THE BOOK OF LIFE - Levine Querido and the 100K Books Challenge

2:44AM Jun 7, 2023

Speakers:

Sheryl Stahl

Heidi Rabinowitz

Arthur Levine

Joshua Levy

Keywords:

books

book

querido

jewish

levine

publishing

lq

publisher

authors

editor

imprint

arthur

group

publish

started

sell

music

heidi

support

worked

[COLD OPEN] We used to say the personal is political, we early feminists. In this case, the literary is the social and the political. You know, we're very positive about Black authors. We have a lot of queer authors. We have a lot of Jewish authors. We have intersections of the above, basically all of the books that are being banned: those are our books.

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Levine Querido is an independent publishing house founded by legendary editor Arthur Levine to showcase gorgeous diverse books by creators from underrepresented backgrounds. And he's been very successful, winning award after award. For a non Jewish publisher, Levine Querido publishes a lot of Jewish books, so I've been wanting to chat with Arthur for a while. When he announced that team LQ had set a goal to sell 100,000 books by September 1, 2023, I knew it was the right time to have him on the show. Please welcome Arthur Levine.

I'm here today with Arthur Levine. And I will just mention that he is outdoors... in your backyard, is that right?

Yes. My backyard.

So we may hear some neighborhood sounds.

You know what? The sounds of children playing is an appropriate backdrop for...

Yeah, it's not a bad sound!

...a talk with a children's book publisher.

That's right. Arthur, I haven't had you on the podcast since 2015, when you were on the episode called "Enough with the Holocaust books for children."

Oh my gosh, wow.

Yeah. So welcome back to The Book of Life.

Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Arthur, tell us about your career in publishing and what led you to create Levine Querido.

Wow, that is a big question that could take even more than one podcast to cover, but briefly, I started my career in 1984 as an assistant to Margaret Frith at GP Putnam's Sons. I worked and worked and worked and worked, and was the senior editor at Dial under Phyllis Fogelman, and then came back and was editor in chief of Putnam, then editor in chief of Alfred Knopf, and then I had an eponymous imprint at Scholastic called Arthur A. Levine Books, which I did for 23 years. And then I struck out on my own and founded Levine Querido, which is dedicated to excellent books by historically underserved minorities.

And what inspired you to strike out on your own, as you say?

Well, I think that I had had my fill of corporate style publishing. I was tired and fed up by the degree of consensus involved in that kind of publishing, by necessity, in all things, from editorial decisions, decisions of what to publish, decisions of what to support, decisions about how a book looks, how it feels, almost all of these things, again, by necessity, in a large corporation is done through group meetings, group conversations: consensus. I find that I'm too often both resistant to consensus as a process. It's part of my personality, and actually, I think, maybe part of my Jewish culture, that I tend to view absolute authority with a degree of suspicion and resistance, you know, I don't like to be a thorn in people's side. I wanted to be with and for people who appreciated my perspective. And that is what I get to do now.

Awesome. So you are an author, and an editor, as well as a publisher.

Yeah.

So tell us about those aspects of your career.

Well, my writing career, such as it is, is not a major one. I started out graduating with a degree in poetry, thinking that I would be a poet, and that publishing would be my day job. But turns out, I use more of my inherent skills as an editor and a publisher than I do as a writer. It's not that I'm not a writer. And it was always important to me to write whenever I wanted to write, so that I was never a frustrated writer because there's nothing worse than an editor who's a frustrated writer. And I think I've written and published some nice books and actually now to come full circle, I am working on a book of poems for Candlewick Press, and I will finally publish a book of poetry.

Excellent. Levine Querido is an unusual name. Can you explain it?

