Autumn 2026 · Season twenty-five
Low
Water
Six books between September and February, four of them first translations into English. The season takes its name from the reach of the Rondout in the weeks before the winter rains, when the channel narrows and the older banks show. We have set every cover in the shop on Abeel Street and printed them two colours at a time on a Vandercook 219. Editions are small and are not reprinted in the same setting.
The list
| Number | Title & author | Translator | Month | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Margit Hale | September | $18.00 | |
| 02 | A Map Folded Wrong | Anna Reszke | September | $17.00 |
| 03 | The Birch Register | Peter Sandström | October | $16.00 |
| 04 | Long Course | Daniel Vaz | November | $18.00 |
| 05 | Katherine Pell | January | $19.00 | |
| 06 | Leyla Mert | February | $17.00 |
Titles set in blue carry an excerpt. Three of the six are ready; the rest follow as the translations are passed.
Lead title · September 2026
Slack Water
Ilse Bregman · translated from the Dutch by Margit Hale
Marthe Doorn has not been back to the river town of her childhood in nineteen years. She returns in February to close her father's accounts and finds the ferry office still standing, the log books still shelved, and the channel he spent forty years keeping open silted to a depth of eleven inches.
Slack Water is a novel about the maintenance of a thing nobody has asked to be maintained. Bregman writes the river as a ledger — soundings, dredging permits, the long argument with the province over a single bend — and lets the family come up through the arithmetic. What emerges is a portrait of obligation without warmth, and of the peculiar dignity of people who keep records for a reader who will never arrive.
Her sixth book and the first in English. Winner of the Libris Prize, 2023.
Fiction224 pp.Paperback with flaps$18.00ISBN 978-1-951432-08-43 September 2026
The press
- Founded
- 2014
- Books a year
- Eight
- Languages to date
- Nineteen
Oxbow Editions publishes translated fiction and poetry, eight books a year, from two rooms above a former lumber office in Kingston. Every cover is set from metal and printed here, two colours at a time, on paper we buy a year ahead. We do this because it is cheaper than it looks and because a cover that has been handled by the people who chose the book tends to be a better cover.
We publish books that were written in another language and have not appeared in English. We pay translators a royalty and put their names on the front. We are interested in the novel of record — the book that counts something — and in poetry that has survived a hard translation.
We do not publish work originally written in English, anthologies, translations from a third language, or books that require an apparatus of notes to be legible. We do not run a contest. We read submissions from translators only, between January and March, and we answer every one, slowly.
Subscriptions
| Tier | Contents | Books | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Season | One season as published, posted on the day of release. | 6 | $96.00 |
| Full year | Both seasons, plus the winter pamphlet and a broadside printed in the shop. | 8 | $142.00 |
| Patron | Both seasons in the numbered binding, signed by the translator, and your name in the colophon of every book. | 8 | $420.00 |
Subscriptions outside the United States add $54.00 a year for postage. Cancel by writing to the office; we refund the unshipped remainder without argument.
Events
- 18 Sep Slack Water — Ilse Bregman and Margit Hale in conversation Kingston, NY · Rough Draft Bar & Books
- 02 Oct Translators' evening — four presses, one hour, no panel Brooklyn, NY · Unnameable Books
- 21 Oct The Birch Register — Peter Sandström reads the Finnish and the English Cambridge, MA · Grolier Poetry Book Shop
- 09 Nov Open shop — setting and printing the winter broadside Kingston, NY · 41 Abeel Street
- 05 Dec Long Course — Daniel Vaz on translating a swimmer's time Chicago, IL · Seminary Co-op