Small Publisher Specials #2: New Vessel Press

New Vessel Press is a small publisher that started up just three years ago, devoted entirely to literature in translation into English. How they make it work financially I have no idea, but it doesn't hurt that they seem to publish uniformly excellent books (I've read around half of their output so far, and there hasn't been a dud amongst them). A particular highlight has been their republication of two wonderfully grim (but funny) novels by Marek Hlasko, a Polish-born, sometimes-Israeli-settled writer who died at the age of 35 from living the sort of life he wrote about so well.

All of New Vessel's covers so far are the work of talented designer and comics creator Liana Finck, They almost all use very limited colour palettes to great effect, and not one of them has any type that isn't hand-drawn anywhere on them.

I just got and started reading this yesterday: fascinating so far--a weird mix of sun-bleached nostalgia, family politics, sexual frustration and depravity

Finck's own experiences in the comics world can probably be summarised by this cartoon she created (click to make legible)...

..since, far from superheroes, her biggest comics work to date is A Bintel Brief, an anthology of true stories adapted from the 100+-year-old advice columns of New York's old Yiddish-language The Forward newspaper. You can read several extracts from the book at her site, here.