Teeth: On negative reviews

One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.

The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that have been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.

Recent examples: Michael Hofmann’s TLS review of Colm Toíbín’s The Magician (‘Crap hat, no rabbit’) and Tom Crewe’s LRB review of Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (‘not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness’). Tom Crewe’s review begins by quoting some of the quotes on the paperback of Vuong’s previous novel: ‘A marvel … brilliant and remarkable … a masterpiece … staggeringly beautiful …’ And then he quotes some of the sentences that, starting to read the book, he stumbles on, and I can almost taste his own exasperation. You have paid for the dish of the day and it’s luke-warm and stodgy.

I am not a contrarian, which would be tedious, and I’m not, I think, a Grumpy Old Man (there are more than enough of those, and they’re getting grumpier). I think the Poems on the Underground scheme is terrific; I like many of the books that lots of other people like; there are new books every year that surprise and delight me, and they’re not always the ones I might be expected to like. It is, always, personal.

Actually I think choruses of approval – most of which are orchestrated: this what publishers’ publicity and marketing departments are paid to do – are seeing diminishing returns. How many masterpieces can there be? Even the informal choruses – the ‘likes’ on social media – result, in my own woodshed-corner experience, in fewer actual sales than they used to. People have less money (except those who have more, but they tend not to buy books). ‘Disposable income’ is a joke. People 'like' and move on and don’t follow through. I’m guilty as charged. What will happen next: more hype, more marketing, more of the same, an escalation of the arms race, because that’s how the system is set up. It’s all kinda silly but I am serious about this, otherwise there’d be no point.

CBe newsletter December 2025

Christmas. Presents. Books are even easier to wrap than bottles. See the home page of the website and bear in mind the Season Tickets: 6 books for £50, 10 for £75. Within the UK, free postage. This is the best of these deals on offer, it really is.

Buying a book for X can be tricky. X might not just not like the book, they might decide that if you thought they would like this then even after all these years you haven’t really understood who they are, and your whole relationship is on the line. You could buy X a book that won one of the big prizes but that’s outsourcing your choice to random panel of judges and is just bland. The point of the Season Tickets is that you choose which books; and if you’re buying for X you’re spreading your bets – X is unlikely to dislike all of the books you’ve chosen. Or you could let X choose for themself: ask them to, or buy the Ticket and send me their email and I’ll take it from there.

There are around 80 titles on the website to choose from. Some are available exclusively from the website – books with only a few copies left may be officially out of print at the distributor, and so not in bookshops, but are still available from the website.

These are the first two books out of the block for next year:

Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, which will publish in January, is available from the website now. Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking, which will publish in March, is now printing and will be available in January. Both books, not through any effort of my own, already have US publishers (and Erin Vincent’s in Australia too). A little later, Axholme by Mike Bradwell (1948–2025), who founded the Hull Truck theatre company in the early 1970s and ran the Bush Theatre (my local) from 1996 to 2007: voiced by a nine-year-old boy in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s, it’s a wonder.

My last day in an office (which I’d gone into at 9.30 each weekday for fourteen years) was the last working day before Christmas 2005, twenty years ago. Quitting the day job has turned out to be one of my better decisions; I’ve made worse.

A first for me: attending a Leicester Square premiere screening. I went because I’m more than a little obsessed with the actor Billy Bob Thornton, and I’ve written about this on the CBe blog, Sonofabook: here.

Billy Bob and I

Twenty-odd years ago Julie and Brian from next door told me they’d seen me in a film they’d watched the previous night so I watched it myself and they were right. Billy Bob Thornton In the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There is me. Here I am on the cover of the published screenplay, holding a broom in a small-town barbershop on a quiet day in 1949:

I became a little obsessed. Billy Bob’s birthday is 4 August, which is the date the First World War began and a recurring date in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and the publication date of my first novel. I so wanted to know that Billy Bob is left-handed, like me, that the third or fourth time I watched the film I kept a tally of how often he holds his cigarette in his left hand, how often in his right. The left hand wins. But when he kills a man, he’s holding the knife in his right hand.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very good film and it has the same basic plot as James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. (I’ve written about this in The Other Jack.) Ed Crane in the film and Frank Chambers in the novel are very different characters – Ed is a perpetual bystander (‘I didn’t see anyone. No one saw me. I was the barber’), while Frank has a raging sexual appetite – but both get away with one murder and are then convicted of another that they didn’t commit. While they are on death row, both characters write down their versions of what has happened – Ed for a men’s magazine called Gent that’s paying him 5 cents a word, Frank writing the book we are reading (though he’s relying on the prison chaplain to ‘look it over and show me the places where maybe it ought to be fixed up a little, for punctuation and all that’).

