NEW RELEASES
An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village southeast of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. For readers of W.G. Sebald.
"Deeply sad and darkly beautiful. The novel is masterly and uplifting and without any doubt it offers solace." —Jury for the Düsseldorf Literature Prize
The seventh collection from one of New Zealand's most admired poets. Camp stares down the ordinary until it reveals both its beauties and its threats.
The Swimmers by Chloe Lane $30
Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.
"The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love — not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us at once to forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out." —Pip Adam
Intimations: Six essays by Zadie Smith $16
Far-Flung by Rhian Gallagher $25
The Bird Within Me by Sara Lundberg $30
The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff $18
Why Visit America by Matthew Baker $33
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shap our future by Merlin Sheldrake $40
In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff $55
The Conservation Revolution: Radical ideas for saving nature beyond the Anthropocene by Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher $33
Selected Poems by James Brown $40
The New New Zealand: Facing demographic disruption by Paul Spoonley $40
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the frontier of birth, food, sex and death by Jenny Kleeman $40
Erin's mother has motor neurone disease and has decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Erin looks back at her twenty-six-year-old self, she can finally tell the story of the unimaginable task she faced one winter.
"The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader. It's an incredibly humane book that looks closely at love — not the easy, conventional love but the complicated, brutal love that invites us at once to forget ourselves and know ourselves completely. We are faulty and perfect in our faults. Sad and buoyant with our sorrows. I can't remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out." —Pip Adam
A series of perceptive essays on the experiences and lessons of lock-down. "There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytic, political and comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those. What I've tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are, above all, personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity. Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table - I was in need of practical assistance. I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book, but I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard."
Far-Flung traverses multiple terrains — home and upheaval, our connection to the environment and to people, our relation to the past, place and placelessness. From 'the Kilmog slumping seaward' to 'the bracts and the berries and the leaves' of the Mackenzie country; the moth ('courier of bloom powder'); the wind that grows like an animal and 'the great loneliness / of grass' — Gallagher is in conversation with the natural world. Her lyric poems, marked by attentiveness, have an earthy, intuitive music and a linguistic clarity. Gallagher moves easily from the ecological and personal concerns of contemporary life to the nineteenth-century Irish migrants and the historic legacy of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.
Berta is a young girl growing up on a farm in the Swedish countryside at the beginning of the 20th century. Her father doesn't understand her and her mother is dying. Berta longs to be an artist and can't stay on the farm forever. This beautifully illustrated book is based on the life of Swedish artist Berta Hansson. It is the story of a young woman with the bravery to follow her own path, despite the protests of her father and society at the time.
For the first time, McSweeney's Quarterly is illustrating each short story with full-spread, elaborately-staged photographs. Featuring eight original stories, and accompanying photos by the award-winning photographer Holly Andres, Issue 60 contains tales of healing powers discovered in a neighborhood market and retiring baseball stars, of ill-fated father-daughter float-plane trips and a romance with the ghost of an old Hollywood heartthrob.
"A key barometer of the literary climate." —The New York Times
"This is an issue you'll want to keep preserved in a temperature-controlled room for generations to come."—Timothy McSweeney
"Everyone talks about falling in love like it's the most miraculous, life-changing thing in the world. Something happens, they say, and you know That's what happened when I met Kit Godden. I looked into his eyes and I knew. Only everyone else knew too. Everyone else felt exactly the same way." An excellent YA novel about a family and a summer — the summer when everything changes.
A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition from an analogue body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child — her own — from a government-run childcare facility. The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the United States. So they decide to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbour — America. The stories in Matthew Baker's collection portray a world within touching distance. This is an America riven by dilemmas — from old age to consumerism, drugs to internet culture — each turned on its head by this darkly innovative and defiantly strange writer.
"This is the first of its kind, a work born of a deep understanding and a philosophical awareness of how things are. Over a century ago James Joyce aimed to write a moral history of his country: Matthew Baker has achieved that for his own. At the end of this acclaimed and untouchable collection there has been horror, but what remains is love.” – Lunate
Neither plant nor animal, fungi are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.
"A dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book. Sentence after sentence stopped me short. I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world. A remarkable work by a remarkable writer." —Robert Macfarlane
From the cave walls at Lascaux to the last painting by Van Gogh, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Mark Twain, there is clear evidence that crows and ravens influence human culture. Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well.
Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current 'sixth extinction' crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desire to move beyond mainstream approaches. Yet the conservation community is deeply divided over where to go from here. Some want to place 'half earth' into protected areas. Others want to move away from parks to focus on unexpected and 'new' natures. Many believe conservation requires full integration into capitalist production processes. Buscher and Fletcher argue that the Anthropocene challenge demands something bolder, a revolution that goes beyond protected areas and faith in markets to incorporate the needs of humans and nonhumans within integrated and just landscapes.
"James Brown is the New Zealand poet laureate of torpor, resignation and exhaustion — with intermittent bouts of fanatical bicycle riding. The miracle is that he can make it all so interesting and darkly humorous and weirdly moving." —Gregory O'Brien
"This is not a poetry book for the faint-hearted." —Pania Brown (James's sister)
"In 2030 there may be six million of us. One and a half million of us will live overseas. We will be clustered in Auckland, dependent on migration, and worried about a shortage of workers. We haven't planned for this. We need to."
What if we could have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise or choose the time of our painless death? To find out, Jenny Kleeman has interviewed a sex robot, eaten a priceless lab-grown chicken nugget, watched foetuses growing in plastic bags and attended members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves. Many of the people Kleeman has met say they are finding solutions to problems that have always defined and constricted humankind. But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll — and why? This is not science fiction.
AntiRacist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky $25
A board book. Start as you mean to go on.