In a time when publishers are under financial stress, it seems foolhardy to launch a new imprint devoted solely to literary fiction. But we did it and it’s working.

Dundurn Press, from its founding in 1972 until the retirement of its founder in 2019, was known primarily for nonfiction, especially books on Canadian history. When Kwame Fraser took over as publisher in 2019, he hired new acquiring editors and rebranded the company with a more contemporary look. This change included launching an imprint for literary fiction. The idea was to create a separate label for work that was sophisticated and challenging, the kind of thing prize juries would notice.

So we had a lot of fun coming up with possible names for it. Ideas thrown out included: Hiraeth Press (the Welsh word for longing for home), Sonar, Submarine, Undertow, Factory, Dazzle Ships, Uncanny Valley, and There Goes My Outfit (my personal favorite, though too flippant). We settled on Rare Machines because a book is a kind of a rare machine, and so is a writer. The imprint’s logo is a wind-up bird.

This list of words gives an idea of what we were trying to suggest: something stylish with a hint of the underground. We are aware that our readers live in a connected world and so are not driven by localist or nationalist biases; they are aware of and influenced by the culture of the world at large. Our writers all have some connection to Canada but are cosmopolitan and outward-looking, and not all their stories are set in this country. The recent release South by Babak Lakghomi, for example, is a dreamlike story of surveillance and repression set on the oil rigs and howling deserts of an unidentified Middle Eastern dictatorship. Our goal is to represent a diversity of voices and styles, and to bring Canada to the world.

We’ve had particular success with hybrids, literary books that borrow from or play on genre conventions. Yume, by Sifton Tracy Anipare, is a novel about a young African Canadian woman teaching English in Japan—and battling demons from Japanese folklore. Autonomy, by Victoria Hetherington, is speculative fiction about a future North America haunted by a new pandemic, written in such a literary and philosophical style that one might think it a feminist memoir.

Since we launched the imprint two years ago, Rare Machines books have been nominated for a total of eight awards, including a longlist nomination for the $100,000 Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious prize, for In the City of Pigs by Andre Forget, a novel about the unlikely relations between classical music and real estate development. (This novel was also shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.)

These successes have in turn led to a rise in submissions from authors previously published by Big Five presses. Next year we will publish The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, by Timothy Taylor, whose previous books have been shortlisted for many awards including the Giller Prize.

And in January 2024, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we are releasing an anthology of erotic writing called Secret Sex. This is a Canadian twist on the “anonymous sex writing” idea—24 authors, 24 short pieces of writing about sex, with no names attached to each piece. The authors’ names are listed, but readers must guess who has written what. The idea is to allow writers to be more free and honest, and even perhaps more explicit, than they would normally publicly be. The list of authors who agreed to participate is dazzling: it includes Lisa Moore, Heather O’Neil, Pasha Malla, Michael Winter, Susan Swan, Zoe Whittall, francesca ekwuyasi, and Drew Hayden Taylor, as well as a number of early-career writers we are excited to have discovered. These pieces range from the subtle and melancholic to the frankly graphic and the gleefully silly (one of the more conceptual pieces is compiled entirely from actual titles of Pornhub videos).

We hope to be able to continue to show that the greatest advantage of being an independent press is the ability to take risks.

Russell Smith is an author, journalist, and editor of the Rare Machines imprint at Dundurn Press. He lives in Toronto.

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