Bursa: Dostoyevsky meets Joe Orton

Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie and other work, reviewed in yesterday’s Independent by Boyd Tonkin:

'From the admirable CB Editions comes a delightful discovery. Dead at 25 in 1957, the Polish postwar firebrand Andrzej Bursa acquired a reputation as a quick-burning, existentially tormented rebel: a literary James Dean of the Stalinist era.
‘This selection of his quirky, darkly witty work – poems, fables, above all the titular novella – does indeed summon the shades of Beckett or Kafka from time to time. Everyday life slips into scenes of fantasy or horror, as when the local Party sacrifices children to a dragon, “an old, blind, mouldy beast” that still tears them apart.
‘Yet Bursa’s dark humour and deadpan satire – finely captured here by translator Wiesiek Powaga – keep utter bleakness at bay. Some will think of Dostoyevsky when it comes to the snuffed-out relative in the novella; read to the end, and you hear something like Joe Orton's wicked cackle too.’

Buy from the website here.

Knight Crew, Brighton

What does a publisher actually do? The skills required, as any clued-up careers adviser knows, include the ability to heat up mulled wine in a microwave oven and then decant it – without flooding the staff kitchen – into those giant thermoses which are trolleyed into executive meetings for the coffee break.

Also, ideally, enough nous to get the flash working properly when taking photos, which in my case I didn’t have. But you can just make out through the murk, I hope, the Knight Crew hoodies, and we did sell books, and Nicky Singer spoke inspiringly and movingly about how the book came to be written.

Huge thanks again to the Jubilee Library in Brighton, which stepped in to host the event last night after Borders went into freefall.

Good wine, onion soup and the price of books

From a US newspaper report on the book wars: ‘Since 1981, French law dictates that both large chain booksellers and independent booksellers sell the same titles at fixed prices. This has allowed small independent bookstores to maintain their businesses . . . Gallimard Publishing House editor Jean Mattern commented, “On a national level there is an extremely strong will to keep the diversity of these independent bookstores alive, because these stores serve as a kind of guarantee for the future of independent publishing as well.”’

Season of lists and mellow bookishness

Alan Hollinghurst in the Guardian (28/11/09): ‘I’ve been intrigued by what seems a new development in that slightly dreaded form, “the long poem” – three really vital books that wed the momentum of prose fiction to the imagistic concision of poetry. After Adam Foulds's gripping re-creation of the Mau Mau rising, The Broken Word (Cape), have come two books from the excellent new CB Editions: JO Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, the 70-page biography of an adventurous boy from Skye whose feats of improvisation are related in easy but apt free verse, and Christopher Reid’s riveting The Song of Lunch, a tiny narrative disproportionately rich in exact observation, sorry comedy and controlled pathos. After reading Reid you start to wonder why fiction-writers bother with all the padding and padding about of prose.’

Wendy Cope in the Observer (22/11/09): ‘[Christopher Reid’s] The Song of Lunch (CB Editions) is a witty narrative about a publisher meeting an old flame in an Italian restaurant. The story is sad, as well as funny, and very enjoyable.’

Buy Natural Mechanical and The Song of Lunch from the website – or, why not, any two titles – and Jack Robinson’s Recessional will be added free.

Distressed retail, bad plumbing

Whenever the plug has been taken out of the bath in recent weeks, water has been coming through the kitchen ceiling and showering the vegetables. The plumbing of the bath, shower and washing machine has been a bit iffy.

Meanwhile Borders has been losing money. Borders bookshops, that is: originally owned by Borders US; bought in 2007 by Risk Capital Partners, who reduced the number of shops; bought again in July this year by Valco Capital Partners (‘the private equity division of Hilco, the distressed retail specialists’, according to The Times), who themselves appointed Clearwater Finance to find a buyer, who failed to do this, and who put on standby the administrators BDO Stoy Hayward, who then found they had a conflict of interest because they have dealings with Borders US. The pipework, again, has been iffy, and the water pouring through the kitchen ceiling has been anything but clear, and Borders has gone into admin.

Now the good news. Larry the plumber has this morning bashed a hole through the house wall and solved (fingers crossed) the bath problem. And down in Brighton, where a bookshop event for Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew had been arranged for next Thursday at, you guessed it, Borders, Nicky has managed to relocate the event to the Jubilee Library.

Booksellers will lose their jobs. The reduction in the number of big chain bookstores may mean that the surviving ones will individually become more powerful (God knows). But right now, no sermon on the state of the publishing and bookselling industry. Instead, huge thanks to the individuals who have stepped in to deal with the immediate mess: Larry; Jen at the Jubilee Library; Marcus at Borders in Brighton.

Go, little book

Another cheapskate publisher who’s too mean to fork out for flimflam on the cover. (Photo courtesy of ‘a friend’: thank you.)

‘Never judge a book by its cover’ – on the other hand, most browsers in bookshops have nothing but the cover to judge by. On the third hand, it’s what’s inside the cover that determines whether it’s going to stick around. You do what seems right for the book and then say, with Chaucer, ‘Go, litel bok . . . And red whereso thow be, or elles songe,/ That thow be understood, God I biseche!’

Or, with Robert Louis Stevenson:

‘Go, little book - the ancient phrase
And still the daintiest - go your ways,
My Otto, over sea and land,
Till you shall come to Nelly's hand.

How shall I your Nelly know?
By her blue eyes and her black brow,
By her fierce and slender look,
And by her goodness, little book!’

You see?

‘At least CB editions don’t try to outdo other publishers in the garishness of their covers,’ remarked a blog review of last year. Not least for reasons of thrift: what the typographic covers bypass is the whole longwinded process of the author preferring one image and me another and the designer going her own way – and then this: when we do find the perfect photo for a book (in this case, a CBe title for next May), and the author is happy and I’m happy and the photographer is happy to take a free book or two in lieu of a fee, there’s still a spanner lying around for someone to throw in. The girl in the photo, taken two years ago, is now with an agency that says using this photo on a book cover would be ‘detrimental to her career’, so no release.

The photo in question is beautiful (and also unsettling and funny), and so is the girl. It cannot be – can it? – that her agency minder thinks that having her on a book cover implies she reads books, and that this an unsexy thing to be implying? If so, the minder clearly hasn’t seen any of the several photos around of Marilyn Monroe reading (one of which was used on a recent Faber cover).