NEW RELEASES
In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, we last see Dr Frankenstein’s Creature shunned by human society and crossing the Arctic wasteland. What if he were rescued by an eccentric English expedition intent on sailing from pole to pole and back – only to be cast away again in a remote fiord in Aotearoa’s deep south? This intriguing speculation ignites the novella that lies at the heart of Vincent O’Sullivan’s electrifying new story collection. Elsewhere, O’Sullivan takes us deep into other times and minds. Two siblings relive a sinister memory of their childhood, an isolated young man learns to walk around the city alone, a Victorian adventurer purchases a human head, and always there is memory, like ‘Stonehenge from a choice of angles’.
"A bold and unnerving book full of mischief and wonder. O’Sullivan’s eye for why people want the wrong things is wincingly good. And always there’s the striking move from the senses and the physical world to a kind of philosophical tussle. You finish an O’Sullivan story feeling implicated and enlivened." —Damien Wilkins
In this fable-like novel from the author of (most famously) Mister Pip and (most recently) The Cage, the narrator's sister gives birth to a very different sort of child, who reveals the family's capacities for both love and shame, and attracts the opprobrium of small-town small-minded New Zealand in the 1960s. Just what is Fish's relationship with the sea beside which he was born, and what bearing might this have on the Wahine disaster? And what is the relationship between the narrator writing this account and the events that are contained within it?
Our mother's clouds and insects fly to embrace your clouds and insects. Her architecture, roads, bridges and infrastructure rush to greet yours. Her molecules on their upward trajectory entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes, hair and skin. Her language, with its past participles, figures of speech, the sounds and tremors which are its flesh and bones these words go out to greet your words and to greet you - these words which will never leave her.
House & Contents is a meditation on earthquakes and uncertainties, parents and hats, through Gregory O'Brien's remarkable poetry and paintings.
Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a beautifully written meditation on being present. It conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena—the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety—we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. A remarkable book.
In her essay 'On Being Ill', Virginia Woolf asks whether illness should not receive more literary attention, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of "love, battle and jealousy". In this collaborative volume, authors, translators and illustrators have come together to represent past, present and future thinking about illness. Includes work by Audre Lorde and Sinead Gleeson.
Through readings of one hundred poems — from Catullus to Alice Oswald, Shakespeare to Hera Lindsay Bird — this is an engaging introduction to how poetry works. Ten chapters look at simplicity and resonance, imagery and form, letters and odes, and much more. In Actions & Travels Anna Jackson explains how we can all read (and even write) poetry.
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son's nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom. First published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is as urgent and necessary an account today of the experience of the female body and of a woman's right to self-determination.
Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni $30
"Woman Running in the Mountains captures the private intensity of early motherhood like none other. Everyone should read Tsushima, a fierce marvel of a writer, who seems to write to us at once from the past and the future." —Rivka Galchen
This book bridges two anniversaries. Ulysses by James Joyce was published in 1922. Venice was founded in 421. The title Breach of All Size is Joyce’s pun on Venice landmark Bridge of Sighs but could as easily describe his sprawling modernist classic, which clocks in at 265,222 words. To celebrate both anniversaries, 36 Aotearoa writers were asked to write love stories set in Venice and inspired by words from Ulysses, but to steer the opposite course and keep them short. How short? 421 words, of course.
Featuring stories by: Anita Arlov • Ben Brown • Diane Brown • Gina Cole • Rijula Das • Lynley Edmeades • Alison Glenny • Trish Gribben • Jordan Hamel • Jenna Heller • Lloyd Jones • Anne Kennedy • Erik Kennedy • Fiona Kidman • Kerry Lane • Wes Lee • Renee Liang • Emer Lyons • Becky Manawatu • S J Mannion • Selina Tusitala Marsh • Paula Morris • Emma Neale • James Norcliffe • Karen Phillips • Patrick Pink • Sudha Rao • Renée • Harry Ricketts • Jack Ross • Tracey Slaughter • Apirana Taylor • Catherine Trundle • Hester Ullyart • Ian Wedde • Sophia Wilson
An amazing resource: 80 interviews published mostly in Artforum across a 13-year span. Interviewees include Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agn s Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Rockburne, Sarah Crowner, Lucy Skaer, Sophie Calle, Mary Beth Edelson, W.A.G.E., Mary Heilmann, Pauline Oliveros, Kathryn Andrews, Jessamyn Fiore, Aura Rosenberg, Lucy McKenzie, Rhonda Lieberman, Lucy Dodd, Hong-Kai Wang, Sakiko Sugawa, Beverly Semmes, Virginia Dwan, Jeanine Oleson, Tauba Auerbach, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Donna J. Haraway, and more.
From making boys cry with the power of poetry to hitting back against microaggressions and sucker punches, these irreverent and tender poems dive head first into race and sexuality with rage and wit, while embracing everyday moments of joy to fortify the soul.
Aotearoa's longest-running poetry journal, first published in 1951 and still a vital barometer of the year's poetic activity. #56 features 130 new poems, including by this year's featured poet, Wes Lee, and by David Eggleton, Janet Newman, Amber Esau, Elizabeth Morton, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Alistair Paterson, essa may ranapiri, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Iain Britton, Jordan Hamel, Jack Ross, Dominic Hoey, Owen Bullock, Semira Davis, Rata Gordon, Adrienne Jansen, Olivia Macassey, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Kerrin P Sharpe — along with essays and reviews of new poetry collections.
Eight remarkable stories that use language as a weapon against political and social 'dismemory'. Roig's striking prose allows the important stories of those silenced by the brutal Franco regime to come to the fore.
"Montserrat Roig, before her untimely death, was a shining light of Catalan literature. The stories in The Song of Youth show her at her most urgent, energetic and inventive. While most of the stories are clearly set in the Catalonia of the 1970s and 1980s, they also have the quality of timeless fable." — Colm Toibin
"Montserrat Roig is one of far too many women authors whose work has taken far too long to be translated into English. These stories, in this excellent translation, will introduce readers to a remarkable writer, who, though not always comfortable to read, is always searingly honest." —Margaret Jull Costa
There are birds everywhere! Some of them live by the sea, some of them in the savannah, and some might live in your roof.
Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time. Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words." —Judges' citation
A visit to Te Papa launches a boy and his whānau on a magical adventure to find Pāpā after he gets lost. He has gone missing inside one of the museum's taonga, but which one? Will they find Pāpā before the museum closes? Searching with the help of a museum host, the family encounters moa, paddles a vaka, flees war-time Hong Kong and rides the famous Britten Bike.
Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch. Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry." —Judges' citation
Completing the project begun in Volume One, fifty biographies bring Ngai Tahu history into the present. The people in the book have contributed to their iwi, hapu and whanau in myriad ways: here are wahine toa, rangatira and tohunga, community leaders, activists and scholars, social workers, politicians, fishermen and farmers, sportspeople, adventurers, weavers, performers, and many more. With a special emphasis on mana wahine, more than half of the biographies in Volume Two celebrate the stories of Ngai Tahu women. The book is illustrated with photographs sourced from the Ngai Tahu archive, external institutions and whanau collections.