A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.

In 2008, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf published Stieg Larsson’s posthumous The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; this was the first time since 1954 that a novel translated from Swedish to English (in this case by Steven Murray under the pseudonym Reg Keeland) landed on the New York Times (NYT) bestseller list. For a modest five weeks, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo stayed on the coveted list. The following year, however, its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, hit the list for 21 weeks. With the release of the third title in the Millennium series, Knopf benefitted from buzz around the franchise and the highly anticipated cinematic adaptation of book one. The result was unprecedented. According to our analysis of 90 years of the NYT hardcover bestseller lists, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest spent nearly 80 weeks—more than a year and a half—in a top 10 spot. This gives Larsson’s novel the record of securing the longest length of time on the NYT bestseller list of any translated novel—from any language—ever.

Larsson’s trilogy was a harbinger of what would prove to be the richest burst of translated bestsellers in the US in more than half a century. For example, the ensuing decade saw tremendous success for the genre of “Nordic Noir,” what Karl Berglund calls “one of the most important genres in the top commercial segment of the contemporary global book trade.” For bestsellers in the US, this has included titles by Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, and Fredrik Backman, as well as David Lagercrantz, who continued the series after Larsson’s death, and Lars Kepler (a pseudonym that is also an homage to Larsson). However, genre alone doesn’t explain what we’ve experienced. Bestseller lists in the US from this period also featured Nordic authors outside the noir genre such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, as well as works in translation by authors writing in non-Nordic languages, including Haruki Murakami (Japanese); Isabel Allende and Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Spanish); Paulo Coelho (Portuguese); Elena Ferrante (Italian); Herman Koch (Dutch); Nina George (German); and Kyung-sook Shin, the first Korean-language author on the lists in NYT history (though, significantly, not the last). Together, all these authors signal nothing less than a renaissance of translated bestsellers in the US, particularly from 2008 to 2020.

How has such a renaissance gone unnoticed? The answer is that our understanding of the translated international bestseller and its history in the US is enormously incomplete.

To get a better sense of the popularity of translated fiction over time, we turned to the NYT bestseller list, which has tracked bestsellers in the US since 1931. We drew from an existing dataset by Jordan Pruett comprising all hardcover NYT bestsellers in fiction. Bestseller lists like that of the NYT, Pruett explains, are heavily curated based on editorial preferences rather than pure sales metrics. Nevertheless, these lists significantly determine the perception of what constitutes a “bestseller,” and they provide a consistent data source on popular fiction.

We wanted to know how often US bestsellers were originally written in languages other than English. To find out, we compiled information on all 7,431 fiction bestsellers from 1931 to 2020, identifying author nationality, original publication language, and country of publisher for each title. Sorting out those novels originally written in languages other than English enabled us to arrive at a subset of 176 instances in which translated titles hit the NYT bestseller lists. Collectively, they provide a broad overview of trends related to the history of translated bestsellers.

We can gloss these results as such: From 1931 to 2020, just 2.4 percent of the NYT bestseller lists in fiction were in translation, that is, titles originally written in languages other than English. On the surface, that number seems low. In fact, it’s larger than the national average of total works of fiction translated into English, which is less than 1 percent.

A closer look reveals three distinct waves in which the popularity of translated works suddenly rises. Each wave leads to a blossoming of linguistic and generic trends within the market before dissipating rapidly. Between these waves, in the trenches, bestsellers in translation fall to nearly zero.

The first wave began before World War II and crested in the prosperous postwar years. These bestsellers were mainly European titles, especially novels originally written in German, French, Finnish, and Italian, as well as several in Russian. The second wave begins in the 1970s with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated by Gregory Rabassa). This wave largely aligns with what scholars refer to as the “Latin American Boom,” accompanied by several postmodern conspiracy novels by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (all translated by William Weaver). The second wave is notably diminished compared to the first. Finally, we see the phenomenon described above, in which Nordic noir accounts for part, but not all, of a more recent surge. This third wave still pales in comparison to the first, but it gains more density than the second and in a shorter amount of time. The chart below visualizes these trends.

Figure 1

US culture is not understood as being particularly cosmopolitan. Other data studies by Matthew Wilkens and Nora Shaalan have documented the “insularity” of US fiction and print culture. Nevertheless, the three waves of translated bestsellers suggest that, despite the persistently low share of published translations in the US, when available resources come together to bring international works to market, readers are eagerly standing by. So what accounts for the dips and dives? Why do translations nearly disappear from NYT lists only to proliferate later?

Analyzing nearly a century of global publishing history is difficult, and much of the complexity falls beyond our scope here. But one thing is certain: the success of translated novels in the US is unstable; so, like a wobbly table, it depends on an ever-changing system of support.

while bestsellers reflect the highest levels of literary mass culture, it’s the support networks built by smaller institutions that make these titles possible.

Take the example of German fiction in wave one: In the aftermath of World War II, German-language literature surged in popularity in the US. Novels like Désirée by Annemarie Selinko, a sweeping historical romance set during the Napoleonic era, and The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, which tells the story of the miraculous visions of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, offered readers a glimpse into matters of European identity and spirituality after the war. Similarly, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, another work by Werfel, narrated the harrowing tale of Armenian resistance to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, while A Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque explored the flight of refugees during the Second World War. These books helped shape the American perception of Europe’s postwar reconstruction and the ongoing effects of its recent conflicts.

The business of translations at the time was largely the purview of independent publishing heads and their own idiosyncratic priorities. But this literary influx was steered by a host of institutions committed to promoting European culture in the United States. University presses were crucial in translating German works into English in the postwar era. Cultural exchange programs like the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (which began in the 1940s) helped foster connections between American scholars and German writers. Government initiatives, including the US Information Agency (USIA), promoted cultural diplomacy through literature during the Cold War era. Additionally, private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation funded many translation projects, ensuring that German works they deemed important reached a wider American audience.

