NEW RELEASES (15.7.23)

New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.

Audition by Pip Adam $35
Audition is hurtling through space towards the event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their incarcerated former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them? Part science fiction, part social realism, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other’s violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.
”In parts sci-fi, absurdist, fabulist, social realist—although all attempts to categorise fall short and do the novel a disservice—this is exciting and inventive writing in the hands of an extraordinary writer. Readers may find themselves equal parts unmoored and floored by this thrilling novel. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.” —Deborah Crabtree
>>”My work always comes from somewhere else.”
>>Constraints and space.

The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (translated from French by Maria Jolas) $33
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us. A key work in the history of the French modernist novel (first published in 1959); the English translation is back in print at last.
”Sarraute’s ability to capture those fleeting impulses that rise to the surface of consciousness only to be immediately resubmerged, or which settle on the surface of consciousness (consciousness being necessarily a surface, I suppose) only to immediately take flight towards another surface, gives insight into the primal, almost organic emotional flux that underlies (or overarches) what we commonly think of as individual personality. Even the most complex of our interactions is compounded of impulses barely distinguishable from nothing.” —Thomas
”The best thing about Nathalie Sarraute is her stumbling, groping style, with its honesty and numerous misgivings, a style that approaches the object with reverent precautions, withdraws from it suddenly out of a sort of modesty, or through timidity before its complexity, then, when all is said and done, suddenly presents us with the drooling monster, almost without having touched it, through the magic of an image." —Jean-Paul Sartre
>>Read Thomas’s review of Tropisms.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore $35
A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all… With Moore’s distinctive wordplay and singular wry humour, this book is a magic box of longing and surprise — about love and rebirth and the pull towards life.
"Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn't matter. Exploring sibling love, death, and longing, it's a novel with big questions, no answers, and it's absolutely brilliant." —Emily Firetog
”Moore's sterling literary reputation is anchored most firmly to her short stories, but in her long-awaited fourth novel, her prose is just as breathtakingly crystalline, her humor wily and piquant. A curious spin on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, with frissons of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo), Moore's unnerving, gothic, acutely funny, lyrically metaphysical, and bittersweet tale is an audacious, mind-bending plunge into the mysteries of illness, aberration, death, grief, memory, and love." —Donna Seaman
"Moore is revered for her wit, and fans will not be disappointed by the novel's dark humour. The prose might be her finest." —Claire Messud
”Moore manages the impossible in her writing: every other sentence is a gut-punch or the funniest line you've ever read, and it coheres into some of the truest writing about life-for what is life if not constantly either hilarious or devastating, and often both? I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a ghost story, a love story, a family elegy, and a search for answers both tangible and ephemeral: it's the world of Lorrie Moore, beckoning us back in." —LitHub
>>New possibilities.

Na Viro by Gina Cole $35
Appearing before the head of the Academy for fighting at her graduation ceremony, puffer ship navigator Tia Grom-Eddy must either join the crew of a spaceship on a deep space mission or complete a lengthy probationary period on Earth. Mortally afraid of travelling into deep space, Tia chooses probation. Estranged from her parents, Tia is bereft when her sister, Leilani, joins the crew of a puffer fish spaceship sent to investigate a whirlpool in deep space. And when the cosmic whirlpool sucks Leilani’s shuttle into its grip, Tia must overcome her fear of space travel and find a way to work with her mother, who is leading the rescue, or risk losing her sister forever. A science fiction fantasy novel and a work of Pasifikafuturism from the author of Black Ice Matter.
>>Outer space through a Pasifika lens.
>>Put on hold.

A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir (translated from French by Patrick O’Brian) $35
Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother’s refusal to ‘go gentle’ while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget. With an introduction by Ali Smith.
”True, and deeply moving.” — Annie Ernaux
”Nowhere is de Beauvoir’s rigorous honesty more visible than in this haunting account of the death of her mother... As she charts her last weeks and her abasement at the hands of doctors and illness, both hostility and unexpected love play themselves out on the page.” — Lisa Appignanesi

A Garden is a Long Time by Annemarie Hope-Cross and Jenny Bornholdt $50
The photographs in A garden is a long time take us beyond the perimeter of the Central Otago garden where they were created. Incorporating processes and materials from the darker, more mysterious corners of early photographic history, the images offer an account of the life and sensibility of a remarkable artist, Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968–2022). With Jenny Bornholdt’s poetry and prose treading deftly around the edges of Annemarie’s life and photographic work, A garden is a long time is a meditation on time, light and the spaces we all inhabit. For Hope-Cross, photography was, at once, a science and a miracle; the camera was an echo chamber and each photograph was a place where past and present met, where the living communed with those lost along the way, and where the most ordinary plants and objects were rendered mysterious, at times radiant. These photographic exposures, and the words that accompany them, are the heartfelt measure of an hour, a day, a season, a lifetime.
>>Look inside the book!
>>Portfolios of Hope-Cross’s photography.

Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren (translated from Swedish by Agnes Broome) $37
Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the shockingly intelligent and beautiful Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript has long been languishing in a desk drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has been missing for years. Not long after they were married, she vanished from his life and left him to raise their two young children alone. So who was Cecilia? Martin's eccentric wife, Gustav's enigmatic muse, an absent mother — a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Martin's daughter Rakel stumbles across a clue about what happened to her mother, she becomes determined to fill in the gaps in her family's story.
”Utterly gripping, like the films of Richard Linklater transmuted to the page. A magnificent doorstop of a novel.” —Guardian
>>Human existence of full of misery.
>>We don’t get endless opportunities.
>>Love, power, and art.

A History of Masculinity: From patriarchy to gender justice by Ivan Jablonka (translated from French by Nathan Bracher) $32
What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, Jablonka uncovers the origins of our patriarchal societies. He then offers an updated model of masculinity based on a theory of gender justice which aims for a redistribution of gender, just as social justice demands the redistribution of wealth. Arguing that it is high time for men to be as involved in gender justice as women, Jablonka shows that in order to build a more equal and respectful society, we must gain a deeper understanding of the structure of patriarchy — and reframe the conversation so that men define themselves by the rights of women.

The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms journey with Nan Shepherd by Merryn Glover $40
Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender. In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain, she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd's seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own.
”A dazzling adventure into mountain, place and time. Redolent with the presence of Nan Shepherd, this book will captivate lovers of The Living Mountain.” —Esther Woolfson
>>The Living Mountain.

Porn: An oral history by Polly Barton $37
”Barton’s book carves out a space to hear a multitude of experiences, from interviewees of different genders and sexualities, who look at a range of porn from mainstream, queer, feminist or amateur. This kaleidoscopic approach allows us to understand many things about porn beyond if it is good or bad, empowering or exploitative, feminist or misogynistic. Activist or academic voices are the ones most commonly heard in conversations about porn. Barton instead gives the consumer a space to add their voices and knowledge to this ever-changing debate, and as a result they offer valuable and engaging insight into the everyday nature of porn consumption.'“ —Caroline West, Irish Independent
”I found my time with Porn: An Oral History unexpectedly moving. Barton’s candid, generous style as an interlocutor allows her subjects to move fluidly between their sometimes contradictory instincts and intellectual approaches in a way which feels revelatory and totally honest and human. A pleasure to read, and a vital new work for anyone interested in sex and its representation.” — Megan Nolan
”I wasn’t expecting nineteen conversations about porn to make me feel as I felt after reading this book: grateful and hopeful and wide-open. Porn is a generous, intimate commentary on how we relate to one another (or fail to) through the most unlikely of lenses.” — Saba Sams
”Porn is many things – a prompt for dreams, the outsourcing of fantasies, a heuristic for the construction of desire – but it is often omitted from our “spoken life”, to use Polly Barton’s wonderful phrase. In Porn, she manages to get people to talk about this subject both omnipresent and omnipresently swept under the rug, peeling off her informers’ ideological armour to get at what they really like and why, and invites us to ask, without forcing any answers, what it means for an entire society to possess an entire guilty conscience surrounding a genre now constitutive of our understanding of what sex is.” — Adrian Nathan West
>>The floodgates open.
>>Comfort level.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Fifty Sounds.

One of Them by Shaneel Lal $37
Growing up queer in a tiny, conservative village in Fiji, Shaneel Lal was subjected to beatings, torture and other horrific treatment from the elders and others, intended to drive the queerness from them or to stop it spreading to others(!). Escaping to Aotearoa, they were shocked to find that similar practices were legal here, and they became one of the inspiring voices in the ultimately successful campaign to outlaw so-called conversion therapy.

The Creative Act: A way of being by Rick Rubin $50
The legendary music producer has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn't, he has learned that being an artist isn't about your specific output; it's about your relationship to the world.
”A gorgeous, delicious and wildly practical interrogation of the creative process. A master of his craft, Rubin supplies rich insights, sound advice, helpful suggestions and supreme comfort to anyone living to create, or endeavoring to live creatively.'“ —JJ Abrams
”This book is a companion to anyone on the creative path; for me, Rick Rubin's attention, consideration, ideas have dug themselves down deep into my consciousness and grown with my work, so that over time, I have found myself in the shelter of a huge resplendent tree, and remembered that it all started with a word or two from a person who really, really listened. May it start something similar in you.'“ — Kae Tempest