NEW RELEASES
Choose from these new titles and click through to have them delivered to your door!
Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer's death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer's family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realises, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed.
A writer attempts to complete the novel for which he has been awarded a large Guggenheim grant, though for a long time he succeeds mainly in procrastinating — getting an electrician to rewire his living room so he can reposition his computer, buying an armchair, or rather, two: "In one, you can't possibly read: it's uncomfortable and your back ends up crooked and sore. In the other, you can't possibly relax: the hard backrest means you have to sit up straight and pay attention, which makes it ideal if you want to read."
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Levrero hunting.
Kāinga: People, land, belonging by Peter Tapsell $15
October Child by Linda Boström Knausgård (translated by Saskia Vogel) $33
Karearea by Māmari Stephens $15
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa $28
Woman Made: Great women designers by Janet Hill $80
Metamorphosis by Penelope Lively $50
Great Demon Kings: A memoir of poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightenment by John Giorno $43
Murder: The biography by Kate Morgan $40
The Italian Bakery: Step-by-step recipes with Silver Spoon $70
The Longest Story: How humans have loved, hated and misunderstood other species by Richard Girling $53
"Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?" Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wider story of environmental degradation and system collapse. This book is an impassioned plea to step back from the edge. It is now up to the Crown, Tapsell writes, to accept the need for radical change. The ecological costs of colonisation are clear, and yet those same extractive and exploitative models remain foundational today. Only a complete step-change, one that embraces kāinga, can transform our lands and waterways, and potentially become a source of inspiration to the world.
From 2013 to 2017, Linda Boström Knausgård was periodically interned in a psychiatric ward where she was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. As the treatments at this 'factory' progressed, the writer’s memories began to disappear. What good is a writer without her memory? This book, based on the author’s experiences, is an eloquent and profound attempt to hold on to the past, to create a story, to make sense, and to keep alive ties to family, friends, and even oneself. Moments from childhood, youth, marriage, parenting, and divorce flicker across the pages of October Child. This is the story of one woman’s struggle against mental illness and isolation. It is a raw testimony of how writing can preserve and heal.
"My journey into law and mātauranga is one more defined by absence, understanding of loss, whakamā, accident and a sense of coming in from the cold, than by any programmatic acquisition of expertise. " This collection of writing from Māmari Stephens (Te Rarawa) travels through introspection, loss and doubt, to present striking moments of insight into the world around us. From a perceptive legal scholars, these are words that question neat categorisations and easy assumptions. Kārearea returns, always, to the ground, the people, the experiences that make up a life of learning, and to the stories that we tell ourselves.
Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahrhas always been many things, and had many names. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive. She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late. Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is heronly reason to get out.
Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious by Antonio Damasio $50
Damasio is convinced that recent findings in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence have given us the necessary tools to the mystery of consciousness. He explores the relation between consciousness and the mind; why being conscious is not the same as either being awake or sensing; the central role of feeling; and why the brain is essential for the development of consciousness.
>>Making minds conscious.
>>Making minds conscious.
Featuring more than 200 designers from more than 50 countries, this well-documented book records and illuminates the often overlooked history of women pre-eminent in the field — shining a vital spotlight on the most extraordinary objects made by female designers but, more importantly, offering a compelling primer on the best in the field of design.
The definitive selection of short stories from the collections by Penelope Lively.
"A sublime storyteller, Lively has us riveted with curiosity as to what will happen next, yet also keeps us consistently aware of the nature of the illusion." —Guardian
To Walk Alone in the Crowd by Antonio Muñoz Molina $45
"I want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished." Join Antonio Munoz Molina for a walk through Madrid, Paris, London and New York, where the past and the present live side by side in the literature of newspaper headlines, billboards, casual glances and overheard conversation. This is the digital metropolis, captured in notebooks, recorded on the iPhone, where Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Fernando Pessoa and Walter Benjamin step beside us, all of us writing the unfinished poem of the crowded city.
When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol—not yet the global superstar he would soon become—exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie, Sleep, they drifted apart. Giorno soon found himself involved with Robert Rauschenberg and later Jasper Johns, both relationships fueling his creativity. He quickly became a renowned poet in his own right, working at the intersection of literature and technology, freely crossing genres and mediums alongside the likes of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Behind historical changes to murder law lie very human stories and sad cases. There's Richard Parker, the cannibalised cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people — victims, killers, lawyers and judges — who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.
Dishes found in bakeries throughout Italy's diverse regions come to life in 140 accessible classic and contemporary patisserie recipes with step-by-step photography, geared toward novices and experienced bakers alike. Includes cakes, pastries, pies, cookies, sweets and chocolates, and frozen puddings.
The history of humanity's relationship with other species is baffling. Without animals there would be no us. We are all fellow travellers on the same evolutionary journey. By charting the love-hate story of people and animals, from their first acquaintance in deep prehistory to the present and beyond, Richard Girling reveals how and where our attitudes towards animals began — and how they have persisted, been warped and become magnified ever since.
The Nordic Baker: Plant-based bakes and seasonal stories from a bakery in the heart of Sweden by Sofia Nordgren $45
The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon $33
From Thumbprint cookies, Kladdkaka and Rhubarb galette in springtime, Raspberry and cardamom cupcakes when the weather begins to warm up, and a Midsommar cake for summer celebrations, through to Lingonberry roll cake, pear tart and cardamom rolls for cosy autumn nights and Gingerbread bundt cake, Saffron buns and Semlor for snowy winter days.
Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry. Then, in 1965, his older brother died and Ewan was set to inherit the family baronetcy. After his cousin contested the inheritance on the grounds that it could only be inherited by a male heir, Ewan was forced to defend his male status in an extraordinary court case, testing the legal system of the time to the limits of its understanding. In The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, Zoe Playdon draws on the fields of law, medicine, psychology and biology to reveal a remarkable hidden history, uncovering for the first time records that were considered so threatening that they had been removed from view for decades.