Bite-size CBe, part 2 (42–64)

Bites 1–41, written in 2014, are in the previous post.

42 February 2016: the new people at the post office are at the counter and the queues are long this week. Farewell to Jay and his wife (below), after 43 years’ service. Every single CBe book ordered from the website since 2007 – a number in the thousands – has been taken by me to their counter for weighing and posting. I’ve seen them at least three times a week, often more. Unwittingly, they have been by far my most regular co-workers in this little venture.


43 A rough audit of how the writers I’ve published have come to me. Author recommended to me by a writer already on the CBe list or by a close friend: 13. Me knowing an author’s work or coming across it and chasing it: 11. Unsolicited submissions: 6. Submission through an agent: 3. Can’t remember: 1.

44 Submissions: despite the huge amount of time and effort that they have put into their writing – and in many cases money too, in fees for CW courses – the great majority of people sending me work skip the 30 seconds of online research it would need to find out who, actually, they are sending to.

45 Number of titles (not including those published this year) published by CBe that have sold fewer than 100 copies through the distributor, Central Books: 15. Number of titles that have sold more than 1,000 copies through the same route: 4.

46 Money is necessary and also embarrasses me. Here is Anne Carson’s theory of money: ‘It’s just the inverse of the usual theory, which is that all money, indeed all numbers in life, should get to be bigger. But it doesn’t make sense that they should get bigger – why bigger? – so if you just switch it around and think all numbers should get smaller, it makes life better.’

47 I’ve hardly evolved from the times when ‘debt’ carried a lingering stigma and the purpose of a man was to be a ‘breadwinner’. As a writer (and especially as a writer who wanted to start a family), either I had to write books whose sales made me a living (which was never going to happen), or I took jobs and wrote on the side. (The oldest writer on the CBe list, Fergus Allen, 94, had a similar outlook: a working career, then publishing his first book at the age of 72.) I don’t claim this attitude is ‘right’; fear is involved, and playing safe. But I do take a perverse pride in CBe’s record of publishing more than 40 books over 9 years without any ACE money.

48 2014 was the glitzy year: Beverley Bie Brahic winning the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translations of Apollinaire; May-Lan Tan on the Guardian First Book Award shortlist; Will Eaves on the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist; a re-issue of Agota Kristof’s The Notebook selling well and being on several ‘books of the year’ lists. I wore a tie.

49 This: different writers I’ve published meeting one another – at a reading, an event, a party, or just online – and clicking. Readers too. I could very easily get sentimental about this. Family. (Despite families being, in media-speak, either ‘hard-working’ or ‘dysfunctional’.) This kind of by-play has been the richest thing.

50 Social media. Facebook aggravates, and I aggravate in return and get in a mess. Twitter’s lighter, funner. CBe has, I think, a low-level, intermittent core following, some of whom do one platform but not the others, some of whom read the irregular newsletter but nothing else, and a least a couple of whom never go online at all, so I probably do need to keep all the channels open, a way of reminding that I’m still around. That’s all.

51 Ebooks. The books about Finland are available as ebooks because there may be English-speaking potential readers in Finland who are keen to buy but baulk at the postage costs for a printed book. Two of my own poetry collections, first published by Faber, are now available exclusively (as they say) as CBe ebooks. Take-up has been less than tiny.

52 Printed books are the CBe thing, but I’m not 100 per cent Luddite. I read a lot of things – poems, prose – online. Online writing doesn’t need to bow to the design restrictions of the printed page, and this can get interesting; to publish a 64-page poetry book (the standard delivery system for poetry over my lifetime) and then issue it as a 64-page ebook doesn’t feel interesting at all.

53 UK orders from the website are free of any postage or packing costs. For orders from Europe (and yes, that does include Ireland) and ‘rest of the world’, there’s a little clickable menu on every book page that adds on a postage cost. It’s surprising – but maybe not – how many people ordering from outside the UK don’t see this. Do I send them a school-teacherly email asking them to send postage? Do I just shrug and send the book anyway? It depends on my mood.

54 I’ve done this twice: taken on an ‘intern’ and paid them a sum of money and then been stumped as to what to ask them to do.

55 Oh, yes: I got one of them to teach me how to make spreadsheets. But then I never followed through. The old system – writing numbers down in columns in a ledger – isn’t broken so doesn’t need fixing.


56 My dad (who died 60 years ago) had a ledger in which he kept track of the business of a farm he ran: wages, cattle bought/sold, tractor repairs, etc. I remember it, and have lost it. It seems pretty clear that I am trying to re-create that ledger. It also seems clear that the way in which CBe publishes – printed books; the lugging around of heavy boxes; the queuing at the post office; the tiny sums of money and the small-scale-ness of it all – is essentially a 1950s way, with a couple of technological advances (the internet, digital printing) added on.

57 The price of a new book of poetry should, surely, be index-linked to the cost of a packet of cigarettes. On the whole this seems to be the case. (Except for Faber: £10.99 for 64 paperback pages?)

58 I made a half-hearted attempt, about two years ago, to stop publishing. And then realised that, as with smoking, stopping is a lot more difficult than simply carrying on. But I can cut down.

59 The course of Sonofabook magazine, whose first issue was published in spring 2015, has not run smoothly: delays, illnesses. I came to believe that there was a curse on it. Someone suggested I rename it The Accursed.

60 In the agent’s office there is a cricket bat, and we talk about cricket as well as books. That this agent has poets on his list, and also the son of the teacher who got me through Eng Lit O-level at school, feels good. Minutes after leaving, I buy a bunch of Victorian lantern slides from an antiquarian bookshop. Two of them show watercolours of worms. I come home and read Darwin on worms: ‘Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.’

