Most of us hold within our minds at least one cherished book we believe should be a classic. But that designation can feel exclusive, even preordained. In 2021 researchers Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak of Cornell University examined over 120,000 Goodreads reviews and discovered that indeed the reader-curated list of “classics” is homogenous, definitive, and less diverse than current high school and college syllabi.
Thomas Gebremedhin (Credit: Jingyu Lin)
Thomas Gebremedhin, vice president and executive editor at Doubleday, has long believed the traditional literary canon is narrow: Eurocentric and male-dominated, a reality reinforced by many editors gravitating toward stories and authors that feel familiar to them.
A turning point arrived in February 2024 when Gebremedhin had an opportunity to reissue Fish Tales by Nettie Jones, a book edited by Toni Morrison during her time at Random House and originally published in 1983, though it had since fallen out of print. Gebremedhin explored acquiring the novel, which is a resonant portrait of Black life in the 1970s and 1980s, but discovered that Knopf Doubleday did not have a “natural” place for it. (Fish Tales was eventually republished by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025.) In that moment, he realized that books like this needed a home at Knopf Doubleday, and two years later, in 2026, Outsider Editions was born.
Launched by Doubleday this summer, Outsider Editions is a new series focused on republishing works of fiction and nonfiction that have been forgotten or overlooked but still prove significant for the current moment. More than a revival of past literature, Outsider Editions seeks to challenge the status quo of how certain books are established as canonical and question why this catalogue has been considered fixed across generations. For example, why should the literary canon include only works of a certain style or center on the experiences of only one community? Gebremedhin, who serves as editorial director of the imprint, says that bringing older works into circulation will only deepen and enhance the existing canon: “I’d like readers to think of the canon less as a monument and more as a conversation.”
For Outsider Editions, a book said to be underrecognized is not a work without an audience but rather one that never secured the resources and advocacy it merited. “Sometimes it was published but not meaningfully supported. Sometimes it fell outside the categories the industry knew how to market. Sometimes it was simply ahead of its time,” says Gebremedhin. Discussing the selection criteria for the imprint, he notes a central question concerns necessity: “Does this book complicate or enrich the story we think we know about literature and culture?”
Journey to Nowhere by Shiva Naipaul is one of five releases that make up the imprint’s first season. A nonfiction investigation into the 1978 Jonestown massacre and the appeal of belief, belonging, and political idealism post-1960s, Naipaul’s work “models how someone tried to make sense of the complexities of their time,” says Hua Hsu, a staff writer at the New Yorker who wrote a foreword for the reprint. Naipaul’s politics resist binaries; Hsu notes that the author “retains idealisms,” but there is visible reluctance as he contends with the Jonestown tragedy. Journey to Nowhere makes a case for an evolving canon in which older writers are revisited not because they are right or their work is politically sound but because they serve, as Hsu describes, “first or second drafts of history” that in turn help us interpret our present.
In a similar vein stands Kate Braverman’s Squandering the Blue, a short story collection, originally published in 1990, about women in southern California navigating addiction, longing, and abuse. While her characters often follow self-destructive paths, Braverman is careful to avoid moral framing. Novelist Marisa Silver, who introduces the reissued title, notes that Braverman’s “characters simply act, and we are asked to simply watch them behave.” In a culture quick to label people as sinful or virtuous—especially women and mothers—Squandering the Blue offers readers the opportunity to move past a “blinkered way of approaching lives that are not familiar to [them],” says Silver. Outsider Editions aspires to expand the canon to include such stories that resist conformity and categorization.
Beyond incisive introductions and author pairings that help bring the titles to new audiences, Outsider Editions also leverages format and design to revive these forgotten works. Published as paperbacks, Outsider Editions titles are intended to be affordable, accessible, and easy to circulate—the kind of book you can “toss into your tote bag on the way to a party,” says Gebremedhin. Rendered in collaboration with Oliver Munday, creative director of Doubleday, the aesthetic of the imprint is minimal but distinct enough to give the works a collective identity.
On the path to building a new ecosystem, Outsider Editions hopes that one day these titles will be ubiquitous in classrooms, book clubs, and bookstores, recognized as part of an ever-growing collection of classics.
Bareerah Y. Ghani is a Canadian Pakistani writer and editor who lives in northern Virginia. Her work has appeared in the Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.
