NEW RELEASES
"When you first told me that you gave me the name of our tupuna so that I would be strong enough to hold our family inside my ribcage, I believed you. Here you are. Here is how I saw you, trapped in your own amber. Now it’s time for you to believe me. Tōku Pāpā is a book that serves as a map of survival for Māori growing up outside of their papakāika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tūpuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us?"
>>Read an extract.
>>'Karaka—Tau'.
>>'Karaka—Wana'.
>>Read an extract.
>>'Karaka—Tau'.
>>'Karaka—Wana'.
>>'Metronome'.
Assembled from the jumble of cultural detritus that comprises everyday life, Gendall's novel tests experiences and relationships by subjecting them to either reinvention or disinvention—but what, at core, does the narrator most want to disinvent?
Land: How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world by Simon Winchester $40
Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan $30
He Iti te Kupu: Māori metaphors and similes by Hona Black $40
The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida $25
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson $26
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem $33
Fat by Hanne Blank $22
The Mermaid's Purse by Fleur Adcock $25
Prehistoric Man in Palliser Bay edited by Foss Leach and Helen Leach $50
Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories, The early years by Michael Posner $55
Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847—1947 by Norman Lebrecht $25
What If We Stopped Pretending? by Jonathan Franzen $15
Sylvie by Sylvie Kantorovitz $20
Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey $22
"Like Olivia Laing or Renata Adler, Susanna Gendall strips back the everyday to get at life’s extraordinary oddness; this novel conjures a strange magic, pierced with little darts of hope." —Emily Perkins
Winchester explores the the possession of land, the ways it is delineated and changes hands, the great disputes, and the questions of restoration – particularly in the light of climate change and colonialist reparation. A global study, this is an exquisite exploration of what the ownership of land might really mean for the people who live on it.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion $45
Not a Novel: Collected writings and recollections by Jenny Erpenbeck $33
These twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time.
Following astonishing, insightful, and pellucidly written novels, including Visitation and Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck turns her pen on herself and reveals aspects of her life, her literary and musical influences and preoccupations, and thoughts on society. Her essays are as astonishing, insightful and pellucidly written as her fiction.
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating. Ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg
"Her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss
"Erpenbeck's writing writing is a lure that leads us — off-centre as into a vortex — into the most haunted and haunting territory." —Anne Michaels
In these essays McLauchlan explores ideas and paths that he hopes will make him freer and happier – or, at least, less trapped, less medicated and less depressed. He stays at a monastery and meditates for eight hours a day. He spends time with members of a new global movement who try to figure out how to do the most possible good in the world. He reads forbiddingly complex papers on neuroscience and continental philosophy and shovels clay with a Buddhist monk until his hands bleed. He tries to catch a bus. Tranquillity and Ruin is a light-hearted contemplation of madness, uncertainty and doom. It’s about how, despite everything we think we know about who we are, we can still be surprised by ourselves.
"McLauchlan is likely the most intelligent essayist in New Zealand and this is likely to be the most thought-provoking book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2021." —Steve Braunias
>>Writing in his head.
>>Writing in his head.
He Iti te Kupu contains nearly 500 sayings that draw a comparison between something (often the natural world) and people, events or contexts. Written in Māori and English, this accessible guide explains the use, meaning and context of a host of the principal figures of speech in te Reo. Divided into themes, including birds of the land and sea, parts of the body, acknowledgements, animals and insects. The title derives from the proverb, ‘The words are small, yet their meanings are substantial,’ highlighting the importance of these sayings in the landscape of Māori language learning and speaking. Invaluable for beginning and advanced learners of te Reo Māori.
Derrida’s thoughts are haunted by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “My friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. Derrida recalls and restages the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy. The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy.
“Derrida has never written more illuminatingly on Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger than he does here.” –Choice
Good Friday, 1612. Two notorious witches await trial and certain death in Lancaster Castle, whilst a small group gathers in secret protest. Into this group the self-made Alice Nutter stakes her claim and swears to fight against the rule of fear. But what is Alice's connection to these witches? What is magic if not power, and what will happen to the women who possess it?
