Ágota Kristóf

There’s a long piece (6,759 words) by Sarah Resnick in the new issue of the LRB on Ágota Kristóf, following the publication by Penguin last year of Kristóf’s slim book (96 pages) of short stories, I Don’t Care. Most of the piece is about Kristóf herself, and about the Notebook Trilogy – The Notebook (1986), followed by The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which ‘secured her reputation as a major postwar author’. The Trilogy has been in print with CB editions for a more than a decade but the LRB has never reviewed a CBe book. Annoyingly, the LRB piece appears at a time when the Trilogy is not available – publication rights have moved from CBe to Penguin, who will publish in November, and meanwhile I’ve been told to stop selling the CBe edition and remove it from the website. But copies of the CBe edition of the Trilogy do exist – right here, in a box by my desk – and if you want a copy now, rather than wait until Penguin publish later in the year, please contact me.

Kristóf’s The Illiterate, also discussed in the LRB piece, is still available from CBe, which published the first English translation in 2014 and re-issued it in 2022. But not for long: Penguin now have the rights to that too, and I’ll soon have to stop selling the CBe edition.

In his introduction to the CBe edition of The Illiterate, Gabriel Josipovici notes that when Kristóf was aged fourteen and still living in Hungary (she fled to Switzerland in 1956), her father was imprisoned, ‘we must presume for falling foul of the Communist authorities’. Sarah Resnick writes well about all of Kristóf’s work and her piece is informed by recent research which found that Kristóf’s father was imprisoned not for political reasons but for the sexual abuse of children at the girls’ school where he taught. More on that here.

Newsletter April 2026: new book, and news of another

Here is Axholme by Mike Bradwell, to be published in June on what will be his posthumous birthday (he died in April last year). Bradwell founded Hull Truck theatre and for over a decade was director of the Bush Theatre, a few streets away from this desk, where there will be a party: balloons, cake, wine and hugs. Axholme portrays a childhood in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s in the voice of a nine-year-old kid. It’s rude and funny and not in the slightest bit sentimental. Laurie Lee, move over. Mike Leigh: ‘A wonderful, moving evocation of a vibrant community – funny, poignant, and above all, real.’

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent was published by CBe in March, and is now also published in Australia, the US and Canada. Sarah Manguso: ‘Magnificent, simply one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read it in a reverie of blissed-out, horrified amazement.’

It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.

Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.

The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.

Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it's also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn't include this book needs kicking.

CBe newsletter February 2026

Fifty-odd years ago Herbert Lomas, a lovely man and very good poet, published a book suggesting that we could solve a lot of problems by just getting rid of money. Title: Who Needs Money? Lomas doesn’t, now – he died in 2011 – but in the meantime CBe does. Earlier this month Waterstones returned books that they’d ordered in and failed to sell and got a refund of £970. That’s a big pothole in the road that needs to be filled in. There is now a Donate link on the website which will set you back £20. You can press it once, twice, many times, or not at all. Anyone who does press it will be sent, as a thank-you, a copy of an odd little CBe booklet titled Vedute a colori: 32 pages, printed in colour, 150 copies only and just some of those reserved for the pushers of the Donate button. The booklet reproduces postcards from three series and adds minimal text.

There’s a fine review of Patrick McGuinness’s Ghost Stations in the current Literary Review by Jonathan Keates: ‘I love Ghost Stations. I wish I’d written it myself. Its tones are civilised, funny and humane …’

The CBe edition of Agota Kristof’s Trilogy is now officially out of print. It will be republished later this year by Penguin, who will also take over Kristof’s The Illiterate. But the last copies of the CBe edition of Trilogy are right here, in a box by this desk, and available from the website.

The two 2026 CBe titles available from the website are Farah Ali, Telegraphy (January) and Erin Vincent, Fourteen Ways of Looking (March).

See no evil

J. B. Smith was my English teacher when I was aged 16 and I owe him much. He left the school in 1967 after just three years and below is a clipping from the school magazine that records his departure: ‘His views were often startling, sometimes unorthodox … he believed that English could be enjoyed at the same time as it was taught in a scholarly way, he felt strongly on national and international problems’. He introduced me to new writers and asked good questions. Before the long summer holiday he suggested I read Anna Karenina and then, back at school, asked not just if I’d liked it but why. I wrote for him – who else was there? – long essays on Lawrence and Blake and another on King Lear in which I argued that Lear was a fool for not recognising the goodness of Cordelia and he deserved all he got.

The other teacher whose departure in 1967 is recorded in this clipping is G. A. Ray-Hills. He gets an even warmer send-off – ‘His keenness, gaiety and conscientiousness were boundless … He will long be remembered at Loretto with affection and gratitude, as a French teacher of undoubted genius and as a man of wide and varied interests and of sparkling personality who contributed so much of value to the school’ – but I was lucky to escape him.

G. A. Ray-Hills features (with certain other teachers) in the 200-page report on this school published by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in 2023 and available online (‘Case Study no. 9: Volume 1. The provision of residential care in boarding schools for children at Loretto School, Musselburgh, between 1945 and 2021’). This is from the summary:

• Guy Ray‑Hills, a charismatic and flamboyant teacher at Loretto junior school, the Nippers, between 1951 and 1967, was a prolific sexual predator of junior and senior boys throughout his tenure. He groomed many children and established abusive sexual relationships with them. Some were isolated incidents, but others lasted for years.
• Children whose parents lived abroad, often thousands of miles away, were particularly vulnerable to Guy Ray‑Hills.
• Ray‑Hills’s behaviour was widely known about by pupils. It was blatant and headmasters and other staff must also, or ought to have, known about it. He was the subject of a number of complaints from the 1950s onwards.
• Guy Ray‑Hills lost control and beat children sadistically, particularly those he did not groom for sexual abuse. He knocked a child out by punching him.

