NEW RELEASES (13.12.24)
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.
Unfinished and Far Far Away: The architecture of Irving Smith Architects edited by Aaron Betsky $75
The Whakatū-based architectural practice built by Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith has created numerous remarkable buildings locally, throughout Aotearoa, and around the world, from private dwellings to public and institutional buildings. Their practice, research and teaching examines and rethinks architectural approaches, seeking to build with the land, not on it. Their projects open up, condense, focus, and interpret both natural and human-made settings. Unfinished and Far Far Away traces their internationally-awarded approach of participating with existing landscapes before generating new contexts. Ten projects across a range of scales, typologies and landscapes show how these architects articulate wood and other local materials to create beautiful homes, places to work, and sites to play. Irving Smith see their work as never finished, but always opening itself up to new ways to question how we can continue to live and thrive in these sites. Ten essays by architects, critics and educators then further a discussion on global peripheries and to how architecture benefits from the continued study and interpretation of multiple contexts. Editor Aaron Betsky, Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving and Jeremy Smith, Marlon Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, Neelkanth Chhaya, Shane O’Toole, Peter Rich, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Julie Stout, Chris Barton, Andrew Barrie and Julia Gatley add their contributions, offering perspectives from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania. The projects are shown in multiple photographs by Patrick Reynolds, which are accompanied by drawings, process models, and other material that exhibit Irving Smith’s particular ability to work with their communities and surroundings.
Counterfutures 16 edited by Neil Vallelly $25
Māori Marx, Māori Modernism: Hone Tuwhare — Dougal McNeill. A study of Ngāpuhi poet Hone Tuwhare’s body of poetry in the context of his Communist Party activities and reading of Marxist and socialist thought, illustrating how Tuwhare makes audible collective forms of working-class agency and subjectivity.
The Neck and the Sword — Rashid Khalidi. An interview with the prominent historian of Palestine, who discusses the history of the Palestinian national movement, the importance of understanding the Arab
Revolt of 1936–39, the evolution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the emergence of Hamas, and Palestine’s complicated relationship with neighbouring Arab regimes.
A Real Piece of Work — Lydia Le Gros. A review of Louise Wallace’s first novel Ash, focusing on motherhood, reproductive labour, and the gender politics of workplaces.
Whakapapa of a Prison Riot: Prison Censorship, Free Speech, and the Fight against Fascism — Emmy Rākete and Ti Lamusse. An analysis of the Waikeria Prison Uprising of 2020–21, focusing on the suppression of prisoners’ free speech, the authors’ censorship at the hands of the Crown, and the need for mass struggle in the face of liberal ‘safetyism’.
At the Edges of Islands — Emma Powell and Emalani Case. A conversational reflection on the legacy of the influential scholar, teacher, poet, and activist Teresia Teaiwa’s thought and practice, exploring Teaiwa’s use of the ‘edge’ as a conceptual device, her insistence on reflective and reflexive thinking, and her understanding of the island as a verb.
Towards a Counter-Nihilistic Politics — Wendy Brown. An interview with the renowned political theorist, who discusses the recent pro-Palestinian encampments at US universities, considers the relationship between her work on nihilism and melancholia, and reflects on her contribution to critical studies of neoliberalism and sovereignty.
The Politics of Infrastructure and Anti-Roads Campaigns in Australasia — Morgan Hamlin. A review of James C. Murphy’s The Making and Unmaking of the East-West Link, which reflects on the planning, and eventual cancellation, of the East-West Link motorway in Melbourne, providing lessons for anti-road campaigners.
China and Its Discontents — Toby Boraman. A review of Ralf Ruckus’s The Communist Road to Capitalism—a study of political, economic, and social transformations in China since 1949.
Counterfutures is a journal of Left thought and practice, seeking connections with the work of labour, trade union, Māori, Pasifika, global indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmental, and other social movements in Aotearoa and internationally – with an especial focus on the Pacific. [Paperback]
Everest by Ashani Lewis $38
A dying woman dedicates her life to Antarctic ice; an All-American star longs for a romance that defies convention — to the detriment of his carefully curated reputation; a woman seeking her exes' opinions on a breast augmentation takes us on a whirlwind tour of the complicated, intertwined lives of urbanites; a singer prepares for her film debut, pushing her humanity to its limits at an unusual acting school; a newlywed couple put their marriage to the ultimate test: Everest. In these twenty-one striking stories, Lewis creates a stark world of fleeting infatuations, violent compulsions, unexpected solace and the sombre ghost of memories. [Paperback]
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates $45
Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories — our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking — expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist — and named for Nubian pharaoh — Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once — a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the vivid reality on the ground. He travels the singular landscape and meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians — the old, who remember their dispossession, and the young who dream of revolution. The final essay takes place in the USA — in Columbia, South Carolina, where Coates visits a school district in the process of banning one of his books. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened and her community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalised by the ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths. [Paperback]
Wild Thing: A life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux $65
Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Includes 70 colour images. [Hardback]
The Party by Tessa Hadley $32
Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn't explain it. On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students' party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn's misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. [Hardback]
”The Party is a coming-of-age story humming with all the tightly packed resonances of a poem. Tessa Hadley is one of our finest chroniclers, and this novella is a glimmering, sensuous addition to her supremely elegant oeuvre.” —Financial Times
The New Sustainable House: Planet-friendly home design by Penny Craswell $80
Designing with the environment in mind is not 'new'. What is new is the increasing number of ways houses can be more sustainably built. With a fresh focus on design ingenuity, new technologies and materials, The New Sustainable House demonstrates that there is more to ecologically motivated construction than solar panels and water tanks. From a mud-brick single-storey box built in the Texas desert to an all-timber Swedish cabin that is completely petrochemical-free, what unites this diverse collection of houses is the shared motivation of the architects and clients to do as little damage as possible to the planet, without compromising on comfort or aesthetics. This compelling survey shows that the environmental impact of every home, no matter the size or location, can be greatly reduced with creative and responsible design. Well illustrated. [Hardback]
