Idara Crespi
Literary Translator & Founding Editor
Idara Crespi was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada. She studied Journalism at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, a practical education oriented toward readers rather than disciplines, and came to translation through her work writing about arts and culture. She was reviewing an Italian novel when she found that the published English translation had made it smaller in every way that mattered. When the review was done, she translated the novel herself. Espresso Publishing House grew from that project.
Her work begins with a question that guides everything Espresso Publishing House does: which novels, celebrated in their original languages and beloved by generations of readers in France, Italy, Spain, or Germany, have never been adequately translated into English? And which of those deserve the careful, unhurried editorial attention that turns a competent translation into a book worth reading?
The answer, she has found, is a longer list than most readers would expect. The English-language literary canon is remarkable. It is also, by any measure, incomplete. The gap between what has been translated and what deserves to be translated is one of the most interesting territories in literature.
Her editions are made with care. Each title she translates carries an original introduction, placing the work and its author in their historical and literary moment without trying to do the reading for the reader.
Her first translation, The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani, was published in March 2026, the first complete English translation of a novel once read by millions of Italians across the peninsula. She is currently at work on two further Italian titles: Giovanni Verga's Story of a Blackcap (pre-order now; forthcoming March 2027) and Marta, or Faith, the opening volume of Mastriani's epic I Misteri di Napoli, forthcoming in September 2026.
Espresso Publishing House
Espresso Publishing House is a boutique literary imprint dedicated to foreign-language fiction that merits an English-language life. We look for works that are legally available, commercially interesting, and, above all, worth reading: novels with literary ambition, historical depth, and the power to surprise readers who encounter them for the first time.
We do not republish existing translations. Each Espresso edition is a new translation made directly from the original-language source text, prepared specifically for a contemporary English-language audience. We care about the quality of the translation, the design of the book, and the framing that helps readers understand why they are holding something worth their time.
Our catalogue currently spans Italian and Spanish literature, with French, German, and Russian titles in preparation. The Espresso Italian Classics series launched in March 2026 with Francesco Mastriani's The Blind Woman of Sorrento. The Espresso Spanish Classics series launched in May 2026 with Alarcón's The Three-Cornered Hat, translated by Inés Bou. The Espresso French Classics series opens in July 2026 with Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème, translated by Clémence Aubert, available to pre-order now.
The name reflects our ambitions: concentrated, carefully made, small-batch. European in spirit, international in scope. Every title we publish is there because we believe it belongs.
The gap between what deserves to be translated into English and what has been translated is larger than most readers suspect. Every title in the Espresso catalogue is our answer to that gap.
What We Look For
When Idara Crespi considers a title for Espresso Publishing House, she runs it past a small set of questions: partly editorial, partly practical, partly intuitive. Literary merit is necessary, not sufficient. What EPH looks for is the overlap between literary quality and a particular kind of English-language opportunity.
The works that interest us were genuinely read in their language of origin: not merely studied or anthologised, but loved. They have either never been translated into English at all, or they have been translated in ways that are no longer adequate: Victorian paraphrases, abridged editions, renderings that were competent for their era but now stand between the novel and contemporary readers. They still have something to say about money, desire, class, place, and the forces that shape a life, regardless of when they were written. And they can sustain careful translation without requiring readers who already know the cultural context.
On the practical side, EPH looks for works where our edition can be meaningfully better than anything currently available in English. That standard guides every decision, from selection through translation, editorial framing, and design. If a genuinely excellent English edition of a title already exists, EPH moves on. The point is not to publish another version of a great novel. It is to publish the version that should have existed years ago.
Not every work that meets those criteria makes the final list. The catalogue grows through restraint as much as ambition. But every title that does appear in it is there because it passed all of these tests, and because we believed, at the end of that process, that the right readers were waiting for it.
On Translation
Every Espresso Publishing House edition begins with the original. Not a previous translation, not a summary or adaptation. The source text in its original language, read closely, worked through sentence by sentence. What emerges is a new English text: one made specifically for contemporary readers, not constrained by the conventions of earlier translation eras or the limits of a different generation's English.
The novels EPH publishes were written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That era's Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian prose has its own rhythms, its own formal conventions, its own relationship between sentence structure and tone. A translation that simply updates the vocabulary while leaving the architecture of the original intact often produces something that reads like a period piece rather than a living text. EPH's approach is the reverse: stay faithful to what the original actually does. Its wit, its pacing, its register. Find the English that delivers the same effect to a reader who has never encountered the source.
Each title also includes an original introduction, a translator's note, and where the text requires it, historical notes. These are not academic apparatus. They are part of the reading experience: the framing that lets a first-time reader understand what they're holding, where the author came from, and why the novel still has something to say. The apparatus should open the book, not close it down.
EPH works with specialist translators assigned by language, each responsible for a particular literary tradition and each building expertise in the specific prose voice of their authors. That depth is not incidental. You translate a novelist differently after you've read three of his novels than after you've read one. The translations reflect it.
