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Sunday, November 11, 2018

Juris Jurjevics: R.I.P.

Juris Jurjevics, Publisher and Novelist, Dies at 75

From the New York Times:

Juris Jurjevics, a founder of Soho Press, an independent publisher that gambled on unsolicited manuscripts by emerging writers and produced serious novels and exotic crime stories, died on Wednesday in the Bronx. He was 75. The cause was heart disease. 

A Latvian-born refugee, Mr. Jurjevics (pronounced YUR-yeh-vitz) joined the publishing industry in 1968. He, Laura Chapman Hruska and her husband, Alan, founded Soho Press in 1986. 

“We want to publish the books that deserve to be published but that the bigger houses can’t afford to do,” Mr. Jurjevics told The New York Times at the time. Larger publishers needed to sell as many as 12,000 copies of a book just to break even, he said, but Soho, with lower overhead, could make a profit on sales of as few as 4,000. “Our ambitions,” he added, “are not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.” Soho, headquartered on Union Square in Manhattan, now publishes about 90 books a year under its imprints Soho Press, Soho Crime and Soho Teen. 

Mr. Jurjevics retired from Soho Press in 2006 to write full time. His first novel, The Trudeau Vector (2005), is a thriller that focuses on an American epidemiologist who travels to northern Canada, near the Arctic, to determine why scientists at a research center have mysteriously died. 

His Red Flags (2011) draws on his wartime experience in Vietnam, where an Army police officer finds himself in an American outpost seething with spies, South Vietnamese profiteers and battle-weary troops as Vietcong battalions prepare to descend from the hills.

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