Strange Masculinity: Read five original short stories by Fitzcarraldo Edition authors, published in collaboration with the press for Another Man's Winter/Spring 2026 issue.
In 1941, during the German occupation of France, the then relatively unknown writers Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure came together to edit, publish and distribute a book called Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea). The story centred on two family members who refuse to speak to the officer occupying their house – their way of maintaining control of a tense dynamic and a rejoinder to the Nazi propaganda campaigns and newspaper censorship widespread in France at the time. They used silence as a weapon against the officer – a former composer and closeted pacifist – just as the Nazis had on them. Soon after, and as Silence hit a nerve in an environment of muzzled media, more books flooded out of the pair: Le Cahier Noir (The Black Notebook) a non-fiction essay by François Mauriac on the French Resistance and Germany’s colonial tyranny; "Le Musée Grévin" (The Grévin Museum), a poem by Louis Aragon that uses a wax museum in Paris known for its lifelike figures of celebrities as a metaphor for society’s superficiality and servility in the fallout of World War One; and even a series of newspaper cuttings that had been pulped by the occupying army. Individually, the novels that Bruller and de Lescure put out on Minuit, the title of their underground press, were brilliant innovations on storytelling style (Arogan’s work with them even lit the touchpaper for a new writing movement called literary surrealism). But at a distance, the books portray a wider social resistance unfolding behind locked doors. Like the best presses in history, Les Éditions de Minuit went beyond book publishing and took the temperature of the world.
Jacques Testard had a similar epiphany about a string of books he released between 2015 and 2018 via Fitzcarraldo Editions, the house he founded in London eleven years ago this August. The titles, Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country and Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good find common ground in Russia before and after the end of the Soviet Union and show, he explained to the Queitus shortly after Alexievich’s release, “the ways in which connections emerge over time in the catalogue.” Over email, Testard compares the best publisher bibliographies to constellations, citing Robert Calasso’s bookselling primer, The Art of the Publisher. “Each of the books we publish is a singular work, but also forms a link in a single chain,” Testard says. “Connections exist between them, whether stylistic, thematic, or formal – and, hopefully, not just in my head.”
From the start, the constellation formed under the direction of de Lescure and Bruller was a key inspiration for Fitzcarraldo Editions. The imprint’s first book, Mathias Énard’s Zone, is written as a single sentence across 528 pages, styled in part to signify the flooding of the mind of protagonist Francis Mirković, a French Intelligence Services Agent called upon by the Vatican to transport a list of most-wanted criminals across Italy. With Zone, and the novels that started trickling into the system via Fitzcarraldo, Testard became one of the few independent publishers interested in evolving the form itself, all the while delicately holding a mirror to a world caught in cultural and political crossfire. Énard’s prose might have felt novel at the time, a retroactive riff on the drunk narrations of a transgressive author like Michel Houellebecq, but its kind is everywhere in literary fiction now (Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad comes to mind more than any.) Tonally, Fitzcarraldo books tend to be slow moving, spacious and deliberate. Control over the flow of ideas, characters’ thoughts and dialogue is what stands a novel like Esther Kinsky’s River apart, its prose gently pulling and pushing the reader down the German and British waterways she describes as if it had become the current itself.
Beyond style, much of Fitzcarraldo’s approach seems to be a reaction to a world resistant to risk and imagination. After losing his job as an editor at Notting Hill Editions in 2013, Testard couldn’t find an alternative publishing house in London to match his ideas and energy. He knew that starting his own would be a laughably difficult undertaking, one he compared to the ambitions actor Klaus Kinski set himself in Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo. “It’s about a man who wants to build an opera house in the jungle (and) is a not very subtle metaphor on the stupidity of setting up a publishing house,” he says of the process of finding a name for his company. “It’s like dragging a 320-ton steamboat over a hill in the Amazon jungle. It’s possible, but it’s going to be extremely difficult.” Unlike most legacy publishers in the UK, Testard wants to develop writers he believes in over the course of a career. “We are a publishing house that publishes authors rather than books,” he says. “For example, if I publish your debut book and it sells 500 copies, I will publish the second one anyway, and so on and so forth. The hope is that the author and publishing house can grow and prosper together.” Although Testard wasn’t wrong to feel daunted by an industry dominated by jaded agents, trending topics and tried-and-tested genre templates, he was right to pursue business and artistic philosophies he felt were genuinely original and bucked cynical trade behaviour.