The narratives of both Cain’s novel and the Coen Brothers’ film echo the early 18th-century ‘True Confessions’ of prisoners awaiting execution that jump-started the English novel. As with Ed Crane and Frank Chambers, Jack Sheppard’s first-person account (‘as told’ to Daniel Defoe) of his robberies and his several escapes from prison gained authority from being spoken ‘on the brink of eternity’: aged twenty-two, Sheppard was hanged in November 1724; a third of the population of London followed his progress from Newgate in an open cart to the gallows at Tyburn. Writing was not going to save Sheppard, Crane or Chambers from the noose or the electric chair, so why did they do it? Sheppard is telling his tale, he insists, ‘to satisfy the curious, and do justice to the innocent’. I think Crane and Chambers might have said the same; they felt a need for some kind of justice which for better or worse they associated with the written word.

As well as with justice, writers are often obsessed other writers (see, for example, Nicholson Baker’s U and I and Matthew De Abaitua’s Self and I) and sometimes with singers, artists, actors . . . Some obsessions are long-lasting (I had a thing about Stendhal that went on so long I wrote a novel about him in an attempt to put it to bed); some are ‘mild’ or even ‘unhealthy’; others are simple fandom. Last Sunday there was a premiere screening in Leicester Square of the second series of Landman, which streams on Paramount and stars Billy Bob Thornton, and a friend of a friend had spare tickets and I grabbed one. I went with my copy of the screenplay of The Man Who Wasn’t There for Billy Bob to sign. Fond hope, and an odd thing to do: I do not collect autographs and generally have no interest at all in signed copies of books. Billy Bob was there, in a red cowboy hat, but a Leicester Square premiere isn’t exactly a poetry reading in a pub where you can wander up and say hi: he was there on the heavily patrolled red carpet, and then far away on the stage, and then at the after-party in the VIP room behind a curtain. I got some curious looks and a woman asked me if I was Billy Bob’s father and I drank three margaritas and came home.

CBe newsletter October 2025

RIP Tony Harrison, 1937–2025. Except of course that I don’t want him to be resting in peace, I want him to be carrying on doing his awkward, troublesome, angry and sometimes tender but always honest thing. That he did this in so many forms – poetry, theatre, film – means there isn’t a convenient pigeonhole in which to bury him. He was both European and very local, from Leeds: the photo is of my first buy, 55 years ago.

This newsletter has nothing immediate to sell (except the whole backlist in print, 80-odd books, and please do click a button or two on the website) but Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, to be published in January, is now printing and will be up on the website for pre-orders very soon. Farah will be in conversation with Dur e Aziz Amna at Brick Lane Bookshop next Wednesday, 15 October: details here.














Substack, for me, is largely sub, off my radar, but an exception is the one written by Katy Evans-Bush, whose Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle was published last year and was a Guardian poetry-book-of-the-year pick. Don’t listen to the party conference speeches, don’t read reports of them, read Katy’s most recent post. American-born, she’s in Kent, frontier-land: ‘Dover […] is here, of course. Dover the town, the beach, is where the small dinghies land once they’ve made it from France. And of course Dover the cliff is an unofficial national symbol, bluebirds or no.’ Katy, like many of the non-UK-born people I know, has a far better understanding of UK history than most English people (I think the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish get it better), including me.

The harvest festival will take place at the Conway Hall in London on Friday and Saturday, 23 and 24 October. I mean the Small Publishers Fair, the annual event at which small publishers come out of their solitary caves and surprise themselves by being sociable. And books are sold, not just apples and pears but fruits even your local independent greengrocer doesn’t stock. Please come – full details here.

And then a couple of rare trips out of London: CBe will be the Bath Indie Book Fair on Saturday, 8 November; and at the Dublin Small Press Fair on 28/29 November.

CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

Two reasons why there has been little news of late. One, CBe isn’t publishing many books – except this month, September, Patrick McGuinness, Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, see here. Subtle, sensible, surprising, immensely intelligent essays by a man who publishes in more forms and speaks more languages than I have fingers on one hand. Second reason, which is in fact the first reason: in the context of the very bad shit that is happening in the world right now, and the complicit refusal of the UK’s media and government to acknowledge the scale and horror of it, promoting a few good books can feel beside the point. I don’t think I’m alone here.