61 Helpful tips. CBe author Dai Vaughan’s advice to ‘aspiring writers’: ‘Be sure that a life of humiliation and disappointment is what you really want.’ Me on lesser things: for editing you need to be awake and alert; typesetting can be done while reasonably hungover.

62 Burger vans (below). The left one is outside the printer in Acton, the right one is outside Central Books in Hackney Wick, the distributor. Snap. I collect boxes from the former, bring home and re-pack, and deliver them to the latter (17 trips in the past year). If just 2 or 3 boxes, by Overground; if more, by car. (Central’s building is perhaps my favourite in London: see photo in previous post.)


63 Inpress are asking me what my ‘targets’ are for the sales of the new titles. I have a feeling this is going to end badly.

64 Ron Costley, text designer at Faber while I was there, died in February 2015. Guardian obituary here. Anything I know about design, I have from him. When I wasn’t sure, when I had about six different ways in play of putting text to page or cover and had succeeded only in confusing myself, I’d email Ron and we’d go to Pizza Express. House red, extra chili flakes. He was a great supporter of small presses in general. It’s not the same without him.

Bite-size, part 1 (1–41), déjà vu

I posted the below in February two years ago and re-post today because I'll add another few bites in the next few days and this is the back-story:

Off-cuts, paper cuts, 2007 to now:

1 After months of batting cover try-outs back and forth, one of the books still had a name spelt wrong on the cover. The mis-spelt editor had noticed this on the proofs but had assumed it was a joke. My fault.

2 Natural Mechanical by J. O. Morgan was an editor’s dream: 40 lines arriving out of the blue as an attachment to an email asking if I’d like to read more, from an author who had never before had anything published, and the book going on to win a literary prize. The title tells it true: this is Rocky’s workshop when I visited him in 2009 in Inverness-shire, during the early stages of his complete restoration of a 1929 Brooklands Riley from a rusted chassis:


3 I did a short print run of J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts with a colour cover for a shop which said that trying to sell the standard edition was like trying to sell a brown paper bag. Some of those are still in a box – free to anyone who orders any other title from the website and asks for one.

4 Naive early error: to assume that a fair few of the people I’d worked with in publishing would buy a book or two. In fact most people who work in the trade expect to get books for free. There have been honourable exceptions.

5 Best CBe-related headline (relates to Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3, McKitterick Prize 2008, one of the first four CBe books in 2007 and now published by Bloomsbury):


6 Number of trips to Blissetts in Acton, who print most of the books, in 2013: not logged, but around 20 at a guess. Chris the printer once house-sat my cats; during that period he was side-swiped by a fork-lift truck and sent to hospital; bandaged, patched up, he bypassed the queue for painkillers at the hospital pharmacy and instead came back to the house, fed the cats, drank the malt whisky I’d left him and went back to work.

7 Speediest printing turnarounds: ordering a reprint from Blissetts one afternoon and collecting the books the next day. Sending files of a new book to the other printer, ImprintDigital in Devon, and receiving a proof copy for approval next day in the post.

8 Number of trips over to the distributor Central Books in Hackney Wick with boxes of books in 2013: 16. Regine in the upstairs office once asked me to sign copies of my own old poetry books; a warehouseman in the downstairs delivery space comments on my very occasional TLS pieces. These people read books and they care. Below, Central Books, a very fine building:


9 A box of a given size holds more slim books of poetry than 200-page novels; the slim books are also cheaper to post. On the other hand, all boxes of books, whether containing poetry or fiction, are heavy. A large proportion of peasants’ work used to consist of carrying things; this manual-labour aspect of the job is something I enjoy (which explains in part my dilly-dallying about ebooks).

10 It’s pouring with rain as I lug boxes of books from a Tube station for a book launch at Waterstones Piccadilly (it was going to be in an art college, but the author had been having a hard time and she really did need a place where she could wear a dress), and I’m running late and I’m thinking, this is OK, this is publishing, and I’m saving money. At another book launch I’m drinking in the Colony Room in Soho and because I’m happy I sign a fat cheque for membership and the club closes a few months later and this is OK too. But I could have saved a little money there.

11 Number of trips to the post office in 2013: 139. Best conversation overheard while standing with CBe book packages in the queue: woman in front of me, very loudly, to man standing in doorway: ‘And you shagged that bitch down the Askew Road and you didn’t even wear a rubber.’ Man moves forward, I think he’s going to hit her to I step between them. Man to me, quietly: ‘Fuck off. I’m having a private conversation with my wife.’

12 Highest sales out of Central Books to date (i.e., not counting sales from the website, and people/bookshops I’ve talked into buying direct) for titles published before the end of 2013: just under 1,000. Lowest: just over 10. I look at these numbers, look hard, as if they’re trying to tell me something. It’s a kind of staring competition, who blinks first.

13 Is there any other trade in which shops can order the wares and then, if they can’t sell them, return them and get their money back? With books this is standard. Except on the occasion on which I sold several hundred copies of a title to a chain of bookshops, which several months later wanted to return most of them and have their money refunded. No, I said. And because I’d sold them direct, and there was nothing about returns on my basic invoice, they were stumped. A tiny and incidental victory.

14 Most over-qualified book-carrier: Anthony Thwaite, OBE, born 1930, carrying bundles of Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew on his trial shift as a warehouseman in 2009:


15 I’m not sure that Shakespeare & Co in Paris, where the CBe authors Beverley Bie Brahic, Gabriel Josipovici and Wiesiek Powaga read on an evening in November 2010, ever paid for the books sold but it was fun. This is Sylvia Whitman, brandishing:


16 Built in 2011, a roadside shrine to St Nicholas Lezard, patron saint of small presses, whose ‘paperback of the week’ columns in the Guardian have featured seven CBe books:


17 The man in the rear-view driving mirror on the website home page is my father, 1940s I think. (He wasn’t a reader. When he was courting my mum he took her to a wrestling match; she, then working as a librarian at the Brotherton in Leeds, took him to the first play he’d seen. He died aged 51.) The children on page 70 of Nights and Days in W12 are my own, many years ago; the writer in the café on page 107 of the same book is a man I’m vaguely related to (son of a cousin) and he wasn’t just idling: his first novel will be published this year.

