The indie Berkeley publisher with a worldwide view

Ashley Nelson Levy and Adam Levy, who founded Transit Books in 2015. Credit: Joanne Furio

In January 2023, Adam Levy, who founded Transit Books with his wife, Ashley Nelson Levy, told his distributor to be prepared. Adam hoped that one of its writers, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, would win the Nobel Prize in literature for his body of work, which includes the Septology series of novels that Transit began publishing in English in April 2020.

“They said, sure, OK, enough already,” said Adam. He had told the distributor the same thing the two previous years. 

And yet, at 4 a.m. on Oct. 5, 2023, the long-awaited news from Norway was live-streamed on the internet. Adam woke his wife, and the two immediately got to work. They called their printer and distributor, trying to figure out how many more books to print. At 4:30 a.m., The New York Times called for a quote. Suddenly, the nonprofit independent press operating out of a Richmond bedroom was thrust into the international spotlight. 

“The Nobel was for sure a real accelerator and, in a lot of ways, an inflection point for the press,” Adam said. “But we’ve been planning for this growth really since the beginning. That kind of stuff obviously helps us along. And as a small press, you need as many breaks as you can get.”

Almost two years since Fosse’s prize, Transit Books has found itself in the rarefied air of nonprofit independent publishers producing works of high literary caliber, a niche within a niche. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. In addition to publishing a Nobel-prize-winning author, Transit has racked up some of the most prestigious awards in literature. Five Transit titles have received or been nominated for the International Booker Prize, both its long and shortlist; two were finalists, and one has won the National Book Critics Circle Award; two titles were finalists for the National Translation Award; three won the Windham Campbell Prize; and one earned the PEN Translation Prize.

Transit has become so successful in winning by publishing authors you’ve likely never heard of — and that’s the point. Its purpose is to “champion exceptional literature from around the world — works often overlooked by mainstream publishing.” Its better-known authors include the Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, whose Kintu, a cult classic in African literature circles, was published in 2017 and is being reissued for Transit’s anniversary, and the Turkish writer Tezer Özlü, whose Cold Nights of Childhood came out in 2023. 

Transit’s steady and planned growth is reflected in its catalog, which has gone from four books in its initial year to 17 planned for 2025 and its need for space. In March 2024, the couple moved its home office of eight years into an honest-to-goodness brick-and-mortar building in Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek Design Center, which doubles as an event space to promote its authors. 

“That was really a piece we were craving,” Ashley said, “To open our doors to the community and have most of our conversations around books and translations and international literature.”

A match made in grad school

Some of the books in the Undelivered Lecture series represent the imprint’s largest group of American writers. Credit: Joanne Furio

The seeds of what would become Transit Books were planted in 2009, when the couple met at Columbia University’s graduate writing program. He hails from Chappaqua, New York; she comes from Petaluma. 

“I have always read widely in translation, and it’s been very foundational for me in terms of my own thinking about reading and literature,” Adam said. When he discovered that Ashley, too, shared his passion for such works, “we started to think more practically about the art of translation and later on moved more into the structural barriers that exist in publishing translation,” he said. “There were so many great books that weren’t making their way into the U.S. and finding their way into more commercial houses.” 

Translation is an underappreciated art in the U.S., a category frequently sidelined by the so-called big five publishers because it attracts a niche readership, is often literary and is unlikely to become a best seller. Kintu, for example, was passed on by the major New York houses, but once the book proved that Makumbi could produce a marketplace success, she’s now with a major imprint. 

According to widely cited statistics, only around 3% of books published in the U.S. are translations.

In 2012, Adam received a Fulbright Fellowship to work on a Hungarian-to-English translation project in Budapest. Ashley joined him and began teaching creative writing. They got engaged there the same year.

Returning to New York a year later, both took jobs in publishing. Adam worked as an assistant to the literary agent Andrew Wylie and then in the marketing department of The New York Review of Books.

Ashley also had a job in The New York Review of Books’ marketing department, and worked on her novel, Immediate Family, about transnational adoption, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2021. 

