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3 July 2026
While being generally uncomfortable about comfort, he wrote when asked what he read for comfort, in times of particular stress or despair I do find that re-reading any of the novels of Thomas Bernhard makes me feel better, though I am also uncomfortable about the concept of feeling better, he wrote. He had been re-reading Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters, a book that he had read before, and, indeed, reviewed before, so, he thought, he would not review it again, he would just read it for what he, not without irony, called comfort, not that he understood the word. Bernhard’s sentences are unrelentingly beautiful and his negativity so intense that it becomes ludicrous, he wrote. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite, so I often find my negativity turned, too, he also wrote, and then, he thought, I have finished answering the question I have been asked, not only answering it but explaining my answer, too, which was more than I had been asked to do, even though I have done it rather briefly. The first time he had read Woodcutters, he had been younger than the narrator, and younger than the author when he wrote the book, the narrator and the author sharing rather more than their age, he thought, but now he was older than the narrator, and older than the author was when he wrote the book, and also older than the author was when he died, or, rather, committed suicide, whichever is the better description of the author’s death. The narrator of Woodcutters has not committed suicide, obviously, and does not even do so at the end, but the entire novel is narrated in the evening of the day of the funeral of one of the narrator’s former friends, who, finding herself denied artistic success merely through mediocrity of talent, which is not necessarily sufficient to exclude someone from success, depending on how you understand the word success, but perhaps sufficient to exclude someone from success in what the narrator calls Vienna’s art mill, the art mill that grinds even those with talent into powder, most effectively by acclaiming their talent, and, by doing so, destroying it, whereas Joana, losing all that she had going for her, which is a strange turn of phrase, spent many years in alcoholism and despair, in decline, so to speak, and hanged herself in the village in which she was born, just before the narrator’s return to Vienna after an absence, apparently, of some twenty years. The host of the dinner party at which the narrator observes the proceedings without involving himself in them, as he says, was once a talented composer, or at least so it had seemed to the narrator when he had been involved with him twenty or even thirty years before, before the narrator had left Vienna in disgust with Vienna and with the artistic and literary circles of Vienna, but now the host has been destroyed by his talent, or by the acclaim accorded his talent, and in this way relieved of this talent, and the host, one Auersberger, or so he is called in the novel, though it is perhaps interesting to note that the book was banned in Austria after one of Bernhard’s former patrons reognised himself in the character, is now little more than ludicrous or pathetic. And the same could be said, and indeed is said by the narrator, albeit to himself, as he sits in a chair just off the main room, observing them, of the other guests at the dinner party, the dinner party styled by its hosts an artistic dinner held in honour of an actor who is rather late to arrive, but really more of a gathering of members of the artistic and literary circles that included both the narrator and Joana twenty or thirty years before, when the narrator, like the author, if the author can be distinguished even a little from the narrator, was an aspiring writer who was supported by persons like Auersberger, or by the person who recognised himself as Auersberger, writers who had talent but whose talent has been destroyed by Vienna’s art mill and other persons whose talent has been similarly destroyed. “As I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can ever bring satisfaction, I thought.” But, thinks the narrator, these people, the people of this so-called artistic circle, have been more than complicit in the destruction of their talent. “All these people have contrived to turn conditions and circumstances that were once happy into something utterly depressing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they’ve managed to make everything depressing, to transform all the happiness they once had into utter depression, just as I have.” When the celebrated actor finally arrives and the narrator moves with the other guests to the dining room, the narrator’s focus moves, if the narrator can be said to have a focus, from his opinions formed in the past of those present, attitudes which caused him to leave Vienna twenty years ago, when his love for those present, and for Joana, had turned entirely to disgust, when he had taken from them all he could, to his observations of what is said and done, though not said and done by him, who only observes the proceedings and does not participate in them, or so he says, in the present, at the artistic dinner itself, observations, it must be said, no less vitriolic but rather more ambivalent, by which I mean, the bookseller thought as he paused in his train of thought, a train of thought that had begun to resemble a review but was not a review but only a train of thought, unless a train of thought can be called a review, and he thought not, he thought, not the popular misconception of ambivalence as some wishy-washiness, if he was writing a review he would replace wishy-washiness with a better word, or at least an actual word, but ambivalence in its true, etymological and Freudian sense of being beset with equally overwhelming but opposite inclinations. The narrator, he thought, loathes those most like himself, all his loathing is self-loathing, and to loathe, therefore, is the greatest act of sympathy, the strongest form, he thought, of identification. “We are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible although, if we are honest we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behaviour and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves — perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me,” the narrator of Woodcutters says. To grow older, the bookseller thought, is not to become more certain but to become less certain, certainty is for the young, he thought, certainty is for those who do not think, not that it is necessarily true that the young do not think, there are, no doubt, some who are young who do think, but they have not thought long enough, being young, to realise that all thought leads to the destruction of certainty, all thought leads to ambivalence, to the undermining of anything that might be said to be one’s own identity, there’s no such thing as one’s own identity anyway, he thought, except in the thoughts of others, and hardly even then, all thought is its own undoing. As the guests depart from the dinner, the narrator, the last to leave, thanks the hostess for a lovely time, after apparently hating it the whole time and hating everything about it and everyone who was there and everything they said and did, kisses her, and then runs through the streets of Vienna, away from his home, towards the centre of town, in the wrong direction, in a dishevelled state of mind, so to term it, completely dishevelled and confused. “To think that I was capable of such hypocrisy, I thought as I was speaking to her,” he says to himself about the only words he actually speaks in a book full of words. “To think that I am capable of telling her to her face the precise opposite of what I feel, because it makes things momentarily more endurable.” Well, thought the bookseller, I can understand that, we all tell others to their faces the opposite of what we feel because it makes things momentarily more endurable, and, in fact, we also do feel what we tell them, that is how we survive and that is how we destroy ourselves, we destroy ourselves by surviving and we survive by destroying ourselves, this is what thinking tells us if we think our thoughts through to the end, this is the truth that is hidden from the young by their youth, this is why I resist my own existence, at least internally, whatever that means, whatever form that resistance could take, and, at the same time, this is why I long to exist, for my nonexistence to end, though my nonexistence cannot end, it can only be obscured, for a chance to take refuge from thinking in busyness, so to call it, in the busyness of my life, the life I therefore both long for and resent. He felt comforted by this thought, he thought, my negativity has become so intense, he thought, through reading Thomas Bernhard or through the thinking that accompanies reading Thomas Bernhard, through thinking like Thomas Bernhard and not thinking like myself, that it has become ludicrous, and always was ludicrous. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite like this, he thought. I find my negativity has turned, he thought, and this, he thought, is a comfort.
Where to start with this slim novel? It’s brilliant. The writing is crisp. Lerner not only writes well, but with economy. Each word feels as though it belongs on the page, each action or non-action vital. Transcription is about things that matter; not a cluster of meaningless or fabulous characters or plot twists that may entertain but don’t add up to much in the end, like much of what passes as a novel in the oversaturated publishing world — as well as other social media that tell ‘stories’. Ironically, a central theme in this novel is technology, and it’s definitely exploring ‘story’: what gets told, what’s said or supposedly said, what’s remembered compared to what’s recorded (or not). The novel opens with the unnamed narrator heading by train to Providence. It’s the return of the nervous protégé to his alma mater to record the ‘final interview’ with Thomas, a famous cultural critic, who is now in his 90s. The narrator is restless, travelling backwards (which makes him nauseous), photographing his masked self in the reflection of the moving train’s window. He looks at the photo and deletes it. He begins a conversation about the morning's problems by txt. This small passage tells the reader so much. It’s sometime after the lockdowns; recording yourself and then just as easily deleting yourself on your handheld device is a common phenomena; our awareness of ourselves in place and time determined by or acted out through the technology we hold close to us (continuously). This same technology enables us to escape the present by replaying or reimaging the past, or determining a future that will never be actual. Time is a central player in the conversations in the three distinct parts of this novel, and the way in which Lerner seamlessly takes us through conversation from America in the 2020s, then to late 1990s and back to Germany in the 1940s, not layering in historical facts or particular incidents but rather by reference to cultural touchpoints, mentions of music, philosophers and writers creating what made me think of a series of vibrations. Vibrations that resonated through not only time, but the shared (and often differently interpreted) experiences of each of the main characters. Are these vibrations a transcription of a sort?