Our Translators
Espresso Publishing House works with a team of specialist translators. Each is assigned a language tradition and works with EPH across multiple titles, building continuity and depth within their literary field.
Idara Crespi — Italian
Idara Crespi is the founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House and the translator responsible for the Italian catalogue. Her translations include The Blind Woman of Sorrento (Francesco Mastriani, 2026), the forthcoming Story of a Blackcap (Giovanni Verga), and Marta, or Faith, the first volume of Mastriani's epic I Misteri di Napoli, scheduled for September 2026. Her full biography appears above.
Inés Bou — Spanish
There is a way of reading that comes from growing up between two languages: the habit of noticing, instinctively, when a word is doing the work of its setting and when it has been imported from somewhere it does not belong. Inés Bou grew up in Barcelona between Catalan at home and Castilian everywhere else, and the habit was already in place by the time she started thinking about literature. She has applied it, since then, to 19th-century Spanish fiction. Most insistently to Emilia Pardo Bazán. The settled English reading of Pardo Bazán treats her as a Spanish Naturalist in the line of Zola: urban, industrial, deterministic. But Pardo Bazán is Galician. Her novels are set in the wet green northwest, not the sunny south; her Naturalism is saturated with folk religion, regional Catholicism, and a social order that had almost nothing to do with anything Parisian. Strip that specificity out, as the available English editions have for over a century, and you produce a book that could have been set anywhere in 19th-century Western Europe. That was not the book she wrote. The Three-Cornered Hat is Inés's first translation for Espresso Publishing House; Sunstroke: A Love Story, her second.
Clémence Aubert — French
Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème has not had a proper English edition since 1897. The translations that exist are Victorian. Polite where Loti is wry, smoothed where he is uncomfortable. They lose the novel's central effect: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. The work of producing a contemporary rendering that stays with that irony, rather than rescuing the narrator from himself, is the project that brought Clémence Aubert to EPH. She lives in Lyon. The body of her work has been 19th-century French fiction, and the case she keeps returning to is that the English-language editions of these novels (Maupassant, Loti, Zola) have been rendered too palatable, for too long. Madame Chrysanthème is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.
Renata Lenz — German
Renata Lenz translates German fiction into English, and she has a long-running fixation. Paul Heyse won the Nobel Prize in 1910, and within a generation his English readership had collapsed. She thinks the explanation is in the translations. They render Heyse as another melancholy North German brooder, a Storm or an early Fontane, and Heyse is nothing of the kind. He is warm. He is sensual. He is, despite writing in German, Mediterranean in feeling. Translating a German-language writer who thinks and feels like a Neapolitan turns out to be a specific kind of problem, and one she has been working on for years. She is from Freiburg im Breisgau, the city on the German-French border where the architecture still argues about which country it belongs to; she has, she would say, never quite trusted writers who can't tolerate ambiguity. Her work for EPH extends across the Poetic Realist canon: Storm, Fontane, Keller, the others. L'Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.
Mira Sorokina — Russian
Most readers outside Russia encounter Kuprin, if at all, as a minor figure in the shadow of Chekhov. Mira Sorokina would push back on that. And on the larger pattern it points to. The English-language reception of 19th- and early-20th-century Russian fiction has been shaped almost entirely by what fits on a shelf next to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the writers who don't fit (Goncharov, Kuprin, Leskov, the early Bunin) have suffered for it. Worse, the writers who do fit have been edited, by their English translators, to fit better: accelerated past their slow passages, tidied past their digressions, moved along. The slowness, she argues, is often the meaning. Mira is from Kazan, where Russian and Tatar, Orthodox and Muslim, European and Asian have coexisted for five centuries; the way a city looks at itself, she would tell you, is always a translation problem. In The Garnet Bracelet, Kuprin builds toward tragedy through careful, slow layering. The impact depends on that patience. It is a story that resists being moved along. She is currently translating it for Espresso Publishing House.
Linnea Wahlström — Swedish
Linnea Wahlström translates Swedish literary fiction into English. Her case is straightforward. English translators of Swedish prose have spent a century unable to sit with Swedish silence. They soften plainness, warm restraint, and reach for the thesaurus when the writer was content with the plain word. The result is a long shelf of books louder than their originals. She intends to correct for this, sentence by sentence. She grew up in a parsonage in rural Värmland, in the country Selma Lagerlöf walked and named. She moved to Stockholm in her twenties and learned the trade in a small literary publisher there, by reading and by working alongside editors who had been doing it longer than she had. She does not have a graduate degree. She does have a long-running commitment to Victoria Benedictsson, whose Pengar she read in her late twenties and re-read the same weekend, in Swedish, to confirm it was as good as she thought. She joins Espresso Publishing House as the Swedish literary translator in May 2026.
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