In 2022, in a Canadian bar in a tempestuous Paris, the idea for a literary journal was first given serious form. Something about writing that dislikes, distrusts, conventions in publishing; that takes chances in style and form alongside content; that does it for a Flaubertian love of the sentence above all. L’Esprit Literary Review was officially launched a few months later, in the month that marked a clean centenary from the publication of Ulysses, an anniversary shared with Jacob’s Room and The Waste Land. We started with an idea to find work that engaged first and foremost in the type of revolutionary literature that Woolf and Joyce personify, alongside an expansive, sharp approach to criticism that Eliot brought to his own journals. Above all we wanted to champion fearless writing, and see what came of it.
The idea to launch Indirect Books emerges from the same desires that gave rise to L’Esprit—a conviction that the current literary industry hews far too close to the shorelines of commercialism and marketability, to work that holds the reader’s hand while concerning itself with making lukewarm ethical claims over driving real social change through artistic skill. Indirect Books means to champion writing that doesn’t shy away from challenging itself or its reader in order to acquiesce to received notions of “right vs wrong,” “entertainment vs difficulty.” In the publishing of full novels, these acute conditions are heightened to urgent demands. As many have seen, observed, and felt, the paucity in books that truly take chances in literary expression has reached a crisis point, especially in the United States. With Indirect, we hope to do whatever we can to help ameliorate this critical state of affairs.
The Press comes into the world in the cenentary year of Mrs Dalloway. Probably Woolf’s most known novel, Mrs Dalloway, like the times in which it was written, mark a period of irrevocable change. Modernists, like Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, all worked within a movement that pushed against conventional notions of art and aesthetic and forced the artist and the audience to rethink their understanding of what language and art could be. What it could do. Risk is required for that kind of irrevocable change. Risk, and courage to say what is true, to communicate the soul.
In her essay Montaigne, published the same year as Mrs Dalloway, Woolf argues that “…beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”
100 years on from the publication of Woolf’s most impactful work, we once again find ourselves in an artistic era saturated with commercial consumption. In keeping close contact with our literary ancestors, we hope that L’Esprit—and, in its turn, Indirect—will continue to publish work with courage to push against what is safe and sellable; writing that speaks for the soul rather than the market. Like the Modernists before us, we will continue to carve a small mark on the world, providing whatever space and light we can for writing that pushes beyond convention and embodies the urgent, timeless, risk-adept spirit that first brought the journal into being.
Indirect Books 