The HarperCollins “Canadian Classics” Is an American Side Hustle

Two weeks ago, HarperCollins Canada announced it was jumping on the nationalism bandwagon by releasing a specially branded series of Canadian reprints.

In a press release dated March 12, 2026, the publisher stipulated that seven books, comprising fiction and nonfiction, will be released on May 5, 2026, under the rubric HarperCollins Canadian Classics. The books included in this selection are The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, By Chance Alone by Max Eisen, Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Any Known Blood by Lawrence Hill, Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, and Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill.

HarperCollins is the latest multinational to go elbows up in the wake of repeated musings from the White House about Canada becoming the “fifty-first state.” Last year, McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, released its inaugural line of Kanata Classics as part of what the publisher described as “a new conversation on the multifaceted nature of Canada’s culture, history, and identity.”

There is every reason to be wary when a foreign-owned corporation stakes a claim to defending Canada’s cultural sovereignty, but the case of HarperCollins calls for particular skepticism.

At least M&S has a venerable history as one of Canada’s most important domestic publishers. Before Avie Bennett sold 25 percent of the company to Random House Canada in 2000, in what Richard Stursberg calls “one of the most puzzling and outrageous transactions in the history of Canadian publishing,” M&S set the agenda for Canadian literature. Under its iconoclastic firebrand publisher Jack McClelland, it was responsible for the lion’s share of what we now consider the nation’s foundational books and authors. Its New Canadian Library (NCL) program, which created the template for a nationalistic classics series, included important work by Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Marie-Claire Blais, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood, among others.

These books encompass the entirety of the country’s history, going back, in the case of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, to pre-Confederation. Whatever one might want to say about the limitations of the NCL—and it was not without its problems—it did provide an expansive chronological canon of significant Canadian writing.

This is a history with which HarperCollins cannot hope to compete, if only because, as it is now constituted, it is still in its adolescence. In 1987, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased Harper & Row, merging it in 1989 with the newly acquired William Collins & Sons to create the company that exists today, including its subsidiary, HarperCollins Canada. It is this thirty-seven-year-old entity that is responsible for publishing the titles now branded as Canadian classics.

HarperCollins Canada is pitching the new line as “commemorating some of the most iconic and diverse voices that have shaped Canadian literature throughout the decades.” While this is typical marketing hyperbole, it also obscures the fact that six of the seven so-called classics were published in the current century. The oldest of the bunch, Hill’s novel, Any Known Blood, first appeared in 1997.

The Kanata crop, by comparison, includes Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), and Alistair MacLeod’s 2000 story collection Island, which compiles short fiction from his earlier 1976 and 1986 volumes.

This sense of history is absent from HarperCollins’ group, which necessarily narrows the perspective by which their classic status may be judged. A stated aim of the Kanata Classics is to place books in conversation with one another, a goal it achieves by putting Campbell’s work alongside contemporary Indigenous writing, such as Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk (2014) and Jordan Abel’s Nishga (2021). No such comparative consideration is possible with the HarperCollins list.

Speaking about what constitutes a classic work of literature, Iris Tupholme, senior vice president and executive publisher of HarperCollins Canada, references Italo Calvino’s principle that “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” This is about as good a definition as I’ve heard; the question is how can we tell whether a text that has not been around very long has or has not exhausted what it has to say?

Perhaps this explains why the Canadian Classics list is largely backward looking. Eisen’s Holocaust memoir recalls the author’s time in Auschwitz, while Edugyan’s Giller Prize winner unfolds in Europe during the Second World War. Donoghue’s novel looks to 1850s Ireland. Any Known Blood tells a contemporary story but also traces the history of slavery and the Black experience in America. Gowda’s book, meanwhile, is a sprawling family saga that spans India and the United States. Only O’Neill’s and Lindberg’s volumes offer contemporary stories set fully in Canada.

Which brings us to the other issue that looms large in HarperCollins’ latest endeavour. It’s not surprising that a publisher would choose this particular moment to bring out a line of books specifically celebrating Canadian literary achievement. The ongoing threats to our sovereignty from the current US administration—and its bloviating Oval Office inhabitant specifically—have spurred a renewed sense of national pride and defiance north of the forty-ninth parallel. Canadian consumers are actively seeking out products made in the country, with a majority saying they would be willing to pay a higher price for them. The Association of Canadian Publishers has instituted a “Certified Canadian Publisher Program,” which puts stickers on books to indicate that they are written, designed, edited, and printed in Canada.

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And herein lies the concern. The impetus for HarperCollins Canada’s Canadian Classics program does not, in fact, have anything to do with Canada at all. The launch date of May 5, 2026, was chosen because it coincides with the launch of HarperCollins American Classics, a much more extensive series conceived by the company’s head office in New York to commemorate the 250th signing of the US Declaration of Independence. In comparison to Canada’s seven titles, the US program will feature thirty-five titles from a much broader and more comprehensive range of writers. Included in the series are Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851), Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1856), Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937), Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1938), Native Son by Richard Wright (1940), Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963), and Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (1978).

Not only do these cover a wide range of authors and eras, they also include poetry, drama, and short fiction—all of which are absent from the Canadian line. (This despite the fact that HarperCollins Canada has on its list the plays of Timothy Findley and story collections by such important writers in the form as Diane Schoemperlen, Sharon Butala, and Bonnie Burnard.)

More significantly, both the Canadian and American series share a designer—Robin Bilardello—who works out of the New York office. The design of the Canadian titles mirrors that of the US books; taken together, they appear visually as a single series. The Canadian Classics will also be printed in America and distributed out of the publisher’s US warehouse. This is, again, in contrast with M&S’s Kanata Classics, which were designed and printed in Canada.

All of which highlights what appears to be a lack of consideration on the part of HarperCollins’ head office as to the exigencies of its Canadian subsidiary. This attitude, it should be pointed out, is not at all new. In 2014, former HarperCollins Canada chief executive officer David Kent was laid off and was not replaced; Craig Swinwood took up the post in 2019. Swinwood was already the CEO of Harlequin, a formerly Canadian-owned company that HarperCollins bought from Torstar in 2014, the same year Kent was let go. Also in 2014, HarperCollins moved its distribution out of Canada, merging it with its US warehouse and fulfillment operation at a cost of some 120 jobs in this country.

None of this screams elbows up. For the company now to greenlight a Canadian Classics line as a means of capitalizing on the renewed patriotic fervour in this country, while simultaneously tacking it on as an adjunct to a larger American project and having the books designed, printed, and warehoused in the US, seems just a tad cynical.

The company’s access to Murdoch’s deep-pocketed marketing apparatus also threatens to further eclipse those domestic reprint programs—like Biblioasis’ ReSet series, Dundurn Press’ Voyageur Classics, or House of Anansi Press’ A List—that do maintain production processes in this country. If the aim is to spotlight the legitimately strong work of the Canadian writers in the HarperCollins Canada stable, there are other ways to accomplish this. Launching a line of recent books produced in the US under the banner of Canadian Classics cheapens an already urgent struggle to retain control over our own culture.

Adapted from That Shakespearean Rag, with permission of the author.