NEW RELEASES (18.10.24)
Build your reading pile, and the reading piles of others!
Click through for your copies:
The Remarkables: The most incredible children I’ve met — So far! by Clotilde Perrin $40
A large-format treasure trove, featuring portraits of 40 extraordinary imaginary children with descriptions of each one's superpower. Meet the most extraordinary children you'll ever see — or might ever see. An electric child, a flying child, a stone child, an invisible child, a thunder child, a cake child — what superpower would you wish for? On each spread, the children describe their characteristics, tell anecdotes, and present the superpowers that makes them unique. A ‘class photo’ brings the children together at the end, alongside a quiz for the reader to find out their own superpower. (BTW: The perfect present!)
Episodes by Alex Scott $40
This astoundingly good Aotearoa graphic novel subtly and devastatingly investigates the crushing disjunction between media-mediated popular culture (as distilled in product advertising) and an actual world comprised of ‘atypical’ individuals yearning for authentic contact and acknowledgement. A smart-mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush, and a former child star struggles to escape his past. Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age even in adulthood. Episodes is a thrillingly observed and well-drawn critique of our media-obsessed society.
”Episodes is funny, sad and strange in the way that so much of the ordinary and familiar is strange. Like a word you say over and over until its oddness is revealed.” —Sharon Murdoch
Vehicle: A verse novel by Jen Calleja $40
In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, this title is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.
”A high-stakes speculation, an adventure into a new world order as well as the possibilities of the novel-form, Vehicle is a feat of ungovernable imagination. Bold, bracing, brilliant.” —Kate Briggs
”To say that Vehicle is a feminist Pale Fire for the Brexit generation may not be high enough praise for this intoxicating, thrilling and endlessly inventive work.” —Joanna Walsh
”Jen’s work brilliantly surfs the wave of engagement with translation, marginalised and re-assertive cultures within and beyond Europe, necessarily calling out the connection between colonial and patriarchal attitudes and actions in literary culture. Bringing a deliciously non- realist and wittily self-aware tone that is unusual in UK writing, it strikes an important balance that fits with a new wave of writing that is brilliantly romantic and feminist.” —So Mayer
Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens $40
A selection of short fiction from a purveyor of comical, techno-millenarian unease. Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognisable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for — or neglect — one another. The stories examine big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective
”Ghost Pains is a brilliant, sophisticated collection. Jessi Jezewska Stevens is one of the rare writers capable of taking both life and literature seriously while giving you reasons to laugh.” —Nell Zink
”Jessi Jezewska Stevens's stories gleam with their wonderfully bleak comic swerves, keen observation and fresh syntax. The world may be a goner, but short fiction is in good hands here. Ghost Pains is alive, an invigorating pleasure.” —Sam Lipsyte
”I remember the first time I read a short story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. I was immediately drawn to its strangely rhythmic sentences, its playful sense of humour. There is a brilliant feeling of both absurdity and sincerity in these stories, of the time we are living through. I know I will want to read her always.” —Amina Cain
Good Cooking Every Day: Simple recipes. Beautiful menus. All year round. by Julia Busuttil Nishimura $50
We use Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbooks frequently at home — her recipes are very user-friendly and her methods and proportions guarantee perfect and delicious dishes that immediately become favourites.
”Every meal is something to celebrate — a casual gathering with friends, a weeknight dinner, a long birthday lunch in the garden. It doesn't matter what the occasion, there is an unspoken joy in sharing food with others.” This collection of recipes includes a guide to creating menus for any occasion, from a celebration of summer produce to pure comfort food in cooler weather, a simple family dinner to a relaxed lunch with friends. Julia pairs ingredients in harmonious and delicious ways, with recipes for every season.
He Kupu nā te Māia — He Kohinga Ruri nā Maya Angelou (Ngā Ika a Whiro o Te Panekiretanga o te Reo) $35
Kua haurua rautau te roa o Maya Angelou e whakarākei ana i te ao ki ana kupu me ōna whakaaro, i hua mai ai ko te huhua o ana titonga kanorau, pukapuka mai, tuhingaroa mai, whakaari mai, ruri mai. I runga anō i te whāriki o tana ao toi, kua tuituia ngā kupu whakatuma, ki te kaikiri, ki te tohe, ki te whai ora, ki ngā wheako hoki o te wahine me te kirimangu, mā roto i tōna reo ahurei. Kua huia ngā ruri ki ngā wāhanga e whitu e hāngai ana ki te ao tonu o Maya, e whai pānga ana anō hoki ki a ngāi Māori: te whanaungatanga, te mate kanehe, te oke o te ia rā, te kirimangu, te whakatōrea, te rere o te wā me te whakaao māramatanga. I te pukapuka nei rere ai ko te reo o te kāhui wāhine o Te Panekiretanga o Te Reo, me ōna kanorautanga. Kuia mai, māmā mai, rangatahi mai, teina mai, tuakana mai, he wāhine kua rongo, kua kite i te ihi o te whai reo, me te wehi o te reokoretanga. Ka titi tonu ngā kupu a te māia ki te ngākau o te hunga e āritarita ana ki te reo Māori i tēnei huinga ruri āna.