18 The man who was in prison for 22 years and sent me his writing from there, and then we met in a café in Shepherds Bush market. The woman who called round with her portfolio of poems and modelling photos: this one, she said, pausing at a photo in which she’s lying on a sofa and wearing about 3 millimetres of clothing, would be good for the cover? Her mother had doubts. What did I think?

19 The manuscript of Jonathan Barrow’s The Queue really was found in a drawer of his office desk on the day after his death: this is not a literary conceit.

20 Two things that give Gabriel Josipovici’s Only Joking a slight period feel: you can’t now smoke in restaurants and cafés, and the classified football results on radio at five o’clock on Saturdays are no longer spoken by James Alexander Gordon.

21 The average age of the authors published by CBe in 2010 was 80-something. I tried and failed to sell a story on this to The Oldie and Saga magazine.

22 The causes of death of over 500 writers, composers, etc, are listed in This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, who himself is one of three authors who have died since their books were published by CBe. (The youngest was Erik Houston, at the age of 37. His novel The White Room was one of the first four titles; it’s now out of print but I still stand by it. He was a concert violinist who played around the world, then teacher. He had one of those very rare afflictions. In hospital, there was a day when he was technically dead for something ridiculous like ten minutes, and then was alive again. And then, later, not. I think about Erik a lot.)

23 In the flat of Dai Vaughan – who died in June 2012; whose Sister of the artist CBe published in February 2012, a month and a bit after he’d sent me the manuscript – there were tiny sculptures that he’d made out of Edam cheese. Last year I made things out of crushed beer cans; before all this started there was a period when I made ships (and a mermaid) in bottles.

24 The CB of CBe was not intended to be just me. Long story. (Nor, at the time of the first four books, were there any plans to do more.)

25 There is a customer who has bought one copy of every single CBe book direct from the website and I have no idea who this person is.

26 Entering a book for a prize that required an author photo, I sent a photograph of the author’s poem titled ‘Self-Portrait in Shades’ because I had no other visual evidence to offer, and nor did he and nor did the internet. Offered readings, the author responded: ‘I’d prefer not to.’ I can understand this. I can understand it very well.

27 When one of the books wins a prize – to date, a fiction prize (McKitterick, best first novel by a writer aged over 40), a translation prize (Scott Moncrieff), and the really freaky thing of each of the three first poetry collections from CBe winning the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (and each of them also being Forward shortlisted) – I feel like a parent watching their child in the school nativity play: pride, even though one knows it’s just a play, and next year there’ll be a different Mary and Joseph.

28 That some agents are willing to accept my minuscule offers for rights to publish fiction is due to the extreme generosity of larger publishers who wish to buy rights to cookery books and the memoirs of footballers.

29 The agent who accepted my offer for UK rights and then spent what must surely have been more than my offer on getting the contract checked by their legal department, which suggested I add in something about second serial rights, which I did, though I still don’t know what second serial rights are.

30 The big-name agents who simply don’t reply to emails, and the mainstream publishers too, and others. It may be company policy. More likely, in any company over a certain size there’s an assumption that receiving and opening an email or envelope is a sufficient task in itself. If anything else needs to be done, there are servants for that.

31 Or if they do reply, they do so with same degree of attention as a former literary editor of the Observer who, after I’d sent him the first four books, all prose fiction, and then followed up by sending again, assured me that he’d passed on the books to the poetry editor.

32 There is a clause in the standard contract that basically states that if after signing the author gets an offer from someone richer and better-looking, altogether more eligible, then the author is free to go off with them, as long as I can have the first four months. It’s a sort of prenuptial.

33 I’ve turned down books and seen them published elsewhere and thought, good for them, I was wrong. On the other hand, I’ve turned down books and seen them published elsewhere, by publishers posher than me, and thought, I was still right. On the third hand, I’ve turned down a book and two years later changed my mind and emailed the author at 5 a.m. in the morning to ask whether it has been placed elsewhere and by lunchtime the book was on track.

34 February 2013, letter from Arts Council England: ‘I am sorry to tell you …’ Three in a row. Ho-hum. (Can one apply to the Arts Council for cigarette money, for alcohol money? Without those two legal drugs there’d have been nothing.) The three stages of reaction: (1) slump; (2) shrug; (3) a light-headed sense of freedom.

35 What continues to surprise is how much can be done without any funding at all, and with small amounts of money. Back in 2007, £2,500 covered the printing & binding of 250 copies each of the first four books, author advances, a basic one-page website and a couple of lunches for proofreaders. CBe has been, roughly, self-sustaining ever since but only because editing, design, typesetting, time, etc, are not costed in.

36 Letters addressed to ‘The Accounts Department’ or to ‘The Reviews Manager’ or ‘The Art Director’ or ‘To whom it may concern’: the cat (one of five) who resides on my desk stirs, stretches, yawns, curls back on the low heap of manuscripts.

37 The emails asking for my ‘submission guidelines’. I honestly don’t care: email attachment or hard copy, double-spaced or single, margins wide or narrow, name on every page or not, whatever. If you write and want to send, then just do. It’s not for me to tell you how.

