PERSEA BOOKS is now more than twenty-five years old. We are an independent, literary publishing house, founded in 1975 by Michael Braziller and Karen Braziller, who still own and direct the company. We are distributed by W. W. Norton and Co., and have produced hundreds of engaging and consequential books.

Our aim is to publish works that endure by meeting high standards of literary merit and relevance. We have often taken on important books other publishers have overlooked, or have made significant discoveries, whether of a single work or writer's entire oeuvre. Among these finds are the fiction of Anzia Yezierska (especially her classic feminist, Jewish immigrant novel, Bread Givers) and the opus of the distinctive modernist poet and thinker, Laura (Riding) Jackson. We also introduced the extraordinary fifteenth-century French feminist Christine de Pizan to the English-speaking world for the first time since 1621, through the publication of The Book of the City of Ladies-now required reading alongside Bocaccio and Milton in surveys of world literature at such universities as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia.We published the first novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Oscar Hijuelos, as well as definitive translations of major twentieth-century poets, including the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and the Holocaust poet Paul Celan.  

Our books cover a wide range of themes, styles, and genres. We have published poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, biography, titles of Jewish and Middle Eastern interest, women's studies, American Indian folklore, and revived classics, as well as a notable selection of works in translation. In addition to the writers listed above, our roster of classic and current American and international authors includes Osip Mandelstam, Breyten Breytenbach, Carl Friedman, Earl Lovelace, Savyon Liebrecht, Jean Said Makdisi, Pablo Medina, Elizabeth Jolley, Les Murray, and Thylias Moss.

Beyond our books published for a general readership, we continue to expand our Young Adult selections, with highly intelligent books by authors such as Anne Mazer, Gary Soto, and Marie Raphael.. These works complement our highly acclaimed series of literary anthologies, which include America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories, Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land, A Walk in My World: International Short Stories About Youth, Starting With "I": Personal Essays by Teenagers, and many more.