Canongate nabs Davis' newest in deal excluding sales through Amazon

Canongate has acquired a collection of short stories by International Booker Prize winner Lydia Davis and the book will be blocked from sale through Amazon—a first for the UK market—at the author’s request. Our Strangers will be made available for sale in physical bookshops, Bookshop.org, and other selected online independent retailers.

Editor-at-large Ellah Wakatama bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton.The title will be launched on 5th October, just ahead of the UK’s Bookshop Day. Bookshop.org will release the title in the US the same week via its Bookshop Editions imprint. Rights have also gone to Groschl (Germany), Atlas/Contact (the Netherlands) and Eterna Cadencia (Spain). 

Canongate said Davis was "deeply concerned about monopolistic bookselling and hopes this decision will both stand as a sign of her solidarity with independent booksellers and encourage further conversation about the vital importance of a diverse publishing ecosystem". 

Davis added: "I do not believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do. We value small businesses, yet we give too much of our business to the large and the powerful—and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice.

"I am all the more pleased now that Canongate, with its long history of independence and its high standards, will be publishing Our Strangers and doing so in a way that puts my book on the shelves of booksellers who are so much more likely to care about it."

Our Strangers is Davis’ seventh collection of fiction. It includes stories where "conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg, and mumbled remarks betray a marriage".

Davis is a short story writer, the author of one novel and of two volumes of non-fiction. This is her first book for Canongate after most of her work was published by Penguin and Picador in the UK. Her many awards in addition to the 2013 International Booker win include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. 

Wakatama called the collection "pure reading indulgence".

"I was captivated from the start by the playfulness with which Davis approaches form⁠—short, sharp, compact and so satisfyingly complete," Wakatama added. "It may look like flirtation with flash fiction but from her blessed pen there are whole chapters between the lines."