NEW RELEASES (3.11.23)
A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:
Pacific Arts Aotearoa edited by Lana Lopesi $65
This remarkable, fascinating and comprehensive account spans six decades of multidisciplinary Pacific creative genius, remembering the diverse, fresh and energetic contributions of Pacific artists to New Zealand, Oceania and the world. Edited by Pacific writer and scholar Lana Lopesi, this book includes over 300 images and contributions from more than 120 artists, curators and community voices, providing new and previously unheard perspectives on this vast and growing legacy.
The Hunger of Women by Mariosa Castaldi (translated from Italian by Jamie Richards) $42
Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself — by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love. Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa's observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A beautifully written contribution only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous.
”Castaldi does not use punctuation, lets thought flow unchained, because life flows like water, and the search for one's identity, always painful, always exhausting, manifests even in our food.” —Rolling Stone
“A hypnotic theatre of cruelty and tenderness in which the protagonist and narrator Rosa and her friends make vacuum cleaners buzz, exhibit the most lavish forms of desire, desire each other, and desperately, and above all make food, the food which is really the nourishment of the book itself, an obsession formalised here in something like a hundred recipes spread over just under two hundred pages.” —Corriere del Mezzogiorno
Lori and Joe by Amy Arnold $38
Lori and Joe have lived in the English Lake District for many years, in a quiet valley where one day is much like another. Bringing Joe his regular cup of coffee one morning, Lori finds him dead. She could call an ambulance, but what difference would it make? Instead, she heads out for a walk over the fells. As she makes her way through the November fog, Lori's thoughts slip between past and present, revealing a marriage marked by isolation, childlessness and a terrible secret she's never disclosed. Arnold's musical prose merges form and content to express what cannot be communicated through language alone. Taking place over the course of a single day, yet revealing the secrets of a marriage of many decades, Lori & Joe is a sparse, intimate and deeply moving story of entrapment and isolation, and of a life in which desire is continually overcome by inertia: nothing changes and nothing is ever (re)solved.
Short-listed for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize.
”Amy Arnold’s subject is the vast and quietly dangerous interior landscape of an individual life. As we move through this novel, traversing and circling back across the Cumbrian moorland and hills where it is set, we come to see the house where Lori lives as a sort of theatre, a seemingly safe outline of walls and rooms that is not a safe space at all. Lori & Joe shows a writer, in this, her second novel, caught up wondrously once again in the creative project of reflecting consciousness in the very rhythm and language of her prose.” —Kirsty Gunn
”A unique and mesmerising book which manages to be both equivocal and amazingly solid; it feels like a walk in the lakes in the mist, all mud and stone and weather that slips and changes around you. It is ghostly and resonant and brutally physical all at the same time, with a propulsive quality to the way language loops and repeats, letting it reveal its secrets slowly. I am haunted by it.” —Sammy Wright
>>Far from being a blank.
>>Read an extract.
>>Walking upstairs carrying two mugs of coffee.
I Hear You’re Rich by Diane Williams $30
In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life. In perfectly honed sentences, with a sly and occasionally wild wit, Williams shows us how any moment of any day can open onto disappointment, pleasure, and possibility.
”A true living hero of the American avant-garde.” —Jonathan Franzen
”One of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt.” —Lydia Davis
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>”I’m afraid I’ve overdone it.”
>>You can look but you can’t touch.
>>Unable to answer the question.
>>Never dutiful.
>>The Collected Stories predate these stories.
The Delivery by Margarita García Robayo (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) $38
An enormous package arrives that can't be opened, Agatha the cat appears and disappears, half-finished buildings punctuate the horizon — semi-ordinary happenings that take on an otherworldly cast if you look at them sideways. And nothing is stranger, in this high rise apartment far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don't. The narrator works, zooms with her sister, makes plans for the future (a writing residency, a child), and tentatively probes her past, while subtle fissures open up around her, changing her life forever. As she says about her childhood home, "Sometimes I get curious...but I don't ask, because the answer could come with information I'd rather not know." Wait until you find out what is in the package! From the author of Fish Soup and Holiday Heart.
”If you’re a fan of Ottesa Moshfegh or Melissa Broder, then this is for you.” —Guardian
>>Aspiring to pastlessness.
>>No spoilers.
Take Two by Vivian Thonger and Caroline Thonger (illustrated by Alan Thomas) $36
What happens when siblings revisit shared memories? Charting the growth from childhood to adulthood of two sisters raised in north London, Take Two is an innovative collage of contrasting voices. The jigsaw includes stories, poems, letters, postcards, a menu, one-act plays, objects and popular music. Fractures are exposed; revelations cast new light on previous episodes; both playful and disquieting, the writing itself aspires to be a form of healing. Aotearoa author and illustrator.
”Take Two moves beyond the conventions of family memoir, fusing narrative with something like the spirit of a compendium or almanac, gathering up song titles, drawings of household objects, letter extracts, playscripts, poems, and illuminated micro-stories. The book accumulates into a vivid portrait of a family of German and British heritage, set up in post-WW2 London and torn between impulses to close ranks or break apart. It’s a fascinating and provocative act of witnessing, one that offers up new insights and patterns with each re-reading.” —Michael Loveday
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au $35
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafés and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here – is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another’s inner world.