Success came quickly to the house, whose offices today are in an anonymous-looking converted sporting goods factory in Peckham. On the day of the launch party of Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and Simon Critchley’s Notes on Suicide in 2015, just 14 months after founding the press and weeks before the release of Secondhand Time, Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature. The announcement, alongside the massive critical success of Pond that was to follow, laid the tarmac for a small-scale expansion in Fitzcarraldo’s operations, its team eventually growing from three to eleven, with in-house readers and publicists cranking up to thirty non fiction, fiction, poetry and in-translation books out a year. It helped, also, that it wouldn’t be the only Nobel Prize awarded to a Fitzcarraldo Editions author. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (translated into English by Jennifer Croft) is a novel set between the 17th and 21st centuries, and is split into 116 fiction and non-fiction shorts that centre on various forms and symbols of travel and its symbiosis with the human anatomy – some the length of a sentence. Its original Polish title, Bieguni, refers to a sect that believed that to avoid the evil inside us, we must move geographically and spiritually. One story, a real historical anecdote, follows composer Chopin’s heart as it is smuggled back to Poland in a jar of alcohol, the body part analogous, at least to his sister Ludwika, of his devotion to the country. Winning the Man Booker Prize in 2018 and the Nobel Prize in 2019, Flights kicked off an awards sweep that is practically unheard-of for a small and relatively new independent press, with two more Fitzcarraldo authors, Annie Arneux and Jon Fosse, picking up Nobels in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Other Fitzcarraldo projects like Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo and Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying sit among a string of previously hard-to-find or out-of-print books that Testard brought in front of new audiences via forensic literary translations. Written in English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and a highlight in the Fitzcarraldo library, The Possessed (1939) by Witold Gombrowicz is an insanely menacing slow-burner about a tennis coach who falls in with a family at a haunted castle in Poland. The catalogue is full of stories like this, of characters moving between countries and contexts, in specific pockets of history and in strange psychological states.
In this way, and in his interest in the rediscovery of largely forgotten but still sought after texts, Testard is a kind of literary archaeologist – testament, perhaps, to his formative years as a bilingual book fan. “My grandmother taught me to read when I was three and from that age I always read a lot, in French to start with, and then in English once I’d learned the language,” he says of his upbringing between France and Britain. “I read all the old school children’s classics – Enid Blyton, the Comtesse de Ségur, CS Lewis, Roald Dahl – and a lot of comic books too: all of Tintin, all of Astérix, Lucky Luke, Spirou & Fantasio, Blake & Mortimer. When I was a bit older I got very into John Steinbeck – East of Eden is probably the book I have reread the most (though not since I was a teenager). I didn’t become a fully pretentious reader until university. I studied History in Dublin but spent a lot of time reading literature instead.”
For all the successes Fitzcarraldo has enjoyed in its first decade, Testard is determined to keep the business small enough to protect its identity. Expansion, he thinks, with all its wider legal and fiscal implications, is hazardous to experimentation. “I’m very keen for us to remain small enough – no bigger than we are – so that we can keep publishing books and authors we are into, rather than having to attempt to publish books for commercial reasons,” he comments. Testard was always firm on his vision for the imprint, even down to its wholesale rejection of cover art. Its graphic design template follows a simple but austere, almost intimidating, rule: International Klein Blue text on white for non fiction, the inverse for fiction. Testard’s model pays homage to the blank, censorship-evading covers Minuit would put out, and aims, he says, to let the content, title and ideas speak for themselves. Like the underground cult that followed Les Éditions de Minuit around war-torn Paris, Fitzcarraldo’s own serif font has become shorthand for high literary taste and an awareness of the subtle differences between good and bad writing.
Increasingly, Fitzcarraldo’s books have explored a number of current topics that affect people across the world and across generations. In 2022, before winning a Pulitzer for his investigation into US airstrikes in the middle east, Mattieu Aitken launched his non-fiction novel The Naked Don’t Fear The Water, which recounted his odyssey from Afghanistan to Europe on a refugee trail. The same year, in what Testard describes as a “reverse detective story”, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season solved the murder of a local witch through various fictional accounts of narcoviolence and misogyny in Mexico. Both books showed that there were ways to contemplate serious issues far outside of tradition.
In the making of this issue of Another Man we were thinking a lot about masculinity, the million ways it is interpreted in the 21st century, and the strangeness of it all. In their ability to explore heavy topics with grace and underground spirit, Fitzcarraldo Editions seemed like the best people to turn to unfurl some of this complexity, and with contributions from their list of authors we collaborated with the imprint on a series of stories that dig into the behaviours and places manhood finds itself today. Strange Masculinity, a twist on Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach, the press’s first ever poetry compilation, is a mini constellation of sorts, a series of small tales that paint a bigger impression of the human state.
The larger constellation that began forming under Testard’s direction in 2014 is still open to interpretation. It’s not as politically direct as the anti-censorship World War Two fruits of Les Éditions de Minuit, but it shares the imprint’s belief in the power of the imagination to explore behaviour and figure out new creative pathways. In almost every way, it’s the modern day equivalent of a renegade press, and if there is a cosmic connection between Testard’s books it’s a yearning for deeper thinking, connectivity, and for better use of the mind. “We are now 11 years old, which is absolutely nothing in the life of a publishing house,” Testard says, reflecting on my questions about the future. “The plan is to continue as we are.”
This story is taken from the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Another Man, which is on sale now. Order here.
