Coach House books have been translated into countless languages and published all over the world.
Recent Rights Deals include:
- The Sleeping Car Porter: German rights to Wagenbach, UK and Commonwealth rights to Dialogue Books, sale of French-language rights in North America pending.
- The Baudelaire Fractal: UK rights to Peninsula Press.
- Pastoral: Macedonian rights to Tabahon.
- Heroine: Swedish rights to OEI.
We hold World rights to most of our titles, and World English for most of our translations. We’d love to talk with you about bringing our books into your language and territory. Our agents are listed below, but you can also email Editorial Director Alana Wilcox, alana@chbooks.com.
To download our most recent rights catalogue, please click here.
Our new and upcoming titles:
Fiction
Yara
by Tamara Faith Berger
From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s.
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends Yara away from their home in Brazil on a Birthright trip to Israel for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.
But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto, where she is forced to reframe her relationship, exploring the possibility that it might have been abusive. From there she heads for California, where she plays with the line between erotic film and real life. As Yara wanders, she tries to keep her head above water, connecting the dots between the lands in which she finds herself, the places she has been, and the places she is headed.
Rights held: World
Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys
by Aaron Tucker
‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity.
Two days before a mysterious catastrophe befalls Toronto, before a man decides he must trek through violence and bloodshed to save his ex-girlfriend, the two of them are having a conversation about John Wayne. She’s telling him about The Searchers as a way to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he drinks more and more, the evening takes a difficult turn. Soon after, he wakes up to disaster and decides to be a hero.
Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity and its deep roots in shaping our culture.
Rights held: World
Not Anywhere Just Not
by Ken Sparling
People are disappearing. And when they return, they can't say where they've been.
At the heart of Not Anywhere, Just Not is a couple who still consider themselves to be a boy and a girl, like they were when they first met. One day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Who is he? Who is she, now, approaching sixty? Who were they together? And who will they be when or if he reappears?
This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which gigantic words fall from the sky, God stands outside in the cold without a hat, angels ride the subway, and dreams whisper from far away, like something loud trapped in a jar. Ken Sparling confronts us with the small dramas of our lives and the language we struggle with to express them, bringing us to the precipice of accepted ideas and allowing us to see, with dread and wonder, what might be coming for us all.
Rights held: World
Falling Hour
by Geoffrey D. Morrison
It’s a hot summer night, and Hugh Dalgarno, a 31- year-old clerical worker, thinks his brain is broken. Over the course of a day and night in an uncannily depopulated public park, waiting to meet someone who never shows, he will sift through the pieces and traverse the baroque landscape of his own thoughts: the theology of nosiness, the beauty of the arbutus tree, the pathos of Gene Hackman, the theory of quantum immortality, Louis Riel’s letter to an Irish newspaper, the sanctity of baseball, the baleful influence of Calvinism on the Scottish working class, the sea, the CIA, and, ultimately, thinking itself and how it may be represented in writing. The result is a strange, meandering sojourn, as if the history-haunted landscapes of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn were shrunk down to a mere 85 acres.
These digressions are anchored by remarks from the letters of Keats, by snatches of lyrics from Irish rebel songs and Scottish folk ballads, and, above all else, by the world-shattering call of the red-winged blackbird.
Rights held: World
Nonfiction
There is No Blue
by Martha Baillie
A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers Baillie's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother's. And then, third, shockingly, the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life, just before the book the sisters co-authored is due to come out.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Rights held: World
Big Mall
by Kate Black
A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back?
In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living? In less than a century, the shopping mall has morphed from a blueprint for a socialist utopia to something else entirely: a home to disaffected mallrats and depressed zoo animals, a sensory overload and consumerist trap.
Kate Black grew up in North America's largest mall: West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids. It’s the site of a notoriously lethal rave for teenagers, a fatal rollercoaster accident, and more than one gunrange suicide; it’s where oil field workers reap the social mobility of a boom-and-bust economy, the impossibly large structure where teens attempt to invent themselves in dark Hollister sales racks and weird horny escapades in the indoor waterpark. It’s a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend.
Can malls tell us something important about who we are? Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming-of-age in North America’s largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. Ultimately, a close look at the mall reveals clues to how a good life in these times is possible.
