A Special Appeal from Three Percent & Open Letter

As the year comes to a close, we thought we’d take a minute to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s also that magical time of year when we thank you all for your continued support, and ask for your help in the year to come by participating in our Annual Campaign.

Most of you are aware that Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s non-profit publishing house, and as such, our annual revenue comes from a few diverse sources, including book sales, foundational support, governmental support (from the U.S. and others), support from the New York State Council on the Arts. One of our most important sources of funding, however, comes from individuals interested in furthering the appreciation of international literature.

Thanks to the support of readers like you, we were able to expand our reach and activities over the past year in a variety of ways:

• We published 10 titles from around the world, including the critically acclaimed Zone by Mathias Enard, My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec, Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda, Vertical Motion by Can Xue and Scars by Juan Jose Saer;

• The Reading the World Conversation Series entered its fourth season, and included presentations by Thomas Pletzinger and Ross Benjamin, Sergio Chejfec and Margaret Carson, the Ledig House, and Piotr Sommer and Bill Martin;

• Awarded the fourth annual Best Translated Book Awards to Tove Jansson and Thomas Teal for The True Deceiver and to Ales Steger and Brian Henry for The Book of Things. All four winners received $5,000 cash prizes thanks to Amazon.com;

• Launched Read This Next to provide readers with extended previews of forthcoming and recently released works in translation;

• Published The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading with all proceeds going to support literary translators;

• Started a semi-weekly podcast to discuss books, culture, publishing, translation, and other related topics;

• Offered internships to students interested in getting into the publishing field.

And that’s really just the visible things . . . Behind every book, every initiative there’s a lot of time, energy, and thought about how best to expand the audience for our titles, and for interesting literature in general. Our goal is to help foster a healthy book culture—something that wouldn’t at all be possible without all of you.

To that end, you can help us continue to create exciting content and fun outreach programs by contributing online to our Annual Campaign. (Or click here for a PDF donation form that you can mail to us.)