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.