Oh, sure. Levine is my name. And Querido is also the name of a person. It was the name of Immanuel Querido, who was a Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent, who established a company at the same time as, and with many similarities to Alfred Knopf and Farrar and Straus, you know, these small, independent literary and kind of innovative publishers. Querido started Salamander Books, which was really the first trade paperback imprint before Penguin. And he was really famous for the beautiful quality of his books and the great writing that he sought. He started in the 1910s. Of course, what came later was the rise to power of Hitler, who eventually prevented Jews and dissidents, from publishing in German. So Querido formed a German language branch of his company, and he continued to publish dissidents and Jewish writers in German, from the relative safety of the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the Nazis didn't love that. And when they took over the Netherlands, they burned Querido, the publishing house, to the ground and took him away, he and his wife, never to be seen again. Later, after the war, his colleagues resuscitated the publishing house, and it continued, and I developed a strong relationship with them. And I wanted to honor his name. You know,the Jewish tradition that no one is ever fully gone, until the last person on Earth doesn't know their name. And I, I wanted to extend that as long as I could, and to honor his publishing bravery and internationalism. So Querido is now the name of the imprint that publishes all of my translated books. And lastly, but not leastly, "querido" means "beloved." And that is a quality that I wanted to be a signature quality of my books as well. So hence, Levine Querido.

That's really beautiful.

Thank you.

How did you first hear about Emanuel Querido?

Well, I've always been an international publisher, interested in what's being written around the world. And as such, I really got to know Querido in the Netherlands as a publisher of extraordinary books. I translated many of them when I was at Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic. And that's how we got to know each other. And so I called them up when I was starting my company said, Would you let me do this? And they said, Yes. And they've been very helpful and kind of a sister company, not formally, legally. But I still translate a lot of their books and at international book fairs, I am proudly in their booth in the Netherlands. And I just admire all of them. Luciënne van der Leije is their foreign rights director and mine as well. We have a lot of cooperation.

It's a great origin story.

Thanks.

So Levine Querido has won a remarkable number of book awards in its short life so far. You were founded in 2019, right?

Yes. And our first list was fall 2020.

Yeah. And this includes most recently, two of this year's Sydney Taylor gold medals, Aviva versus the Dybbuk by Marie Lowe in the middle grade category, and When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb in the young adult category, plus a silver Sydney Taylor, for the picture book, Big Dreams Small Fish by the late Paula Cohen.

Yes.

And then When the Angels Left the Old Country also won a Printz Honor and the Stonewall Book Award.

Yup!

And remarkably, these are all debut books.

That's true.

And you've won other awards recently, like Newberys and Batchelder and the American Indian Youth Literature Award.

Pura Belpre.

Belpre! Yeah, sorry to forget something!

The National Book Award long list.

Yeah, so that's what I'm saying, right? So you're doing an amazing job in this very short time span. What are you doing, or what are you doing differently? What's your special magic sauce that has made you so very successful?

I'll start from the concrete. So first of all, I have an amazing staff. The man who is responsible for many of those medal winning books is Nick Thomas, who started as my intern 15 years ago, or whatever. He's a remarkable editor. And more recently, Irene Vázquez, they are an unbelievably talented editor, as well as a publicist. So in terms of building a secret sauce, you have a group of people with a great love of wonderful books and writing and art. That is who we are. You find these great people, and you trust them. And they don't have to, you know, convince a marketing team or a finance team, that something is worthwhile. I bow to the editors at these corporations, because they do manage to persevere and guide books that are absolutely wonderful through their processes. But we don't have to spend our energy on that. I've had dispiriting experiences being told that a certain author is part of a group that doesn't sell, or somebody who's already represented, because we have one book by that sort of author. That's not an obstacle. So I've removed some obstacles to publishing great books. And once again, there's also less consensus. Consensus tends to, I'm sorry, I'm gesturing and you can't see, consensus tends to depress innovation. And it tends to homogenize. And I'm not interested in homogenization. That isn't how I approached publishing.

Well, this kind of dovetails with my next question. Levine Querido has a mission that is social and political, as well as literary. Can you explain about your mission?

