FSG Closes Its MCD Imprint, and What That Says About the Future of the Weird
When was the last time you bought a book because it sounded strange? Not strange as in "not for me," but strange as in "I don't quite know what this is and I need to find out."
FSG has closed its MCD imprint. For those who don't know it: MCD was Farrar, Straus and Giroux's experimental arm, founded in 2016 and run by editor Sean McDonald, who departed April 15. Ten years building a catalog that bet on the unclassifiable — those books that arrive at bookstores and the bookseller isn't quite sure which shelf to put them on.
MCD published titles that won prizes that also weren't quite sure what they were, and books that sold better than expected without anyone being able to fully explain why. That is exactly what a good imprint does: create space for things the market didn't ask for but which, when they appeared, turned out to be necessary.
The closure is not a footnote. It's a symptom. The big publishing groups are closing or absorbing their riskiest imprints. Commercial logic crushes editorial logic. And in that process, the editors who know how to recognize a strange book and bet on it anyway — those people get lost too.
I think about books that exist because someone took a risk. La memoria de Shakespeare by Borges is exactly the kind of book that in today's market would be flagged as "a difficult editorial project." Same with Bolaño's early books, or Pizarnik's late poems. Those books came to exist because there were editors with their own criteria and a willingness to lose money on something that mattered.
I don't know if MCD's closure means FSG lost its taste for the strange or that the budget simply ran out. Probably both. But what I do know is that every time an imprint like this closes, the range of what's possible in English-language literature narrows a little more. And somewhere, someone has a manuscript that no longer knows where to send itself.
