NEW RELEASES (21.6.24)
Out of the carton and into your hands. Click through for your copies:
Parade by Rachel Cusk $37
Cusk clarifies her style and complicates her content still further in the creation of a new ‘documentary’ voice that operates on the border between fiction and reality. It braids imagined characters with the actual, experience with the philosophical, to altering effect. Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands. The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It spins past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a ‘true’ story about art, family, morality, gender, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and about how we compose ourselves. A new and potentised distillation of Cusk’s enduring themes (and targets).
"Cusk continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat. ... No one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent." —The Guardian
“Parade ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the ‘Outline’ trilogy and Second Place, one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. Parade is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which.” —Los Angeles Times
The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti (translated from German by Peter Filkins) $38
In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that “by definition, he could never live to complete”, as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death — published in English for the first time — interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate who dies in 1994 is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicisation, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while considering death as a force exerting itself upon culture and fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power.
”Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti's great strength. He is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words. His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.” —Susan Sontag
My Cinema by Marguerite Duras (translated from French by Daniela Shreir) $45
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history. A beautifully designed and produced volume, illustrated with film stills.
”To still be able to hear Marguerite Duras’s voice as she speaks and writes about her filmmaking practice is a gift.” —Bette Gordon, filmmaker
”Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to ‘destroy’ conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius.” —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker
At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley $37
Following a disastrous family holiday, Libby and Curtis make a promise — if they ever visit the West Coast of the South Island again, it will be to stay at the majestic Grand Glacier Hotel. Twenty years later, Libby is recovering from cancer and the couple finally return to the resort. Except the glacier has retreated, nothing goes to plan, and after a storm separates her from Curtis, Libby finds herself alone in the isolated hotel. She tentatively begins to explore her surroundings. Could the inaccessible hotel and its lurious collection of staff and guests hold the key to Libby reconnecting with the person she once was?Drawing on a varied soundscape, this tangible, moving portrait of physical and emotional recovery offers a way forward, one hopeful step at a time.
”I am such a fan of Laurence's writing. I devoured her book in two sittings, breathlessly, compulsively, saying to myself, this is what fiction can do.” —Paula Green
”An experienced and accomplished writer with a command of language.” —Owen Marshall
”Fearnley pulls the reader into her story with a deft and inescapable grip that keeps you peering into the plot, arms out in front to keep your place in the narrative, to the last page.” —Sally Blundell
A Silent Language by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searls) $25
Interesting enough to forget your coffee but short enough for your coffee still to be warm when you've read it. Jon Fosse's Nobel Prize in Literature lecture on how and why he writes, gives a picture of a mind with a unique relationship to language.
Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker) $32
Éric Chevillard is one of France's leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday with some postmodern twists. This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel's cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip. Throughout, Chevillard's powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze — initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic — manages time and again to defamiliarise the familiar and make us think anew about what we thought we knew.
"In Museum Visits, Chevillard is at his best, spewing anxious observations of the everyday in shortform. While deliriously funny, Chevillard's short prose also palpitates from one anxious cogitation to another. In his fluid translation, Daniel Levin Becker matches the minute tonal shifts. The reader is elevated, planted in Chevillard's unordinary perspective and given access to an inside joke told by an author of extraordinary wit." —Bridget Peak, Asymptote
”Museum Visits is a book of sheer exuberance, a delicious ten-course meal whipped up out of Chevillard's fizzing, capacious, elegantly controlled delight in the world." —Lauren Groff
"These improbable, oblique, razor-sharp and often hilarious miniatures seem to be about nothing very much. Don't be taken in by appearances. Chevillard's gem-like pieces, superbly translated by Daniel Levin Becker, bring to life a whole world, and its gently squinting observer." —David Bellos
Landfall 247 edited by Lynley Edmeades $30
Landfall 247: Autumn 2024 announces the winner of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition, an annual competition that encourages young, up-and-coming writers to explore the world around them through words. Landfall 247 features the winning essay, alongside the judge’s report from Landfall editor, Lynley Edmeades. Landfall 247 also includes essays from the 2024 collaboration between Landfall and RMIT University’s nonfiction/Lab. These trans-Tasman essays, written in collaboration between New Zealand and Australian writers, focus on the theme of ‘making space,’ and what it means to use writing as a tool to create space for different voices, perspectives and ideas.
Contributors: NON-FICTION Maddie Ballard, Airini Beautrais, Lucinda Birch, Amy Brown, Joan Fleming, Mia-Francesca Jones, Emma Hughes, Lauren Vargo, Jessica Wilkinson; POETRY Nicola Andrews, Nick Ascroft, Rebecca Ball, Cindy Botha, Nathaniel Calhoun, Chris Cantillon, Medb Charleton, Brett Cross, Mark Edgecombe, David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy, Craig Foltz, Michael Hall, Chris Holdaway, Greg Judkins, Fiona Kidman, Wes Lee, Zoë Meager, Harvey Molloy, Federico Monsalve, Emma Neale, Mikaela Nyman, Claire Orchard, Vaughan Rapatahana, Harry Ricketts, Nicola Thorstensen, Ariana Tikao, Chris Tse, Rose Whitau, Kit Willett, Kirby Wright, Nicholas Wright, Zephyr Zhang; FICTION Connie Buchanan, Lorraine Carmody, Thom Conroy, Kristin Kelly, Michelle Duff, Scott Menzies, James O’Sullivan, James Pasley, Phoebe Wright; REVIEW David Herkt, Simone Oettli, Iain Sharp, Ian Wedde, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb, Helene Wong; ART Ayesha Green, Pat Kraus, Kate van der Drift.
