Aflame Books

Thanks to Complete Review for calling attention to Aflame Books, a new press in the UK dedicated to “Sharp writing from the warm world.”

Aflame Books is an independent publisher based in the UK. It publishes, in English translation, works from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; works whose brilliance has been hidden from the English-speaking world by the barriers of culture and language.

Very admirable and necessary mission, and the books sound interesting. Titles will be “distributed” though IPG in the U.S., so they will be available, although hopefully Aflame will be able to find a worth U.S. house to publish U.S. editions of some of the titles. It’s just a fact of business that a U.S. publisher can do a lot more for a book in the States than a UK publisher can, regardless of distributor. And if the point is finding readers to appreciate these books, it’s better all around for UK presses to sell U.S. rights than to pretend they’re going to make a killing in the U.S. market.