Editor's Introduction

Since 1980, when we published our first list, we have brought out some fifty books, many in both hardcover and paperback editions, from poetry collections by Albert Goldbarth and Chase Twichell to critical anthologies devoted to the work of E. L. Doctorow and Joan Didion. Our publications include a number of anthologies, most notably The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, edited by William Heyen; First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; and You Don't Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Stories, edited by Ron Hansen. The Letters of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Robert Phillips, appeared in 1984, and The Table Talk of W.H. Auden by Alan Ansen in 1990. Our strongest department is fiction, with an emphasis on first collections of short stories, including titles by Pinckney Benedict, Greg Johnson, and Janice Daugharty.

Ontario Review Books was a natural, if not inevitable, offshoot of the magazine. Many of the books we have published are by authors whose work first appeared in Ontario Review, some of them, like Pinckney Benedict and Jeanne Schinto, discoveries of ours. We published first books by them and many other fiction writers and poets, over the years, from Annette Williams Jaffee's widely acclaimed novel Adult Education (1981) to Jeanne Wilmot's Dirt Angel (1997). Tied in with our interest in publishing first books by previously unknown authors, has been our aim to introduce to an American audience writers from Canada and overseas that we feel are particularly provocative. Among them are the Irish poet Eavan Boland, the Swedish fiction writer Margareta Ekstrom, and the Canadians Tom Wayman and Alistair MacLeod, the latter hailed by Robert Stone, as "one of North America's masters of the short story."

The Ontario Review, Inc. acquired the reputation of being "small but select" as The New York Times put it in a "Book Note" by Edwin McDowell in 1990, the tenth anniversary of Ontario Review Books:

The The Ontario Review, Inc. publishes only three to four books a year, but one of them--On the Island, by Josephine Jacobsen--was nominated earlier this month for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. When Claude Simon of France won the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, his novel The World About Us was available in the United States only from the The Ontario Review, Inc. Another book from the publishing house, Letters of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Robert Phillips, was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review in 1984. And next month the The Ontario Review, Inc. will reprint Expensive People, the third of Joyce Carol Oates's 20 novels.