Jeannette and Richard Seaver started Arcade in 1988 to search for literary voices that would expand the horizons of English language publishing. After years of publishing hundreds of translated books from dozens of different languages, Arcade became an imprint of Skyhorse publishing so that the extensive catalog of Arcade’s powerful and sometimes challenging works would once again see circulation.

Spotlighted Titles:

The Temptation to Exist, by E.M. Cioran, translated by Richard Howard

Romanian thinker Emil or E.M. Cioran first published this work in French in 1956. Cioran’s themes, rendered in crystalline clarity by Richard Howard, are some of the most interesting approaches of his era’s philosophers. His musings simultaneously evoke a nearly complete irreverence for topics not traditionally addressed and a beautiful lyrical quality that finds beauty in his despairing musings on his existential, nihilistic, and skeptical ideas.

Strange Times, My Dear, edited by Nahid Mozaffari

This poetry collection, coming in at a behemoth of just under 500 pages, is one of the works that the treasury of the US attempted to censor due to being from a country on the “America’s enemies” list. Arcade, along with the American PEN center, the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, and the Association of American University Presses, filed a joint lawsuit against the government and forced the changing of such standards regarding the publication of translated literature. In addition to being tied to this important action in American history, the collection elucidates much of the Iranian culture that has been unseen to American eyes for the past few decades. It’s a sprawling, impressive collection—one of the few that allows English-language speakers to peak into an Iranian way of life.

Check out more of their titles here!