Onegin Publishing, a brand-new imprint specializing in African-American literature, begins with a bang—and three very different titles
By Steve Pick
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
“In my opinion,” says 69-year-old first-time novelist Bruce Petty, “readers progress naturally from a very low level to the highest level they can attain. Right now, I think there is an opportunity to provide for this group that is looking for the next level, that is tired now of the work they have been reading. I think we can offer them the next challenge.”
Petty is a tall, soft-spoken man who leans back and listens very carefully to all that is being said around him. He and Harvard-educated poet Ruth-Miriam Garnett are telling the tale of Onegin Publishing Company, a new locally run press that has just released books by both authors, as well as a title by attorney and activist D.B. Amon. Garnett is animated and vibrant, and she moves toward her listeners as if she has much more to say than the speed at which she can say it will allow.
“We want to highlight writers from the African diaspora, whose work we anticipate will be as important as Alexander Pushkin’s work,” she says. (Pushkin, whose great-grandfather was an African slave who became a Russian noble, wrote Eugene Onegin, from which the press took its name. He is often referred to as the father of Russian literature.)
“Russians revere Pushkin, and that’s not really a circumstance that we have in this country,” she continues. “Shopkeepers aren’t expected to be reading John Updike. We don’t have the same reverence uniformly. We want to work toward that.”
Garnett is Onegin’s marketing director, but, she says, the boundaries between jobs at the press have been blurred. The publisher prefers to remain anonymous, so the writers are out there as the public face of the company.
“The Christian Science Monitor reported five years ago that the African-American book market is the most noticeable trend in the book industry in this country,” says Garnett. “It shows a good profit every year, when the industry itself shows a tiny profit. The challenge is, of course, that these books are not visionary. We want to get people to think. We follow the principle that artists transform. We want people to understand art as a cultural product, literature as a cultural product, writers as arbiters of that. We want it to be something that’s used to uplift, as opposed to ‘I slept with my daughter’s boyfriend.’ We don’t want to do the Jerry Springer books.”
Odds are, Springer won’t be booking the Onegin authors anytime soon. Amon’s book, a nonfiction work titled Spatial Deconcentration: Regentrification and the Kerner Commission: The Dispersal of Metropolitan Blacks to Suburban Bantustans, challenges the general consensus on the history of urban renewal. Garnett’s book, a collection of poetry called Concerning Violence, explores her commitments to pacifism and black liberation, as well as her family connections and the loss of her sister and mother in recent years.
Perhaps the most intriguing work in Onegin’s first print run comes from Petty, whose debut novel, An All-American Deal (Jump or Burn), tells the tale of a new back-to-Africa movement based on a sophisticated investment strategy and explores the confluence of capitalism and race.
“During much of the 40 years I worked as a government contractor, I was writing research reports and proposals,” Petty says. “I had threatened on many occasions to take one of my proposals and jazz it up with a little literary content, but I never did.
“As I began to think about my life, what I was going to do after retirement, I realized I had lived in Spain, I had done agriculture projects for five years in Jamaica, I had traveled around what we’re calling the black diaspora. I knew where black people were, I knew what their circumstances were. I wanted to bring that together and let other people experience it through me, that there was this world out there that we are racially a part of and that they needed to know something about it.”
Of Petty’s book, Garnett raves that “the conceit is absolutely wonderful. It’s such a tickler. It’s funny. At the same time, it has a handle on an immense tragedy, a circumstance that’s so immense. There are African-American people who spend their lives in a state of despair and grief. I think, if we’re honest, we know that the society is not going to work for everybody—it just is not. I think if anybody is struggling with that, Bruce’s novel offers this epiphany. People who have reservations about capitalism, that’s a perfect way to turn it on its head, turn it into something that remedies a vast social predicament.”