Rights held: World
Daddy Lessons
by Steacy Easton
Cowboy erotica meets Kathy Acker in this smart, raunchy look at a queer sexual awakening.
Part memoir, part literary study, part formalist exercise in excitement, a transgressive text of pleasure, bodies, the Lord, and the West.
In this post-gender, post-sexuality, queer prairie Decameron, Steacy Easton’s sexual anxiety becomes textual anxiety. This is a messy history of Mormon missionaries, Anglican boarding schools, the back rooms of prairie bars, Montreal classrooms, and the many religious spaces that have tried to snuff out queer desire while turning a blind eye to abuse. These are provocative tales to turn on, offend, and sentimentalize. Easton explores the seminal texts of their sexuality, from Frank O’Hara to Neil LaBute, Kip Moore to Lorelei James, and delves into their own encounters as they came of age. These daddy lessons are blunt about the ambivalences of trauma and the pleasures of disobedience, slippery and difficult, reveling in the funk of memory and desire.
Rights held: World
Fiction in Translation
To The Forest
by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette
translated by Rhonda Mullins
When the pandemic forces a family to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.
Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are thrown together in a century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and the mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones and Internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds. Five children become tiny explorers, discovering nature and its treasures, while the adults reconnect with something greater than themselves.
In To the Forest, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette considers existence and death in a celebration of small places and the natural world. A house built on a foundation of gravestones, the local handyman Clark Kent, a mystery woman long dead that no one wants to talk about: Barbeau-Lavalette brings to life the oddities of a place and a cast of colourful neighbours who have lived unusual lives.
Rights held: World English
Sing, Nightingale
by Marie Hélène Poitras
translated by Rhonda Mullins
Peter Greenaway meets Angela Carter: a Gothic tale of secrets and revenge.
‘Sing, Nightingale is, by design, a disconcerting book … The overall effect is one of decadence laced with a creeping sense of horror.’ – The Washington Post
Beneath the bright sky of Noirax lies a long tradition of secrets. Generations of men on the Malmaison estate have fathered countless children, both legitimate and not. The women all meet tragic ends or live in the shadows of the estate, and the illegitimate offspring are cared for by nursemaids or sent off to orphanages.
Right now the estate is quiet. But the son is returning home, and the father, worried that the land has been less generous with its sumptuous offerings, decides to bring in a whisperer to make plants and animals grow. But this whisperer awakens the past. The generations of silenced women will begin to make their voices heard, and the violence lurking under the lush perfumes of the forest will make itself known. The hunters will be hunted and the wolves will howl an announcement of a new reign.
Rights held: World
Please email rights@chbooks.com for a PDF of these or any other of our titles.
Foreign Rights Agents:
China and Taiwan
Gray Tan
The Greyhawk Agency
Phone: +886 2 27059231
Fax: +886 2 27059610
grayhawk@grayhawk-agency.com
Eastern Europe
Livia Stoia Literary Agency
Phone/Fax: 0040 21 232 99 09
www.liviastoiaagency.ro
France
Corinne Marotte
Marotte et compagnie
corinne@marotteetcompagnie.ag
Germany
Mohr Books Literary Agency
Annelie Geissler
Klosbachstrasse 110 ch-8032, Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: 41 43 433 8626
Fax: 41 43 433 8627
annelie.geissler@mohrbooks.com
www.mohrbooks.com
Italy
Maura Solinas
Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency
+39 02 487 133 65
maura.solinas@pnla.it
www.pnla.it
The Netherlands
MO Literary Services
Monique Oosterhof
Phone: 31 (0)20 632 58 10
mo@moliterary.nl
www.moliterary.nl
Spain, Portugal, South America
Asterisc Agents
Natàlia Berenguer Gamell
Phone: +34 610 596 295
natalia@asteriscagents.com
www.asteriscagents.com
Turkey
Anatolia Lit Agency
Amy Spangler
Caferaga Mah Leylek Sok, Tekirdagli
Apt. No 18/1 34710 Kadikoy Istanbul, Turkey
Phone: +90 216 700 1088
amy@anatolialit.com
www.anatolialit.com
South Korea
Ines Yoo, Giovanni Marrocco
Icarias Agency
icarias@icariasliteraryagency.com
Phone: 82 070 7719 1695
For all other territories, please contact editorial director Alana Wilcox at alana@chbooks.com.