Q & A: Frank Oveis
By Graham Christian -- Library Journal, 5/1/2007
Frank Oveis is a vice president of Continuum Books as well as senior editor for titles in Catholic studies, spirituality, Judaica, and current affairs. In the busy pre-Easter season, he generously took a bit of his time to answer a few questions for LJ.
How long have you been with Continuum?
Continuum International in its present incarnation has been in existence for eight years but draws upon the legacies of several other or previous publishing houses for which I've worked: the Continuum Publishing Group, the Crossroad Publishing Company, Seabury Press, and, before my time, Herder and Herder. I joined Seabury out of graduate school in 1973 and pretty much stayed in place while the companies changed hands around me.
Continuum has published titles that join spirituality, culture, and scholarship in intriguing ways. Is this the result of an editorial policy or vision?
Despite new technologies and marketing forces, publishing remains a highly personal affair dependent upon the interests, education, and intelligence of the acquiring editors. At the same time, an editor works within a tradition, that is, in a publishing house with various programs and a certain "profile," history, etc. Happily, I've worked for a "continuum" of publishing houses that have been committed to serious publishing in the fields of religious studies, theology, and high-quality spirituality. But we have always published in other fields as well, so there has always been a healthy interaction among different disciplines.
Do you accept unsolicited materials, or do you mostly develop titles with authors?
I have to confess that I've "inherited" many of my authors, especially prolific ones of longstanding like Father Thomas Keating, whose Open Mind, Open Heart has been a best seller for 20 years. I'm simply reaping what another colleague sowed. Yet many of my favorite books have been unagented, unsolicited, over-the-transom affairs. I'm thinking recently of Cristina Mazzoni's The Women in God's Kitchen and Yitzhak Buxbaum's The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov. I can't say I "develop" books. Rather, I encourage certain authors.
What does the landscape of publishing in religion and spirituality look like to you now?
Like thousands of moviegoers in Paris, London, and New York, I was mesmerized by Into Great Silence, the "silent" documentary about the Carthusians of the Grande Chatreuse. It's a good metaphor for serious religious publishing, past and future. The best books in spirituality seem to have three elements in common: they're about retrieving or reclaiming long-neglected spiritual teachings or practices, with the aim of "democratizing" them, or making them available to a much wider public than they would ever have known before; and they have a certain ecumenical or interreligious resonance. This is true of all the authors whom we publish.
Are there any books you are especially excited about this season?
One title of ours that's deeply and richly "inspirational," if I may use that overworked term, is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah. Sacks, who is chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, thinks like Maimonides and writes like Isaiah Berlin. It astounds me that the U.K. has produced in one generation two such brilliant spiritual leaders as Sacks and Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury.
Could you highlight any forthcoming titles?
I'm particularly excited about two books on our fall list that are both about God and written by women. By the sheer number of languages into which her numerous books have been translated, Elizabeth Johnson, the most famous Roman Catholic woman theologian in the world, shows in Quest for the Living God how various contemporary theological movements have enriched the notion of God for our time. Australian American scholar Val Webb paints with a much wider palette in Like Catching Water in a Net: Human Attempts To Describe the Divine, delving into the writings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics as well as the Jewish and Christian Scriptures to find intuitions and intimations of the Divine nature and attributes.