38 The Circulating Library – the idea was to send off a bunch of free books, asking the recipients to pass on to others after reading, and so on (and thereby expand awareness of CBe and maybe generate a few sales from the curious) – was a drowned duck: no emails from happy strangers, not one (as far as I know) extra sale.

39 This desk in the living room, but also the in-town office: the café on the first floor of Foyles, Charing Cross Road. (Deals have been done there, on backs of envelopes. And all praise to that shop, which actually asked to stock the books, rather than me having to make the first move.) If it’s too busy, the Pillars of Hercules. Once, the place around the corner where you can get a bottle of wine for a fiver.

40 The two points in time at which I knew the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair was worth the effort: (1) when in 2011 I was being shown a church hall in Exmouth Market by the woman who was in charge of hiring it out and her labrador dog, chasing a ball, went skittering and scrabbling across the recently polished floor; (2) lunchtime on the day of the first fair when, out for a cigarette, I said to the busker in the street, Brooke Sharkey, there was a book fair going on, and she said she’d move on, and I suggested she come in and do a set onstage instead and she did. (The book fair was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over fifty presses participating; from 2014 CBe is ducking out, leaving it in the more than capable hands of Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly.)

41 The stuffed gorilla that sat outside the CBe/Eyewear pop-up shop in Portobello Road in July last year appears to be one of a limited edition made for the California zoo where Koko (born 1971) lives. How it came to a junk shop in the Askew Road, Shepherds Bush, I have no idea. (Below, Koko on the right; on the left, seated, Wiesiek Powaga, translator from the Polish of Stefan Grabinski’s In Sarah’s House and Andrzej Bursa’s Killing Auntie and other work.)

Mongrel books

Preamble: I owe this blog a post or two. Just one so far this year, in January, when there was a fuss about festivals not paying authors decently, and I was suggesting that mainstream publishers taking advantage of unpaid interns is more worth shouting about. I stand by this. Lip-service to ‘diversity’ while having got rid of the trade unions and thereby being free to make free use of the free labour of those who can afford to live in London without wages is a nonsense.

Anyway. For starters, here, this review of Will Eaves’s new book from CBe, The Inevitable Gift Shop. It is, to put it mildly, complimentary. I’m pleased, and grateful. Here’s the opening para: ‘An artistic movement is forming. One that is open to spontaneity, artistic risk, emotional urgency and one which flies against traditional models. Will Eaves’s latest book, The Inevitable Gift Shop, is an example of this movement displayed in written form. We may call it a book at first mention, rather than a novel or a collection of poetry, because really this is simultaneously both of these things, and at the same time, something else and something new entirely. A combination of prose, poetry, literary critique and philosophy, it is collage, it is memoir, it is anything and everything that you want it to be. If there were rules to writing – which there aren’t (probably) – this book is rewriting them.’

But not new. The border controls between genres – despite the standard bookshop shelving labels: ‘fiction’, ‘non-fiction’, ‘poetry’, ‘memoir’, ‘travel’, ‘crime’ – have been relaxed for some time. It’s like the EU. Markson, Ondaatje, Sebald, Teju Cole, Hanna Krall, Emmanel Carrère, Anne Carson, Valeria Luiselli … Many more. Even the 19th-century ‘realist’ novelists twisted and turned (Stendhal, in The Red and the Black: ‘Here the author wants to put in a page full of dots. – That would show very little grace, said the editor’ – and the passage continues.) Claire Louise Bennett, asked at an LRB shop event last year whether Pond was short stories or novel or: ‘It’s just writing, innit?’

I’m enamoured of hybrids; the CBe list hosts several. The book from another publisher, Les Fugitives, that the CBe website hosts is hybrid. I think bookshops should have category labelled ‘mongrel’. But the trade doesn’t make it easy. When you publish a book and register it on the Nielsen central databank, from which everyone else – booksellers, Amazon, etc – takes their data, you have to give it a BIC (Book Industry Communication) code. Why? It does help booksellers, who can’t be expected to read everything. It’s pretty sophisticated. ASZJ is Dance and other perfoming arts/ Juggling. FJMV is Fiction & related items/ Adventure/ Vietnam war fiction. DCF is Poetry by individual poets. There is no BIC labelling that adequately categorises The Inevitable Gift Shop – or, I suspect, a fair few other books.

For the apportioning of fame, the labelling continues: prizes for novels, for short stories, for poetry, for flash fiction, for journalism, for memoirs. For eligibility, they have to define, to restrict. I once asked a major organiser in the short-story scene whether one of Lydia Davis’s short shorts might be considered for one of the short story prizes and she said, without any hesitation, no. But the Goldsmiths is relaxed about ‘novel’ and the Forward is relaxed about ‘poetry’. (Last year’s Forward prize went to the Claudia Rankine book – which, though the publisher categorised it as poetry, is to me essay, polemical prose – but that’s just me doing my own counter-labelling.)

A friend used to run a bookshop, and when people applied to work there part of the process was her asking where they’d shelve some titles she named. This was, obviously, a way of finding out how widely read the applicants were, but it wasn’t an absolute measure, other things counted too. Nothing wrong with an honest not knowing. Sometimes there is no right answer.

Shock, horror, authors don’t get paid

Philip Pullman resigns from being a patron of the Oxford Lit Festival because they don’t pay their attending authors and people sign petitions and letters to The Bookseller and it’s news, again, again. Of course it’s not good but it’s not exactly Syria and it really isn’t putting a stop on any writing, any publishing, any reading.

I’m not keen on festivals taking advantage. See previous post: ‘to have this work taken advantage of by other arts organisations that are in receipt of large amounts of public money – no’, etc. But I’m not keen either on authors requiring payment as a right. ‘We are essential to the culture’ – the culture will decide that, not me or you. The days – early 20th century – when a writer could make a decent annual income by selling a short story or two to Strand magazine are long gone. Get over it.

