Reception for Heresy Press

“I’m Bernard Schweizer, co-founder and director of Heresy Press, the publishing house that’s now approaching only its second anniversary; yet, somehow it feels like it’s been an integral part of my life for a very long time. And maybe it has, in a way… quietly biding its time, waiting for the right occasion to come out and manifest itself. But what is certainly clear is that leading Heresy Press has been the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done.

Flashback to 2019: That year I took early retirement from my academic faculty position in New York, and for a while I toyed with the idea of educating myself on First-Amendment Law to become a kind of free speech consultant or to join a task force going around college campuses educating students on the virtues of free inquiry and open debate. But then COVID happened, and the plans for my post-retirement vocation were reshuffled.

During the months of lockdown and the following 2-3 years of social distancing, I wrote a novel—a beautiful, ambitious, unconventional, and…apparently unsellable novel. Once it became clear that my novel wasn’t going to make it past the gatekeepers, Liang suggested that I should turn the tables on the situation and go into publishing instead. I thought that was a Quixotic idea, at best. But Liang is nothing if not persistent, and after a while I began to warm up to the idea. I realized that opening a publishing house would be just another outlet for my free speech advocacy! I was building a platform for free-spirited writers, so they could practice their craft unhindered.

The last two years have only confirmed for me that the world truly needs publishers like Heresy Press and Skyhorse. We are giving hope to writers—and many readers—by providing an alternative to the status quo of mainstream publishing. We show that literature does not need to be neutered by sensitivity readers, that books don’t need to be made child-proof by moral scolds, and that novels are not instruments of social justice and identity politics. Instead, the best books have since time immemorial often been wild, disruptive, and irreverent. I’m thinking of, for instance, Aristophanes, Lucian, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Rebecca West, Han Kang, Emmalea Russo, Bruce Wagner, and so on. We have to preserve the boundary pushing spirit of this kind of writing at all cost.

And you are all here, presumably, because you see value in this outlook, and I want thank you for your support. A special thanks goes to Nadine Strossen, who gave me guidance and encouragement when Heresy Press was no more than a one-page business plan back in November of 2022. My gratitude also goes to Pamela Paul, whose mention of Heresy Press in her NYT article “The Long Shadow of American Dirt” gave us our first big exposure and
put Heresy Press on the map, so to speak. And, of course, I want to thank Tony Lyons, our host tonight, for being a courageous publisher and icon of viewpoint diversity who decided to give Heresy Press a big leg up, bringing us to the next level as an imprint of Skyhorse. And most of all, I want to thank my wife, Liang, whose visionary impulse made me believe that I could to make the transition from teaching books to actually publishing them.

In that spirit of gratitude, I raise my glass to truly independent, fearless publishing!”