Termination of the Arts

Queridos Amigos,

     A nation without a vigorous arts and literature scene is like a person without an inner voice. Democracy is loud, messy, and contradictory. Nobody wants to hear only one viewpoint, especially when that viewpoint belongs to the commander-in-chief. Yet that is what President Donald Trump is seeking: to listen only to himself.

     On Friday, May 2, 2025, at 9:38 p.m.—just before the weekend—a letter came in from the National Endowment for the Arts canceling our current grant. You can read it below. Like dozens of other arts and literature nonprofits in the country, all important in our ecosystem, we have received, for years now, support from the NEA, which is de facto tax payers’ money. The projects that the NEA chooses to support go through a rigorous selection process.

      From the start, our work at Restless Books has been devoted to publishing superb international literature in English translation for children and adults, including novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, theater, and travel writing, as well as immigrant writing from across the globe and reimagined literary classics for underserved communities.

     The NEA grant we received this year was for $25,000, not an insignificant portion of our annual budget. When I received the letter notifying us of the termination of this grant, we had just received the final installment of the money. We are fortunate that the books supported by the NEA this year are already well into production, so we were able to request this money relatively early in the year. Others were not so lucky. We had also recently submitted our application for the next fiscal year. Clearly, our chances of receiving that grant are negligible.

     I disagree with the NEA’s determination: like others across the ideological divide, ours too is a voice within “the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity.” If the NEA has been guilty of supporting an homogeneous left-leaning worldview, as President Trump and his cabinet suggest, the solution isn’t to dismantle the NEA as a whole. To destroy is easy: it takes little creativity and pays no attention to artistic heritage. It is harder but far more important to build a balanced palate.

     Although we didn’t seek it, Restless Books now provides an official alternative to the numbing cultural revolution this administration is intent on orchestrating. Similar experiences in Pinochet’s Chile, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Hitler’s Germany, and other ideologically intolerant regimes serve as a lesson. America, we all believe, is exceptional. Is that no longer the case? Exceptionality is never a done deal: we must collectively work for it.

     As the cofounder and publisher of Restless Books, I stand undeterred, not because I disagree with President Trump (actually, a few of his aims are indeed commendable) but because I believe a single, stultifying viewpoint, coming from the left or from the right, is antithetical to a pluralistic democracy. For decades, the Republican Party has advocated for less government. How ironic that nothing now falls outside the government’s purview.

     For me, the best government is a small government, one that doesn’t seek to be the center of attention. The best government values art and literature for their independence and not as a propaganda tool.

     Sinceramente,

Ilan Stavans

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <no-reply@arts.gov>
Date: Fri, May 2, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Subject: Notice of Termination: NEA AWARD 1933681-52-25, Restless Books Inc


Dear Ilan Stavans:

This is to inform you that the above referenced National Endowment for the Arts award has been terminated, effective May 31, 2025.

The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities. The NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities. Funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.

Your project, as noted below, unfortunately does not align with these priorities:
Purpose: To support the publication and promotion of international literature.

The agency issued an award to your organization, subject to you agreeing to and accepting certain terms and conditions. You accepted the offer of funding, which was subject to the General Terms and Conditions (GTCs) that apply to all NEA awards. Per your award’s GTCs, the National Endowment for the Arts may terminate a federal award to the greatest extent authorized by law if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. These provisions were clearly and unambiguously specified, as required by 2 CFR 200.340(b), and are consistent with the requirements of 2 CFR 200.340(a)(4), and the NEA’s authorizing statute at 20 USC 954 and 959. Accordingly, because your project no longer effectuates agency priorities, the agency is exercising its ability to terminate this grant award in accordance with the GTCs with which you agreed to comply.

TERMINATION PROVISIONS
Period of Performance: The period of performance is changed administratively to end May 31, 2025. NEA support for this project does not extend beyond this date.

Payment requests (if applicable): If you have award funds remaining as of the date of this notice, you may submit a final payment request reflecting actual, allowable, approved costs incurred during the revised period of performance. A final payment request must be submitted by June 30, 2025. Failure to submit a final payment request by this date will result in the de-obligation of your award’s remaining funding.

Final Reports: You must submit a Federal Financial Report (FFR) for the award by July 31, 2025. The FFR must reflect actual, allowable, approved costs incurred during the revised period of performance. All other final and/or interim performance reporting requirements, including the Final Descriptive Report and the Geographic Location of Project Activity (GEO), are waived. Failure to submit an FFR by this date may result in your organization being ineligible for future National Endowment for the Arts funding opportunities. All other provisions of your award including record retention requirements remain in effect.

Appeal: You may appeal this determination within seven (7) calendar days of this notice if you believe your project meets one of the agency’s new priorities. Email grants@arts.gov and provide documentation that your project supports one of the specific priorities set forth above.

Sincerely,
The National Endowment for the Arts


*Please do not reply to this email. This email box is not monitored.

Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

April 14

What best distinguished Mario Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima on April 13, 2025, was the voraciousness of his intellect and the elasticity of his literary talent. He was an advocate for the free-flow of ideas and a meticulous portraitist of what makes Latin America a fascinatingly complex landscape. 