Far, far more harmful to the literary scene is the non-payment by publishers to interns. A few do pay: Verso, and some other (surprise) left-wing publishers. Most don’t. Some excuse themselves by saying that their interns are drawn from publishing courses, so they’re already in debt anyway and let’s just take advantage.

When I started work in publishing, back in the 1970s, the staff of many publishers were members of trade unions (often, in editorial, the Book Branch of the NUJ; I was ‘Father of the Chapel’, as it was quaintly called, for a time); pay, conditions, holiday allowance, what to do about the stink in the toilets, were discussed and negotiated with management. Taking on free labour would have been resisted. The easing out of the unions has led to the present situation – in which to start a career in publishing you have to apply to be an intern, usually unpaid, and then another internship after that, and have enough income from other sources to pay your rent and your bills. In London. Which, to say the least, is preserving the status quo of mainstream publishing: middle class, white, a dollop of privilege. The young and bright interns have no negotiating organisation. This is where I’d sign a letter, do the protest thing. Not for authors not getting paid for turning up in Oxford and charming an audience they haven’t worked to bring in and selling their books off the back of it: just say no. As things stand in publishing, people wanting to work in this profession don’t have that option.

I wonder how many of the authors protesting about not being paid by festivals actually know what their own publishers' policies are regarding interns - i.e., whether they themselves are profiting from unpaid labour.

Sequels

A lot of people are happy to spend a lot of money going to see ‘the new’ Star Wars film or ‘the new’ James Bond. On the other hand, I remember copy-editing a book by a tired author who, following the success of a particular novel, had been commissioned by his publisher to write two more with the same lead characters; replying to my copy-editing queries, he thanked me for attending so closely to ‘this awful tosh’.

Sequels are tricky things. Last year CBe published Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, which found a lot of admiring readers. This year CBe published the short follow-up novels: 2 Novels: The Proof, The Third Lie. Tristan Foster, naming his ‘top reads of 2015’ on the 3:AM blog, mentions that ‘I read the sequels to The Notebook by Agota Kristof this year and think about them often enough. About how Kristof totally upended the first and how brave I thought that was, but mainly about how shocked I was by the difference in tone and narrative style. So why aren’t they on the list? I wish I hadn’t read them at all.’

In 2013 CBe published Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter, another book that found many admiring readers. It won a prize, was shortlisted for another, and was called by Patrick McGuinness in the Guardian ‘A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry’. This year CBe published O’Brien’s New Life, which tracks the war reporter Paul Watson through the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring and into Syria, and includes the black comedy of Watson and O’Brien pitching a TV show based on war reporters to Hollywood producers. New Life has received almost no attention, and found fewer readers than the first book. (Is this in part because of the subject matter? Have we reached a war-reporting threshold, beyond which it feels like not ‘news’ but ‘more of the same’?)

Anyway, here is a US review of New Life that hardly starts promisingly: ‘I’m no stranger to lamenting the failures of sequels … when a poet writes a sequel, it’s hard to resist the opportunity to skewer it.’ Oh, but read on: ‘This book deserves more praise than I have room – for its courage, for its innovation, for its empathy – and other critics have and will say more. But as for me, New Life left me wanting to read more from Dan O’Brien rather than more about his book. His is the type of poetry we cannot afford to neglect or neglect to return to.’

Not your usual poetry podcast

Decades ago – truly – I read a piece by Peter Levi in which he argued that a test of good poetry is whether it can be read, and still claim its space, in any place, situation, context: not just sitting comfortably at home ‘with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array’ (that’s from a Donald Barthelme story) but on an overcrowded train, in hospital, at work, at play …

A test case is here. The link is to a podcast from LA in which Dan O’Brien (above) is a guest on a podcast whose other guests – three women, one man – are all American comedy actors. It’s long: an hour and 13 minutes. Dan reads poems (from Scarsdale, War Reporter and New Life, all from CBe) at roughly 6 minutes in, 16 minutes, 34, 45 and 57 minutes. The rest of it is quick-fire banter: funny, daft, obscene. No one has time to even blink. There are riffs on racoons, dildos, the poetry-reading hmmm. The whole is a mash-up of different registers: super-witty improvised joshing and the stark, deliberated poems. You may hate it. I think it’s wonderful.

Books of the Year chosen by CBe authors

I asked some of the writers published by CBe to recommend books (not necessarily published during 2015). The only rule: titles published by CBe not eligible. The name of each chooser – listed in alpha order – is followed by a link to their own book or books on the CBe website.

There are hints in the below as to how this end-of-year formula might be reconfigured. Patrick Mackie, for example, chooses not books but individual poems (most of them can be read online) – we do, in the main, first come across poems singly, not in books but in magazines or online. My only interest in the regular lists is pointers to books that have flown under the radar – the latest Ian McEwan or Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t NEED flagging up – and if I do this again that has to be the whole point. Next time (and it doesn’t have to be end-of-year) I’ll pose the question differently: a book that you think has been undervalued; a writer that no one else seems to have noticed; a book that doesn’t exist but which you’d have liked to read … Meanwhile, there are enough under-the-radar books here to have made the exercise worthwhile. Meanwhile, also: it has been a privilege to have published these choosers. Linking to their books and buying will help there to be a next time.

Alba Arikha (author of Soon)
I devoured the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan series and when it was over, I found myself mourning the loss of Lenu and Lila. Because they had become my friends, as had Elena Ferrante. The visceral, tactile, hungry quality of her writing is unlike anything I've read in a long time: the sights and smells of Naples, the noise, the food, the poverty, the violence, the way Ferrante writes about women, female friendship, that fine line between love and loss, all contribute to an unforgettable, mesmerising reading experience.