Yes, you know, we used to say the personal is political, we early feminists. In this case, the literary is the social and the political. LQ's mission is to search for and support authors and illustrators, from groups that have been particularly historically overlooked or underestimated, finding and raising those voices. And the personal and political comes in with fighting the single story too. So we're not just randomly saying we want a book by this group and a book by this group. If the larger mission, beyond the specific books and authors that we are loving and promoting, if the larger goal is to shift the culture of publishing in general, there's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. You're trying to be inviting to people of historically underrepresented groups; it doesn't feel so inviting if you're sitting in a meeting, and you're the only Black person and a Black book comes up and all eyes in the room turn to you as if you have to be representing everyone who's Black in history. I didn't want that. We have gone out of our way to bring in interns and freelance folks who are also representing points of view and experiences that have not been actively sought by publishers. We're not just a bunch of white folks "doing good work." We are in fact, majority non-white and majority queer. That is a lovely atmosphere. I mean, it's a joy for me. So that is the sociopolitical aspect of what I do. You know, we're very positive about Black authors. We have a lot of queer authors. We have a lot of Jewish authors. We have intersections of the above. Basically, all of the books that are being banned: those are our books. So apparently, that is threatening to the government of Florida.

Yeah. Yes. I apologize for the state where I live.

Oh, I'm sorry. It's not your fault.

Yes, thank you. For a non Jewish publishing house, Levine Querido has a relatively high proportion of Jewish representation and its diverse lineup. And this is especially notable because many publishers have started to embrace the goal of having more diverse representation, but Judaism is often left out of that mix. So can you talk about that? Is that like a conscious choice?

Yes! And I'm smiling because of course, I don't feel that way. And people define diversity and representation and equity in different ways. I'm a Jewish person and an ardent Reconstructionist. So that is part of who I am. And it's also part of my experience as a person in publishing. So just as I have been told, Gosh, this book by a Chinese American that you're bringing up, don't we already have one of those? Like, I've literally been told that. I have also been told that I shouldn't publish a book with a Jewish theme because there weren't enough Jews to support a small print run. The implication is that no one is interested in the Jewish experience, aside from Jews. Having had those parallel experiences, I can't help but group them in my mind as needing a literary counterweight. Publishing waxes and wanes of what what should be published, which is always a combination of an idea of what will sell and the individual passions of the editors. But it's too infrequently interrogated, what it means to believe that a book won't sell. It sounds on the surface like that is a statement about historical data. But not present in that analysis is the question why? But why? Why didn't it sell? Why doesn't it appeal? Did it not appeal because we didn't make the effort to convey how special and wonderful and meaningful and important the story is? Did we assume that we can only convey that to people who already have the experience? I think queer stories went through the same thing, too. It's like, Well, jeez, we can't publish that story of two boys falling in love. It's too radical, and we'll only be able to sell it in the two gay bookstores. It took somebody at some point, it took David Gale, when he was at HarperCollins, publishing a book called Am I Blue? to have big commercial success, that then other publishers said, Oh, look, Am I Blue? sold a lot of copies. Maybe we should tell queer stories, too. Or maybe we CAN, you know, maybe we can. It empowered editors and authors to seek that channel. I think it's just a very complex inter relation between social and business forces. It's not simple.

So you're a small, independent publisher. But as you mentioned, you actually have imprints within this small publishing house. So tell us about the various imprints that you have.

Okay, so it's how we organize and promote our publishing. So we have Arthur A. Levine. And that is the imprint in which we publish books originally written in English. And we have Emanuel Querido. That is the imprint in which we publish international books written in other languages. We've launched Lantern Paperbacks, which is our trade paperback imprint. And we have Ediciones LQ, which is our Spanish language imprint. Coincidentally or not, six of the seven of us speak Spanish. So we believe that the United States is a big country with many, many, many, many millions of Spanish speakers, and it's silly not to address that. We're about to launch a new imprint called Relit, which are wonderful, classic books by people of historically underrepresented minorities that have gone out of print, and are worthy of being brought back, and we're starting with a book by Virginia Hamilton. I'll just say!

