CBe has been operating low-key – just one book so far this year, and I’m down from five cats to three – but news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated.
New book: Inheritance by Paul Bailey – who has been publishing novels for five decades and whose first novel, At the Jerusalem, 1967, is being reissued this month (with an introduction by Colm Toibin) by Head of Zeus. (For why that odd name, see this equally odd explanation, which claims that the name is ‘not a tribute to Zeus himself but to his daughter Athene’.) Lately, Paul Bailey has been writing poems. Good ones. Available now from the website.
Also happening: Diane Williams, whose Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine was published by CBe in 2016, will be at the London Review Bookshop on 8 November, talking with fellow CBe author Lara Pawson (This Is the Place to Be). Event details here. The current LRB features a new story by Diane Williams.
CBe will have a table at the Small Publishers Fair in the Conway Hall, London, on 15 and 16 November. As well as CBe titles there will be copies of a lavish new book from Green Bottle Press comprising poems by Julian Stannard (What were you thinking?, CBe, 2016) and artwork by Roma Tearne.
On the Saturday at the book fair – 16 November – I (me: Jack Robinson) will be talking about Good Morning, Mr Crusoe, which was published in April this year on the 300th anniversary of the first publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I’ll also be talking about the book on a BBC Radio 4 programme about Defoe’s book scheduled for November. Racism, misogyny and class privilege have been embedded in the political structures of the UK by Crusoe. If you think I’m over-egging it, please read the book and engage with its argument before telling me I’m a snowflake. The B-word occurs only glancingly in the Robinson book, on a single page, but I’m not arguing with Observer review’s angle: ‘Jack Robinson uses Crusoe to analyse the mad act of self-maiming we call Brexit.’
Thank you, everyone who is still on board.