Preparing for a short story masterclass, I found myself dipping back (among many others, too long a list) into Chekhov's The Collected Short Stories – a modern visionary, a master reader of character – and John Updike's The Early Stories, 1953–1975. From 'Separating': 'Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.' Doesn't get much better than that.

I found Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation powerful. Narrated by the brother of ‘the Arab’ shot dead on a beach by Meursault in Camus’s The Outsider, it is written in succinct, insightful phrases, reminiscent of Camus himself.

Nina Bogin (translator of Agota Kristof’s The Illiterate)
The most remarkable book I read in 2015 was L’usage du monde (The Way of the World) by the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier. First published in 1963, it recounts the journey Bouvier and his painter friend Thierry Vernet (whose drawings illustrate the book) made in 1953 and 1954, when they were in their mid-twenties, from Switzerland to India via the Balkans, Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan – a journey that would be impossible today. The conditions they travelled in would also be considered grueling by current standards – the whole trip, over mountains and through deserts, was made in a little Fiat Topolino they sometimes had to push for miles uphill or wait weeks to have repaired. But this is no ordinary travel book. What makes it exceptional is Bouvier’s magnificent writing, exhilarating and beautifully phrased, and the generosity of his vision. I had begun reading L’usage du monde when the January terrorist attacks took place in Paris, and in the ensuing weeks it helped keep up my morale with its embrace of people – urban, rural, nomadic – stark landscapes, and night skies vast enough to allow us, in spite of everything, to continue to believe in the world and its possibilities.

It is also a tribute to a friendship between two young men which was to last throughout their lives. I read the book in French, but it is available in English in what appears to be an excellent translation by Robyn Marsack, originally published in 1992 and now available in two different editions, Eland Press and New York Review Books Classics.

Charles Boyle (aka Jack Robinson, author of Days and Nights in W12 and by the same author)
Hotel Lambosa (1993), a book of (very) short stories by the poet Kenneth Koch that sat unread on my shelves for years before, early in 2015, falling off and into my hands: I have now read it three times and each time it’s as fresh, funny and unpredictable as the time before.

Fragments of Lichtenberg by Pierre Senges: I don’t think it’s a book I will ever finish reading. Suppose that the several thousand aphorisms written by the 18th-century German scientist Georg Lichtenberg were the surviving fragments of a great Lost Novel – and suppose then that several generations of passionate, argumentative ‘pioneers, losers, casualties, freeloaders, cheaters, scholars, connoisseurs and laymen’ (not to mention dandies, lovers of puzzles, frequenters of auction houses, graphomaniacs, etc) were to dedicate their lives to filling in the blanks, to reconstructing that which is lost … You get the picture – though its frame is porous, letting in politics, philosophy, history, medicine, folklore … (Scheduled for publication by Dalkey Archive last August, this English translation by Gregory Flanders hasn’t yet appeared in the shops – it has become another lost book. And if you think I’m making this up, see below.)



Beverley Bie Brahic (translator of Apollinaire, The Little Auto, and Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud; author of White Sheets; new poetry collection forthcoming in 2016)
Like an addict I scarf down anything in print. If I think of it, I jot book titles in my diary, with a line around them to separate them from the grocery lists. Usually I read several books at once, and mostly they aren’t hot off the press. Like Hédi Khaddour’s Treason, a collection of poems by a witty Franco-Tunisian poet translated by Marilyn Hacker (Yale, 2010). Treason has been sitting in my to-read pile for two years. I opened it in October and I haven’t put it down. It is so good I went to the Librairie Compagnie opposite the Sorbonne to buy Khaddour’s latest collection and found he has become a novelist whose latest book, Les Prépondérants (Gallimard, 2015), won the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française. His 2009 spy novel, Waltenberg (Vintage, 2009), has been translated into English by David Coward. Are his novels as good as his poems? Can’t say, but I strongly recommend Treason.

David Collard (author of About a Girl: A Reader’s Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, forthcoming from CBe in 2016)
Published last year in the States and earlier this year in Britain, Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been? (Faber) is a casually brilliant and richly rewarding collection of essays, mostly about poets and poetry. The first two thirds of the book focus on anglophone writers, the final third on German (and many of latter were entirely new to me). A year's worth of slow reading and reflection, and a prompt to explore further.

J. O. Morgan's first three volumes (Natural Mechanical, Long Cuts and At Maldon) were published by CB editions. In Casting Off (HappenStance Press) is his latest book-length poem. It's a love story, of sorts, set in a remote fishing community over the course of a summer. Morgan combines a clear, fresh voice with easy virtuosity. What puzzles at a first reading subsequently dazzles.

Claire-Louise Bennett is an English writer living in Ireland. Her debut Pond (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is a collection of short stories linked by a single (and singular) narrator – her voice calm, droll, sad and scrupulous. My favourite new fiction of 2015.

Will Eaves (author of The Absent Therapist and, forthcoming in March 2016, The Inevitable Gift Shop)
I read associatively. Something leads to something else. Books I have enjoyed in this manner are not necessarily new or fun straight away. I am just beginning Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses and wondering how Shakespeare ever got as far as the poem proper after the rubbishy epistles at the start. But then it’s perfectly true that we read out of a sense of duty as well as pleasure, or that the duty itself becomes a pleasure. You get out what you put in, I suppose. This year, then, I really enjoyed: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (science), G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (memoir), and William Golding’s A Moving Target (essays). Novels: Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker, The Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy, True Grit by Charles Portis and The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald. Poetry: Eavan Boland’s translation of the Old English elegy “The Wife’s Lament” into antiphonally rhymed half-lines. Two words – ‘pain’ and ‘tough’ – corrupt the rhyme scheme, one by refusing it, the other by extending it. She has listened to the voice of the original, which is about a woman bemoaning her exile while cleaving to it.

