Goodbye, New York

In the fall of 2005, Daniel Slager, then a 39-year-old editor at Harcourt, the venerable New York trade publishing house, told colleagues he was quitting to take a job in Minnesota. Because nobody ever does this kind of thing, Slager assumed his announcement would not go over well. New York is the center of the publishing universe—part shining star, part black hole—and is thought to exert an irresistible gravitational force on everyone who wants to be anybody in the book business. But when Slager said he was taking over as editor in chief at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, he got an unexpected response: Great move.

“They all knew about Milkweed,” says Slager. One veteran editor even confided that Ordinary Wolves, the unusual and widely praised 2004 debut by Milkweed author Seth Kantner, was the best novel she’d read all year. “In the end,” says Slager, “I felt pretty confident about my decision to come here.” Slager arrived in Minneapolis that October, about the same time Kantner won the Whiting Award—a $40,000 prize—as one of the country’s most important emerging writers. Slager and Milkweed have played a strong hand ever since. “Milkweed was well-established and well-funded when I got here,” says Slager. “The only need was for more good books.”

If only they could say that back in New York, where times are tough for book publishers. The steadily worsening outlook reached a new level of bleak last year, when balance sheets crumbled, imprints died, and editorial departments were streamlined and downsized. Slager’s old shop, Harcourt, went through an unhappy merger with Houghton Mifflin, which went so spectacularly bad that at one point the company admitted it had ceased acquiring new books—a mind-bending disclosure that was followed by the abrupt resignation of the company’s publisher.

Slager heard about the Milkweed job from Adam Lerner, an old NYU acquaintance who is president and publisher at Lerner Publishing Group, a children’s book publisher in Minneapolis. “I knew Dan was well-qualified for this job,” says Lerner. “He’s very entrepreneurial by nature, and in a way he was somewhat limited working in a big publishing house. It’s been a good fit for him here.” Slager was promoted to publisher and CEO in late 2007 and subsequently added Lerner to the Milkweed board of directors.

Slager has roots in the upper Midwest and a longtime interest in language. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan before moving on to graduate school in comparative literature at NYU. Slager’s name is Dutch—it means butcher—and he grew up hearing Dutch spoken. Later he studied and became fluent in German. He was at work on his PhD dissertation—the subject was Austrian writer Robert Musil’s revered but seldom-read The Man Without Qualities—when he started evaluating German books for American publishers. This led to work as a translator for a literary quarterly, Grand Street, which Slager went on to edit before landing at Harcourt.

Coming back to the upper Midwest was less about going home than climbing out of the big-city rut. Married and a father of two young sons, Slager and his wife, Alyssa Polack—then a school principal—were living in Park Slope in Brooklyn and growing increasingly disenchanted with New York. “New York City has become a place for the rich,” says Slager. “Here we both were, Alyssa and me, doing well in our careers but living in a crappy little apartment and not able to make ends meet. Then I came here and toured the city and I loved it. It was beautiful. The idea of this as a place for our kids to grow up in was very appealing. And it’s been really, really good. We both thought we’d miss New York a lot. The truth is, I rarely even think about New York.”

It helps that Minneapolis has become publishing’s Second City, with Milkweed and friendly rival Graywolf Press bringing out ever-more-powerful lists of poetry, literary fiction, and serious nonfiction. Last fall, Milkweed author Matthew Eck—a veteran of the U.S. incursion in Somalia whose first novel, The Farther Shore, had critics comparing him to Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy—was named to the National Book Foundation’s list of five writers under 35 who showed unusual promise. Meanwhile, the National Book Foundation picked Graywolf’s Salvatore Scibona as a finalist for the National Book Award for his novel about Italian immigrants, The End. “I would say there is a sort of cordial competition between us,” says Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae.

Milkweed is 30 years old this year, with an annual budget of about $1.7 million. That translates to between 16 and 20 books released a year. Like Graywolf, Milkweed is a nonprofit corporation, and both publishers benefit from the Twin Cities’ network of foundations that support the arts.

Slager’s first order of business on arriving at Milkweed was to find out if author Seth Kantner was at work on a new book. And the challenge in finding out anything about Kantner begins literally with finding him. Born and raised in a sod igloo above the Arctic Circle in Alaska—his parents were back-to-the-land types who abandoned civil society in the early 1960s to live as subsistence hunter-gatherers—Kantner is the wild man of American letters. During a standing-room-only appearance at the Minneapolis Public Library last September, Kantner recalled the good fortune that befell his family when they got their first snowmobiles and AK-47s. The heavily autobiographical Ordinary Wolves is a story about a young Alaskan named Cutuk Hawcly who, like Kantner, is in love with wilderness and the old ways of living in it, and yet has a perverse fascination with the outside world and its steady encroachments. The New York Times called the book a “magnificently realized story.” Married now and with a family of his own, Kantner has a theoretical fixed address in the coastal town of Kotzebue, though he is just as likely to be off in the Alaskan backcountry or out on the treacherous ice of the Bering Sea. Slager hoped Kantner was writing a second novel—Milkweed had an option for one—but knew that Ordinary Wolves had been a long time in the making. “The trouble with Seth is that he’s off the grid for weeks and months at a time,” says Slager. “That kind of life doesn’t lend itself to writing a novel.”

Kantner was writing something, but it wasn’t another novel. It was a fragmentary memoir consisting of a few dozen pages and a trove of stunning photographs of the Alaskan wilderness from his family’s early days there, as well as many others Kantner had taken more recently. “Seth wanted to publish something with the photos,” says Slager. “I could see that.” Kantner’s agent hinted she was going to shop the book with other publishers in New York, but Slager convinced her it would need the kind of close attention that only Milkweed could provide. The result was one of last year’s handsomest and most compelling books, Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska.

Milkweed brought out Shopping for Porcupine last June and The Farther Shore in October. Sandwiched in between was the most improbable novel of 2008, David Rhodes’s Driftless (reviewed on page 151). A product of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Rhodes published three novels in the 1970s, each to limited but sensational reviews. The last of these, Rock Island Line, came out in 1975. Two years later, after the disappointing rejection of his fourth novel, Rhodes was paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle crash and vanished. He was found in 2005 by Milkweed editor Ben Barnhart after a friend gave Barnhart a copy of Rock Island Line. “It was an amazing book,” says Barnhart, who succeeded in tracking down Rhodes in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, not far from the Dells. Barnhart was mainly interested in reissuing the long out-of-print Rock Island Line, but it turned out that Rhodes had kept writing even after a long hospitalization, a divorce, and a bout with morphine addiction. One of the manuscripts was about a small town called Words, in the southwestern Driftless region of Wisconsin.

This all happened during an interregnum between the departure of Slager’s predecessor and Slager’s arrival at Milkweed. Barnhart, who says he just went ahead and started negotiating with Rhodes even though he suspected he didn’t have the authority to acquire books on his own, couldn’t wait to show Rock Island Line and the manuscript for Driftless to Slager. “Rhodes was under consideration but not yet under contract when I got here,” says Slager. “But as soon as I read the manuscript I was convinced.” Driftless is now in its third printing.

So Slager and Milkweed have come off a banner year. As to what’s next, Slager already has an answer. “We are about to start making the transition from being a publisher of books to being a publisher of content,” he says. “That means entering the digital world, where right now the demand exceeds what’s available. It’s a very big challenge.” Slager says Milkweed will publish its first e-book, readable on a handheld device, later this year.

Expect it to be a good one.