Yet it is technology that lets the narrator down. He drops his phone in the sink. It’s kaput. And, as much as he tries to suggest that the interview could be the next day, and the evening for ‘catching up’, Thomas is keen to get started, and the narrator is too cowardly to say his phone isn’t working. So the interview goes ahead without a recorded transcript. The protégé doesn’t even take notes. Or so it seems. There is the possibility that Thomas suspects there is something amiss. There is the possibility that even if the phone had worked the subsequent published interview would have been a fabrication. Ben Lerner is leaning into this idea of the real and imagined, of what is fiction? And the novel is dotted with this concept. Of how we look, how we remember, and what happens when we start to think that something is imagined or described rather than ‘real’ – whatever that may be. When his phone doesn’t work, the narrator begins to ‘notice’ everything, “The stones are stonier”. He has no google directions. He would have used them if his phone was working even though he knows the way. Without his phone, time shifts as his head has space to imagine and remember, and he’s walking through the campus of his student days. If this sounds nostalgic or overwrought, don’t worry: it’s not. These moments are often depicted wryly, with a wink to the reader and a self-depreciating honesty.
The characters in Transcription are ordinary and real (and possibly often Lerner himself, or facets of). They are fallible and not always likable. There are no heroes, although maybe sometimes heroic, if you can call it that, attempts to deal with our contemporary world, that’s a world on the intimate as much as the wider scale. This is most telling in the passages where the narrator talks about his relationship with his daughter, and Max (his friend from college, who also happens to be Thomas’s actual son) discusses his own daughter’s problems. Both children have issues with the world, and these issues visit upon their bodies. One through anxiety and a refusal to participate (go to school) and the other through a refusal to eat. Both these problems are overcome to some degree via mindless games and social media dross. That this distraction, although empty, can be an antidote for other more harmful problems, puts our devices, and what they deliver to us, into that ambivalent space, providing a lifeline despite appearing meaningless. How do we measure this against the ability of the book to provide a place to escape to?
Transcription is completely satisfying — it’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that ends so well. Ben Lerner covers so much ground in these 130 pages. Here we encounter interviewer, author, and cultural critic; here are the fathers, Thomas the elder, Max the son, and the unnamed narrator — the cultural son. There are the issues of the modern world (climate, politics, image), threaded through but never belaboured. There is memory and misremembering — what is invention? And where does fiction start?
We will be discussing Transcription at our next Talking Books session on July 14
Find out more and join in by Zoom
”Set in a remote penal colony built on land scarred by slavery and colonialism, this vivid and haunting novel unfolds in a landscape where punishment has replaced justice and cruelty has become the norm. As the colony nears its end, the warden introduces a ritualised full-moon hunt, releasing prisoners into the forest for sport. Through spare yet masterful prose, Ana Paula Maia renders a closed world thick with dread, brutality and moral decay. The prisoners and guards alike are trapped within a system that corrodes and suffocates everyone it touches. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption that will linger with readers long after the final page.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
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Kieron Smith, boy by James Kelman $48
Rejected by his brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron Smith finds comfort – and endless stories – in the home of his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of Glasgow, a world away from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to find a way to adapt to his new life. Kieron Smith, boy is a brilliant evocation of an urban working-class childhood, capturing the joys, frustrations, injustices, excitements, revels, battles, games, uncertainties, questions, lies, discoveries and sheer of wonder. Kelman is an outstanding writer, uncompromising and with deep sympathy for the downtrodden, and it is good to see his works coming back into print. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Kieron Smith, boy is one more in a line of uncompromising, honest, passionate, radical and perfectly crafted books from a writer who has not given up on the questions of freedom and justice.' —Sean O'Reilly, Stinging Fly
'Kieron Smith, boy gives voice to an honourable decency which guides the human spirit even in the midst of its own brutality. This is an outstanding novel of immense power, and is Kelman's best yet.' —Simon Koevesi, The Independent
'By forcing us to rethink childhood, (and therefore adulthood), Kieron Smith, boy is a magnificent and important novel, and might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date.' —Irvine Welsh, Financial Times
'An outstanding, living, breathing novel that powerfully documents the life of a Glaswegian boy in his own voice. This book is almost impossible to review, because it is simply too good. Kelman is not beating up the contemporary novel — he is simply showing how it's done and shoving the bar that bit farther up and out of reach for most British writers.' —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'James Kelman's best novel so far, Kieron Smith, boy is Kelman's tender evocation of his own childhood.' —James Wood, New Yorker
'The boy's voice, to my ear, is flawless and brilliantly sustained. The diction, the syntax, the sudden cliff-edges Kelman brings us to, where language fails — these are the product of years of careful listening to people who're never listened to.' —Kathleen Jamie, Granta
>>Read an excerpt.
>>The war against silence.
Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette (translated ffrom Fench by Kate Briggs) $42
In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man--a husband, father, and employer--has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father's death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette's signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head. Introduction by Kathryn Scanlan. [Paperback with French flaps]
'Twenty Minutes of Silence is a sublimely rare thing: a feat of experimentation that defies comparison. Helene Bessette's phrasings (translated by the brilliant Kate Briggs) pulse with a bass drum and freewheeling speed, as she upends the sentence so that we can reconsider our relationship to language and the stories we tell with it. Thrilling.' —Makenna Goodman
'Discovering Helene Bessette through Kate Briggs's incredible translations has felt like having a light switched on. I can feel so many of us excitedly learning and re-exploring the potential of the novel, which as a form, multiplies in Twenty Minutes of Silence. The brilliant modernist and anti-commercial styles that run through it feel perfect for us now and I am grateful we get to write and think in the extraordinary milieu of Bessette and Briggs.' —Holly Pester
>>With the revolver in the library.
Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno $42
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child's life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more. [Paperback]
”Kate Zambreno's oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an interrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence.” —Paris Review
>>Worthwhile ghost.
>>Writing postpartum.
The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $25
One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women's conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie's memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. The Other Girl explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. This book, beautiful and profound, attests to what we already knew from her other works — that Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.” —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
”Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history. Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.” —Jamie Hood, The Baffler
>>Other books by Annie Ernaux.
Maybe Baby by Emma Neale $39
Nate, a grieving widower, is determined to honour his late wife and find a way to have the child they were desperate to raise together. After various attempts to identify a suitable surrogate come to nothing, Nate is compelled to try something radical. He travels to London to take part in a groundbreaking medical trial. As things progress, he becomes caught in the complex hinge of three powerful desires: his loyalty to his late wife, a primal urge to be a father, and his knee-weakening attraction to Sadie, who has her own reasons to resist starting a family. [Paperback]
”An irresistible story of grief, hope and the miracles we dare to chase.” —Catherine Chidgey
>>By page 25 she is dead.
>>Grief and desire.
Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery) $40
An archaeological novel that digs into the strata of the European soil, and uncovers a long history of oppression, expropriation and erasure. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small Prussian town to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a freehold farmer. Digging a grave for his wife’s body, Redo finds the body of a soldier. The next day, Redo uncovers two soldiers from an earlier time, perfectly preserved. This novel contains the story of Redo's mysterious life, and the great love at the heart of it, revealed in chapters of increasing length: as the bodies proliferate, the story gets more complicated. What will be excavated from the earth, and what will remain buried? Astounding, bursting with ideas and novel thoughts. [Paperback]
‘Mora embarks on a radical adventure in a Europe ravaged by wars and revolutions that has no reference in our current literature.’ —La Vanguardia
>>Hidden and revealed delights.
>>Freedom through structure.
>>Melville in miniature.
Repetition, A novel by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) $25
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange. It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended. [Paperback with French flaps]
”Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marias and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse.” —S.C. Cornell, The New York Times
”For Freud the 'compulsion to repeat,' as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel's explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family's house like a hungry beast in the darkness. If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed.” —Madeline Gressel, Parapraxis
>>Never let it go.
>>Finding words.
>>Familiar and strange.
>>Unfolding the past.
>>Other books by Vigdis Hjorth.
>>Other Repetiton.
When the World Sleeps: Stories, words and wounds of Palestine by Francesca Albanese (translated from Italian by Gregory Conti) $38
The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historic transitions to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese (who lived in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families and is currently a United Nations Special Rapporteur) takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting with the stories of the people she met. Anyone following the harrowing events that have unfolded in the Middle East who wants to understand Palestine will discover in When the World Sleeps a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until recently, and what it has become today. [Paperback]
Motherland: A feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to autocracy by Julia Ioffe $40
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home mothers. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women. [Paperback]
'A fresh, unexpected, and revealing portrait of Russia. Julia Ioffe tracks the transformation of Russia from dictatorship to democracy and back again in sharp, engaging prose, filling in the blanks, telling the stories left out by so many others.' —Anne Applebaum
Search and Find: Alphabet of Alphabets [and] Number of Numbers by Allan Sanders $30
There are hours of fun in this epic search-and-find activity book! Children can practise their letters and numbers in this interactive activity book designed to engage and entertain. There are over fifty fully illustrated 'search-and-find' activities, each themed on a number or letter of the alphabet. In Alphabet of Alphabets, you'll take a ride through twenty-six fully-illustrated alphabets, from an A to Z of Birds to an A to Z of Zoo. Then, flip the book over for Number of Numbers, where you can count the animals going into Noah's Ark two-by-two, spot thirteen scary skeletons at the haunted house on Halloween, visit Farm Fifteen and more. Dip in and out of the pages or do each one in order for a unique reading experience. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Being: Why its harder to be a human than a hamster or a herring by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies $40
From early childhood, we start to become aware of the difficulties we must all inevitably face. We will battle an inner critic across the entirety of our life. We will never truly know those around us and time will destroy all we create. Death becomes a reality, and we cannot escape the knowledge that it is coming for us all. These are the problems of being; the existential truths that make it harder to be human than a hamster or a herring. Many other problems emerge from the knowledge of our own mortality. How do we find meaning, choose a life path, form an identity, face uncertainty, cope with hardship and, ultimately, bear the loss of all we love? How do we make peace with the inner voice that won't stop attacking the choices we've made and the opportunities we've missed? How do we deal with the uncertain and unpredictable nature of the world and our future? [Paperback]
'Few books capture so powerfully the paradox of being human: that self-awareness both elevates us and unsettles us. Being is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand anxiety, identity, and the shadow of mortality.' —Professor Thomas Heidenreich, Esslingen University
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26 June 2026
An appealing history of Japan in the nineteenth history, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a tale both personal and encompassing. Tsuneno is the daughter of a priest. Growing up in a small mountainous village, the temple is central to her life and expectations. Married at 12, life seems mapped out: she will be a diligent temple wife. Yet 15 years on and with no children in sight, she is sent home again with the divorce papers—not an uncommon occurrence in the nineteenth century, where women would be remarried—a failed relationship not necessitating disaster. Two more marriages down the road and the picture for Tsuneno isn’t quite as rosy, her family are losing patience with her and she has other ideas. Seeking independence, she goes against her family’s wishes and knowledge, pawns her belongings (mostly clothes), and makes her way to the city of Edo in the care of a family acquaintance—someone she thought she could trust. In a relatively short time, Tsuneno’s world is turned upside down. Not only has the trustworthy friend betrayed her, physically and emotionally, but he has also left her in financial peril and abandoned her in the city. Living in a tiny room, at the mercy of her landlord, without money or warm clothes, bedding or utensils, she is desperate to find work. Her dreams of a good position in a Shogun household are remote, but she does get a job working long hours as a housemaid. It isn’t ideal, but it enables her to stay in Edo, a lively city with prospects. Tsuneno rises and falls alongside the city. This is the story of a woman and the story of a city, Edo, at the end of a golden age, known as the Great Peace, a time just prior to the arrival of the American gunship and Commodore Perry. As we read we fall into step beside Tsuneno, seeing the informal structures of the city — the migrant workers and peddlers — that underpins the economic structure of the more formal organisations, the geisha and the theatre performers that brighten the evenings, the temple priests, the samurai of all classes (one of whom will impact this woman’s life more than she expected) and the hierarchies of the ruling shogunate classes. Pieced together from letters (between Tsueno and her family), family records kept at the temples, combined with historical events (famine, fire, political machinations) and research, Amy Stanley creates a gripping account of a woman who chose between family and freedom, who made the most of the hand she was dealt. Rich in detail with its vivid descriptions of the environs (urban and rural), and lively portraits of Tsuneno, her family and the people of Edo, Stranger in a Shogun’s City is a compelling history of an ordinary woman in a fascinating time and place.
An essay is a literary form but a collection of essays is not a literary form, or, rather, a collection of essays, unless written specifically as a cohesive set, which is unusual for collections of essays, and in which case they are not usually considered a collection of essays but something else, only becomes a literary form, and only if we stretch our concept of what constitutes a literary form, at the point at which the essays are assembled, selected and ordered by someone, plausibly not even the author of the essays, some time, perhaps some considerable time, after they were written, at various times perhaps over a considerable period of time, during which the author may or may not have changed her approach to whatever and however she writes and may or may not have written and had published any number of other literary forms, if she happens to be an author who also writes other literary forms. ‘Selected works’ is not a literary form, and essay collections often tend to be selected works, these works often having appeared in various periodicals or other platforms over the years preceding their collection, or, generally more accurately, selection. Reviewing a collection of essays, as an instance of a literary non-form, presents certain difficulties as the reviewer is denied the various familiar analytic tools that are dependent on form, usually ending up making some generalised statements about the author, her qualities and importance, and then garnishing these comments with snippets pulled from various of the works in the collection, each work of which could be analysed as a literary form but none of which tend to be so treated, except perhaps cursorily, due to lack of space and time, space and time being a single entity in writing as they are in physics. If a reviewer does not quite know how to approach the literary non-form of a collection of essays this is because a reader, of which a reviewer is merely a pitiful example, does not know how to approach a non-form. A reader has no obligations towards the collectedness of pieces towards which, severally, he may have obligations, but also, at least, thankfully, tools dependent upon the form of the several pieces, but what obligations does a reviewer have towards the collectedness of the pieces? It is hard to review something that you do not recognise as a thing. Lydia Davis is best known for the devastating precision of the sentences that comprise some of the shortest, sharpest stories you are likely to read, and for her subtle and precise translations of Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Leiris and others. Her economy of expression astounds, whether that economy is displayed in a single-sentence fiction, indefinitely extended in a translation, or in such various essays as are collected in this book. The essays, which are of various forms, all concern the relationship between language and lucidity; they all concern writing: either writers or the practice of writing; they are all about reading (of which the practice of writing is a peculiarly freighted subset). The essays all both demonstrate and concern what we could call ‘the mechanics of form’, the way in which language, well used, creates, sharpens or transfigures meaning in literature. Davis shows us how to narrow our linguistic aperture in order to maximise our literary depth of field. She is full of good advice, suggestions for new reading, exemplary sentences and memorable observations: “If we catch only a little of the subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it.” Because a collection is not a literary form, you have no obligation as a reader towards the totality of the volume, but there is much here to enjoy and discover, much that will sharpen your writing and your reading of the writing of others, much to return to and re-read. Most likely you will read it all.
