The Pushkin Press offices in Bloomsbury occupy two floors above a shuttered Italian deli on Lamb's Conduit Street. On a Tuesday afternoon in early April, the publisher Adam Freudenheim was sorting through proofs for the autumn 2026 list. Forty-one titles, fourteen of them reissues. Twenty-three translators across nineteen source languages.
Freudenheim took over Pushkin in 2012 from its founder Melissa Ulfane, who had run the press on a small scale since 1997. The imprint then carried perhaps thirty titles in print. As of spring 2026 the figure is 624. The growth is one of the more striking quiet stories in twenty-first century British publishing.
Pickering, who first read a Pushkin edition of Stefan Zweig in 2003, has been reviewing the press's titles for almost as long as it has existed in its current form. The pattern across two decades is legible. The first ten years were dominated by mittel-European recovery: Zweig, Joseph Roth, Antal Szerb, Sándor Márai. The middle decade widened: Yoko Tawada, Antonio Tabucchi, Andrés Neuman, Mathias Énard.
The current decade has done something different. The 2026 list, taken alongside the 2025 one, contains translations from Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tamil, Arabic, Albanian, and Lithuanian. Of the forty-one titles in the autumn list, only seven are from major European languages. The press has tilted, deliberately, toward what its catalogue copy calls the smaller traditions.
Whether this is recovery or expansion is a fair question. A small press built on bringing back forgotten Europeans is a different animal from one that commissions first translations from the global periphery. The economics are different. The risk profile is different. The introductions, which Pushkin has historically commissioned at modest length, have grown.
Take the autumn lead title, a first English translation of the Albanian novelist Ridvan Dibra's The Legend of Loneliness, originally published in Tirana in 1996. The translator, Lleshi Berisha, has been working on the book since 2018. The introduction, by the critic Robert Elsie's literary executor, runs to 6,200 words and includes a four-page note on the post-1991 Albanian literary scene.
This is more apparatus than Pushkin used to offer. It is also more apparatus than many readers will want. But for a book that the English-language reader is unlikely to have any prior framework for, the apparatus does necessary work.
The press's reissue line, which Freudenheim formalised in 2017 as Pushkin Vertigo and as a separate Pushkin Collection imprint, has settled into a rhythm of about twenty titles a year. The 2026 reissues include three Zweig short story collections, two Antal Szerb novels, and a long-overdue reprinting of Yasushi Inoue's Bullfight, last in print in English in 2013.
The Inoue is a useful test case. The 2013 edition, from a now-defunct American imprint, sold somewhere between 1,800 and 2,400 copies. The Pushkin edition, with a new introduction by Mieko Kawakami and a slightly revised translation, has a first printing of 7,500 copies. The difference is not entirely down to Pushkin's marketing reach. Some of it is the Kawakami name, which has its own audience now.
Freudenheim has said in interviews that he commissions introductions from current writers as a matter of policy. The rationale is that the introduction does double duty: it positions the reissued book and it gives the contemporary writer's audience a reason to attend.
This is a more commercial logic than the press's first decade operated under. Whether it has cost the catalogue anything is debatable. A Kawakami introduction to Inoue is not, in itself, a betrayal of seriousness. Kawakami is a serious reader of Inoue. The introduction, which runs to 4,800 words, is mostly about Inoue's prose rhythms, not about Kawakami.
Still, there is a question of scale. A press that publishes forty-one titles in a single season is not a boutique. Pushkin now has a staff of eighteen, an American distribution arrangement with W. W. Norton, and translation rights deals with publishers in nine countries. The 2025 fiscal year, according to filings at Companies House, saw turnover of just under 4.1 million pounds.
Compare this to NYRB Classics' parent operation in New York, or to the Italian imprint Adelphi, or to Sort of Books in Edinburgh, and Pushkin is no longer the small operation. It is the medium-large operation. It is, in some sense, the institution that NYRB was twenty years ago and that Adelphi has been since the 1970s.
Pickering's concern, reading through the autumn list across a long weekend in early April, is not that Pushkin has become commercial. The titles are not commercial in the trade sense. The concern is that a press built on the unusual has begun to develop a recognisable Pushkin sensibility, the way Faber developed a recognisable Faber sensibility in the 1960s.
A recognisable sensibility is not necessarily a problem. It is a feature of mature imprints. But it does change what a reader expects from a Pushkin title. The expectation now is for the slightly strange, the carefully translated, the book that comes with a 5,000-word introduction by a writer the reader already trusts.
Which is to say that the press has, almost without anyone noticing, become a brand. Readers buy Pushkin titles on the brand. Bookshops stock Pushkin titles on the brand. The brand is doing real work, and it is the kind of work that lets a small press carry an Albanian novelist's first English appearance with a 7,500-copy first printing.
The cost of the brand, if there is one, is a slight narrowing of risk. A press that knows what its readers want will, over time, give its readers more of what they want. The titles get a little more refined. The covers get a little more uniform. The introductions get a little longer.
Pickering came away from the autumn list mostly persuaded. Forty-one books, fourteen of them reissues, in nineteen source languages, with an average page count of 246. It is a serious season's work. The Inoue alone is worth the price of the catalogue.
Whether Pushkin in 2036 will still feel like Pushkin is the open question. The Bloomsbury offices are not getting any cheaper. The translation grant landscape is not getting any healthier. The reading audience for serious fiction in English, by every measure available, is not growing. None of this is the press's fault. All of it is the press's problem to manage. So far the management has held.