Anyway. The soil is toxic but I cultivate a little garden. Last week a very good review of Caroline Clark’s Sovetica appeared in Tears in the Fence; excerpts are on the book’s website page. I am very excited about two books that are almost ready to send to print and that CBe will publish early next year: Farah Ali, Telegraphy, and Erin Vincent, Fourteen Ways of Looking.

Again, a mention of the Season Tickets available from the website: 6 books of your choice for £50 or 10 for £75, free UK postage. This is much better than Amazon: some CBe books are listed on Amazon as ‘not currently available’, others are listed there with crazy prices (£41.78 for a book selling on the CBe website for £8.99). The disrespect here is large and mutual. For anyone buying one of those Season Tickets, a free copy (while limited stock lasts) of the A1 poster of CBe covers 2007–26. Oh, and why not, I’ll add in a free copy of Leila Berg, Flickerbook, or Todd McEwen, Who Sleeps with Katz – just email to say which.

Jonathan Main of Bookseller Crow in Crystal Place – a bookseller I have respected, for many years – has died. Sincere condolences to everyone in that shop. Things are not going well.

Pick'n'mix: newsletter July 2025

Pick’n’mix: choose – from any of the books in the photo or on the website – six for £50, ten for £75: see the Season Tickets on the home page of the website. From titles first published in 2008 to this year’s new ones; free postage, UK only. These deals were first offered during the Covid lockdowns, when they were a lifeline. Currently, the weather is good but sales are slow and I need to be going to the post office more regularly. Until I run out of them, posters (A1 size, eats up wall space) showing the book covers 2007–2026 will be sent free with every Season Ticket.

Below, Sheila Ramage in the bookshop/shed in Notting Hill that she ran for 45 years. ‘The loveliest person in the trade’ – Marius Kociejowski. She was generous and fun and immensely knowledgeable, and this place was about as good as human civilisation gets. It was formative. Sheila died in 2020. I’ll be talking about her briefly at 2 p.m. this Saturday, 26 July, in this very place, now the Bouda Gallery (132 Palace Gardens Terrace, W8 4RT), at an event organised by Steven Fowler. Free entry. Come.

Back in 2014 CBe published Ágota Kristóf’s brief memoir The Illiterate (translated by Nina Bogin) and brought back into print The Notebook (translated by Alan Sheridan). Still in print with CBe: The Illiterate and Trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie). In August a collection of stories by Kristóf titled I Don’t Care (translated by Chris Andrews) will be published by Penguin, and in the next year (roughly) the Trilogy will also move to Penguin. For readers and for Kristóf (she died in 2011) this is good: she should have been on the Penguin modern classics list years ago. On 21 August the London Review Bookshop will host an event to celebrate the publication of the stories – tickets available here.

Thank you all for keeping this thing going.

"Run up the colours": newsletter May 2025

Early books, above … 176 Interruptions, scheduled for July, is a revised and expanded edition of 99 Interruptions (published in 2022 and now almost out of stock). In Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, scheduled for September, Patrick McGuinness – novelist, poet, translator, editor, critic and speaker of several languages – writes about his personal history, the unofficial histories of places in which he has lived, and some of the lesser-known byways of European literature and art. Both books are available for pre-order now from the website.

The encounter with the bear that resulted in three fractured bones in my neck (see previous newsletter) is now history: the bones have healed, the neck brace I wore night and day for two months has been discarded, the bear has gone over the hill. Early in Master and Commander, one of several old films I watched over the past weeks while slumped on the sofa, Captain Aubrey gives this order: ‘Mr Boyle, run up the colours.’ So I did. Below, a slice of unfinished history: a size-A1 poster of the CBe book covers (and 3 pamphlets, 2 issues of a magazine) 2007 to now. The history is ravelled: some of the books are now out of print, some have gone to other publishers, some have been reprinted with different covers. There’s only one print of the poster; I may print a limited run, but how many people have enough spare wall space for a poster?

Shelf space may be easier. Eighty of the books on the poster are available from the website, either individually or – for bargain-hunters – in one of the Season Ticket bundles, 10 books of your own choice for £75 or 6 for £50. Among them are the last two books of Paul Bailey, who may now be among ‘the riotous dead’ but whose life was celebrated at a memorial service last week in the spirit of the titles of his books: Inheritance and Joie de vivre.