A selection from the collected poems of Maya Angelou, translated into te reo Māori by thirty-four wāhine from across Aotearoa. This collection of ruri/poems will warm the hearts of Maya Angelou’s most ardent admirers and will also introduce new readers to the legendary poet, activist and teacher. Presented with English and Māori on facing pages, as well as poetic biographies of each translator, this book is a taonga that welcomes a literary icon to Aotearoa.
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and narrative by Isabella Hammad $26
Author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history. In this moving and erudite melding of literary and cultural analysis, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
”Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose. This is a book that calls us to witness our place in history. Isabella Hammad deserves our thanks for sharing it with the world.” —Sally Rooney
”A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.” —Max Porter
”Hammad's writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.” —Olivia Sudjic
”Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.” —Rashid Khalidi
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel $25
Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a small underfunded archive dedicated to women's art. There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman - a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola — to a friend living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As Nicola reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession. She abandons one job after another to make time for the archive. The litany of coincidences in the letters becomes uncanny, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing dread: should she be afraid of where these letters are leading?
”Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It's also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel's protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction.” —Daisy LaFarge
”The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one's own life. Regel's prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page.” —Sophie Mackintosh
rock flight by Hasib Hourani $33
Hasib Hourani's rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora.
Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family. rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.
”rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.” —Alison Whittaker
”Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is propelled by urgent anaphoras and compelling fragmented imagery. Scrolling and sprawling across the page and downward and outward, as attempts to articulate and scrawl the horrors facing the Palestinian people. Out of such scrawls are new languages, new refusals.” —Victoria Chang
Pātea Boys / Ngāti Pātea by Airana Ngarewa $37
A lively and playful bilingual collection of stories about growing up in Pātea. Interlinked and full of recurring characters, these stories are about growing up in small-town Aotearoa — sneaking away during cross country, doing bombs while the lifeguard isn't looking, peeling spuds on the marae, crashing a car at age four, and learning to live by the tikanga 'don't ask, don't tell'. Exuberant, exciting, poignant and heartfelt, each story is featured in English and te reo Māori. The perfect resource for those on their reo learning journeys as well as for readers who enjoyed The Bone Tree.
Nature, Culture, and Inequality by Thomas Piketty $35
In his new work, Thomas Piketty explores how social inequality manifests itself very differently depending on society and epoch in which it arises. History and culture play a central role, inequality being strongly linked to various socio-economic, political, civilisational, and religious developments. So it is culture in the broadest sense that makes it possible to explain the diversity, extent, and structure of the social inequality that we observe every day. Piketty briefly and concisely presents a lively synthesis of his work, taking up such diverse topics as education, inheritance, taxes, and the climate crisis, and makes a lively contribution to the debate on the existence or otherwise of ‘natural inequality’.
”A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it, however — as citizens, we must be ready to fight for it, and constantly (re)invent the myriad of institutions that will bring it about. This book is here to help.'“ —Esther Duflo
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel $28
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls' pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight. This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we've been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon? Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls' lives, which intersect for a moment — a universe that shimmers and resonates.
Long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
“As blazing and distinctive a performance as I've beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel's figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters' bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I'm amazed.” —Jonathan Lethem
The Zone: An alternative history of Paris by Justinien Tribillon $43
In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh's paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today's Paris, and even France itself. Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday's Paris made way for tomorrow's banlieue. But the metropolitan dream was never realised. The Zone became a symbol of division: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the working-class immigrant outskirts; between 'us' and 'them'. The Zone, both a physical space and a powerful myth, came to crystallise the social, spatial and ethno-racial differences between Paris and the banlieue. The Zone is a brilliant anatomy of the true heart of Paris. An essential book for urbanists and historians.
”Shows how to read the recent history of Paris from its edge towards its center. How do the complicated conditions in the banlieue shape life for the Paris of tourists, monuments and bourgeois amenities? This book is innovative in its methods and absorbing in its analysis. More than this, Justinien Tribillon has worked out a way to understand other cities from the outside in.” —Richard Sennett
History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the past for the future of humanity by Roman Krznaric $40
What can humankind's rich history of radical revolts teach us about the power of disobedience to change climate policy? What inspiration could we take from seventeenth century Japan to create a regenerative economy today? How might the history of financial capitalism help us understand what it takes to bring AI under control? Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. From bridging the inequality gap and keeping AI under control, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse, History for Tomorrow shows that history is not simply a means of understanding the past but a way of reimagining our relationship with the future. Krznaric shows how, time and again, societies have risen up, often against the odds, to tackle challenges and overcome crises. History can offer a vision for radical hope that could turn out to be our most vital tool for surviving and thriving in the turbulent decades ahead.
”This joyful and informative book opens our minds and souls, helping us to see with new eyes and to believe in ourselves as a species, so we can meet our predicament with a belief that change really is possible.” —Gail Bradbrook, Co-Founder, Extinction Rebellion
”An amazing feat of synthesis and imagination, weaving together many different strands of world history to make a pattern that can guide us in the present toward a vibrant future. Krznaric's book is immensely suggestive of positive actions that have track records; they've worked before, and in new formulations they can work again. Wise and practical inspiration.” —Kim Stanley Robinson