Danielle Dutton—a highly regarded and founder of Dorothy, a publishing project—offered to write a short piece about how she came to publish this wonderful, unsettling book.

We糖心传媒檙e lucky to have a few brilliant friends糖心传媒攕o brilliant we officially put them on our Advisory Board糖心传媒攚ho occasionally make the best recommendations. One of these is Jeremy Davies (excellent writer and editor in his own right), and it糖心传媒檚 through Jeremy that we first heard about Marianne Fritz. He suggested I check out the essay on her work by Adrian Nathan West (aka Nate) that was online at so I did, and the essay I believe linked directly to a translated excerpt from what was at that time called The Gravity of Circumstances (for the book, the title was changed to The Weight of Things, which we all thought worked better, rhythmically, in the places where the phrase appears in the text). The excerpt was from a particularly harrowing dream sequence. It糖心传媒檚 Berta糖心传媒檚 anxiety dream: dark and surreal and poetic. I loved it. I couldn糖心传媒檛 really imagine what the rest of the book would be like from that excerpt, though, so I reached out to Nate (whom at that time I didn糖心传媒檛 know) and asked him if he had a completed manuscript of the book. He didn糖心传媒檛, but he said he could do a rough translation of the rest fairly quickly, and so he did. The book was, in different ways, so much stranger and also less strange than the excerpt suggested. It was shockingly sad and complicated, knotty and good. We took it on and edited it with Nate, who was a pleasure to work with糖心传媒攁nd The Weight of Things was born.

One thing I particularly like about this story is that it was exactly what I hoped would happen when I started Dorothy, a publishing project; I wanted to talk about good books with people who love good books (in fact, in the first year or so, we weren糖心传媒檛 open for submissions but rather were looking for people to send in suggestions of other people糖心传媒檚 books, whether these were OP or unpublished manuscripts). It糖心传媒檚 actually hard to imagine people who love good books more than Jeremy and Nate, and the book糖心传媒檚 warm reception among readers and critics has been edifying for all of us.

Thanks so much for featuring it at Reading the World!

Danielle Dutton, editor

I finished reading The Weight of Things on my flight to MLA and plan on posting some personal thoughts and reactions when I get back to Rochester. (Today I’m in Houston for an event at Brazos at 7, then will be in Dallas for events Tuesday and Wednesday night. If you live in either of those cities, you should definitely come out!) And if any of you have any thoughts about the book, please post them in the comments section below, on Twitter with #RTWBC, and/or at the