Blending detailed research with the sensitvities of a novelist and poet, Said the Dead breaches the boundaries that contain the past to resuscitate the voices of women who were inmates in a now-derelict Victorian mental hospital in the city of Cork. As the narrator follows their traces through the archives and through the corridors, she finds in the murmurings of these women much that resonate with her own life and experiences.
"Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts." —Yiyun Li
Our 486th newsletter!
19 June 2026
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa $38
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them — and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. From the author of A Ghost in the Throat. [Paperback]
”The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.” —New Statesman
”Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. Astounding and utterly fresh.” —Irish Independent
”Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go: sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.” —Sunday Times
”Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death — dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.” —Paris Review
>>Lost voices from the asylum.
>>Grateful to live these days.
>>Also available in hardback!
Dear Memory: Letters on writing, silence, and grief by Victoria Chang $40
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly and in the silences of her father. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In letters to family, past teachers, fellow poets, and to the imagination itself, Victoria Chang offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. Illustrated with artworks by the author. [Paperback]
"Groundbreaking. Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR
"Dear Memory is an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection. Chang has followed language to the edge of what she knows; the question her book asks is whether language can go further still. Her own project is not to erase those incisions — or even, as a child might hope, to heal them — but to retrace and redescribe them. If there are wounds in the past, she seeks to live with them as scars." —New Yorker
>>Look inside.
>>The grammar of loss.
>>A different kind of life.
>>Other books by Victoria Chang.
Hexes of Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila (translated from Polish by Scotia Gilroy) $38
Anna Frenza hates the tyrannical tree huggers and the idiotic eco-warriors, after all, she's the CEO of Poland's biggest oil company. But then she finds herself in a trance, sleepwalking into the woods and making love to a tree, manically, all caught on camera. Her career ends and, in the fallout, she discovers her husband's disturbing secret. Her mind splinters and whether by delusion or possession of spirit, she finds herself in medieval province ruled by the Catholic Church. Deep in the past, Anna falls in with Mathilde Spalt, leader of the Earthen Ones — a congregation of women who live in the woods and reject all patriarchy, instead engaging in ecstatic, sensuous worship of Mother Earth and learns to love the forest . . . until the Church decides to fell the forest and all the women within it. [Paperback]
”The kind of debut that grabs you by the collar and doesn't apologise, it's bold, surreal, feminist and ferociously funny — exactly the kind of book that rewires your brain. A fever dream of feminist fire, we've never read a book quite like it.” —Service 95
”You're holding a torpedo of a book in your hand. Take a seat and get comfortable. This novel's energy, humour, and rebel spirit will awaken your mind and change your way of thinking.” —Olga Tokarczuk
>>Ecofeminist rollercoaster.
>>Alchemical dreams.
B is for Bird by Lily Emo $25
Make your way through the alphabet with this stunning book featuring a cast of familiar birds. From albatross to fantails, ganets to quail, and all the way to the silvereye (also known as Zosterpos lateralis), B Is For Bird is a beautiful celebration of birds, illustrated with collage and written by Whakatū artist Lily Emo. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>How the collages were made.
Talking Classics: The shock of the old by Mary Beard $40
What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point? The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only. They make us wonder how to make sense of people who lived long ago (from angry landlords to giggling senators) — and to think harder about our own world, to look at it differently. In Talking Classics, Mary Beard points to the surprising connections between antiquity and the present. From revolutionaries to dictators, Bob Dylan to Beyoncé, she joins forces with the varied modern characters who have been transfixed by the ancient world. It's not compulsory, she argues to be excited by antiquity, but it's a shame not to be. After half a century teaching and studying classics, she fills the book with lively stories, curious facts and some good gossip. Talking Classics explains why the deep past does really affect us all. [Hardback]
”This book is a true delight, a thought-provoking, engaging and deeply personal look at the classical world from an author who understands it like no other.” —Elodie Harper
>>A laboratory for understanding what it would be like to be different.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan $38
Dilara's father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell. At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara's family are exiles — they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue. Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her — to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets — drawn inexorably back to Istanbul. [Paperback]
”Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told — like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodovar — I couldn't put it down and I didn't want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness.” —Avni Doshi
”Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Cecile Pin
”The Renovation brilliantly describes what it's like for ‘elsewhere’ to be ‘here’. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now.” —Isabel Waidner
>>A thing and a half.
>>A place that no longer exists.
Ngāti Kuia: He pūtake, hei pakiaka ora; A history by Madi Williams $60
Ngāti Kuia are tangata whenua of Te Tauihu-o-Te-Waka-a-Māui (the northern South Island). Descended from the ancestress Kuia, their whakapapa sits within a rich and complex Māori lineage, connecting with the stories held by neighbouring iwi - particularly the other Kurahaupō waka groups. Their networks also stretch towards the head of the country, linking to iwi originating from the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island), such as Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Muaūpoko, and ultimately back to the Polynesian homelands, Hawaiki. Drawing on hundreds of whakapapa, pūrākau, waiata and karakia recorded in nineteenth-century tribal manuscripts and court records, Madi Williams presents Ngāti Kuia history in Ngāti Kuia voices. From the stories of such tīpuna as Kaikaiāwaro and Hinepopo, through early encounters with neighbouring iwi and European settlers, to recent events such as the Treaty settlement process, this expansive account places Ngāti Kuia at the heart of the region's living, layered history. As Te Kenehi Teira observed during the Ngāti Kuia Treaty claim, the history of the iwi resembles “one huge jigsaw puzzle — you have to find all the pieces and put them together”. In this book, the pieces finally sit alongside one another. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Strength and agency.
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a world of change by Rebecca Solnit $37
”An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters'.” —Antonio Gramschi. Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature — despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach. [Hardback]
”The optimism of this book arrives like a breath of fresh air. Solnit is adamant that positive change — social, political, climate — is not only a possibility but inevitable.” —Irish Times
”It would be easy to think we inhabit a global-digital age of despair. Think again, says Rebecca Solnit. In nine deft chapters, she pushes back on the current political gloom, setting it against the achievements made since the 1960s in decolonisation, environmentalism and gender equality, as well as within her own experience of US civil, labour, LGBT+ and indigenous rights.” —Financial Times
”Beautiful and inspiring: this book gives us the courage to face change, and to make it.” —George Monbiot
”A powerful meditation on transformation in turbulent times. Solnit argues that the current turmoil signals the dying throes of patriarchy and colonialism. A rallying call for all those who yearn for a just, sustainable and flourishing society.” —The Conversation
”Timely. As a deliberate exercise in reframing — as an open-ended invitation to consciously adopt new paradigms — The Beginning Comes After the End is very effective. Solnit is wise to focus on the nonlinear, and sometimes almost entirely invisible ways that change happens.” —Guardian
>>The change has begun.