Best unexpected thing in the post: Peter Blegvad’s Kew. Rhone. Best book fished out of a skip: A Tale of Two Cities. Best disappointment: Howard’s End. Best next on the list: The Life of Houses, by Lisa Gorton (fine Aussie poet). Best stable-mate: Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan (Ed.: not allowed, I know; except as an exception that proves the rule.)

Gabriel Josipovici (author of Only Joking)
It’s a long time since a book of poetry moved me as much as Lucy Newlyn’s Earth’s Almanac (Enitharmon). She has grafted a sequence of elegies for and rememberings of a dead sister over a fifteen year period onto a Shepheard’s Calendar of the natural year. This could lead to mawkishness and sentimentality, but Earth’s Almanac is tough and complex. Often it is impossible to tell if the details of the changing seasons in Cornwall and Oxford, where the poet lives, are the occasions or the metaphors for memory. I loved it.

Peter Handke’s long poem Gedicht an die Dauer came out in 1986 and has only just been brought out in English as To Duration, in a fine translation by Scott Abbott, from the small press, Cannon Magazine. That the same person could write Offending the Audience, Essay on Tiredness, Repetition and this poem is quite remarkable. Handke is one of the shining literary lights of our time and it says a great deal about the insularity of our culture that this profound and beautiful poem has had to wait almost thirty years to appear in English.

Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844) was a contemporary and friend of Pushkin's. He is practically unknown in this country, unjustly so, for he was fully Pushkin's peer, argues Peter France in the introduction to his fine translation of a selection of the poems with facing-page Russian, published by the enterprising Arc Publications as Half-Light and Other Poems. Reading this fascinating volume will transform, if ever so slightly, your sense of the nature of European Romanticism.

Stephen Knight (author of The Prince of Wails)
In The Worm at the Core: On the role of death in life, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski use compelling empirical research to show how the knowledge of our mortality unconsciously shapes our behaviour, so we seek to bolster both our self-esteem and our belief systems (psychological shields against the inevitable). A reminder of death will, for example, cause us to come down hard on those who do not share our political, religious or other view of the world. The trio coined the term Terror Management to describe the various coping strategies, and now I see it everywhere: adverts for wrinkle creams, the prize culture, recycling crates overflowing with wine bottles, splenetic below-the-line comments, BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, house extensions, and all political manoeuvring from the local to the global. Few books change the way you look at life. This one does.

Todd McEwen (author of The Five Simple Machines)
I spent the most horrid part of my youth in a place called Palo Alto, California. You think that tells you all you need to know, but it doesn’t, because you are too interested in Steve Jobs and are unaware of the almost-too-fabulous-to-be-believed Bell’s Book Store on Emerson Street. The first book I bought there, in 1968, was the autobiography of Texas Guinan, a famous speakeasy owner. I wish I still had it. But that is the kind of book one always finds in Bell’s, fabulous books one didn’t quite know existed. Last month I rushed out seethingly with a sumptuous biography of Saul Steinberg by Deirdre Bair, and two volumes by Ludwig Bemelmans, My War with the United States, his first in English and quite odd – lonely and perverse, but he’s all there. Also Holiday in France, an anthology he edited in the 1950s, including his divine alter-ego Joseph Wechsberg. This year I read a truly wild series of essays, The Professor, by Terry Castle, who seemingly has the bad fortune to live in Palo Alto. I’ll bet she goes into Bell’s a lot. But the book that marked 2015 for me was the Collected Poems of my late friend Paul Violi. The last time we had dinner together, he spent about twenty minutes trying to convince me that the restaurant we were in was situated atop a giant underground military complex right in the middle of the West Twenties in New York. Paul being Paul, no one, least of all I, will ever know if he was serious.

Patrick Mackie (author of The Further Adventures Of The Lives Of The Saints, forthcoming from CBe in 2016)
But could it not be poems of the year instead? The definition of poetry as news that stays news is one that we all remember. But we tend to emphasise the staying, and so overlook what it means for a poem to be news in the first place. A poem wants to be a type of news in which fact and report are fused with uncanny intimacy and wildness. So a good poem is one that brings us the news that this voice or this experience or this way of making sense or this set of losses or this pack of desires can be reported on, can report, can turn out to exist at all. It was for instance news to me this year that Karen Solie in her poem 'Bitumen' could bring such Lucretian qualities of massiveness and verve to wrestling with what it means now to live on a planet that is both a frail and beautiful biosphere and a sort of lavish monster. Likewise, in a poem called 'Midsummer Loop' that is itself both loopy and summary, Frances Leviston brought the news that the most meticulous stylistic contrivance and the most distractable empirical openness could fuse to produce a new way of inhabiting time itself. In his 'Musculature' Carl Phillips fused an intellectual intensity worthy of Blake with a slickly cartoonish casualness of movement to produce a new sort of elegy for lost aspects of selfhood, one whose light lines are electrically tense with knowledge of how fluidly we think that we live now, and how stubbornly the actual reasserts itself. Rebecca Perry's 'Wasp' associates so freely on its pungently creaturely little subject that it ends up bringing us all the more news about what poetry can be as the poem reveals that it is a sort of wasp itself, splendidly reductive as well as errant, sleekly designed and neatly aggressive. Frederick Seidel has long been a sort of cosmological news junkie in his poems, and there has often been bright political vibration as well as bitter panache in the ways in which he has shown us how the great and terrible political murders of the 1960s remain in many ways news to us now. The historical vistas and ambiguities opened up by 'France Now' have become, stunningly, if anything more urgent since its publication only a few months ago, as have its fusions of inventiveness at its most lurid with sincerity at its most obsessive, its insistence on flinging these qualities, finally, at its own subject matter with a garishness livid enough to vie with violence itself.

