What are some upcoming trends for the next year?

In general, unless you’re publishing an insta-book to directly plug into current events, it’s almost never worth it to chase an of-the-moment trend given books’ long gestation period. In any case, the series I work for, the Library of Arabic Literature, publishes pre-modern Arabic texts in translation, covering everything from poetry to history, travel literature, philosophy, religion, and even cookbooks. There is a very small pool of Arabic-English translators who are able to render these books in a flowing, readable English, so the challenge always lies in pairing texts with translators. The long time it takes to produce these translations, coupled with the fact that our authors have been dead for hundreds of years, means it’s hard for us to hitch our seasonal list to whatever is in this year.

On a broader level—although this isn’t a new story—the market for literary translation in the United States is thriving. When I first started out in trade publishing, a book by a non–U.S. author was usually the kiss of death at editorial meetings. The publishing environment feels very different now, starting with a raft of newer, risk-taking publishers that started up a dozen years ago and then moving on to mainstream trade houses that have realized the potential not only for runaway successes in translation like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Elena Ferrante, but for books as varied as Han Kang’s The Vegetarian or Muhsin al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens.

What topic don’t you ever want to see again?

It sounds strange to think about now, but over a century ago, many people’s idea of “an Indian writer” was Rudyard Kipling. The contemporary equivalent seems to be books that purport to give an account of another culture or society but are in fact more about their American author. It’s a rare book (such as Peter Hessler’s The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution) that can successfully carry off that kind of first-person perspective without sounding entirely self-absorbed.

What do you want to change about publishing?

As both a translator and an editor, I would love to see American book publishing be more imaginative about how to publish international literature. It has always struck me as strange that—unlike our publishing counterparts elsewhere in the world—many American publishers and editors don’t read a second language.

Books are inherently slow—even bad ones take a long time to write—and there is a real value in what an editor does to turn a good book into an excellent one. Unfortunately, the shorter shelf life of new books in bookstores these days means more pressure on editors, and I hope that kind of editor-author relationship doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

What’s unique about your corner of the publishing industry?

I am very fortunate in working for a wide-ranging book series like LAL and in conjunction with the brilliant scholars who head LAL’s executive board. These authors and their texts are a blank slate for many readers, which forces us to come up with innovative ways to present these books to general readers, whether in design, public events, or engagement on social media. For our paperbacks, that means foreword writers who can help draw in new readers, such as the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on a collection of the sayings and wisdom of 'Ali ibn Abi Talib; travel writer and novelist Tim Severin on a first-person account of a journey from medieval Baghdad to the Viking settlements of Russia; or fantasy novelist S.A. Chakraborty on an upcoming book that reveals the tricks of the trade of professional con men.

The translations themselves involve a lot of work, given the wide gap between the contemporary world and the original milieu of these texts. Those few texts that have previously appeared in English often suffer from what we call the “industry standard”—a kind of plodding, overly literal translation that academic translators often use. Our aim has been to have our translations actually read like English and hopefully seem as engaging and fresh to 21st-century readers as they were when they were first written.

Chip Rossetti is the editorial director of the Library Arabic Literature series at NYU Press, which publishes translations of pre-modern Arabic texts in both bilingual and English-only editions. He began his publishing career acquiring and editing nonfiction at Little, Brown; Wiley; and Basic Books, where he primarily acquired history. Having begun learning Arabic at a relatively late age, he moved to Egypt in 2005 and worked as an acquiring editor at the American University in Cairo Press, which is how he first began working with translators and with contemporary Arabic fiction. He holds a B.A. in Greek and Latin from Harvard and a Ph.D. in modern Arabic literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated several Arabic novels, including Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik and Beirut, Beirut by Sonallah Ibrahim.