The Post looks at the history of Knopf Canada’s celebrated line New Faces of Fiction (that brought you Yann Martel and Ann-Marie MacDonald, as well as a host of Bookninja readers and friends) and follows it up with a “where are they now” list of who’s got what coming when.

As Dennys was gearing up for the spring of 1996, she realized Knopf was committed to publishing four first fictions. She went into a sales and marketing meeting and delivered the news, which was not enthusiastically received. Undeterred, she told them she wanted to publish them in hardcover, and all at the same time. “Let’s turn it on its head,” she says. “Just undercut all that nay-saying. Let’s turn what’s potentially a negative into something that is genuinely positive.”

Despite a tepid response from some booksellers, Dennys proceeded to publish the four books: The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz; In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand; Self by Yann Martel; and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, which eventually became one of the bestselling novels of the past 15 years.

“For someone to say, ‘We’re going to bring all the resources of this big publishing company to new Canadian literary voices’ was very exciting,” says MacDonald. “It was a commitment to Canadian authors. And I think [Dennys] wanted to announce that, and put it on the map. ‘Make no mistake about it: this is what we’re about, this is what we’re doing.’ And make a very strong statement.”