NEW RELEASES (3.6.26)

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Dog Days by Emily LaBarge $48
Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath. Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences — from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch — LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative. Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving. [Paperback]
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous, and totally original." —Olivia Laing
"Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound." —Lynne Tillman
"Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we've read, what we've seen, and what we've survived." —Anne Boyer
"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious." —Deborah Levy
"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself. LaBarge demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance.” —Daisy Lafarge, Frieze
>>What narrative can and can’t do.
>>Refusing ‘The Good Story’.
>>The ordinary extraordinary event.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) $38
Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nestled in a mouthwatering exploration of food, language, history, and power. Set in May 1938, the young novelist Aoyama Chizuko sails from Japan to Taiwan where her interpreter proffers tantalising glimpses of island life and helps her to taste as much of its cuisine as her larger-than-life appetite can bear. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. [Paperback]
”With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>On food, power and structure.
>>Listen to translator Lin King.
>>A Reading.
>>Read an Extract.
>>Author Q&A.
>>The Meta Process.
>>Also available in this edition.

Ghost Stories, A memoir by Siti Hustvedt $40
Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul's cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing — the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1st January 2024. The result is the story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on. [Paperback]
”She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf.” —Literary Review
”All love stories must end as ghost stories. So we are reminded in Siri Hustvedt's tremendously moving portrait of a man, a marriage, and the joys and sorrows of a shared artistic life. Love and grief lie, inseparable, on every page. This is essential reading from an all-time great.” —Sara Collins
”Both a work of intimate reflection and a moving tribute to the 43 years she and Auster shared: a profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature. For now, in dark times, we have Ghost Stories. Some will see it as a love letter to Paul Auster. Actually, more interesting than that, it's an account of a widow falling in love again, but with a ghost.” —Robert McCrum
”Hustvedt is a writer of astonishing range and depth. It seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds. Auster comes across here perfectly as he was: smart, funny, caustic, loving, idealistic — exasperated to the last by the politics of his native land. Hustvedt (who always looks so cool in her photographs, even when not dressed in a jumpsuit) reveals the nerves that co-exist with her grit and wisdom. The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love: love of life, love of the world, love of family. Ghost Stories deserves its place among the enduring accounts of sorrow and survival. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know — we all know — are yet to come.” —Erica Wagner, Observer
>>Double tragedy and diagnosis.
>>What exactly is a self?
>>Writing in the first person seems to be therpeutic.

Men in the Sun, And other Palestinian stories by Ghassan Kanafani (translated from Arabic by Hilary Kilpatrick) $27
First published in 1962, Men in the Sun is both a classic of Arab literature, and of what Kanafani himself would term 'resistance literature'. Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Their driver, a jaded, fat, former freedom fighter, living with his own compromises and contradictions, makes for a garrulous if cavalier companion. Both the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun see that things grow steadily more stark. The author's ardent politics are apparent throughout, but the novella's characters are their own beings — ambivalent, conflicted creatures of context. While breezily conversational, with disarming, dreamy strokes of lyricism, this short novel delivers a shuddering and grounding dose of true horror. As well as the titular novella, the book features six short stories, including the timelessly resonant 'Letter From Gaza' , Kanafani's first published work, written when he twenty, and the essential 'The Land of Sad Oranges'. [Paperback]
”One of Palestine's foremost intellectuals and leaders. Kanafani's universalism and commitment to Palestine will eternally serve as a model.” —Ilan Pappe
”Every now and then in a reading life you pick up a book that leaves an inexpressible imprint on your head and heart. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is one.” —The Irish Independent

Landfall Tauraka 251 edited by Lynley Edmeades $35
Alongside the finest new writing, art and reviews from across the motu, Landfall Tauraka 251 announces the winner of the Landfall Tauraka Young Writers' Essay Prize, an annual competition that encourages emerging writers to explore the world around them through words. ART: Megan Brady, Julian Hooper, John Reynolds, Deborah Smith; FICTION: Molly Crighton, Heather Holdaway, Sam Keenan, Cait Kneller, David Large, Jemma Richardson, Grant Smithies, Cora Tate, Pearl Tuohy, Tarn Wright; NON-FICTION: Cian Dennan, Uzair Khan; POETRY: Tunmise Adebowale, Hannah Rose Arnold, Nick Ascroft, Izzie Birnie, Cindy Botha, Hana Buchanan, Nathaniel Calhoun, Kim Cope Tait, Brett Cross, Brandon de la Cruz, David Eggleton, Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny, Eliana Gray, Jackson, Erik Kennedy, Fiona Kidman, Brent Kininmont, Leonard Lambert, Jessica Le Bas, Carolyn McCurdie, Kirstie McKinnon, Alice Miller, Anuja Mitra, Janet Newman, Grace Nottingham, Gregory O’Brien, Jilly O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Harriet Prebble, Joanna Preston, Hope Rännäli, Vaughan Rapatahana, Richard Reeve, Holly Ruth, Will Salmon, Regan Solomon, Jillian Sullivan, Stacey Teague, Dunstan Ward, Andrew Paul Wood, Nicholas Wright; REVIEW Sally Blundell, John Gereats, Michael O’Leary, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Paddy Richardson, Elizabeth Smither, Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb. [Paperback]
“In an age where we are channeled content via the overlords of the internet, picking up a print copy of Aotearoa’s Landfall Tauraka right now feels like an act of subversion. It’s a quiet act of participation against the dopamine delivering machines we clutch. Somehow, nearly 80 years on from its inception — in today’s testy climate of eyeball harvesting — Landfall’s spring edition, edited by Lynley Edmeades (with a new name Landfall Tauraka) not only pulls this off, but it does so very well. It is dense. It is modern. It contains some of the best of Aotearoa’s new and not so new writers.” —Claris Harvey, Kete