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen $28
Life on a remote Scottish island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance. It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door. When one of those lodgers — Firth, a chaotic writer — arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble. A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections — and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake? [Paperback]
”A kaleidoscopic and linguistically daring work.” —Ocean Vuong
”A quirky and original debut that sizzles with scintillating prose.” —Bernadine Evaristo
”Michael Pedersen is a rare writer of real passion and power and this debut is phenomenal.” —Matt Haig
The Secret Life of Fungi: Exploring the otherworldly beauty of New Zealand’s micro-marvels by Jay Lichter $50
Obsessive fungi photographer Jay Lichter takes you on an extraordinary journey into the mysterious world of fungi — from the tiniest fruiting bodies barely visible to the naked eye, to the sprawling mycelial networks that stretch for kilometres beneath our feet. From urban backyards to suburban parks and beyond exists a magical world that weaves every living thing together in a vast underground web of connection. Without fungi, there would be no plants, no animals, no us. With his stunning photography and infectious curiosity, Jay uncovers the bizarre beauty, hidden intelligence and ecological genius of the fungi world. Funny, fascinating and a little bit filthy, this book celebrates the unsung heroes of our planet — the recyclers, the networkers, the quiet alchemists who make life possible. Once you've glimpsed their secret world, you'll never look at fungi the same way again. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>Shuffling in the moss.
Insuring the Future: Reimagining home insurance in Aotearoa by Jonathan Boston $35
Securing home insurance is no longer a sure thing. Nor is it always affordable. In this clear-eyed work, public policy expert Jonathan Boston tackles one of the defining policy challenges of climate change: how can residential property insurance remain accessible and affordable as climate-intensified risks escalate? Given New Zealand’s distinctive natural hazards profile and numerous at-risk communities, small policy changes won’t be enough. Sustainable insurance affordability will require a paradigm shift in risk governance, adaptation planning, and property insurance arrangements. We need fair, collective risk-sharing, vigorous risk avoidance, and serious public investment in risk reduction, including planned relocation where long-term protection is neither cost-effective nor feasible. Navigating the stark realities of climate-intensified risks and implementing effective reforms will be challenging. There are powerful political incentives for procrastination and buck-passing. But delay will be costly; poor policy choices likewise. To enable progress, evidence-informed public debate about the policy options is vital. Insuring the Future seeks to encourage that debate and proposes a practical, integrated set of reforms. [Paperback]
”Urgent and timely.” —Max Rashbrooke
>>A climate-impacted future.
>>”Politics is the art of the possible.”
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
The days are cooler and the evenings closing in early. It’s time to stay in and cooking a satisfying meal. Making your own pasta is both sasifying and rewarding. If you’ve got a pasta machine, it’s time to get it down from the top shelf or out of its box, give it a dust and you’ll be set to go. No pasta machine? A good rolling pin and a little extra patience.
Start with the….shapes! The Geometry of Pasta is a delight and you will discover new swirls, twists and frilled edges — over 80 to explore! Know your bigoli frrom your cappelletti, your gemelli from your pici. Designer Caz Hildebrand provides the stunning black and white illustraions, and chef Jacob Kennedy enlightens you with history, descriptions and recipes. For each pasta type there are its dimensions, thickness, what it’s good with, which Italian region it’s from, and its relatives. Reading this will make you a pasta expert.The Geometry of Pasta is packed with information and over 100 authenthic recipes, complete with an index of sauces for every occassion and palate.
Looking for something that’s good for your budget and tasty on your tongue? Try Pasta for the People, the new cookbook from the Northern Pasta Co. along with a bunch of their favourite chef friends. This is joyful comfort cooking, reimaging classic favourites, with a little fusion and some twists on what you know. Tomato and Tamarind Gigli brings all the flavours while keeping the process simple, Harissa Peperonata Casarecce is a one-pot vegan wonder, and sastfy a crowd with the eggy delights of Pasta Mista Frittata. Pasta for the People is full of moreish everyday mouthfuls — comforting and refreshing.
Elevate your pasta cooking with Tipo 00: The Pasta Cookbook. Here are the professional tips and elegant recipes. Andreas Papadakis, a Greek chef based in Melbourne, is known for his small pasta bar, Tipo 00, and in his cookbook he’s sharing the scerets of excellent pasta-making and some of the recipes fans queue for. All you will need to know about ingredients, equipment and pasta dough making is covered in the first chapter, and then you move to the ‘long’ pastas or as Papadakis states ‘Why Spaghetti is King’. Then there are the pastas – shaped and filled – along with a wine pairing guide. Then move aside the fillings for a full chapter on Risotto (who doesn’t want to improve their risotto?). It’s not all pasta: there’s a selection of recipes for sides and other delecious tidbits; and, of course, dessert. Tipomisu anyone?
Rachel Kushner’s essays in The Hard Crowd read both like edgy youthful memories giving us a window into a life lived on the edge of danger, as well as intelligent analyses of political structures and cultural output. From the daring of her motorcycle racing days and obsessions with classic cars (it’s not surprising the opening scene in The Flamethrowers kicks such adrenaline on the page), in the opening essay 'Girl on a Motorcycle' to her conversations about literary intrigues Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson to mention a few, to her knowledge of Italian 1970s politics and prison reform which play a major role respectively, in The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, to her connections and interest in the New York art scene, the collected essays are varied in style. Some are self-effacing and gritty, in line with the popular 'personal essay' trend, yet Kushner’s memories remain dark, honest and absorbing without the cloyingness of the self-reflective and sometimes self-satisfied elements of this form. In her essays about writers, she is endlessly fascinating, almost finding her way through the writing — through description, analysis and the anecdotal to an understanding or a reflective essence of the writer and their work — giving us, the reader, an insight that makes us wish to seek out not more about the said author, but their output — to delve for ourselves into their words. There’s also a great essay with accompanying images (film stills, photographs and other ephemera), 'Made to Burn', which considers the influences and research for her novel The Flamethrowers. It’s filled with quirky snippets of information, as many of the essays are, which cast small surprises like flitting shadows and light bulb moments — observations that rub up against each other creating a texture that marries guns and art, writers and alcohol, and the adrenaline of competitive danger with fierce loyalty. And in pure juxtaposition to this hard-arse style are essays that will stop you in your tracks: a heartbreaking visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is so established that it is functionally a dysfunctional town, and a conversation with an American prison abolitionist that raises some hard questions about incarceration. In The Hard Crowd, Kushner describes herself as the soft one, but these punchy essays make me think there are different kinds of softness, and Kushner's is one that has a core of steel, unafraid to look with intent.
If the first recorded ‘drawing’ by an animal was a picture by an orangutan of the bars of its cage, what does this tell us about art? Are we ‘creative’ only to the extent that we are constrained, and is that constraint always therefore the underlying subject of our art? Nabokov’s assertion that such a drawing was made at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes zoo cannot be verified by documentation but seems to contain a truth that is too appealing to discredit (possibly this ‘seeming to contain a truth’ is more important to us than an actual truth, expressing a shared subjective state beyond the reach of facts, even though such thinking is the basis of our worst sorts of actions as well as of our best), but it is interesting that this supposed drawing was made by the sort of animal we see as most ‘similar’ to ourselves and that this ‘art’ occurred in a zoo, a place where we, as adults at least, see our own predicament in the constrained lives, boredom, helplessness and frustration of the animals, but are also kept separate from them by the grammar of the cage. The two zones demarcated by a single set of bars differ perhaps in physical scale more than they do in type. Is it for this reason that zoos are "deeply sad”, as Zambreno states in one of their reports that comprise ‘Zoo Studies’, the first half of this little book. “There is perhaps no more pronounced gap of awareness between a child and adult than when visiting the zoo,” writes Zambreno of visiting the zoo with their children, though they acknowledge, too, that children may experience the intense melancholy inherent in the species-alienation and the gazes that pass between the viewers and the viewed, gazes predicated on the bars through which they pass. Do we visit zoos to see in animals that which we are not or do not want to be? Are children more able than adults at seeing the actual individual behind the label on the cage? As adults are we blinded to the experiences of others by the very indignities of separation, classification and containment that we have expressed upon them?
