

Moushabeck, though, believes that "reading fiction – the unofficial language of the people – is the best way to learn about people and places far away ... and (he) became determined to publish the best of the world's contemporary fiction in translation ... once-unheard voices of writers who have achieved wide acclaim in their native lands, but are not recognized beyond the borders – especially women writers."

His first series in this area was called Emerging Voices. When I first discovered them in the publisher's catalog, I was hesitant to suggest them for purchase. We rarely buy fiction without a review of some sort. Plus, the conventional wisdom, as Moushabeck was to learn, was that the American public was not interested in reading translations.

Interlink almost had to abandon this project because of abysmally low sales. Then Moushabeck had the idea of marketing them through academic channels instead of to booksellers. Professors who turned the titles into "assigned reading" saved the series.

I hesitated, but then took the plunge. Most of the titles were prize-winners in their native countries, and Interlink's stated mission of promoting greater understanding through literature is one that resonates with public librarians. We began collecting this fiction in 1993, and now have 44 titles in the original Emerging Voices series and a later one called Interlink World Fiction.

Periodically, we gather them together in a display and discover anew that, with just a tiny bit of encouragement, Americans will indeed read translations and embrace new authors.

I spoke with Moushabeck's daughter, Leyla, at Book Expo America a few weeks ago in New York. She said that Interlink receives much positive publicity and several of their novels have turned up on "best book" lists. Still, pre-publication reviews in mainstream journals, which would bring more of their titles into bookstores and libraries, remain elusive.

Undeterred, Moushabeck has decided to up the ante and has started another imprint: Clockroot Books. The clockroot symbolizes the dandelion – "that spot of sunny disorder in the vast green American lawn – an assault against its propriety." The first six Clockroot Books feature writers from Greece, Pakistan, Palestine and Israel.

Yes, we bought them. This time we didn't hesitate.