The couple really didn’t have a plan and struggled somewhat with their publishing salaries in New York. Ashley had roots in the Bay Area,  so they packed up a U-Haul and drove cross country in 2014, landing in Oakland. In the Bay Area, they discovered a much different literary scene. 

“The literary culture was much less stratified and hierarchical,” Adam said. “We got to know a lot of booksellers, people who worked for magazines, people who worked in publishing and we also had the space both literally and psychologically to take a risk on something.”

While the Levys recognize New York as the center of establishment publishing, they straddle both worlds —  a business necessity for sure, but one that also reflects their training and backgrounds.

“That was always part of our plan: To be a West Coast publishing house that was also rooted in the Bay Area but also looked back across the country and beyond in terms of the kind of reach the books needed to have for the press to find its readership,” Adam said. 

The Levys chose Transit because it represents movement and dynamism. It opened for business in a bedroom in their two-bedroom Oakland apartment in 2015. They immediately began reaching out to translators, looking for books they loved but had been rejected by a commercial house for being “too big or too small or too strange,” Adam said.  

In addition to Kintu, Transit’s first run in 2017 included Such Small Hands by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba, Swallowing Mercury by the Polish author Wioletta Greg and Lessons for a Child who Arrives Late by the Peruvian writer Carlos Yushimito. 

“We wanted to really showcase a variety of languages and regions and a mix of Anglophone and translated literature to show what the list was going to be,” Adam said.

The couple worked out of their apartment for six years. Ashley joked that it was a rite of passage for their two children, a son, now 5, and a daughter, now 2, to sleep in the Transit office. In 2020, the family — and the Transit office — moved into a Richmond house in 2020.

Discovering Fosse

Transit Books’ complete collection of works by Fosse, which includes the Septology series of novels and A Shining. Credit: Transit Books

The Levys had long known of Fosse, mostly known as a playwright, who was prominent in Norway and widely translated elsewhere, when they published the first of the three books in the Septology series in April 2020.

“It was a terrible time to publish a book,” Adam said. “We weren’t even sure if the books would come back as returns because bookstores were closed” due to the pandemic. Soon, however, the Levys were happily surprised to learn that Fosse’s first volume, The Other Name, became long-listed for the International Booker Prize, a boost for an otherwise rocky start. 

Septology has been praised for its breakthrough form and mystical message, heavy on Catholic symbolism and liturgical cadence, reflecting Fosse’s conversion to Catholicism in 2012. He wrote the entire series as one 600-page long sentence devoid of a single period, which nevertheless achieves flow and movement through paragraph breaks and dialogue. 

The Nobel Committee for Literature noted that Fosse’s work “blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism.”

In The New York Review of Books, Ruth Margalit pointed out how Septology  “is suffused with religious symbolism, taking on, in its incantatory language and formal repetition, the rhythm of the rosary.”

Levy, who is not Catholic, described the series as “the closest thing I have had to a religious experience of reading.” 

The seven novels in three volumes (or one volume that collects all the works) follow two doppelgangers whose lives converge and diverge and the many paths that a life can take. While exploring these paths, Fosse reflects on his central themes: Catholicism, alcoholism and art. 

The Levys had been beating the drum for Fosse for a few years, which led to reviews in Harpers, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. The third volume, A New Name (2021), was a finalist for the International Booker Prize and The National Book Award in the U.S. 

“For us, it’s trying to get behind an author and not necessarily an individual work. I don’t think the first Fosses sold more than 2,000 copies, but it was the kind of stuff we didn’t lose faith in because we were behind it,” Adam said. “It’s always been our attitude to build a really successful, long-lasting backlist,” which now numbers 55 books, “rather than just taking bets on the front list books to hit in the marketplace.” 

A runaway best-seller — thanks to Gen Z women

While Fosse’s Nobel generated a whirlwind of publicity, the Septology series has not been the imprint’s biggest seller. For a small imprint like Transit, sales of between 2,500 and 5,000 copies would make us “really happy,” Ashley explained. By the end of 2024, Fosse’s books have sold around 65,000 copies. 

