NEW RELEASES
The compelling new novel from the author of The Wish Child. The eyes of the wife of the new Buchenwald concentration camp administrator are opened to the actualities of her situation when she forms an alliance with one of the inmates, the inventor of a machine he claimed would cure cancer. Whether the machine works or not, it may yet save a life...
"Chidgey's compellingly gentle and empathetic treament of the consequences of very disturbing patterns of human behaviour serves to maintain her position as one of our 'must read' novelists." —Otago Daily Times
Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise. Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. Every blow rings true.
Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention.
"Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power. In funny, acerbic prose, Clark shows us how it feels to inhabit a body that moves through a world full of eyes. She illuminates the cracks that begin to appear when the subject turns voyeur and the violence inherent in the shatter."
–Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater
"Electric, compulsive and extremely dark, Boy Parts blew me away. Eliza Clark is unflinching in this witty and shocking excavation of female rage and desire, and is sure to gain a cultish following. It is unlike anything I've read before, and it left me utterly invigorated and repulsed. I can't wait to read what she writes next." –Elizabeth MacNeal
>>Eliza Clark talks with Katharina Volckmer (author of The Appointment)
Take a story and shrink it. Make it tiny, so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. Carry the story with you everywhere, let it sit with you while you eat, let it watch you while you sleep. Keep it safe, you never know when you might need it. In Kawakami's super short 'palm of the hand' stories the world is never quite as it should be: a small child lives under a sheet near his neighbour's house for thirty years; an apartment block leaves its visitors with strange afflictions, from fast-growing beards to an ability to channel the voices of the dead; an old man has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko are locked in a bitter rivalry to the death. Short stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.
Lucía and Pablo are Colombian immigrants who’ve built their lives together in the US yet maintain conflicting attitudes towards their homeland and the extent to which it defines their identity. After undergoing fertility treatment, Pablo finds himself excluded from raising their twins, and the new family situation seems to question the very nature of their relationship and of who they believed they were. In search of respite and time to reflect, Lucía takes the children to her parents’ apartment in Miami. Meanwhile, Pablo learns he is suffering from a syndrome known as ‘Holiday Heart’. But is this just a break, or is it really the final days of their marriage? A well-written and unsparingly perceptive novel from the author of Fish Soup.
>>Interesting.
Icelandic author and activist Andri Snaer Magnason's 'Letter to the Future', an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjokull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven't been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth.
"The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll." —Rebecca Solnit
"A cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim." —The New York Times
Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative non-fiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the cliches of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it.
Astounding images of the natural history collections at Te Papa, from the award-winning photographer.
>>Look inside.
>>10 questions.
"Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew." —Selina Tusitala Marsh
The classic book about how to make English clearer has now been made even clearer and brighter and more fun with Kalman's colourful and quirky illustrations.
>>This sort of wonderful.
An Exquisite Legacy: The life and art of New Zealand naturalist G.V. Hudson by George Gibbs $60
George Hudson, 1867-1946, was one of New Zealand's pioneer naturalists, who devoted his life to collecting and describing the New Zealand insect fauna. He amassed what is probably the largest collection of New Zealand insects, now housed at Te Papa. Hudson also wrote seven books on insect fauna between 1898 and 1946, each illustrated in colour with immaculate paintings of the specimens, a total of over 3100 paintings, mainly focused on moths and butterflies.
What would a post-capitalist society and a post-capitalist economy look like? In a fascinating series of dialogues, the outstanding Greek economist discusses the necessities, the problems and possible solutions for making a society founded on equality, democracy and justice. Urgent.
Canada's Northwest Territories are a huge, frozen wasteland populated only by the Dene, the indigenous people who once lived by hunting but are now divided in their response to an invasion of their land by mining companies. Some deplore it, arguing that the government misled their forebears with treaties they did not understand; others think the development was bound to happen anyway. Sacco's first work of comics journalism in over a decade is set against the background of a culture that has suffered the shattering impact of the residential school system which took children from their parents and returned them unable to speak their language and unable to relate to their traditional way of life. As recently as the 1970s the children were brutalised and abused in the government's stated policy to 'remove the Indian from the child'. Beautifully drawn, Sacco's latest work is a story of culture as much as it is a story of oil, money, dependency and conflict.
Foucault is remarkable for his dissection of the structures of power and control that pervade all institutions and relations in society. Indefinitely relevant.
Philosophers in Britain and America have often been regarded as narrow-minded and pedestrian compared to their counterparts in continental Europe: this book reveals them instead as colourful, diverse, inventive and cosmopolitan. Philosophy, in Rée's interpretation, turns out to be not the work of a few canonical old men, but of masses of ordinary people who have insisted on thinking for themselves, and reaching their own conclusions about religion, politics, art and everything else.
Can you find the animals in the various habitat? (Some of them really shouldn't be there...).
Many of New Zealand's best hand-coloured photos were produced by Whites Aviation between the 1950s and 1970s . Once ubiquitous, these prints are now highly collectable.
In 2004, David Chang opened a noodle restaurant named Momofuku in Manhattan's East Village, not expecting the business to survive its first year. In 2018, he was the owner and chef of his own restaurant empire, with 15 locations from New York to Australia, the star of his own hit Netflix show and podcast, was named one of the most influential people of the 21st century and had an online following of over 1.2 million.
"David Chang writes about a chef's life in a way that feels completely fresh. The recipes, including those from the ginger-scallion noodles and roasted pork belly served at Noodle Bar, are almost perks; this would be a great read even without them." —The New York Times
From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, to Norway, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a crisis that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children.
"Talaga's research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action." —Publishers Weekly
Oaks are born and die on the same patch of earth. This is the story of one man's relationship to an ancient tree, the Honywood Oak. Colossal and wizened, it would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. James Canton spent two years sitting with and studying this unique tree. It was an exercise in discipline — he needed to slow down in order to appreciate it fully, to understand the ecosystem around, inside and under it. In this meditative treatise, he examines our long-standing relationship with trees, a material as well as a source of myth and legend, and of solace.
>>Canton on RNZ.
The all fit together! (even the dog).