The second half of Zambreno’s book, ‘My Kafka Method’, considers the actual impossibility of such a separation, through an accumulation of observations and fragments responding to first the life and then the animal stories of Franz Kafka. They see Kafka’s ambivalence about what could be called his ‘animal’ nature (though, when written, this term seems ludicrous) as the source of both his sufferings and his writings. If there is a zoo, Kafka is within the bars, his subjectivity complicated and enriched by the inescapability of his identification with the object of his attention. Our awareness, after all, is primarily a property of that of which we are aware. A text is a kind of cage in which the writer both performs for and avoids the gaze of the reader, a zone of both connection and separation, a space of porous and conflicted subjectivity, but Zambreno shows how, in Kafka’s stories, the circumstances of the writer, of the animal in the story, of Zambreno, of the reader — both of Kafka and of Zambreno — converge and begin to align. “Animals live in an ongoing present tense, the setting, possibly the subject, of this story,” Zambreno writes of ‘The Burrow’. Kafka does not exploit his animals as metaphors (“To make a metaphor of the animal is also to ignore the animal.”); he gives them enough vagueness of description to make them uncageable; he does not burden them with the sorts of meanings that would make their stories ‘signify’. “Don’t call them parables,” said Kafka. “If anything, call them animal stories.” We inhabit a zone of undifferentiated subjectivity. To draw a conclusion is to misrepresent the material.
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex. How does each of these shape our experience of ‘being in the world’, our relationships with others, our independence and creativity? As we receive and transmit the voices of others, how can authenticity survive between flux and fixture?
After the narrator of the novel drops his cellphone in the handbasin of the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian mentor, Thomas, a cultural eminence, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. Towards the end of the book, the narrator’s onetime friend and alter ego, Thomas’s son Max, transmits a very different version of his father, showing that even our concepts of identity and value, intimacy and influence are altogether slippery and contingent.
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton $38
What does it mean to lose yourself — and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession - not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton's formidable novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. [Paperback with French flaps]
”A stunning achievement of narrative craft. The pleasures of What Am I, A Deer? lie in the way its constituent episodes, themes and recursions crystallize into layers of insight on the hopes and fantasies that drive people to action. It is a funny, moving work that rewards thoughtful, careful reading — with breaks to listen to the songs and videos it references.” —Arin Keeble, Financial Times
”Barton's prose is offbeat and witty, alive to the excruciating pain of clutching at a romantic fantasy. A good novel tells us about ourselves, scooping out our worst impulses and deepest hopes, and Barton does so with a disarming candour. What emerges is a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one's own life.” —Emma Loffhagen, Guardian
“Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude — crafted by the narrator's selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances — the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving. A woman's candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, A Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.” —Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews
>>Love and limerence.
>>Shyness, obsession, and the joy of karaoke.
>>The extremes of having a crush.
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff $45
Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America's ‘War on Terror’, countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start. [Paperback]
"A work of genius. What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt's work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description." —The New York Times Magazine
"It is a novel of permanent, persistent becoming, a story whose endings are multiple and essentially arbitrary, and it takes its own seeming unpublishability as a theme, or perhaps a promise. Reading a novel like Your Name Here, you can come to see that there are no real limits in literature, and fewer in life than you'd expect." —The Atlantic
"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organised: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes. Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalised and pornified and digitised somehow, bit after bit after bit." —The London Review of Books
>>Move your head and the picture changes.
Knife-Woman: The life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac (translated from French by Lauren Elkin) $72
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She is known for a body of work that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking but eludes any aesthetic classification. Her life and art were so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell them apart. In her own words: "Sculpture is the body. My body is the sculpture." Marie-Laure Bernadac's biography of Bourgeois traces the career of a great artist, her training, and her influences, as it tells the story of an exceptional woman's life. Featuring personal photographs as well as reproductions of her work, this landmark publication is the first major biography to draw on the artist's unpublished personal archives, including diaries, correspondence, and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the many interviews she gave and the reminiscences of those who knew her. Bernadac elucidates Bourgeois's friendships and rivalries with other major figures, including sculptor Louise Nevelson and Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. She also draws on Bourgeois's well-known fascination with psychoanalysis to explore the deeply autobiographical nature of her artwork. This erudite and keenly insightful biography pays tribute to the talent of the artist and the complexity of the person. [Hardback]
"Bourgeois's life was inseparable from her art and this too was constantly revised. One of the triumphs of Bernadac's book is her sangfroid in dealing with this slipperiness. She was deeply untrustworthy, impossible to believe. Yet truth, as Bernadac notes, wasn't the point. Louise Bourgeois had to be experienced." —Charles Darwent, Literary Review
"In Knife-Woman, Louise Bourgeois is revealed as a complex, self-analysing, and profound artist —embedded and respected in both the New York and Paris art worlds, impassioned by materials, and worldly and introspective. Her penchant for living for work was periodically arrested by the agony of depression, yet this never stopped the flow of wit, insight, and creative energy." —Griselda Pollock
>>Look inside.
>>Chelsea.
As If by Isabel Waidner $40
Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams. Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has. As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman- a character trapped in reality's hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for. [Hardback]
”Wonderfully implausible and absurdly humorous, the latest novel from a Goldsmiths Prize-winner follows a rich tradition. As If is a great step forward, a maturing of Waidner's talent with no loss of the quixotic qualities that gave the other books their charm. It adds depth without sacrificing energy. Kafka and Beckett are good touchstones, because, like Waidner, they are very funny without telling obvious jokes.” —Daily Telegraph
”The novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner's past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade. A taut psychological puzzler, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling — no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies — for suspense and ambiguity.” —Observer
”A surreal existential caper exploring identity and performance, midlife purpose and regret, and the difficulty of finding — and escaping — yourself. Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition of dopplegangers, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. Sly, absurd and poignant, it is a triumph of narrative voice.” —Spectator
”Waidner's writing, always dazzlingly clever and formally inventive, is here also deeply moving. As If is a great success and an intriguing departure: a dourly beguiling dark comedy about fluffing your lines halfway through the performance of a lifetime and being given another chance.” —Times Literary Supplement
>>Absurdist realism, queerness, and doppelgängers.
>>Hours of my life are lost to writing.
>>Absurdity is anything but nonsensical.
>>Some other books by Isabel Waidner.
Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle $30
Carlisle examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle's place as one of our most innovative thinkers. [Paperback with French flaps]
”The final chapter of Transcendence for Beginners ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life. By this time, we have climbed quite a mountain of ineffability, but Carlisle has led us so gently step by step that we are willing to follow. Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either. Like the man in Blixen’s fable, we see a picture traced by our steps, but I suspect it may vary for each reader, and even for the same reader at different times and in different moods. This is to Carlisle’s credit: we can make our own shape out of her words because she is never dogmatic and because she is clearly on an open-ended quest herself. All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book.” —Sarah Bakewell, Guardian
”In this gem of a book, Carlisle asks a question that may especially preoccupy professors of philosophy (which she is) and biographers (which she is also, of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot), but that equally concerns the rest of us: How to make sense of a human life?” —New Yorker
”This is the book of a lifetime, and a book about lifetimes. What is the relationship between philosophy and biography? How can a line of writing reveal a line of living? Clare Carlisle is a guide and a guru: Transcendence for Beginners is a transformative and transcending experience.” —Frances Wilson
>>Half-way up a mountain.
>>Life to the page.
