NEW RELEASES
Patricia Grace begins her remarkable memoir beside Hongoeka Bay. It is the place she has returned to throughout her life, and fought for, one of many battles she has faced. This book provides special insight into the life of this important author. "It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl. I found that being different meant that I could be blamed."
Throughout Proust's life, nine of his short stories remained unseen-the writer never spoke of them. Why did he choose not to publish them along with the others? One possible answer is that he was developing his themes in preparation for In Search of Lost Time; another is that the stories were too audacious—too near to life—for the censorious society of the time.
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one’s self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
“We all talk the talk about public intellectuals nowadays. Vivian Gornick walks the walk. The essays in Taking a Long Look could not be more direct, more authoritative, more alive with the pleasures of discovery or alert to the ambiguities of argument. Whether writing literary or political criticism, memoir, or feminist polemic, her mastery is assured.” —George Scialabba
>>An interview with Gornick.
>>An interview with Gornick.
How can you save your friend's life if she doesn't want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, watchful portraits and twinkling chandeliers. In this new sanctuary, they are confronted with a set of clues leading to a hidden room where one of them will be granted a wish. But there's a catch—if they don't leave the castle by five o'clock, they will be punished. As time passes, a devastating truth emerges—only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved.
In Berlin and the north of Germany around Kiel, Wedde's nineteenth-century ancestors whisper to him amid the clamour of history and the pleasures of daily life. Wedde wrote these poems while researching his novel The Reed Warbler.
>>Find out about The Reed Warbler. 
Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand's best writers edited by Bill Manhire $40
Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall. First published in 1989, this is a new edition of what remains an excellent introduction to New Zealand short story practice in the twentieth century.
The Benjamin Files by Frederic Jameson $43
I am an Island by Tamsin Calidas $37
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of renewal.
Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall. First published in 1989, this is a new edition of what remains an excellent introduction to New Zealand short story practice in the twentieth century.
Jameson offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Walter Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination.
Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens, and to escape the dangers of the outside world. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycee into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.
The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For more than a century, a diverse array of researchers has been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it. In Models of the Mind, computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed scientists to understand and describe many of the brain's processes, including decision-making, sensory processing, quantifying memory, and more.
"Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy. Moving effortlessly back and forth between history and journalism, Sanghera connects the racial violence and discrimination of his childhood in 1970s and 80s Wolverhampton with the attitudes and methods previously used to impose empire and white supremacy across the world – and still perpetuated in British fantasies of global leadership. Both deliberately and unconsciously, the empire was “one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity”, and it still corrupts British society in countless ways. Sanghera’s unflinching attempt to understand this process, and to counter the cognitive dissonance and denial of Britain’s modern imperial amnesia, makes for a moving and stimulating book that deserves to be widely read." —Guardian
Talking Heads by Alan Bennett $37
Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of twelve groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television. At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic. This new edition, which contains the original complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, contains some of Bennett's finest work.
>>Two Besides adds two more monologues to the series.
>>Two Besides adds two more monologues to the series.
Twenty years ago, Oona left the Irish island of Inis for the very first time. A wind-blasted rock of fishing boats and turf fires, where girls stayed in their homes until they became mothers themselves, the island was a gift for some, a prison for others. Oona was barely more than a girl, but promised herself she would leave the tall tales behind and never return. The Island Child tells two stories: of the girl who grew up watching births and betrayals, storms and secrets, and of the adult Oona, desperate to find a second chance, only to discover she can never completely escape. As the strands of Oona's life come together, in blood and marriage and motherhood, she must accept the price we pay when we love what is never truly ours.
Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence? On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.
Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet few of us understand how this extraordinary, complex ability really works. How do two languages co-exist in the same brain? What are the advantages and challenges of being bilingual? How do we learn - and forget - a language?
Watermarks: Life, death and swimming by Lenka Janiurek $28
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu $26
Words Fail Us: In defence of disfluency by Jonty Claypole $37
Ceramic: Art and civilisation by Paul Greenhalgh $66
Lenka Janiurek's story really begins after the death of her mother when she was a small child, and speaks of the men who came to define her life; she is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father, the sister of five brothers, the wife of one husband, the lover of several men, and the mother of two more. Her memoir speaks of identity and trying to find your place in a country that isn't your own, within a family that doesn't feel like your own. This remarkable book traces Janiurek's journey from the UK to Eastern Europe, from the 1960s to the present day. However, across the years, she remains haunted by the rage, addiction and despair of the men she is closest to. Alongside these challenges, she develops a powerful connection with the natural world, particularly water, which provides her with strength and joy.
A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the underbelly of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn — with unexpected consequences.
"Gripping, impassioned, unexpected." —Los Angeles Times
What if hyper-fluency is not only unachievable but undesirable? Jonty Claypole spent fifteen years of his life in and out of extreme speech therapy. From sessions with child psychologists to lengthy stuttering boot camps and exposure therapies, he tried everything until finally being told the words he'd always feared: 'We can't cure your stutter.' Those words started him on a journey towards not only making peace with his stammer but learning to use it to his advantage. Here, Claypole argues that our obsession with fluency could be hindering, rather than helping, our creativity, authenticity and persuasiveness. Exploring other speech conditions, such as aphasia and Tourette's, and telling the stories of the 'creatively disfluent' — from Lewis Carroll to Kendrick Lamar — Claypole explains why it's time for us to stop making sense, get tongue tied and embrace the life-changing power of inarticulacy.
"Jonty Claypole's book is timely, thoughtful, rich in fact and personal anecdote, and looks to a more enlightened, speech-diverse future." —David Mitchell
"Jonty Claypole's book is timely, thoughtful, rich in fact and personal anecdote, and looks to a more enlightened, speech-diverse future." —David Mitchell
The story of ceramics is the story of human civilisation. This book traces both the utilitarian and the ornamental developments in the use of clay, from the most ancient examples to those of the present.