NEW RELEASES
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here—is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey?
Winner of the 2021 Novel Prize.
"Au’s is a book of deceptive simplicity, weaving profound questions of identity and ontology into the fabric of quotidian banality. What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment." —Claire Messud
I can be of use beyond myself. There is no question
of my right to board a ship, or take a room.
It is as though I were a ghost and I have now been given form.
Dr James Barry was many things. He was a pistol-toting dueller, an irascible grudge-holder, a vegetarian, an obsessive cleaner – and a brilliant, humane military surgeon who served throughout the British empire, travelled the world with a small menagerie of animals, and advocated for public health reform. Barry was also a transgender man living in the Victorian era, a time when the term ‘transgender’ was unknown in Western thought. The poems of The Surgeon’s Brain imagine Barry’s inner worlds and the historical and social pressures that he resisted. As this story unfolds and begins to fragment, it speaks to both our past and future ghosts.
"Upperton has a way of linking the urgency of poetry to the urgency of being human." —Piet Nieuwland, Landfall
>>RNZ interview.
>>RNZ interview.
The story of two brothers who leave the southwest coast of Ireland on an expedition to Transhimalaya, the land of Kham, and the mountains of eastern Tibet—looking for an untamed, unnamed mountain that represents perhaps the last blank spot on the map. As they advance toward their goal, the brothers find their past, and their rivalry, inescapable, inflecting every encounter and decision as they are drawn farther and farther from the world they once knew. Only one of the brothers will return. Transformed by his loss, he starts life anew, attempting to understand the mystery of love, yet another quest that may prove impossible. This remarkable novel, written in blank verse, was long-listed for the 2018 Booker International Prize.
50 stories from Cook Island, Chamorro, Erub Island (Torres Strait), Fijian, Hawaiian, Māori, Ni-Vanuatu, Papua New Guinean, Rotuman, Samoan and Tongan writers. Never before have so many Moana women writers gathered together to share their stories. Contributors: Amy Tielu, Arihia Latham, Ashlee Sturme, Audrey Teuki Brown Pereira, Caroline Matamua, Cassie Hart, Courtney Leigh Sit-Kam Malasi Thierry, Dahlia Malaeulu, Denise Carter Bennett, Emmaline Pickering Martin, Filifotu Vaai, Gina Cole, Isabella Naiduki, Karlo Mila, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Lani Wendt Young, Laura Toailoa, Lauren Keenan, Lehua Parker, Lily Ann Eteuati, Mere Taito, Momoe Malietoa Von Reiche, Nadine Anne Hura, Nafanua PK, Nichole Brown, Nicki Perese, Niusila Faamanatu-Eteuati, Ria Masae, Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen, Salote Timuiapaepatele Vaai Siaosi, Shirley Simmonds, Sisilia Eteuati, Stacey Kokaua, Steph Matuku, Sylvia Nakachi, Tanya Kang Chargualaf, Tulia Thompson, Vanessa Collins.
For many years, poet Frances Samuel worked at a museum, writing the text for exhibitions. In her new book she redefines the notion of a museum, making it infinite and wild. Like freewheeling thought experiments, Samuel’s poems blur the lines between material and immaterial, natural and supernatural, to funny and surreal effect. Objects of significance include water bears and tornadoes, ancient penguins and robots, and a paper-cut skeleton that walks off the page. In this book, a museum is the air itself, and the idea that everything we love survives. The result is continually surprising, intimate and imaginative.
"Frances Samuel's Museum is full of wonders. It's a storehouse of words, objects, feelings – at once strange and marvellous." —Jenny Bornholdt
A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock. A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris's novel has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers.
"The Guyanese William Blake." Angela Carter
"One of the great originals. Visionary. Dazzlingly illuminating." —Guardian
The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transport to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy — her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.
"Hypnotising and lyrical." —Guardian
The third and final book in Ariana Harwicz's loose 'Involuntary Trilogy' finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother's madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior. Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality.
Words are meant to be invented. In this fascinating illustrated book, Massini traces the 'origin stories' of words he himself has invented back to real people and events. Recommended.
"Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet." —New York Times
This well-illustrated book examines how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today's "sculpture wars"—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian.
Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index- an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.
Stålenhag's lush painterly visual storytelling make his books memorably —and hauntingly — immersive. A world covered by ruins and ash, the remnants of an otherworldly phenomenon that has ravaged the earth's atmosphere and forced the few survivors deep underground. Matt, Sigrid and Charlie leave the safe harbour of the enclave for an expedition onto the wastelands of the surface world. During their journey they are forced to confront dark secrets from the time before civilisation's fall.
>>Something like this.
>>The world according to Simon Stalenhag.
>>Something like this.
>>The world according to Simon Stalenhag.
A survey of papermakers, printers, bookbinders, artists, designers, and publishers from around the world, who use traditional skills, art and experimentation to make books. With over 30 profiles, spanning traditional craftspeople to modern makers reimagining the book for new audiences, and contributions from experts, we are given an insight into the history and contemporary context of the processes behind the books. Nicely presented.
Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Rights spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.
Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face? Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not impossible extreme, might be extinction? To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world- climate change, technology and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement on how the world's various problems are to be confronted at least managed, if not solved the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia — the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.
Tharoor, the author of Inglorious Empire, explores hotly contested notions of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship and belonging. Two opposing ideas of India have emerged: ethno-religious nationalism, versus civic nationalism. This struggle for India's soul now threatens to hollow out and destroy the remarkable concepts bestowed upon the nation at Independence: pluralism, secularism, inclusive nationhood. The Constitution is under siege; institutions are being undermined; mythical pasts propagated; universities assailed; minorities demonised, and worse.
>>In the news today.
>>In the news today.
From his own adolescence, when his allegiance was to punk rock, to his work as one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture at the New York Times and the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh has made a deep study of how our popular music unites and divides us, the tribes it forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't transcendent: it expresses our grudges as well as our hopes, and it is motivated by greed as well as inspiration. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there's always been a 'Black' audience and a 'white' audience, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there is Black music and white music (and some very white music), and a whole lot of confusing of the issue, if not to say expropriation.
A novel exploring the history of an African-American family in the American South, from the time before the Civil War and slavery, through the Civil Rights movement, to the present.
"This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain, and so much more. In Jeffers's deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel." —Jacqueline Woodson
Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world. From the author of Braiding Sweetgrass.
In 2013 Kate Greene moved to Mars. On NASA's first HI-SEAS simulated Mars mission in Hawaii, she lived for four months in an isolated geodesic dome with her crewmates, gaining incredible insight into human behaviour in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory. Greene draws on her experience to contemplate what makes an astronaut, the challenges of freeze-dried eggs and time-lagged correspondence, the cost of shooting for a Planet B. The result is a story of space and life, of the slippage between dreams and reality, of bodies in space, and of humanity's incredible impulse to explore. From trying out life on Mars, Greene examines what it is to live on Earth.
Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement. Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Susan B. Anthony, Jack LaLanne, and Jane Fonda, among many others, make appearances in Sweat, but chief among the historical figures is Girolamo Mercuriale, a Renaissance-era Italian physician who aimed singlehandedly to revive the ancient Greek "art of exercising" through his 1569 book De arte gymnastica. Though largely forgotten over the past five centuries, Mercuriale and his illustrated treatise were pioneering, and are brought back to life in the pages of Sweat. Hayes ties his own personal experience to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the 21st century.
The Best American Poetry, 2021 edited by Tracy K. Smith and David Lehman $38
Since 1988, 'The Best American Poetry' series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets).