Laertes Press

We strive to publish keenly human documents – literature that catches the fullness of our experience and situation in the world, from Cavafy’s solitary notes, at the start of the twentieth century, that bear on homosexual lack of agency (together with the poems that came to birth in the same period), to a play set during the war in Kosovo and the NATO bombings; from the poetry of Pascoli on the brink of the twentieth century, embedded in rustic life and the natural world, to the work of engaged poets, playwrights, and prose writers who grapple in distant places with the crises of our times.

We seek to hold a lamp to difficult human circumstances, obscure moments of history, and dimensions of life on earth that seem to be escaping us. Literary translation is that lamp – the beautiful instrument of such illumination.