Housekeeping

This week’s poem on the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre website is D. Nurkse’s ‘The North Side’ from his collection A Night in Brooklyn, published by CBe last year. (I read that poem first in a US magazine; it was one of those poems I had to buy the whole magazine for, just to have it; I never guessed, at the time, I’d eventually publish the book that includes it.)

That US publishing rights for Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue (‘A wild picaresque fantasy, erotically polymorphous ... with a cast of bizarre humans and talking animals’ – Independent on Sunday), published by CBe in 2011, have been sold is a happy surprise.

Update (non-update) on the tedious saga of Faber partially remaindering their poetry books – see this previous post. To my email to the sales director accepting his offer to sell me copies of my own book at 27p each (the price at which they were sold to a remainder merchant), no reply. To my email of over a month ago asking whether the same offer would be made to other Faber poets whose books are subject to ‘modest stock reductions’ (i.e., they are being partially remaindered), no reply.

I don’t think this is anything personal. (Well, it probably is, by now.) Earlier this year, after rereading work by an author I knew and admired, I emailed both his editor (at Faber, as it happens) and his agent to ask if they knew of any writing by him left unpublished at the time of his death in 2011. No reply from either. Alexei Sayle once wrote that the switch for the indicator light in taxis is located in the rear boot; for many in publishing, the email ‘reply’ button is similarly located.

From next week I’ll be away for a month (the Czech Republic, since you ask) and during that time I too may find the ‘reply’ button hard to find. Apologies in advance for erratic service.