The Odyssey by Homer (a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn) $38
Setting aside the streamlining, modernising approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn reproduces the epic's formal qualities — meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance. His expansive six-beat line, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result conveys the original’s oral poetics while also bringing to life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer's work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. [Paperback]
”Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus's heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I've ever read.” —Edith Hall, The Telegraph
”Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for.” —A. E. Stallings, The Times Literary Supplement
>>c.f. Emily Wilson’s translation.

Childish Palate by Shariff Burke $32
Childish Palate follows a cast of outsiders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, searching for hope in a country caught in an identity crisis. A philosophy student makes a striking proposal to the imam of the Kilbirnie mosque; flatmates ignite a flame over a bowl of chicken ginseng soup; an office worker finds a sense of purpose in the brightly lit aisles of Thorndon New World. Across eleven stories, Shariff Burke wrestles with possibility, ignorance and the ways we compromise in order to survive. Childish Palate savours the richness and warmth of community, rejecting easy answers about whose tastes should define our world. [Paperback]
>>Charmed from the very first sentence.
>>This is the real red pill.

The Baker’s Percentage: The simple formula for making perfect sourdough bread at home by Mara Ripani $55
The Baker's Percentage is a formula developed by bread bakers to allow them to create any bread. From a pure white sourdough to a hundred per cent whole wheat loaf. With it, bakers can scale up or down, from one loaf to many and can choose to speed up or slow down fermentation according to their daily commitments. It is completely liberating, yet most home bakers have never heard of it. Unlike making a cake, sourdough bread recipes do not require a strict list of ingredients with precise measurements. It is a process that can be 'felt'. It is malleable. Enter the baker's percentage: a simple set of parameters that allow you to bake bread using one of multiple pathways. With chapters on Flour, Starters & Leaven, Mixing & Kneading, Bulk Fermentation, Dividing, Shaping & Proofing, Baking, and more, this is a thoroughly comprehensive guide to baking bread, whatever way takes your fancy. The Baker's Percentage is unlike any other cookbook. There are no recipes (except fot in a section at the end!). Instead, it encourages the reader to bake bread with confidence, according to their own needs and schedule. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest $38
They were coming back to life. They were free and getting freer. Rothko Taylor has washed up with the tide, back in their hometown, Edgecliff. Fifteen years since they left it behind. The past is accelerating towards them- the skateboard kids on the high street that remind them of their teenage years, the splintered benches looking out to sea, where their mum Meg clutched her cans. The nice bit of town, where their dad Ezra tried and failed to build a happy home. And Dionne's block. Beautiful, extraordinary Dionne, the only person who had ever looked at them and seen what was there. Back then, overwhelmed and full of fear, they sank beneath the surface into chaos. But they made it out alive. And this time, Rothko is determined that things will be different. Tempest's first novel in a decade, Having Spent Life Seeking is about family and forgiveness; redemption and atonement; desire and abandon; selfhood and community. The things we seek when we are hiding, and what finds us, if we can let ourselves be seen. [Paperback]
”Kae Tempest brings into the literary realm that which others choose to leave outside. This is a remarkable act of literary bravery. If books can still change the world, this one most likely will. Narrative-driven, stuffed with soul, brimming with brokenness, rife with repair, this is a book for our splintered times. In Tempest's hands, redemption travels faster than the speed of light.” —Colum McCann
”An authentically soothing, powerful thought-provoker.” —Matt Haig
”A truth-speaker.” —Max Porter
”Powerful and merciful.” —Ali Smith

Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray $38
Brendan Murray redefines memoir in this haunting excavation of his own experiences as a child, teacher and parent to discover why imagination is so important throughout our lives. Brendan James Murray's childhood was one of stark contrasts: vivid imaginative adventures but also disadvantage, fear and the shadow of a school he spent months refusing to attend. When a silhouette on a freeway overpass forces him to confront the ghosts of his own childhood, he has a defining realisation about the extraordinary power of imagination to transform lives, and the degree to which it has been neglected. Childhood is a deeply personal investigation into how we can help children find their place in the world, drawn from Murray's perspective as a child, teacher and parent. This haunting, uplifting memoir is a must-read for everyone seeking to understand how the crucial and overlooked absence of a rich inner life in childhood echoes through all our adult years. [Paperback]

Remarkable Animals: 1000 amazing algamations by Tony Meeuwissen $30
One of the most ingenious mix-and-match books ever devised. Based on ten real-life animals, each described in words as well as pictures, it offers 1,000 fantastic variations. Just flip the split pages and see ten remarkable animals become 1,000 crazy creatures, taking on new names and astonishing new identities as their heads, bodies and tails are swapped around. Huge fun. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
>>It goes like this!