Echoes from Hawaiki: The origins and development of Māori and Moriori musical instruments by Jennifer Cattermole $50
Cattermole traces the origins and development of taonga pūoro, the stories they carry and how they connect present-day iwi with ancestral knowledge and traditions. She shows how traditional Māori and Moriori musical instruments have developed in response to available materials and evolving cultural needs, from their ancestral origins through the suppression of their use in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, to their revival in the present day. An essential resource for all who are interested in taonga pūoro as treasured objects and as voices through time and place. Beautifully illustrated with examples of traditional instruments of all sorts.
”How did our forebears succeed in creating a bountiful array of musical instruments using stone tools and natural materials? This book answers that question in fine detail and also reveals how our present generation is reviving indigenous culture and language, thereby sustaining our brightly burning fires.” —Huata Holmes (Kāitahu, Kāti Mamoe, Waitaha, Hāwea a Rapuwai ano)
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry $37
Butte, Montana, October 1891, and a hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the bad-lands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast. A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the award-winning author of Night Boat to Tangier.
”Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements - the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs - brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvellous.” —Jon McGregor
The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (translated from French by Frank Wynne) $40
In the soft morning light, a man, a woman, and a child drive to Les Roches, a dilapidated house, where the man grew up with his own ruthless father. After several years of absence, the man has reappeared in the life of his wife and their young son, intent on being a family again. While the mother watches the passing days with apprehension, the son discovers the enchantment of nature. As the father's hold over them intensifies, the return to their previous life and home seems increasingly impossible. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the father slips into a kind of madness that only the son will be able to challenge. A blistering examination of how families fold together and break apart under duress.
”The Son of Man demands a fearless kind of reading. It combines the impassive eye of a naturalist regarding their object of study, with the fierce revolt of that which is scrutinized, and resists being catalogued and known. Del Amo reaches into atavistic territories of impulse, desire, violence and repetition, and refuses to domesticate through conclusion. I was mesmerized by this formidable tale of a son and a mother who come up against both the law of the father and the lawlessness of nature.” —Daisy Lafarge
”An exquisite and mesmerizing novel, in which violence constantly threatens to break the surface. The precision and detail of the prose imprints on the mind like a photograph.” —Isabella Hammad
Granta 166: Generations edited by Thoimas Meaney $37
Baby-boomers, gen-X, millennials, zoomers: the dividing lines among generations in literary culture have become stark to the point of parody. Granta 166 tests the limits of each generation's given definition in popular culture against the reality of its most sharply observed fiction. Stories by Andrew O'Hagan, Brandon Taylor, Nico Walker and Lillian Fishman fill an issue that captures the change in values, aesthetic emphasis and technological experience among different age cohorts, all the while questioning the legitimacy of the generational conceit. Non-fiction includes meditations on the short history of the idea of 'a generation', as well as on the relative absence of youth revolts in our time, and the shadowy rule of the old — gerontocracy — in societies across the globe.
Language City: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues by Ross Perlin $33
A portrait of contemporary New York City, the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet, told through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and — because many have never been recorded — when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Both social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is an exploration of a city and the world that made it.
Liar’s Test by Ambelin Kwaymullina $30
Seven will come. Two will die. Two will sleep. Two will serve. One will rule. I didn't want to rule the Risen. Wreak a little havoc upon them, though? That was something else entirely. Bell Silverleaf is a liar. It's how she's survived. It's how all Treesingers have survived since they were invaded by the Risen and their fickle gods. But now Bell is in the Queen's Test — she's one of seven girls competing in deadly challenges to determine who will rule for the next twenty-five years. If Bell wins, she'll have the power to help her people and take revenge on the Risen. But first she has to make it through the challenges alive. She doesn't know how much she's been lied to, or where she fits in a bigger story, a mystery stretching back generations. And she's facing much bigger dangers than the Queen's Test. She's up against the gods themselves. Liar's Test is a fast-paced, intricately woven YA fantasy novel with an unforgettable heroine inspired by the strength and power of Aboriginal women.
”A genre-bending, non-stop adventure foregrounding First Nations lifeways, the power of resistance and the multi-generational harms wrought by colonialism and empire. Bell Silverleaf is the kick-arse First Nations heroine we have longed for.” —Rebecca Lim
”Tucked into a twisty, fast-paced narrative that explores legacies of colonialism are subtle messages about the ever-changing, symbiotic web of life. Intriguing and imaginative.” —Kirkus
Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler $37
An investigation into the medical origins of LSD, and how the Nazis and the CIA turned it into a weapon, by the author of Blitzed. First used as a drug capable of treating mental illnesses, then as a 'truth serum' by the CIA, Tripped reveals how the fortuitous discovery of LSD in April 1943 led to a mass exploitation of this ‘promising’ hallucinogen. Using archival material, Norman Ohler brings to light the often misguided interaction between scientific research, state authorities and hedonistic drug culture that shaped drug policy in the twentieth century. With a cast of characters ranging from Albert Hofmann to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics; Richard Nixon to Elvis Presley; to Aldous Huxley and John Lennon.
”Utterly fascinating and illuminating. In tracing the curious origins of LSD as a drug and as a cultural phenomenon — a compulsive maze-like trail that takes in obscure Swiss institutes, the rise of Nazi Germany, the philosophy of brainwashing, CIA conspiracies, the White House and Elvis Presley — Norman Ohler also cleverly throws fresh light on the Cold War that dominated the late twentieth century: a global struggle for psychological supremacy and psychic liberation. On top of all this, his storytelling is not only beguiling but — by the end — profoundly moving as well. It is possible that LSD will have a part to play in all our medical futures: this gripping and deeply felt book will tell you why.” —Sinclair McKay