As the immediacy of postwar reconstruction faded, the once-booming market for German translations gradually also declined. This decline coincided with the early restructuring signs of what Dan Sinykin calls the conglomeration era in US publishing. Conglomeration also disrupted national publishing traditions outside the US, though not exactly in the same way. In Germany, conglomeration shifted the focus of publishers to the business of imports, whereas, in the United States, publishing conglomeration prioritized exports.

The results seemed to have been mutually advantageous for publishers from both nations. For example, a major deal in 1969 entailed the merger of Droemer Knaur with four other German publishing houses. The newly merged publishing giant made it “the specialty of the house” to collaborate with US publishers directly, with the aim of identifying US bestsellers for German readers. One publishing journalist termed this the invention of “bestsellerism” in Germany. The emergence of scouting agencies, particularly from Zurich, aided this process. In the 1950s, Lothar Mohrenwitz, Ruth Liepman, and Erich Linder, to name but three of the “pioneers,” all started Swiss scouting agencies that “primarily involved selling English language rights to German publishers.” And in the 1970s, ambitious publishing heads such as Fritz Molden aggressively pursued US bestsellers such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, offering huge price tags on licensing deals. The tactic eventually led Molden to bankruptcy, but not before he brought half of the top ten NYT bestsellers of the ’70s to Germany, helping incite a craze for US popular culture that his compatriots criticized as the “Amerikanisierung” or the Americanization of German culture. From these examples it’s easy to see why the period in which US novels were more stridently marketed around the world also led to a sharp decline in the number of translated bestsellers in US culture.

From 1965 to 1970, hardly any works in translation emerged as bestsellers. Then, in 1970, the English translation of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude made the NYT lists, if only for one week. Nevertheless, it sparked a literary explosion from Latin America that lasted through the 1970s and ’80s. Other titles by the Colombian magical realist, including Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth were bigger hits. They paved the way for Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, which transported readers to the Chilean and Californian landscapes during the Gold Rush, and Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which spent a record 61 weeks on the charts, surpassing the French and German titles of the previous wave. These works, full of multigenerational sagas and social relevance, obviously struck a deep chord with American readers.

This wave was also buoyed by an institutional and literary network, which, this time, brought Latin American voices to the world stage. As Deborah Cohn has explored, the boom was the result of complex negotiations of Cold War nationalism, though writers ultimately benefited from the “increased availability of funding and subsidies from public and private organizations seeking to cultivate positive relations with Latin American artists and intellectuals.” Major private initiatives came from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations and the Center for Inter-American Relations. US government efforts included cultural exchange programs like the Fulbright Program and the USIA, along with support for Latin American writers through the National Endowment for the Arts). Gregory Rabassa, who translated Márquez’s bestsellers into English, has emphasized the professionalization of translation during this era, including the formation of the American Translators Association (ATA) in 1959, the first National Book Award for Translation in 1968, and the establishment of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 1978. Additionally, a major advocate for translations into English that emerged during the second wave were nonprofit independent presses such as Graywolf (founded in 1974) and Coffee House (founded in 1972), as well as Dalkey Archive (founded in 1984).

Like the first wave, however, the second doesn’t last forever. By the turn of the millennium, bestsellers in translation had once again fallen to zero. Notably, Gisèle Sapiro clarifies how this moment marks the height of globalization in the publishing industry: measured by the rise of English as the target language of literary translations. The hegemony of English, she concluded, severely diminished translations from other languages, including Spanish. Corresponding precisely with the dying out of the second wave, Sapiro’s theory of globalization suggests a second time in which the restructuring of the publishing industry, this time on a global scale, bears immediate consequences for international bestsellers.

This brings us full circle to Larsson and his peers. Following the decline of translations into English (again), it’s not surprising to find a variety of on-the-ground responses since the early 2000s. New efforts by Open Letter Books (founded in 2008), Archipelago Books (founded in 2003), and the Classics division (founded in 1999) of the established New York Review of Books have all renewed efforts to import translations from around the world. Meanwhile, now stalwart independents such as Graywolf and Coffee House continue their missions. Such efforts may account for some of the cultural flourishing that has made the third wave so diverse. The presence of Elena Ferrante on the NYT lists, for example, is an immediate outcome of the establishment of Europa Editions in 2005, whose founding goal was to import English translations from Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O.

But as Anna Muenchrath shows, one newcomer on the scene with enormous leverage is Amazon Crossing (founded in 2010). Amazon generates its translation cycle based on algorithmic data about user preferences. Not only has Amazon emerged as the largest source of translations into English, Muenchrath discovered, but the corporation now “has a relative monopoly on translations out of” Nordic languages, including Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Danish, and Icelandic. Consequently, the generic explosion of Nordic noir at the heart of the third wave may be primarily an outcome of a US corporation wresting away the business of translating, publishing, and selling books to American readers from traditional institutions.

This serves as a reminder that while bestsellers reflect the highest levels of literary mass culture, it’s the support networks built by smaller institutions that make these titles possible. By focusing on independent presses, cultural organizations, and translators, we can better understand—and even anticipate—future trends in global literature. In the end, these support structures, though often operating behind the scenes, bear much responsibility for creating the conditions that give rise to the blockbuster international titles that dominate bestseller lists.

At the same time, it’s clear that, beyond even the most strident efforts by cultural ambassadors and advocates for diversity in US publishing, other forces are at work on an enormous, even global scale: conglomeration, globalization, and digital platforms. Where the industry shifts next, even Amazon can’t predict.