That's very exciting!

Have I left anything out? I don't think so.

It's great that you have so many you can't keep track. So you touched on this a little bit, but now I want to focus on it. How does the current book banning movement affect you as a small independent publisher with this mission to showcase diversity?

Well, we sell books in many different ways. We sell them through independent bookstores, through agnostic Internet giants, through chain stores. We also sell them to chains like Target, etc. And we try to sell them to school districts. So if you take the state of Texas and the state of Florida out of your ability to sell books, that's a lot of potential market that is not accessible anymore. I mean, even worse is the effect it has on the kids in those states who desperately need the books and the support, it hurts us to know that this book that we are making so that they don't feel alone, they are going to not be able to find it in their library, they're not going to have that experience that we wanted to provide of, oh, my gosh, that's somebody who's going through what I went through, I'm not alone. So it's super bad for our audience, but financially, we can't shrug that off, we're a small publisher, you know, we don't have The Very Hungry Caterpillar on our back list. We need to sell these books now. So that's the challenge of book banning for a small company with the particular mission that LQ has.

And that brings us very neatly to my next question. Tell us about the LQ 100,000 Book Challenge, what it is, why you created it, and how we can take the challenge, how we can accept that challenge.

We can't control what we can't control. But I think there are many, many people who would love our books. This is just my idea of saying, Look, I know each of you can't give me $10,000. But most of you would be willing to click on this link and buy an LQ book from bookshop.org. Most people will give chai... or chai-95! Maybe you know 25 people who would be willing to buy a single book in order to make a statement about the necessity for books about Jewish experience, books about queer experience, books about Black experience, Latinx experience, Native nations experience. Buy a copy or five copies of LQ books and give them to some kids, and you know, give them to some organization in Florida.

Well, so lay out the actual challenge. What is the challenge?

The challenge is to sell 100,000 books by September. If people did that, we could make that difference. It would support us, it would keep us in business. And it would support the independent bookstores. And it would support the authors, all in a very direct way. I mean, that seems very compelling to me. Like, click this link, buy a book, tell 10 of your friends who you think would be open to it, like just forward.

So listeners, this is your summer reading: books to take to the beach, books to read in the air conditioning. Go ahead and and click the link which will be in the show notes to buy a Levine Querido book, or several books, from bookshop.org.

Yeah, and if if you don't want to buy them for yourself, you know, buy them for an organization. There are many organizations that will gladly accept books and distribute them to kids in need. Maybe even kids in states where they can't read them otherwise. We'd be grateful, everyone along that chain of book positivity would be grateful.

All right, thank you. Tell us about any recent books or something forthcoming that you would like to highlight.

Great! I should've prepared this because now I'm in my editor hat, I have to think not about the books that I'm frantically working to get out to the printer but books that I did that a year ago. So the next Mari Lowe, the author of Aviva versus the Dybbuk, a fantastic book called The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman. It's a kind of Heathers in an Orthodox community, but without all the murder. You know, it's a queen bee. It's about a regular girl who desperately would like to get some attention from the most popular girl. And when she gets her opportunity, it turns out to have much more problematic things attached to it, and it's about whether she can extract herself in time. It's just really a great suspenseful insightful book. I'm very excited about that. Something completely different is a book called Desert Queen by Jyoti Gopal, illustrated by Svabhu Kohli. And it is the story of a performer with the stage name, Queen Harish, who was a beloved folk dancer and teacher and performer in Rajasthan, India. Now, Queen Harish was also Harish Kumar, and he was a boy whose parents died when he was young and left him to care for his sisters. His love of dance could do that; he started to dance, but he was attracted to traditional women's costuming. He became this figure, widely loved and supported. And he also went about his life and married a woman and had kids. It's kind of amazing and beautiful story about being fearless in order to do what you love, and how beautiful that can be. The text is really a poem, beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated picture book biography. I also have a book called Ways to Play by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. It's a picture book about an autistic kid. The word autism is never mentioned. But it's a child who has a particular way of doing things. But their cousins are always correcting and saying, No, that's not the right way to play with your dolls, you know, you have to make them have a tea party, not line them up in size order. So while all this criticism is happening, the dog is in the background, and when the dog wants to play, the dog doesn't follow the cousins' rules, or the child's rules either. And the result is that everyone figures out that everyone has their own way to play and all ways to play are good and fun. So it's a lovely book about individuality and not being rigid, being open to other perspectives and possibilities.