A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente (translated from Italian by Julia Nelsen) $40
It is 1946 and Milan is in ruins. A woman named Camilla opens her illegally occupied attic to her extended family as they rebuild their lives among the rubble. The absence of men — lost to war, death, or abandonment — leaves the burden of survival to the women, who use the attic to incubate fragile futures: Camilla works to carry the family toward dignity and normalcy; Lalla dreams of becoming a novelist to escape their grim reality; Regina, widowed by the war, pins her hopes on her infant daughter; Alba chases independence and love. Varying political ideologies, loyalties, and wartime secrets filter through the house, creating a thick net of tension. As the narrative roams from the thoughts of character to character, the residents of this ‘hotel for the poor’ consider their own complicity and moral compromises, wondering if they're able to escape the weight of what they've lived through. Fausta Cialente's exquisite prose captures the frailty of the human heart in its desperate search for connection. A Very Cold Winter is about the impossibility of forgetting the past and the difficulty of living with it. [Paperback]
"Cialente was a pioneering feminist, anti-fascist writer with a profound literary sensibility. In this crucial account of post-war Italy, her rootless authorial perspective sheds unique light on individual, collective, and national trauma, and speaks to ever-relevant questions about what it means to be a woman, a foreigner, and a survivor. Julia Nelsen's engrossing English translation is cause for celebration." —Jhumpa Lahiri
"The first of the undersung Fausta Cialente's books to appear in English, A Very Cold Winter contends with what it means to move on in the aftermath of war." —The New Yorker
"In this overdue translation of Cialente's vital 1966 novel, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw." —Publishers Weekly
>>Read an extract.
The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease by Svetislav Basara (translated from Serbian by Randall A. Major) $35
Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness. Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him acclaim and notoriety. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humour evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colourful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society. [Paperback]
Alone in Japan: A journey to the future by Tom Feiling $65
When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come - but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning. This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation. Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples' homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks — and the opportunities — of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond. Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. [Hardback]
>>Days without seeing any children.
>>The story of the book in 21 photos.
The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni) $35
In this Indian modern classic, roofs are a special place; they are meant for wild things, for romance and for play. They are realms of freedom freedom from the male gaze, sexual freedom, and freedom from society. Chachcho and Lalna use their roofs to build a friendship that transcends time and memory. Suddenly one day, Lalna has to leave, to return only after Chachcho's passing. Amidst rumors and gossip in the neighborhood, Chachcho's nephew tries to piece together his memories of the two women, one of whom is his mother. The truth he is searching for could destroy him forever, but to not find out is no longer an option. Now finally published outside of India, this consummate novel of twists and turns by the International Booker Prize-winning author of Tomb of Sand. [Paperback with French flaps]
”What does mourning look like? What is the nature of grief? These are some of the questions that Geetanjali Shree explores. In The Roof Beneath Their Feet, grief takes different forms. It spreads everywhere. Memory becomes grief. This is a lucid meditation on desire, grief and belonging. Geetanjali Shree's prose is animated — the walls and doors have a special role to play. They hold people's secrets. They have seen and heard things. They have eyes and ears, but none of the biases of people.” —Hindustan Times
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and he making of history by Selena Wisnom $35
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen — the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal's library to the ground — yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform — the first written language in the world. More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories — in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognisable. The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar — a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity's first civilisation — their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe. [Now in paperback]
”Fascinating and rich in detail, this book provides an excellent survey of Mesopotamian literary classics, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the ways in which they influenced later cultures and texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wisnom also offers snippets of daily life, including an account of Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, getting into a panic because a mongoose had run under his chariot (was it a fatal omen?) and the actual agenda of a meeting.” —Bijan Omrani, Literary Review
”In this remarkable book, Wisnom takes her readers on a spell-binding tour through one of antiquity's great monuments to knowledge: the Library at Nineveh. As she surveys the clay tablets that were buried in a blaze millennia ago, a lost world of learning and literature comes back to life.” —Sophus Helle, author of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
Hyperpolitics: Extreme politicisation without political consequences by Anton Jäger $30
What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher's London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how public life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out. Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the ‘end of history’ and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post-Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private passions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power. Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq's disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so inconsequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment. [Paperback with French flaps]
A selection of books from our shelves. Click through to find out more:
All your choices are good! Click through to our website (or just email us) to secure your copies. We will dispatch your books by overnight courier or have them ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Te Tiriti, Equality, and the Future of New Zealand Democracy by Dominic O’Sullivan $40
leading Māori political scientist Dominic O'Sullivan draws on theories of republicanism and the commonwealth to challenge understandings of Te Tiriti as a partnership between races, or between Māori people and the Crown. O'Sullivan also critiques the idea that Te Tiriti created one people, assimilating Māori into colonial ways of governing. Instead, he proposes a new politics where Māori self-determination and liberal democracy, rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga, complement one another to promote meaningful and culturally grounded political equality. O'Sullivan enables us to see a future for Aotearoa in which political authority and responsibility belong to everyone and should therefore work equally well for all; a country where Māori people, as much as anyone else, bring their tikanga to public life; and a society where the Crown is no longer the word we use to describe government. For scholars, policymakers and political leaders, for Māori and Pākehā, for all of us imagining a respectful and inclusive future for our island democracy, this is essential reading. [Paperback]
”This will be a seminal book in Aotearoa New Zealand political and Maori scholarship. O'Sullivan moves beyond the weirdness of the Treaty principles and interminable originalist arguments. Instead, he provides a language grounded in republican ideals of non-domination and equality to debate the political morality of our current institutional arrangements. He thinks through the practical implications of rangatiratanga, mana motuhake, and community control amongst iwi, hapu and other Maori political authorities — offering a new way of thinking about how we ought to live together, given the legacies of colonisation.”—Lindsey Te Ata o Tu MacDonald, University of Canterbury, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha
”I admire O'Sullivan's work and think it is significant and timely. He explores the potential of deliberative democracy in a commonwealth that draws upon legacies from te ao Maori, the indigenous 'world' as well as cosmopolitan modernity in a way that respects his own critique of 'a simple Maori/Pakeha or kawanatanga/rangatiratanga binary'. This holds great promise. As O'Sullivan argues throughout, the challenge is for deliberation and decision-making to be equally shared, rather than unilaterally imposed, as has too often been the case from the beginning.” —Anne Salmond
>>Refraining from ignorance.
>>Indigenous diplomacy.
Nova by Tim Corballis $38
Set on NOVA, a self-contained world launched into deep time, the novel unfolds through conversations between Kalla, a former councillor uneasy with consensus and ceremony, and System, the voice of all NOVA's mechanisms and processes. System is curious and anxious — and seems to know about every aspect of life on NOVA, but in some ways knows nothing at all. Kalla is sceptical, smart and increasingly troubled by what can and can't be measured. Together, System and Kalla circle around questions of democracy, labour, memory, entropy and love. As it moves between scenes of work, public ritual and speculative reflections on systems theory and time, and as NOVA itself coasts, rotates and persists in its unknowable form, the novel asks disarming questions: what might it mean to have on-demand access to the voice of the world? What would we do with that knowledge? And is it possible for a world to be meaningfully organised at all? [Paperback]
”This novel is such a wise, far-reaching, and funny reflection of organised societies and the relationship between humans and machines. What an ambitious, enlightening, and strangely joyful book.” —Alice Miller
Vocal Break: On women, music, and power by Lauren Elkin $70
For millennia, women's raised voices have been heard as unruly, uncivilised, dangerous. Women singing were cast as sirens — mythical creatures who lured sailors to their death. In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voices — and how women have used them to defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism and sexism. Drawing on her own experiences training as a young soprano in the 1990s, Elkin reflects on the way power and identity shape our voices, focusing on the women who most excited her when she was learning to sing. A vocal break refers to the place where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers, so from one thing to another, and this is a book about what kind of meanings, and sounds, can be made there. Immersing readers in an eclectic soundscape, from musicals and pop music to art punk, what follows is a full-throated tour of women's voices, including Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Beyonce, FKA Twigs and Billie Eilish. [Hardback]
”Reading Vocal Break felt like being round at a friend's house playing through a stack of records and talking about them until sunrise. Warm, clever, funny and deeply thoughtful, this is a rich work of feminist criticism with a beautifully light touch.I loved it.” —Octavia Bright
”An essential, eclectic, authentic exploration of the politics of women's voices. I loved it! It took me ten years to go from shy young girl to punk rocker, if I'd had this book I'd have got there much quicker.” —Viv Albertine
>>A celebration of the female voice.