"A gripping gothic read." —Sarah Hall, Guardian
"Utterly compelling, thick with atmosphere and dread, but sharp intelligence too." —Telegraph
A Kick in the Belly: Women, slavery, and resistance by Stella Dadzie $35
Time's Monster: History, conscience and Britain's empire by Priya Satia $48
A revelatory history of the ways in which enslaved women in the West Indies found ways to fight their oppressors, and of the ways that their histories have both been suppressed and endured.
For generations, the history of the British empire was written by its victors. British historians' accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised the force of decolonisation. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.
After an event that means the end of pretty much all the technology we have taken for granted, two former Hollywood friends find themselves at odds.
"Inventive, entertaining, and superbly written." —New York Times
House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman $43
"This is a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history. It is, in short, a blast." —Guardian
When Hadley Freeman found a shoebox filled with her French grandmother's treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of her grandmother, Sala, and her three siblings, Henri, Jacques and Alex Glass. The search takes Freeman from Picasso's archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz.
Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonised in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs, simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people "fat" is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, "feeling fat" and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one another with richer, fattier meanings.
Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.
Detailing 1,000 years of life in Palliser Bay, this landmark book presents, in 14 papers by 9 authors, the results of a pioneering, multifaceted, archaeological research programme carried out between 1969 and 1972 in the south-eastern coastal part of the North Island of New Zealand. The volume reviews archaeological evidence from the time of first settlement from Polynesia through to the 19th century. More than 25 excavations were carried out, focussing on midden sites, house areas, kumara storage pits and prehistoric gardens. Laboratory analysis of middens revealed details of the history of fishing, birding and sea mammal hunting. Artefacts of stone, bone and shell are described in the volume, and analysis of land snails provides evidence for environmental change during the period of occupation. Analysis of human bone samples provided detailed medical histories of the people who lived in the region. Two concluding chapters consider the significance of the evidence for early horticulture in Palliser Bay and the nature of prehistoric communities in the area. Back in print at last.
The first of three volumes--The Early Years--follows him from his boyhood in Montreal to university, and his burgeoning literary career to the world of music, culminating with his first international tour in 1970. Through the voices of those who knew him best at that time, the book probes both Cohen's public and private life. It also paints a portrait of an era, the social, cultural, and political revolutions that shook the 1960s.
>>'Suzanne' with Judy Collins.
The Handbook of New Zealand Mammals edited by Carolyn M. King and David M. Forsyth $160
The definitive reference on all the land-breeding mammals recorded in the New Zealand region (including the New Zealand sector of Antarctica). It lists 65 species, including native and exotic, wild and feral, living and extinct, residents, vagrants and failed introductions. It describes their history, biology and ecology, and brings together comprehensive and detailed information gathered from widely scattered or previously unpublished sources. The description of each species is arranged under standardised headings for easy reference. Because the only native land-breeding mammals in New Zealand are bats and seals, the great majority of the modern mammal fauna comprises introduced species, whose arrival has had profound effects both for themselves and for the native fauna and flora. The book details changes in numbers and distribution for the native species, and for the arrivals it summarises changes in habitat, diet, numbers and size in comparison with their ancestral stocks, and some of the problems they present to resource managers.
In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. All these people had Jewish origins. In 1847, Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world's population, and yet they were influential far beyond their numbers. Why?
"Today, the scientific evidence for climate change verges on irrefutable. If you're younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilisation of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you're under thirty, you're all but guaranteed to witness it. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope."
Sylvie lives in a school in France. Her father is the principal, and her home is an apartment at the end of a hallway of classrooms. As a young child, Sylvie and her brother explore this most unusual kingdom, full of small mysteries and quirky surprises. But in middle and high school, life grows more complicated. Sylvie becomes aware of her parents' conflicts, the complexities of shifting friendships, and what it means to be the only Jewish family in town. She also begins to sense that her perceived "success" relies on the pursuit of math and science-even though she loves art. In a funny and perceptive graphic memoir for children, author-illustrator Sylvie Kantorovitz traces her first steps as an artist.
Although early medical textbooks treated it as a healing agent, early alchemists (as well as their critics) claimed gin's base was a path to immortality and also Satan's tool. In more recent times, the gin trade consolidated the commercial and political power of nations and prompted a social campaign against women. Gin has been used successfully as a defense for murder; blamed for massive unrest in 18th-century England; and advertised for as an abortifacient.
From its harshest proto-gin distillation days to the current smooth craft models, gin plays a powerful cultural role in film, music, and literature.
>>Behold!.