NEW RELEASES (27.9.24)
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Kataraina by Becky Manawatu $37
Becky Manawatu's new novel is the much-awaited sequel to award-winning bestseller Āue and is unflinching in its portrayal of the destructive ways people love one another and the ancestral whenua on which they stand. In Āue, eight-year-old Arama was taken by his brother, Taukiri, to live with Kat and Stu at the farm in Kaikoura, setting in train the tragedy that unfolded. Arama's aunty Kat was at the centre of events, but, silenced by abuse, her voice was absent from the story. In this new novel, Kat and her whanau take over the telling. As one, they return to her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins — the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of her tīpuna, the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the girl shot the man.
The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone — or something — seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling in this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon.
”The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.” —Michael Cronin, Irish Times
”A magnificent writer. —Svetlana Alexievich
”A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” —Annie Proulx
”One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” —The Economist
”Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious – and spooky – web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus
”Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is a richly entertaining, captivating and thought-provoking novel. Despite its acute engagement with The Magic Mountain it’s more Hoffmann than Mann, which works in its favour.”
—David Hayden
Seeing Further by Esther Kinski (translated from German by Caroline Schmidt) $40
While travelling through the Great Alfold, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by what she calls "a dream in a glass coffin," the preservation of the cinematic experience, "beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people's thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking." What follows is a history of place, told by the town's few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures.
”Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky’s narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see.” —Christine Smallwood
"This fixation with ‘the how of seeing’ allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema.” —Lou Selfridge, FRIEZE
”Kinsky delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema.” —Publisher's Weekly
”Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss.” —Kirkus Reviews
”Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.” —2022 Kleist Prize jury
An Inconvenient Place by Jonathan Little (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell), with photographs by Antoine d’Agata $45
What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality. With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small sub-urban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph when, there is literally nothing to see — or almost nothing?
”Of the three ways of observing – as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come – Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn’t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia’s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it’s not because Littell’s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d’Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.” —James Meek
”In An Inconvenient Place, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Littell’s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the willful amnesia imposed on history’s savageries by its perpetrators.” —Jon Lee Anderson
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder $40
Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. Timothy Snyder has been called "the leading interpreter of our dark times." As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism throughout the world. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we're fighting for. Freedom is the great Western commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn't so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes — the habits of mind — that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish.
”Timothy Snyder is one of our most original and perceptive thinkers, on the history of Europe, on American politics, and now, on freedom. Everyone who cares about freedom — what it means and what it takes to preserve it — should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum
”There's nothing else like On Freedom. This time the acclaimed historian draws not just from global history but his own. The result is a wonderfully provocative and profoundly persuasive book. Snyder leads us away from our misconception that freedom is just the removal of what stands in our way and toward a project of liberty that, through active engagement and commitment to the common good, we can achieve together.” —J. J. Abrams
”A must-read. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading minds of our times. This new book draws from his work as an historian of central Europe, his travelling and moving encounters in Ukraine at war, and his thinking on how democracy, pluralism and wealth inequality will look like in 2076 United States and the world at large.” — Thomas Piketty
”Much like life itself, freedom needs to defined and redefined. On Freedom offers fresh insight into essential aspects of human existence — the values and obligations inherent in every individual's life.” —Ai Weiwei
Great Women Sculptors edited by Lisa Le Feuvre $110
Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day. Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today's rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today's most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.
Playground by Richard Powers $38
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, author of The Overstory. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three thousand- year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure — a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to green light the project or turn the seasteaders away.
”Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive.” —Percival Everett
”An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways — gripping, alarming and uplifting.” —Emma Donoghue
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss $40
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did - and still does - with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.
”Devastating, funny and full of brilliant insights. This is a brave book, but more than that it is generous. It has made me think about how incredibly porous we all are: to our families, to society, to culture, to each other. That's why this book is important: it asks us to take responsibility for our impact on each other.” —Melissa Harrison
”Defiant in its anger and humour, My Good Bright Wolf is a compulsive and compelling story of how hard it is to break free of the punishing narratives around women's bodies and how easy it is to nearly lose yourself to them. And it is also a story of how words — painful and beautiful, wolf-sharp words — can be a way back.” —Emilie Pine
Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders $37
The Burke and Hare 'anatomy murders' of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with a nasty reputation and finds himself a woman who had been abandoned on his beach. Nearby, children sing dark nursery rhymes of murder. One afternoon Ōkiwi is visited by a pair of ex-soldiers, a bo'sun looking for a fight, and itinerant worker William Leckie with his young daughter Mary. When a body is discovered on the beach, it could be that a drunken man has drowned. But it could be that the gathered witnesses know something more. From the author of Jerningham and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant.
Nature’s Ghosts: The world we lost and how to get it back by Sophie Yeo $62
For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment — for good and for bad. In Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries. Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found. And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth. Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives — archaeological, cultural and ecological — reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost. Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been. But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future.
Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell $50
During lockdown, Lyell Cresswell wrote this far from conventional autobiography. Each chapter begins with an increasingly fanciful — and very colourful — account of an exciting life. Under the cover of this playful narrative, he smuggles in deeply considered ideas about music, and about what it means to be a composer - a person who is both philosopher and storyteller. These ideas are accompanied by beautiful and exuberant pen and ink drawings — some for graphic scores, others for his own pleasure. He says, ‘When we look at art, we look for something deep and private. If we find what we're looking for we realise that no attempt to put it into words is adequate.” His music was like the man himself: emotional, uncompromising, richly textured, often quite noisy - and wonderful.
Kahurangi: The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson by Dave Hansford $80
Kahurangi is a celebration of the biodiversity of Kahurangi National Park, Northwest Nelson and Golden Bay. Energised by ancient, complex geology and a multitude of habitats, from vast beech stands to lush coastal rainforest, from sprawling ramparts of karst and marble to extensive wetlands and estuaries, this region holds the greatest variety of plants and animals in the country. Hansford argues for the urgent protection of these precious areas
Geckos and Skinks: The remarkable lizards of Aotearoa by Anna Yeoman $60
One of the least known, and subsequently least celebrated parts of Aotearoa's native wildlife surely are our lizards. The reason is simple - our geckos and skinks are shy, secretive creatures, rarely seen except by seasoned observers. They are remarkable creatures found in a huge range of habitats, from rocky islets on the Fiordland coast, through all our forests and shrublands and up to the high mountains. While identification guides have been written Geckos and Skinks is the first book to tell stories about these creatures, how and where they live, and how they breed. But crucially, this book is a fascinating insight into the myriad conservation efforts that are ongoing in New Zealand, for our geckos and skinks are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and predation from pests. Heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs, this book shines a light on our remarkable lizards, and exposes a world that deserves to be far better known.
Marina Abramović Turned Herself into Art and Wasn’t Sorry. by Fausto Gilberti $30
Marina Abramovic is an artist who uses her body to perform in unexpected and unusual ways that make an audiences think. She once sat back-to-back with her partner and had their hair tied together for over 17 hours. Another time, museum visitors watch her scrub 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day. This innovative book tells an inspiring story about the pioneering performance artist who is also the first female artist to hold a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This celebration for young readers of one of the most important contemporary woman artists of our time features striking black-and-white and red illustrations printed in Pantones throughout, together with a reproduction of the artist's work and a brief biography at the back of the book. In this innovative volume, Marina Abramovic and her cutting-edge work are brought to life for young readers like never before.