First newsletter of the year. The news is – happily, and thanks mainly to some very loyal readers – that there is no news, in the sense that some very good books are being written and CBe will be publishing a very small number of them during 2025.
Finished copies of the first two 2025 books are in and can be ordered from the website. First, Mrs Calder and the Hyena, short stories by Marjorie Ann Watts, which will be officially published on 28 January, the author’s 98th birthday. [Ed.: Surely some mistake? No – no typo there, no mistake.]
Second, 2016 by Sarah Hesketh. 2016 was quite a year: David Bowie died in January and Leicester City won the Premier League in May and Jo Cox was murdered in June and in November many good people still thought that Donald Trump could not possibly be elected President of the US … Fergal Keane: 2016 ‘vividly, stirringly defies categorisation. It is a story, a poem, an oral history, a series of arguments about an epoch, and who and what we are becoming.’
Later in the year, Patrick McGuinness’s Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines. And a novel, maybe. And maybe more interruptions (99 Interruptions is down to a few last copies but they don’t stop at 99).
On the 13 February you have a tricky choice: Sarah Hesketh will be reading from 2016 at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and on the same evening Will Eaves will be reading from Invasion of the Polyhedrons and Beverley Bie Brahic from her Carcanet collection Apple Thieves at the Broadway Bookshop in London: more details here. Beverley Bie Brahic’s Hunting the Boar and her translations of Apollinaire (The Little Auto) and Francis Ponge (Unfinished Ode to Mud) are still in print with CBe; as are several previous titles by Will Eaves, including The Absent Therapist and Broken Consort.
As always, the new titles can be included in the Season Tickets: 6 books of your own choice for £50, or 10 for £75, free UK postage. Available from the home page of the website. I like going to the post office: below, post receipts from the past months, kept for tax purposes and to stuff my shoes when the leather wears out.
