In the summer of 2024, Deep Vellum, a Dallas-based press, announced a program to bring out “badass avant-garde masterpieces that would otherwise not be translated or published.” Kicking things off would be a trio of postmodern thousand-plus-page magnum opuses: a Pynchonian quintet by the Catalan writer Miquel de Palol, a surreal and meditative trilogy by the Italian writer Antonio Moresco and a singular contemporary novel “like no other” by the German writer Michael Lentz, which was also to be the venture’s maiden publication.

Retaining its deutsche title, Lentz’s Schattenfroh was pitched as brethren with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, narrated by a prisoner held within a nightmarish panopticon constructed by his father, the novel’s titular figure. Art, history and horror would inform his story. “What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible?” the press release asked. “You’d get something like SCHATTENFROH.” Its English publication would help earn it a place among the “pantheon of the best works of world literature published in the past two decades”—and in so doing “cement the press’ reputation as the champion of maximalist literature in the Anglosphere.”

The hyperbolic ad copy reminded me of my days at New Directions, where I would also bullhorn the brilliance of foreign writers when critical attention had yet to come (I can recall shilling László Krasznahorkai as the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse” before his readership took off). Using copy to promote the press itself, however, was discouraged; our publications did that for us. But ND has also had nearly ninety years to build its brand; Deep Vellum is barely a teenager. In chucking this taboo, the press’s founder, Will Evans, had adopted the more self-promotional swagger of his press’s generation.