I admired Vargas Llosa’s stamina, his unpredictability, his perseverance. Suspicious of ideological orthodoxies, he ran for president of Peru in 1990—and lost soundly. Twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The legacy he leaves behind is monumental: literature, he believed, must be far more than entertainment: it is sheer inquiry. As such, it must be defined by skepticism, by refusing to take anything for granted. 

His novels, from Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) to The Feast of the Goat (2000), offer a nuanced portrait of just about every layer of society. Imbued by the influence of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, they are written with a nineteenth-century flair for realism and a hope for totality, juxtaposing a multiplicity of voices in an effort to see truth in the sum of its parts.  

The last surviving member of the generation known as the Latin American Boom that included Julio Cortázar from Argentina, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico, José Donoso from Chile, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante from Cuba, Vargas Llosa was also a superb essayist. His fortnightly opinion column “Touchstone” (“Piedra de Toque”) for the Madrid-based newspaper El País was a lucid example of rigor and daring. Its style was as hypnotizing as it was thought-provoking. 

As Vargas Llosa’s career developed, so did his politics. He began as a fervent leftist and evolved into a supporter of neoliberal ideals. That odyssey maps the syncopated sides in the Spanish-speaking world. The swing of the pendulum is the true engine for progress.

—Ilan Stavans 

On This Day, in This Year, Reading is an Act of Resistance

January 20

Queridos Amigos,

Sometimes at night, when insomnia visits me, I imagine a country made up entirely of immigrants—every single one of its citizens. Would such a place be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis more typical states? Certainly not for any lack of roots, since immigrants, just like everyone else, have roots in abundance. And we have something else: “the immigrant ethos,” pushing forward all the time and at any cost, for ourselves and for others. I don’t think this dream of mine is dystopian. On the contrary, I would happily pledge allegiance to such a nation: after all, it would always feel new.

More than 14 percent of Americans are immigrants—a whopping 27 percent if you count their children who were born here. That’s over 90 million people, enough to make its own large country. (As an example, France today has a population of 66 million.) Of course, the issue of immigration is not new, neither here nor anywhere else. Odysseus is an immigrant, at least until his journey back to Ithaca is complete. The Bible is full of immigrants (Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham…). So were the songs of medieval troubadours. If the word “immigrant” doesn’t convince you as a referent in all these cases, just call them outsiders.

The United States has, from day one, questioned what it means to be an outsider, and how newcomers reinvent us as a nation. That’s also a global conversation. People from Egypt, Pakistan, and India constitute more than 80% of the population of the United Arab Emirates. Half a million Haitians have sought a better life in the Dominican Republic. The same can be said of Turkish citizens moving to Germany, Palestinians to Chile, Chinese and Vietnamese to South Korea, and people from Benin, Ghana, Niger, and Togo to Nigeria. For whatever the reason—financial, political, climatic—venturing from one’s place of birth to a safer haven is the defining force shaping the 21st century.

At Restless Books, empathizing with the outsider is our mission. In our increasingly polarized world—ruled by suspicion of the other, and shaped by the dangerous belief that immigrants seeking a better life pose a threat to citizens seeking the same—we remain committed to delivering superb stories from around the globe about people and ideas in motion.

Our books are often by and about immigrants. Their disparate stories open us up to unexpected discoveries about who we are. They illustrate that the movement of people from one place to another isn’t a threat but an affirmation of shared humanity. For these books to reach our shelves, they depend on another heroic figure: the translator. Without translators, language would divide our world rather than unite it. (Independent publishers like Restless are increasingly the best purveyors of literature in translation—take a look at World Literature Today’s list of 75 notable translations of 2024.) 

This year, I invite you to read books by immigrants, about immigrants, and books from countries other than your own. I am proud to say that 8 of the 11 books we will publish in 2025 are written by immigrant writers. Here is a sampling: 

Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl, a collection of Nahuatl poems by the most transformative thinker of the pre-Hispanic past in Mexico, inaugurates our new line of poetry books. 

What This Place Makes me: Contemporary Plays On Immigration brings together seven prize-winning American immigrant playwrights whose work looks at the capacity of outsiders to redefine us.

Linda Bondestam’s Good Morning, Space tells an illustrated story of a spirited young child who discovers space creatures waking up on the other end of a makeshift telescope at 4:00 a.m.

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s cult classic The Village Beyond the Mist, which famously inspired the film Spirited Away, will now be published for the first time in English on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Camille U. Adams’s How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir brings an astounding new voice and style to the genre, one that will redefine the Caribbean literary canon.

In addition to our publishing program, thanks to our ongoing collaboration with the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, we will continue our immigrant writing workshops to offer tools to emerging immigrant writers to tell their stories.

I also have the pleasure to announce that, in the spirit of debunking what used to be strict boundaries between literary genres, our prestigious Prize for New Immigrant Writing, awarding $10,000 and a residency at Millay Arts, will no longer separate submissions into fiction and nonfiction categories. In this 10th year of the prize, we will now accept both genres each year. The prize has proudly launched the careers of essential voices such as Grace Talusan, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Rajiv Mohabir, Priyanka Champaneri, Ani Gjika, and others. We look forward to the next generation of immigrant writers who will define our age through their unique insights.

I invite you to open these and other books and travel to unforeseen places. Yes, I invite you to do something humans depend on more than ever: the intimate art of reading. May the new year make us less suspicious of one another. Reading is the antidote. In the act and art of reading, we all become immigrants.

Gracias,

Ilan Stavans

Publisher