I love that.

It's a lovely book.

I really enjoyed The Lost Ryū . Do you say ree-you?

Oh, yes. Um-hm.

By...

Emi Watanabe Cohen.

Yes. And I hear she has another book coming out. So when is that going to be available? Golemcrafters?

Yes. The Golemcrafters. I'm working on it with her even as we speak. I think it's next spring that it's going to be out.

Spring 2024.

Yeah. And it'll be fabulous.

Okay, so yes, Japanese/Jewish representation. I don't know if I've ever seen that anywhere before.

I know!

It's certainly rare.

Yeah. Like, we are all colors. We are all races. Another book I'm working on is a picture book about the origin story of the Jews of India.

Oh!

And it's illustrated by Siona Benjamin who is herself an Indian Jewish woman.

Awesome!

Yes.

All right! It's tikkun olam time. So beyond the call that we are putting out to listeners to go ahead and participate in the 100,000 book challenge, is there any other action you would like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Vote. Support LQ, support your local libraries and independent bookstores. Read and enjoy, and then vote.

Perfect. What message do you have for listeners who may be writers themselves who may be hoping to be published someday by Levine Querido?

Well, I would encourage everyone to develop their writing, to read lots of great books. I mean, if you're reading Levine Querido books, I would read not just the Jewish ones, but all of the ones perhaps in the age group or genre that you're exploring, I would try to take a whole life view of what Jewish writing is. For instance, these days, I get a lot of submissions that are a variation of "me and my grandma make X together, which is the traditional dish of Y." Like, it's more than that! A manuscript I just bought is wonderful. It's set in the town of Tripoli, where the Jewish women are the poets and they have a unique way of praying, setting their poems to music. One of the times that comes out is when they're making challah. They sing their blessings and their wishes into the challah dough, and then they bake it. And that becomes part of hamotzi. The challenge is that they only have one communal oven. So the challot, they get mixed up. And the little girl who is the narrator of the story, comes up with an ingenious solution. So that's an example of, okay, it's Jews that we haven't heard of, yes, it's a recipe. But it's not just, here we make it, isn't it delicious? You know what I mean? It's an actual story. So I would encourage that.

Where can listeners find you online?

My website is LevineQuerido.com. I am on Twitter. But don't DM me manuscripts. I'm very happy to hear from people. In fact, you and I have interacted, Heidi, on Facebook and, and Twitter. And that's lovely. So yes, please seek me out, seek out Levine Querido. But if it's about submitting a manuscript, those instructions are on the website.

Okay. Arthur Levine, thank you so much for speaking with me!

Heidi, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to kibitz with you.

Truly! And keep up the good work.

Thank you so much, and I appreciate your friendship and allyship.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Josh Levy, author of The Jake Show. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to Chris Baron and Naomi Milliner, two other Jewish middle grade authors. We are co editors on a Passover anthology project together titled On All Other Nights. I couldn't ask for better partners or better friends.

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through Bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!

[MUSIC, PROMO] Twins JoJo and Bronka are coming of age in the United States in the 1960s. Daughters of Orthodox Jewish parents, they both have dreams and ambitions, JoJo of becoming an actress and Bronka of becoming a journalist. But shadows follow them: their parents' Holocaust experience, US politics, Neo Nazis, sexism, and an unplanned pregnancy. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Join me for a conversation with Meryl Ain, author of The Shadows We Carry. Find us at Jewishlibraries.org/niceJewishbooks.