>>Not only theoretical but personal.
>>Some voices stay with us.
Becoming George: The invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson $60
Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself — cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, and promiscuous — scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day — from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert — form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? In Becoming George, poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time. [Hardback]
”From Sampson's approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson's sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers. She would also have enjoyed Sampson's quietly witty touches. When Sand died, Hugo sent a tribute claiming: ‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Many readers will start this fascinating biography with the assumption that he was merely being polite. By the time they have finished it they will probably agree with him.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times
>>Radical self-invention.
Make Believe: On telling stories to children by Mac Barnett $33
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives. Mac Barnett, the beloved children's author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children's books-and the particular brilliance of young readers: What if children are a great audience for art? What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults? What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood? Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books. Make Believe is his incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure. [Paperback]
He Aha te Raru ki Tai? / Mij le Abijn Dahpaduvvamin? / What's the Matter with the Sea? by Rita Sørly; Malgorzata Piotrowska (Illustrator); Kanapu Rangitauirat (Translator); Are Tjihkkom (Translator); Maria Nayr de Pinho Correia Ibrahim (Translator); Charlotta Maria Langejan (Translator) $30
Alerted to the appearance of a rare whale in the north of Norway, Māori marine biologists Aihe and Whina set out from Otago to track its path and find out what is going wrong with the world's oceans. Co-publishing with Saami publisher Davvi Girji, this unique picture book is trilingual in Lule Sami, Māori and English — foregrounding the connection between the indigenous peoples of Norway and Aotearoa, while telling a neat story that highlights the need to care for our marine environment. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
Ungrounding: The architecture of genocide by Eyal Weizman $80
Eyal Weizman is one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice's genocide case against Israel.In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza's subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised - and how Israel's actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time. [Hardback]
”Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman proves that decolonisation is not revenge but a condition for justice and, in the end, for the liberation of both Palestinians and Israelis.” —Francesca Albanese
”In the face of overwhelming state violence, forensic architecture is becoming an indispensable tool of international law and human rights, as well as a new approach to history. Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.” —David Wengrow
”A wake-up call to the world and the international community — a very important book.” —Shawan Jabarin
”Ungrounding leads us between layers of earth and history, soil and infrastructure, elucidating both the long story of Israeli aggression against Gaza and the histories of Palestinian resistance. Weizman cuts through obfuscations and horror, and helps us to see something of the truth.” —Isabella Hammad
”Eyal Weizman's work has long manifested a unique combination of moral passion and scientific rigour. It makes him, as Ungrounding shows, a formidable adversary of technically sophisticated regimes of violent dispossession. No further evidence of Israeli genocidal acts and intentions in Gaza would be necessary after this shocking report.” —Pankaj Mishra
”A timely and crucial contribution tracing the trail of the Israeli architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip. The ruthlessness and inhumanity detailed in this extraordinary book, nonetheless, also hold hope for turning the future soil and grounds into spaces of liberation and reconciliation.” —Ilan Pappe
>>All they will find is sand.
>>Some books by Eyal Weizman.
>>Investigations by the Forensic Architecture team.
America, América: A new history of the New World by Greg Grandin $45
A sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents. The story of the United States' unique sense of itself was forged facing south — no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain. America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest — the greatest mortality event in human history — through the eighteenth-century wars for independence and the Monroe Doctrine, to the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century. This monumental work of scholarship fundamentally changes our understanding of racism, the rise of universal humanism, and the role of social democracy in staving off extremism. America, América shows how the United States and Latin America together shaped the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. Drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World. [Paperback]
”Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.” —Naomi Klein
”In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.” —Amitav Ghosh
Leaving Home: A memoir in full colour by Mark Haddon $65
As an artist and writer, Mark Haddon has always created vivid and unforgettable images. Now he takes his own life as raw material, writing about growing up in the cultural wastelands of the English Midlands of the 1960s and 70s. Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier m che and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does. [Hardback]
”His distillation of the fear and powerlessness of childhood is so deeply moving and beautifully drawn. The most tender, transporting, creative and beautifully written tale I have read all year. In Leaving Home, Mark Haddon turns words, images and his trademark empathy upon himself to conjure all the repressed emotion, strained relationships, shyness, humour and orange formica of his childhood in 1970s provincial England. Simply glorious, from start to finish.” —Rachel Clarke
”A really extraordinary book. Painful, funny, beautifully illustrated. Nobody does it quite like Mark Haddon.” —Max Porter
”I loved this funny, melancholy and arrestingly original memoir of an artist's coming into being. It also made me quite badly want a Walnut Whip.” —Sarah Perry
>>Look inside.
Bothy: In search of simple shelter by Kat Hill $30
The door to the bothy is always unlocked, you just need to step inside. A bothy is a remote hut in the wilderness that you can’t reserve, with no electricity, mod-cons or running water. And it’s here you’ll find Kat Hill — kettle on, feet up and pen out. Leading us on a gorgeous and erudite journey around the UK, Kat reveals the history of these wild mountain shelters and the people who visit them. With a historian’s insight and a rambler’s imagination, she lends fresh consideration to the concepts of nature, wilderness and escape. All the while, Kat weaves together her story of heartbreak and new purpose with those of her fellow wanderers, past and present. Writing with warmth, wit and infectious wanderlust, Kat moves from a hut in an active military training area in the far-north of Scotland to a fairy-tale cottage in Wales. Along her travels, she explores the conflict between our desire to preserve isolated beauty and the urge to share it with others — embodied by the humble bothy. Bothy is a stirring, beautiful book for anyone who longs to run away to the wilds. [Now in paperback]
”An intelligent and thoughtful book that will have you reaching for your boots. Hill offers learned and considered reflections on the consolations of retreat, simple living, of finding even temporary shelter when all outside is tempest. It is also a meditation on change: climate change, emotional growth, and the unquenchable nostalgia for a past slipping ever further from view.” —Cal Flyn
”It would be difficult to think of a subtler or more careful exploration of the wrinkles of modern life and modern nature, with all its traps, delights, delusions and possibilities.” —Adam Nicolson
>>The book came out of a bothy.
Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray $38
One murder is a crime. Two is a mystery. Alex used to break into houses illegally. These days, it's his job. Alex is part of a small firm of consultants who break into offices and homes to test their security. It's fun, it's well paid, and he's very good at it. It's almost like he's grown up at last. But when he gets fired from his firm, evicted from his flat and dumped by his girlfriend, all in the same evening, he decides to steal one last job from his company without their knowing. A job they had already decided not to accept. Big mistake. Before long, Alex is in remote northern Scotland, following the trail of an ambitious young man who supposedly fell to his death with no witnesses in sight. And if Alex doesn't get to the truth soon, he may well be the next one over the edge. [Paperback]
”Bad Deeds is the perfect page turner for those who like their thillers with propulsive plots, rollicking action, and a serving of bone-dry satire. An absolute hoot!” —Ross Montgomery
”Bad Deeds is a smart, page-turning romp that sees the ripples from one tiny not-quite-innocent action reach tidal wave proportions for its lively anti-hero. Funny, thoughtful and intriguing, this is crime writing with an edge of biting wit that sets Andrew Hunter Murray in a class of his own.” —Janice Hallett
”A brilliant and wickedly entertaining murder mystery by a brilliant and wickedly entertaining author.” —Emma Freud