How Alums Ashley Nelson Levy '12 and Adam Levy '12 Met and Founded an Award-Winning Press
Writing alumni Ashley Nelson Levy ’12 and Adam Z. Levy ’12 met on their first day in the Fiction program at the School of the Arts. The two would later marry and, in 2015, found Transit Books, a nonprofit indie press dedicated to publishing works in translation and international literature. Transit Books has gone on to publish an impressive list of authors, including 2023 Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, who was largely introduced to American readers by Transit.
Both Adam and Ashley attribute much of their success to lessons learned at the School of the Arts and particularly formative professors. Adam recalls taking a translation course with Writing Professor and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia, Susan Bernofsky, right around the time that the translation program was created; and he credits the class with changing the way he approaches a text.
“[Bernofsky] was one of the first people who we talked to when we were thinking about starting up the press,” Adam said. Bernofsky would go on to join Transit Books's National Advisory Council. “Our network really was formed and forged through our experience in the [Writing] program. We had these really separate worlds of people who were in a New York or domestic literary scene and reading a lot of stuff domestically; and people who were translators or among this network of international publishing who were reading much further beyond our borders. It was there that I think the seeds of the press were born.”
Ashley agreed, citing in particular the importance of spending time around other readers and writers, and learning to think critically about writing. “[The Writing program] was the first time I was able to be around other writers and have the influence from the teachers and professors there,” she said. “I completely loved it.”
“Before the program," added Adam, "I never really had a language for critiquing other people's work. It [is] for sure in the setting of workshops, but also in the settings of all those things that happen after a class where you're having conversations and arguments about books, that you really develop a kind of shared language for how you talk about things, how you think about what people are reading, and how and what they're writing.”
These shared experiences gave the Levys a common language for discussing writing and translation, which helps them stay aligned on the work they select for publication at Transit Books—despite the fact that individually, they have very different tastes in literature.
“When Adam and I walk into a bookstore, I think we would gravitate to totally different writers and sections of the store,” Ashley explained, “but I think that what we've always had in common is looking for the quality of the prose style and what new things writers are trying with the form. We keep our minds open to new framing for what a novel or a collection of stories or work of nonfiction or all of those genres combined could be. I think that's where we often align.
“[Our professors at the School of the Arts] broadened our understanding of what a book could be,” Ashley elaborated. “A lot of the work that we publish is formally bold and experimental and I think [the program] was really eye-opening—to see all the different ways a book can be imagined and created and made. We definitely found that through teachers there.”
After graduating, the Levys moved to Budapest, Hungary for Adam to pursue a Fulbright Fellowship, allowing him to work on a translation project. Upon their return to New York, both Adam and Ashley started working in publishing, an experience they both claim prepared them well for what came next.
“We started to realize what it could look like if we were to build a list of our own,” Adam said.
It was only after the Levys’ eventual move to the Bay Area that the seeds of Transit began to bear fruit. They officially founded the company in 2015 after making the acquaintances of journal editors and booksellers and contacting admired translators. “We were wondering if there were projects that they had worked on or were interested in working on that they couldn't find homes for in more commercial [publishing] houses because they were too long, too short, too hard, too weird, too something,” Adam said. “In this interstitial space, we found an easy groove for ourselves.”
“That space that you're talking about," added Ashley, "it’s a nice blend of both the books we really wanted to publish and the books that the larger publishing houses weren't bold enough to.”
One of the first translators to correspond with the Levys was Lisa Dillman, whose translations of Yuri Herrera had previously been reviewed by Adam for Music and Literature. Dillman told the Levys that she had a “cool little book” that no commercial publishing houses had expressed interest in publishing. The book, Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, was first published in Spanish in 2017. “It’s about orphan girls who end up killing each other,” Adam began, laughing. “I said, okay, that sounds crazy. But we read it. And it's one of those things where you immediately want to get that book into someone else's hands, you want to talk to someone about it. I think that's how a lot of publishing works.”
The Levys signed Dillman’s translation of Such Small Hands within a day of reading it, making it their very first publication at Transit—and as they designed the book, the Levys made several decisions that would set Transit apart as a press that champions works in translation.
“We tried to be pretty explicit in our first year with the way that we were publishing the books to show the ways that we wanted to highlight translation," explained Ashley. "We put the translator's name on the cover. Lisa Dillman wrote a translator's note for our first book to really position [the translator’s note] as an important part of the text.”
Since this publication, Transit has grown in both list and staff, a shift that has recently driven the team out of the Levys' home––where the press was previously headquartered––to a new, larger office space in West Berkeley. In addition to Ashley and Adam, Transit’s masthead comprises four other team members, all of whom collaborate heavily on all aspects of the publication process.
Adam and Ashley work so well together primarily because their professional communication reflects a history of like-minded artistic partnership. Adam still reads and edits Ashley's personal writing, and Ashley has edited Adam's translation work in the past. “The work we've done with the press feels like a natural extension of the way that we collaborated creatively before we started the press,” Ashley said.
Adam and Ashley first published a translation of Jon Fosse’s work, The Other Name, in 2020. Three years later, Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, catapulting Transit to new heights.
“It is the kind of thing that can have a really profound effect on a press of our size,” Adam said. “The books have sold crazily since then. It's really been kind of amazing. My first calls [after hearing about the win] were to our distributor and to our printer and we're still trying to navigate the logistics of it.”
Authors represented by Transit have also been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Booker Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and others; but Adam expressed that Fosse’s Nobel, particularly, has powerful implications for the future of Transit Books. In the nonprofit’s first year, the company published four books, moving up to numbers between six and eight in ensuing years. This year, Transit plans to publish fourteen books and will likely keep producing around that number.
As the press expands, Adam and Ashley are looking forward to further establishing Transit's identity and mission. "In this post-pandemic moment, we've been really trying to find ways of grounding the press again in the East Bay," said Adam. "To host events and do translation things outside of publishing has always been a fun part of [our work]. It's part of the kind of organization that we want to run, where we are spotlighting these works and these authors and translators, and really bringing the art of translation into the center of things." For Adam and Ashley, it's the strength of their small team that helps make this all possible. “Building a culture around mutual trust and respect feels like the only way to do something like that," concluded Adam, "and also have it work.”