“I’d like readers to think of the canon less as a monument and more as a conversation.”
“Does this book complicate or enrich the story we think we know about literature and culture?”
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 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. {read}