Associations

Linda Leith Publishing is a member of the following organizations:
Association of Canadian Publishers 
Literary Press Group of Canada 
eBound Canada
Association of English-language Publishers of Quebec.

Acknowledgement

Linda Leith Publishing is proud to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians through the country.

Netgalley

LLP is a subscriber to Netgalley, an online service for the electronic delivery of galleys and press materials. You can register and use this service to view selected new LLP titles at no cost for a limited period of time. 

The LLP Story

Linda Leith created LLP in June 2011, just six months after leaving Blue Metropolis Foundation. As the founder and artistic director of Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival for more than twelve marvelous years, she had the unique privilege of bringing some of the world’s best writers to Montreal – among them Mavis Gallant, Carlos Fuentes, A.B. Yehoshua, Norman Mailer, A.S. Byatt, and Alaa al Aswany. She is delighted now to have the opportunity to bring some of Canada’s best writers to the world.

As a new house starting up at the height of the digital revolution -- the first titles appeared in Spring 2012 -- LLP features fiction, short Singles essays, and cartoons, all in both print and electronic formats. As a reader, Leith has a special love of short books – novella-length fiction and the kinds of essays you can still find in the pages of The New Yorker but not too many other places – and edgy topics, but what she loves most of all are good books that might see the light of day if it were not for LLP. She is  proud to have published seven books with international appeal in the company's first year.

Year 1 at LLP

·      The Dead of Winter, the first in a three-part series of Luc Vanier novels by Montreal lawyer Peter Kirby;
·      Was It Good For You? … and other recent cartoons by Aislin, the legendary Montreal Gazette cartoonist.
·      Caricature Cartoon Canada, edited by Terry Mosher (Aislin), collecting “the best of the best” of Canadian editorial cartoons in English and French;
·      Abou Farman’s stunningly original essay on movement and migration, Clerks of the Passage;
·      Radio-host extraordinaire Tommy Schnurmacher’s smart, savvy, and funny Are We On Yet? Insider Secrets on How to be Interviewed (and other essential media skills);
·      Rick Salutin’s passionate and persuasive defence of public education and the public sector, Keeping the Public in Public Education, winner of the 2012 Lamp of Learning Award; and
·      Romanian-born Felicia Mihali’s The Darling of Kandahar, the first novel she has written in English, a top 10 pick for Canada Reads 2013.

Year 2 at LLP:

.       Wade Rowland's timely Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service (23 March 2013) is the third title in the LLP Singles essay series.
.       Love Letters of the Angels of Death, Albert writer Jennifer Quist's first novel (August 2013); 
. ​      The Girls of Piazza d'Amore, a quintessential Calabrian love story by Montrealer Connie Guzzo-McParland (September 2013);
.      Stephen Henighan's A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change (September 2013) is the fourth in LLP's Singles series of provocative essays; 
.       Vigilante Season, the much-anticipated second Luc Vanier novel from Montreal lawyer Peter Kirby (October 2013); and 
.       Peter Kirby's critically acclaimed first Luc Vanier novel, The Dead of Winter, goes into a second edition in October 2013.

This is a publishing programme of great quality, and it has made LLP's one of the most exciting launches on the literary publishing scene in recent years. Already we have attracted the attention of Publishers’ Weekly, Maclean's, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Gazette, CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition, Montreal Review of Books, and The Rover.

We invite you to explore this website, where you can read short essays by Linda Leith and by some of Canada’s best writers in the online literary magazine Salon .ll., check out news and reviews of all LLP titles -- including Atwood’s tweets – and buy a print copy or download an electronic copy of one of our books right then and there. 