The children at the junior school where Ray Hills taught were aged between 8 and 13. The abuse ‘included masturbation, oral and anal sex. It was regular, and it was illegal.’ It was also known to what the report calls ‘the senior leadership team’, who did nothing – maybe, the report speculates, because of ‘concerns about the risk to the school’s reputation, or a failure to appreciate the enormity of what was happening, or a failure of governance …’ Also: ‘There is no indication of any thought being given to the impact on children of Ray‑Hills’s abuse and, rather than take steps to protect other children from his paedophilic appetites, the actions of the school paved the way for him to access children again.’

Ray-Hills left the school with references that described him as ‘exceptional, enterprising, hardworking’ and ‘ignored the history of complaints about him abusing children’. Ray-Hills continued to teach, and abuse, in other schools until he retired in 1991. He died in 2010.

Jimmy Savile. Epstein. Trump. And everyone who turned a blind eye.

CBe newsletter January 2026

Here we go again. First, a reminder that Telegraphy by Farah Ali is published this month and there’ll be party for the book at Burley Fisher Books, 400 Kingsland Road, London E8 on 15 January – full details here. It’s a free event and there’ll be money behind the bar but the bookshop would like you to tick the Add-to-Cart box if you’re minded. Please do. Please come.

Next: Erin Vincent, Fourteeen Ways of Looking, published in March, finished copies due any day. Next, Mike Bradwell, Axholme, June. Anonymous puff quote for Axholme, which may or may not actually appear on the cover: ‘Pisses all over Cider with Rosie.’ Rude and funny and a lot more, this is village life in England in the 1950s – for me, hitting 75 later this month, almost yesterday. Next, Penelope Curtis, The Fall, September: interwoven stories (told mostly from the perspective of the sidelined women) of people who cross paths over time in a single small village in Lincolnshire – Isaac Newton measuring the motion of heavenly bodies; the Rev. Charles Hudson, intent on climbing the Matterhorn; the actor David Niven, intent on women.

Mickey Mouse manages to be both an emblem of the Walt Disney Company, a beacon of global capitalism, and a derogatory term used by Tory MPs to decry the kind of college courses taken by people seeking vocational qualifications. CBe is a kind of Mickey Mouse operation – it’s held together with string and sellotape – but is now into its 19th year.

Teeth: On negative reviews

One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.

The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that have been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.

Recent examples: Michael Hofmann’s TLS review of Colm Toíbín’s The Magician (‘Crap hat, no rabbit’) and Tom Crewe’s LRB review of Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (‘not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness’). Tom Crewe’s review begins by quoting some of the quotes on the paperback of Vuong’s previous novel: ‘A marvel … brilliant and remarkable … a masterpiece … staggeringly beautiful …’ And then he quotes some of the sentences that, starting to read the book, he stumbles on, and I can almost taste his own exasperation. You have paid for the dish of the day and it’s luke-warm and stodgy.

I am not a contrarian, which would be tedious, and I’m not, I think, a Grumpy Old Man (there are more than enough of those, and they’re getting grumpier). I think the Poems on the Underground scheme is terrific; I like many of the books that lots of other people like; there are new books every year that surprise and delight me, and they’re not always the ones I might be expected to like. It is, always, personal.

Actually I think choruses of approval – most of which are orchestrated: this what publishers’ publicity and marketing departments are paid to do – are seeing diminishing returns. How many masterpieces can there be? Even the informal choruses – the ‘likes’ on social media – result, in my own woodshed-corner experience, in fewer actual sales than they used to. People have less money (except those who have more, but they tend not to buy books). ‘Disposable income’ is a joke. People 'like' and move on and don’t follow through. I’m guilty as charged. What will happen next: more hype, more marketing, more of the same, an escalation of the arms race, because that’s how the system is set up. It’s all kinda silly but I am serious about this, otherwise there’d be no point.

CBe newsletter December 2025

Christmas. Presents. Books are even easier to wrap than bottles. See the home page of the website and bear in mind the Season Tickets: 6 books for £50, 10 for £75. Within the UK, free postage. This is the best of these deals on offer, it really is.

Buying a book for X can be tricky. X might not just not like the book, they might decide that if you thought they would like this then even after all these years you haven’t really understood who they are, and your whole relationship is on the line. You could buy X a book that won one of the big prizes but that’s outsourcing your choice to random panel of judges and is just bland. The point of the Season Tickets is that you choose which books; and if you’re buying for X you’re spreading your bets – X is unlikely to dislike all of the books you’ve chosen. Or you could let X choose for themself: ask them to, or buy the Ticket and send me their email and I’ll take it from there.

There are around 80 titles on the website to choose from. Some are available exclusively from the website – books with only a few copies left may be officially out of print at the distributor, and so not in bookshops, but are still available from the website.

These are the first two books out of the block for next year:

Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, which will publish in January, is available from the website now. Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking, which will publish in March, is now printing and will be available in January. Both books, not through any effort of my own, already have US publishers (and Erin Vincent’s in Australia too). A little later, Axholme by Mike Bradwell (1948–2025), who founded the Hull Truck theatre company in the early 1970s and ran the Bush Theatre (my local) from 1996 to 2007: voiced by a nine-year-old boy in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s, it’s a wonder.

My last day in an office (which I’d gone into at 9.30 each weekday for fourteen years) was the last working day before Christmas 2005, twenty years ago. Quitting the day job has turned out to be one of my better decisions; I’ve made worse.

A first for me: attending a Leicester Square premiere screening. I went because I’m more than a little obsessed with the actor Billy Bob Thornton, and I’ve written about this on the CBe blog, Sonofabook: here.