We spoke with Alana Wilcox, the editorial director of Coach House Books, in our latest member spotlight.
What is the history behind Coach House Books? When was it founded and what is its mission?
Coach House Books started in 1965 in, you guessed it, an old coach house in downtown Toronto. Sixty years later, we’re in a different coach house, but with the same spirit and on almost the same printing press; we did have to upgrade our Heidelberg press a few years ago from a 1965 to a 1973. We still print and bind all our books in our coach house, and we’re proudly Canadian, though we sometimes publish books by writers from beyond our borders.
Our mission is to publish adventurous and courageous books, books that challenge expectation or convention, in handsome volumes and accessible digital versions. We produce eighteen to twenty titles per year, with a fairly even split among poetry, literary fiction, and select nonfiction, including many books in translation—primarily from Quebec but increasingly from farther afield. We don’t chase prizes or bestseller lists, but we’ve found our way to both, including Giller Prizes, Griffin Poetry Prizes, Governor General’s Awards, and many others.
Can you tell us about some recent or upcoming Coach House Books titles?
We’ve just published the second novel by poet Lisa Robertson, Riverwork, and it’s already garnering much acclaim from critics and readers; ostensibly it’s about a buried river in Paris, but it’s also very much about women’s labor and the buried writerly aspirations of an older woman.
Like Riverwork, Munir Hachemi’s The Mulai and Geoffrey D. Morrison’s The Coffin of Honey—perhaps not coincidentally—are also about labour and language, both with a speculative fiction vibe. The Mulai is set on another planet in the future as an archeologist tries to understand how the Mulai live (and write!), and The Coffin of Honey imagines a post-revolutionary world that is visited by benevolent pill-shaped spaceships.
Celebrated poet Sina Queyras has collected, in On Occasion, over a hundred poems that reconsider what an occasional poem is. From Kaveh Akbar to Michael Ondaatje, these poets write not just about weddings and funerals, but also about political occasions, occasions of embodiment, and more.
Coach House Books celebrated its sixtieth anniversary last year. What are your hopes and goals for the press’s future?
We’re planning for another sixty years of adventurous and courageous publishing! And, in the process, continuing to expand what “adventurous and courageous” can mean.
Last year we published Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig. It’s a gorgeously written account of Maggie’s struggle to prevent the unhoused community living in her churchyard from being removed. It’s been a prizewinner and bestseller in Canada, and countless people have told us it changed the way they think about community and the unhoused. Our aim is to keep publishing books that tangibly encourage social and political change.
We plan, also, to keep proudly producing innovative literature that stands as an antidote to AI, books a machine could never dream of and that ask something of their readers.
What distributor is Coach House Books working with? How can bookstores and libraries find and order your titles?
Our American distributor is Ingram, through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. Bookstores and libraries can easily order our titles from Ingram Publisher Services. We work with Cursor Literary; they manage American publicity and marketing for us.
In Canada, you can find us at Raincoast Book Distribution via Publishers Group Canada.
Are there any indie bookstores (or libraries) that you think do a particularly good job featuring titles from indie publishers? If so, what do they do?
More and more indie bookstores are finding a kinship with indie publishers, and we love it! Winter Institute felt like a love fest this year!
So many stores support us, both by stocking our books and by writing blurbs and otherwise spreading the word—it seems unfair to name just a few! But here we go. McNally Jackson’s Soho store currently has a Coach House Books display, and we had rave advance quotes for Riverwork from Brad at East Bay Booksellers, Stephen at Point Reyes Books, James at Leviathan Bookstore, and Laurel at White Whale Bookstore. City Lights sells a ton of our books, and Elliott Bay Book Company, Books Are Magic, Three Lives & Company, and Interabang Books are all amazing and supportive. We could go on…
How can interested writers submit their work to Coach House Books?
Information about submitting can be found here. We are currently focusing on Canadian writers, but we do make exceptions…
