CB editions publishes novellas, short stories, translations, poetry, and writing that invents its own genre: we cater, as the Guardian noted, ‘for works which might otherwise fall through the cracks between the big publishers’.

New titles for 2009 include two book-length poems – Natural Mechanical by J. O. Morgan, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch – and Recessional, a documentary record of the early months of recession that mixes text and photographs, fact and opinion. Last year’s titles include Unfinished Ode to Mud, the only UK edition in print of the poems of Francis Ponge, and Michael Hofmann’s translation of his father’s last novel, Lichtenberg & The Little Flower Girl. One of the first CBe titles in 2007, 24 for 3 by Jennie Walker, won the 2008 McKitterick Prize and is now published by Bloomsbury.

Writers write, according to Walter Benjamin, ‘because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like’. We aim to publish for a community of like-minded readers who are interested in books they have not learned to expect.