Miha Mazzini (author of The German Lottery)
I tried to read several of Orhan Pamuk's books but I didn't get far. I quit My Name Is Red in the middle, declaring in front of witnesses that it was so overwritten and boring that it must be ripe for a Nobel prize. So, I started his latest, A Strangeness in My Mind, very cautiously, prepared to drop it anytime – and I'm still holding it after 500 pages, with a few more to go. It's funny and tender, the story of a person and a city woven together brilliantly into a single life.

J. O. Morgan (author of Natural Mechanical, Late Cuts and At Maldon)
Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Bill Manhire's Selected Poems. I have so far read neither, and may not ever do so, not completely, but I am curiously happy (and maybe content) just to have them in my possession.

I went out of my way to buy the Carson in hardback, from America. It has the Greek, fragmented, on the verso, in red (like Jesus), and Carson's translations in black on the recto, also fragmented, but not always mirroring the Greek. I don't exactly read it; I look at it occasionally, and consider it. The UK paperback edition: not nearly so nice.

I don't like books of Selected Poems, but, for reasons I forget, in this case I made an exception.‎ I also sought out the hardback, and it's a nice heavy object, with a simple unlaminated wrapper and one of those built-in bookmark-ribbon things. I bought it on the strength of one poem I happened to read by Manhire and have since read only a handful of other pieces in the book, fairly randomly. I have not been disappointed. I am very glad to have this book.

D. Nurkse (author of Voices Over Water and A Night in Brooklyn)
I'd pick At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón. Alarcon is a storyteller in the ‘boom latinoamericano’ vein at a time when attention has pirouetted elsewhere. Written in English, his novel explores guerrilla theatre and the aftershocks of political violence in Peru. Alarcon is a master of displaced narrative, but the effects don't feel forced. He's faithful to his characters' volatility, to a truth that never stays put.

Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones, a writer who can explore ‘race and class’ without a trace of rhetoric. I think it's a classic – a semi-autobiographical portrait of a girl coming of age in a city terrorized by unsolved killings, knowing that she may be a target.

Dan O’Brien (author of War Reporter, Scarsdale and New Life)
I’m breaking the binding of two books rights now: The Littlest Pumpkin by R. A. Herman and Betina Ogden (Scholastic, 2001), which is, yes, Hallowe’en-themed. My two-year-old daughter gets stuck on the picture of a boy costumed as a skeleton. ‘What is that? What is that?’ she asks nightly at bedtime, pointing to tiny hand bones. The picture and the pointing perturb me, maybe, because we’re dealing with an illness in the family, but I suppose it’s natural for her to ask such questions, and to begin to try to learn about such things. ‘Bats fly at night,’ she also likes to say, about a drawing on a later page.

The second is Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Partly I’m reading this book as research for an experimental chamber rock opera I’m endeavoring to co-write about Sasquatch and cancer. But the truth is that eyewitness testimony of any as-yet-undiscovered life – and taxonomical prose thereof – is one of a few sub-genres that helps me fall asleep at night.

Nicky Singer (author Knight Crew)
I don’t remember much these days (I think it’s the alcohol) but I do remember Vanessa Gebbie’s The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury 2011). It returns to me every so often with its Welsh lilt, its tenderness, its exact observation. Hailed as ‘the legitimate offspring of Dylan Thomas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ (that would have been a rough and tumble) and chosen as book of the year by A. N. Wilson, you’d think it would have had a shelf life. But it hasn’t. It’s just disappeared, rather like the people in the mining tragedy that lies at its narrative heart. Gebbie’s new offering (2015) is just as good and four times as quirky. Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures (illustrated by Lynn Roberts) is a book that ‘doesn’t fit’. It could have been a CB edition but it is actually a Liquorice Fish: a portrait of a marriage in bugs and bats and ... other creatures. Intimate, surprising, strange and occasionally moving. This writer should be better known.

Julian Stannard (author of What Were You Thinking?, forthcoming from CBe in 2016)
Blue Movie (Nine arches Press, 2014). Bobby Parker is a Romantic living in Kidderminster. He writes about drugs, psychic conflagration , desperation. Good. Good. Good. Come back Robert Lowell – ‘Why not say what happened?’ Or even Coleridge. It was difficult not to think of ‘Frost at Midnight’ when reading Parker’s ‘Fuck the Moon’. I didn’t go for every poem in Blue Movie – his debut collection - but I liked a great many and his moon piece seems to me a rather good introduction to the volume as a whole:

Leave the moon alone.
Give us your head; peeled, colourful, half-asleep.
We have been eating the moon since high-school.
Our bodies are weak, they need meat,
gristle and hot fat. They can barely stand.
We have overdosed on the moon; caught exotic
diseases, genital warts, spent nights in jail
with your fucking moons up our arses.
Give us strange spices, a flash of bone
from your skeleton lockers. Leave it alone!
The next time you find yourself writing
about the moon, stop. Go for a walk in the dark.
Call your mother and tell her you are sorry.

Marjorie Ann Watts (author of Are they funny, are they dead?)
The Delicate Prey and Other Stories by Paul Bowles, published by Ecco Press (with ‘Shelbourne Public Library’ printed on the inside), and picked up on the London Underground. Seamus Heaney’s choice of poems by W. B. Yeats (Faber and Faber). The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published by Virago. I had never read her, and was completely dazzled, went on to read everything I could lay my hands on. The Land Where the Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee, Penguin: fascinating, erudite and funny, and as good or better than actually going on holiday in Italy.