I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (translated from Palestinian Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif) $28
The first narrative work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical memoir about the ironies of homecoming. The bridge that Barghouti crosses as a young man leaving his country in 1966 to pursue university studies in Cairo is the same bridge that he uses to cross back in 1996 after thirty long years in the Diaspora. I Saw Ramallah is about home and homelessness. The harrowing experience of a Palestinian, denied the most elementary human rights in his occupied country and in exile alike, is transformed into a humanist work. Palestine has been appropriated, dispossessed, renamed, changed beyond recognition by the usurpers, yet from the heap of broken images and shattered homes, Barghouti repossesses his homeland. [Paperback]
”As powerful, moving and vital as it was twenty years ago.” —Andrew McMillan
”Barghouti manages to be temperate, fair-minded, resilient and uniquely sad. This is an impressive addition to the literature of exile.” —Independent
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj $38
With humour and poignancy, Behind You Is the Sea delves into the intimate lives of three primary Palestinian immigrant families in America — the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars — whose destinies and struggles electrify the community dynamics, occasionally sparking tension and turmoil. Through shifting perspectives, it intricately weaves a rich social tapestry filled with weddings, funerals, shattered hearts, and closely-guarded secrets. This captivating narrative amplifies the voices of a diverse Palestinian community, capturing the struggles of young activists pushing against tradition and the marginalised labouring for survival. Lives intersect across class, generation, and religion, painting a vivid portrait of resilience and complexity. [Hardback]
”We desperately need more books like this in which Palestinian people are presented as beautiful, richly complex human beings, not consigned to insulting, diminishing references. Gratitude to Susan Muaddi Darraj for her very necessary, beautiful work.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $28
”In the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, man struggles to achieve infinity only to find madness as his consolation prize. In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, the pretty grandson of a prince seeks a mythical garden that haunts his every waking moment. His search leads him through a labyrinthine and seemingly abandoned monastery, whose astonishing beauty and inevitable decay the author painstakingly details. His work details a deeply deterministic worldview, in which suffering and sublimity are equally arbitrary conditions of existence. His prodigious sentences (translated from the Hungarian by faithful collaborator Ottilie Mulzet) are burdened with an accumulation of constitutive detail; they fold in, double back, and refract upon themselves, ever more quickly accelerating our attentions toward the anxieties of oblivion, which rapidly approaches but never seems to arrive.” — Alex Watkins, Vulture [New paperback edition]
The Book of Wild Flowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks $40
A particularly lovely book. Illustrator Angie Lewin and author Christopher Stocks celebrate wild flowers and their place in the landscape with The Book of Wild Flowers. Christopher Stocks reveals the interesting and unusual history and science of British wildflowers, including guidance on where they can be found and tips for identification. The book features twenty-one of Lewin's favorite wildflowers, and include reproductions of her paintings and illustrations, many created specifically for the book.[Hardback]
Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance $40
Amongst the hard, physical landscape, the rational landscape of the geologist, ecologist, and cartographer, there lies the more elusive, but no less real, soft landscape of the poet, psychologist, and artist. This soft landscape is, for the most part, a fabrication of our minds; a fabrication so ingrained in us that it has become a language we understand without ever appearing to have formally learned it. Combining essay and memoir, Matt Vance takes us on a sharp-eyed and poignant journey through our everyday places, places that have been shaped in our minds by the unseen influences of words, images, and memories. It is a journey that takes us from park benches, malls, and mudflats to the modest suburbs of New Zealand. Innerland reveals a fresh way of seeing and understanding the ordinary landscapes around us.
First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite politics and the decline of great powers by Richard Lachman $45
The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership. Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world. Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy. [Paperback]
”Masterful. Lachmann shows us that, far from being unique to the period of British denouement, the destructive pursuit of such narrow self-interest by elites has repeatedly caused the decline of great powers throughout historical capitalism.” —Journal of World-Systems Research
The Book at War: Libraries and readers in an age of conflict by Andrew Pettegree $40
Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture — from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank — has shaped, and been shaped, by the vast conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war — and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. [Paperback]
”Rich, authoritative and highly readable, Andrew Pettegree's tour de force will appeal to anyone for whom, whatever the circumstances, books are an abiding, indispensable part of life.” —David Kynaston
Fire by John Boyne $35
On the face of it, Freya lives a gilded existence, dancing solely to her own tune. She has all the trappings of wealth and privilege, a responsible job as a surgeon specialising in skin grafts, a beautiful flat in a sought-after development, and a flash car. But it wasn't always like this. Hers is a life founded on darkness. Did what happened to Freya as a child one fateful summer influence the adult she would become — or was she always destined to be that person? Was she born with cruelty in her heart or did something force it into being? [Hardback]
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik $40
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world, centred on a two-storey rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also the breaking and then the remaking — and thus the true making — of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (and many others). Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters as the key to unlocking Didion. [Paperback]
We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord by Garth Nix $20
All Kim wants to do is play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends and ride his bike around the local lake. But he has always lived in the shadow of his younger sister. Eila is a prodigy, and everyone talks about how smart she is, though in Kim's eyes, she has no common sense. So when Eila finds an enigmatic, otherworldly globe which gives her astonishing powers, Kim not only has to save his sister from herself, he might also have to save the world from his sister!
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
We can have anything gift-wrapped and dispatched by overnight courier — or ready to collect from our door in Church Street, Whakatū.