The Montreal Launch at Blue Met, April 20, 2012

Part of the crowd at the launch of LLP and Salon .ll., Friday April 20, 2012 at the
Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival with authors Felicia Mihali
and Rick Salutin as well as Salon .ll. directors Eve Pariseau, Annie Heminway and 
editorial committee members Marie-Andrée Lamontagne and Annabelle Moreau, as well as contributor Julie Groleau. [Photo: Courtesy Felicia Mihali] 

The Toronto launch, at Massey College, April 5, 2012
 

Margaret Atwood with Andrew Phillips of the Toronto Star, with Graeme Gibson
and author Rick Salutin at the LLP launch at Massey College, Toronto,

April 5, 2012
[Photo: Linda Leith]
Tweet from Margaret Atwood ‏April 13, 2012 @MargaretAtwood: Look! New publishing house launches, + Rick Salutin on keeping public education public: http://www.lindaleith.com/publishings/view/6 @TorontoStar

The Gazette article, written by Victor Swoboda, also appeared April 13th in the Edmonton Journal and the Dallas News, and on April 18th on Top News Today.

For Immediate Release: Atwood, Polley attend launch of Linda Leith Publishing
 
Toronto (April 10, 2012) Linda Leith, founder and former artistic director of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival celebrated the launch of her new literary press in Toronto on Thursday night with Keeping the Public in Public Education by Rick Salutin, drawing luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Sarah Polley, Charles Pachter, Howard Engel and Dusan Petricic to an event at the University of Toronto. Also in attendance were journalists Warren Clements and Erica Ritter, Toronto Star editorial page editor Andrew Phillips, and agent Bruce Westwood, President of Westwood Creative Artists.
 
Hosted by John Fraser at Massey College, and presented in association with Annie Kidder of People for Education, the event celebrated both the launch of a new Canadian publishing house and the challenge to public education at a time when the entire public sector “dares not speak its name.” 
 
Fraser, in opening remarks, quipped that in publishing Salutin in his first issue of Saturday Night, he succeeded unequivocally in demonstrating his magazine wasn’t a voice-piece for [then owner] Conrad Black. Kidder praised Salutin as one of Canada’s great thinkers, demonstrating that the conversation about public institutions (in Ontario and elsewhere) is exciting, necessary and rife with possibility.
 
Salutin’s book, a trenchant defense of teachers in the public system, is the first in the LLP SINGLES series, a pioneering series of provocative shorts (essays under 100 pages in length). LLP SINGLES meet the challenge of the digital age, says Leith, “short enough to be read in a sitting -- and long enough to develop a provocative argument.”
 
Leith describes her publishing mandate as “telling truths”; naming her specialties as SINGLES,  literary fiction and political satire, including two upcoming books of political cartoons, one by popular Montreal Gazette cartoonist Aislin (Terry Mosher) and the other edited by him. She describes herself as publishing in the romantic tradition of underground pamphlets and samizdat publishing – priding herself on books that might not otherwise see the light of day.
 
In the new digital world, she says, their commercial potential is uninhibited, and bestsellers will come from unexpected corners. The LLP publishing experience, Salutin adds, is one of the best he’s had in his career to date.
 
Leith’s stated intention with literary fiction (she is a novelist herself) is to introduce edgy new voices and styles to an international readership. Award-winning novelist and biographer Charlie Foran describes the LLP vision as "intrepid and lively and interesting." 
  
Linda Leith Publishing will officially launch in Quebec City this week at Festival Imagination and Blue Metropolis on April 20th, introducing the SINGLES series and The Darling of Kandahar by Romanian-Canadian Felicia Mihali, whose style Leith likens to Quebec writer Marie-Claire Blais and Canadian Nancy Huston, who writes in French and English. (See press releases for both books attached.) 
 
As the founder of Montreal’s internationally renowned literary festival, Linda Leith has a cosmopolitan vision. During her tenure, Blue Metropolis became the largest and most diverse of Canada’s festivals, offering events in a multitude of languages, attracting writers from all over the world, and granting lifetime achievement awards to Norman Mailer, Mavis Gallant, Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood, Alaa Al Aswani, Amitav Ghosh and A.S. Byatt, among others.
 
LLP buys world rights, publishes in both English and French, in both physical and ebook format. Canadian and US sales are handled by the Literary Press Group, ebook distribution by eBound Canada.
 
Details of UPCOMING TITLES by Abou Farman, Peter Kirby, Terry Mosher, and Tommy Schnurmacher here 
For further information, please contact: Yvonne Hunter yvonne.hunter@me.com; 647-348-2024