Fifty Fifty: Carcanet’s Jubilee in Letters
Edited by Robyn Marsack, With interjections by Michael Schmidt
(Carcanet, 2019, 464 pp., $21.99)
Fifty Fifty: Carcanet’s Jubilee in Letters might be described as a victory lap for what Harold Pinter has called “a great publishing house.” It could also be read as a year-by-year epistolatory narrative of its publisher, Carcanet’s managing director Michael Schmidt. In either case, the fifty-year history of the press is of considerable interest well beyond the UK. In the US Carcanet has remained, relatively speaking, under the radar. But not only does the Jubilee volume’s five-decade survey neatly illustrate the widening world of English-language literature, several ALSCW poets (Greg Delanty and Jee Leong Koh, to name but two) also form part of the Carcanet narrative.