A slender, beautifully bound blue hardback showed up on my desk. Its pages were creamy, its typeface clear in a formal, old-fashioned way. Each page number was picked out in scarlet. It was a book to put Kindle out of business, so covetable that, I almost thought, it scarcely mattered what it contained. It was then I noticed its curious title, "Things I Don't Want to Know," and a quotation, picked out on the cover in pink type: "To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL."

THINGS I DON'T WANT TO KNOW, by Deborah Levy. Notting Hill Editions, 2013, 107 pp., £12 (hardcover)

The writer is Deborah Levy, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker for her marvellous novel "Swimming Home." "Things I Don't Want to Know" is published by Notting Hill Editions, a small, choice, independent publisher committed to "reinvigorating the essay as a literary form." They came up with the idea of commissioning writers to respond to essays of distinction. Levy has had George Orwell's "Why I Write" (1946) at her elbow.