Goodbye, New York

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.