So far, Transit’s best seller has turned out to be a surprise: I Who Have Never Known Men, a feminist dystopian speculative novel by a dead Belgian author translated from French. It is the only feminist dystopian speculative novel that Transit has published. Ashley read the book in two sittings. She described it as “very literary and very feminist.” Adam called it a cross between Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. 

The book follows 39 women who live in an underground cage that’s guarded by men. When they break free, they discover “a strange world that awaits them above ground.”  

The book sold 2,500 copies in its first year in 2022, and 8,000 the following year. Then Gen Z women took notice and posted TikTok videos about the book, with some posts getting almost 300,000 views. The book has now sold more than 100,000 copies. 

A new nonfiction series and a line of kids’ books

Some of the children’s titles at Transit Books’ Strawberry Creek Design Center offices. Credit: Joanne Furio

Since the Levys had always wanted to “take risks within the nonfiction form,” Transit launched “Undelivered Lectures” in 2020, slim volumes of essays that engage with contemporary culture and socio-political issues. The series represents Transit’s largest group of American writers and includes Berkeley’s Lauren Markham, whose Immemorial is being released Jan. 15, and the novelist Kate Zambreno, whose Animal Stories will be published next fall, along with the paperback version of her book The Light Room. 

In 2023, Transit introduced a children’s division, which Ashley calls “a natural extension of what we were doing on the adult side with translation.” The division was also a natural extension of what the Levys were doing in their personal lives: reading books to their children. So, in addition to attending the Frankfurt Book Fair each year to search for adult books, the Levys also visit the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair for kids’ titles.

The first book in an early reader series, A Day with Mousse, was selected by The New York Times Book Review in December as one of the best kids books of 2024. In the Frog and Toad tradition, the series follows a misanthropic creature who lives by the sea and runs a kind of Etsy shop for the shells he collects.

What’s likely the most titillating title in the children’s lineup, however, is A Sleepless Night, by the Peruvian author Micaela Chirif  (translated by Jordan Landsman) with illustrations by Joaquin Camp. Told from the perspective of her older brother, the book follows the plight of little Elisa, who can’t stop crying, and no one knows why. “After a sleepless night, it takes a grandmother’s touch — and an explosive fart — to bring much-needed relief,” according to the synopsis. 

“It’s the most literary fart book on our list,” Adam said. 

A space of their own

The Levys work in an office where furniture can be moved to accommodate literary gatherings. Credit: Joanne Furio

Though they had considered several spaces over the years, it was a visit to Strawberry Creek’s playground with his children one Saturday that led Adam to the adjacent Strawberry Creek Design Center, a 19th-century building that had been a furniture factory for decades. They furnished the 750-square-foot space with movable desks so they could host gatherings. 

So far, Transit has hosted two events in its new offices: with Iman Mersal, a celebrated Egyptian poet and the author of Transit’s Traces of Enayat, and Aysegül Savas, a Turkish writer who lives in Paris and wrote The Wilderness, part of the Undelivered Lectures. Children’s programming is also in the works. 

Transit now employs a staff of five, including  Executive Editor Lizzie Davis, who moved from Chicago to start the position this month. She formerly worked for another literary indie publisher, Coffee House Press. Later this year, Transit will host an undergraduate intern from the Art of Writing Program. 

Ten years in, Transit is right where the Levys want to be “in terms of the size and balance,” Adam said. To celebrate the milestone, Transit will host special events in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York. 

“That’s one of the things we really like to do: both to make publishing, the art of translation more visible in the Bay Area and to break out of our little silos so it’s not just a little literary bubble,” Adam said. 

When the word “serious” was used to describe the type of books Transit publishes, the Levys pushed back.

“Serious, but not self-serious,” Adam said. “I mean, we published a fart book.”

“Serious but never stiff,” Ashley added. “A lot of them are really wild and bold and fun.”

A case in point: In November, Transit is publishing a book about a woman who has a sexual relationship with a pangolin and a bat. 

“But it is a high literary book, and like most high literary books, there has to be some humor in it,” Adam said. “Otherwise, what’s the fun of publishing?