About us - Metonymy Press

Metonymy Press was launched in August 2014, at a reading event following that year’s Queer Between the Covers book fair, part of the Pervers/Cité (the underside of Pride) program. Featuring a number of readers who would later be published by Metonymy, this event and its broader context remain at the root of what Metonymy does as a small press. Slow, community-based, and largely diy, Metonymy Press has published one to four books a year starting in 2015.

With a plan to publish queer, feminist literary fiction and nonfiction, we have assembled a catalogue that includes these forms and formats as well as poetry, a guidebook, and a children’s picture book. Metonymy’s critically recognized, award-winning catalogue of daring and unconventional genres is, as one author put it, replete with “authors and books that reframe power and affirm life.”

Metonymy’s choices of authors and genres arise from our commitment to aesthetic and editorial excellence, and we seek work that transgresses boundaries, undermines the status quo, and sustains those on the margins. We put significant thought and resources into acquisitions, design, editorial, and promotion.

Metonymy was founded by old friends Ashley Fortier and Oliver Fugler, who have remained the owner-operators for the first 10 years. The press has no permanent staff, but many important tasks at the press have been done on contract with designers, editors, and artists, as well as an editorial and acquisitions committee from 2021 to 2024.

El Ghourabaa co-editors Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch and Samia Marshy

Dear Black Girls window display at Drawn & Quarterly

jiaqing wilson-yang at the 29th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony

Oliver Pickle and Rima Athar at launch of She Is Sitting in the Night

Upcoming events

Title	Description	Date
July edition of the Left-wing Book Sale in Montreal	Metonymy Press and Sheer Spite Press will have a shared table at the July edition of the monthly Left-wing Pop-up ... see more	1753531200 26th July 2025, 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Past events

Get in touch:
438.338.4591
publish@metonymypress.com

Mailing address:

Metonymy Press
PO Box 143 BP Saint Dominique
Montréal, QC H2S 3K6

Street address:
635 ave. Beaumont
Montreal, QC
H3N 1V7

Office hours:
Our office hours are variable. Please reach out to find a time to stop by! You can reasonably expect to reach us by email, phone, or social media during our regular working days: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Please note that we are not accepting submissions until further notice.

DISTRIBUTOR INFO

Booksellers, libraries, and wholesalers, please find distribution information below:

LitDistCo in Canada

1-800-591-6250
orders@litdistco.ca

Or reach out to our sales reps at the Manda Group.

AK Press in the US

(510) 208-1708
sales@akpress.org

Turnaround Publisher Services in the UK (and elsewhere apart from Canada and the US)

+44 (0) 20 8829 3000
customercare@turnaround-uk.com

ZOM-FAM by Kama La Mackerel is available in Mauritius through International Press and Book Distributors Ltd (IPBD).

enquiry@ipbd.mu
+230 660 5252 / 53

For all other sales inquiries, including for ordering Thea’s Tarot, contact sales@metonymypress.com or visit our shop page.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

*Please note* submissions are currently closed until further notice.

Our general submission guidelines are below, for reference only.

We accept simultaneous submissions; however, please let us know if your work does get accepted somewhere else prior to hearing back from us. Decisions are made by the acquisitions committee: Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, H Felix Chau Bradley, Kama La Mackerel, Oliver Fugler, and Ashley Fortier.

Metonymy is a small independent Montreal-based press that publishes queer and feminist literary fiction and nonfiction by emerging writers. As one author put it, Metonymy books reframe power and affirm life.

We publish work that transgresses boundaries, undermines the status quo, and sustains those on the margins. If you have a writing project that would be a good fit, we want to hear about it!

Submissions of literary fiction and nonfiction geared at an adult audience will be prioritized, but we’re interested in looking at whatever you’ve got! (Please don’t send us full manuscripts as a first step, though.)

Please include the following in your submission:

An introductory letter describing what you as an author can bring to the table, and what audience your book aims to reach. We do not require previous publishing experience (in fact, we are explicitly committed to supporting new writers), but we are interested in knowing if you have an existing network to tap into, a blog we can look at, research in a particular field, experiential knowledge, training, or anything else that you think will help propel the success of your book.
A short summary or outline of the proposed project (including estimated final word count, table of contents if appropriate, and stage of manuscript completion). Please be sure to explain how you see the work fitting with Metonymy’s catalogue and mandate.
A representative sample of the work (e.g. a full chapter, section, story, essay, or up to 10 pages of poetry).

Please send proposals electronically (pdf format is best) to: submissions@metonymypress.com.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions!

Metonymy values feedback from everybody in our networks. If you do not have a book proposal to submit but want to make suggestions about authors, topics, and genres of literature you’d like to see us publish in the future, please share! We really want to keep gay book lovers satisfied.