”Au’s novel is ... masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire—our own and other people’s.... We can sense it in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose, which sometimes feels attuned to truths just out of the narrator’s reach.” —New Yorker
”Au’s is a book of deceptive simplicity, weaving profound questions of identity and ontology into the fabric of quotidian banality....What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment.” —Claire Messud, Harpers
”This novella is graceful and precise. Like the narrator fine-tuning the aperture on her Nikon camera, Au seems to say, we have to choose our scale, what we pay attention to.... Finally, we bump up against what is not knowable. Au has mentioned her taste for ‘subverting narrative expectation … open endings, scenes in which nothing happens yet everything happens’. Cold Enough for Snow is exactly this, a book of inference and small mysteries. The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions … Aesthetic, opaque, endlessly uncoiling.” —Guardian
>>How to read one another.
>>Life and art.
The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto (translated from Japanese by Ada Yoneda) $33
Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family — something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past. Deciding to take a break, she goes to stay with Yukingo, her mysterious but beloved aunt, whose strange behaviour includes waking Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, watching Friday the 13th over and over and throwing away all the things she wants to forget. Living a life without order and rules, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover her own lost memories, and everything she knows about her family threatens to change forever.
The Marquise of O— by Heinrich von Kleist (translated from German by Nicholas Jacobs) $28
In a Northern Italian town during the Napoleonic Wars, Julietta, a young widow and mother of impeccable reputation, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. This follows an attack on the town's citadel, in which several Russian soldiers tried to assault her before she was rescued by Count F—, at which point she fell unconscious. Thrown out of her father's house, Julietta publishes an announcement in the local newspaper stating that she is pregnant and would like the father of her child to make himself known so that she can marry him. What follows is an ambiguously comic drama of sexuality and family respectability. One of Kleist's best-loved works, The Marquise of O— is an ingenious and timeless story of the mystery of human desire, and Nicholas Jacobs's new translation captures the full richness of its irony.
Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry and the mysteries of mental illness by Andrew Scull $32
For more than two hundred years, disturbances of reason, cognition and emotion — the sort of things that were once called 'madness' — have been described and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, it is said, is an illness like any other — a disorder that can be treated by doctors, whose suffering can be eased, and from which patients can return. And yet serious mental illness remains a profound mystery that is in some ways no closer to being solved than it was at the start of the twentieth century. In this clear-sighted and provocative exploration of psychiatry, acclaimed sociologist Andrew Scull traces the history of its attempts to understand and mitigate mental illness — from the age of the asylum and unimaginable surgical and chemical interventions, through the rise and fall of Freud and the talking cure, and on to our own time of drug companies and antidepressants. Through it all, Scull argues, the often vain and rash attempts to come to terms with the enigma of mental disorder have frequently resulted in dire consequences for the patient. Now in paperback.
”There are few heroes in this enraging study of a great failing. Fascinating.” —Sebastian Faulks
City of Lions: Portrait of a city in two acts: Lviv, Then and now by Józef Wittlin and Philippe Sands (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $30
The Ukrainian city Lviv's many names (Lviv, Lvov, Lwow, Lemberg, Leopolis) bear witness to its conflicted past — it has, at one time or another, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Russia and Germany, and has brought forth numerous famous artists and intellectuals. My Lwow, Jozef Wittlin's short 1946 treatise on the city he left in 1922, is a wistful and lyrical study of an electrifying cosmopolis, told from the other side of the catastrophe of the Second World War. Philippe Sand's essay provides a parallel account of the city as it is today: the cultural capital of Ukraine, its citizens played a key role during the Orange Revolution, and its executive committee declared itself independent of the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. This new edition of The City of Lions includes both old black-and-white photos showing Lviv during the first half of the twentieth century, and new photographs by the award-winning Diana Matar, of the city as it is today.
>>Read Thomas’s review.
Prima Facie by Suzie Miller $38
A very able young barrister has made a name for herself casting doubts on the accusations against men charged with sexual assault and harassment. When she finds herself on the receiving end of a fellow attorney’s attentions, she has to reorient her attitudes towards consent and consider testifying in a legal system she knows is stacked against her. Based on Miller’s award-winning play.
Passenger by Alexandra Bracken $20
In one devastating night, violin prodigy Etta Spencer loses everything she knows and loves. Pulled back through time to 1776 in the midst of a fierce sea battle, she has travelled not only miles, but years from home. With the arrival of this unusual passenger on his ship, privateer Nicholas Carter has to confront a past that he can’t escape and the powerful Ironwood family who won’t let him go without a fight. Now the Ironwoods are searching for a stolen object of untold value; one they believe only Etta can find. Together, Etta and Nicholas embark on a perilous journey across centuries and continents, piecing together clues left behind by an enigmatic traveller. But as they get closer to the truth of their search, and the deadly game the Ironwoods are playing, treacherous forces threaten to separate Etta from Nicholas, and her way home, forever.
”An ambitious and exquisite symphony of adventure, romance, and dynamic characters, Passenger grabs you by the heart from its opening notes and doesn’t let go until its knockout, blockbuster finale.’” —Sarah J. Maas
The Letterbox Tree by Rebecca Lim and Kate Gordon $19
Nyx lives in the Tasmania of 2093 – deforested, over-mined and affected by bushfires and drought. With sea-levels rising, Tasmania is marooned and abandoned to its fate. Nyx’s widowed father wants them to leave while they can, but for Nyx, West Hobart is all she has ever known, and where her mother is buried. She finds solace in the single living tree on the dusty reserve near her home, an 80-foot pine that has defied odds and survived the climate crisis. Bea lives in present, beautiful, Tasmania and is facing a move to the mainland. She will miss the giant tree that she climbs to seek solace from bullies. One day she leaves a despairing note, the words pouring out her troubles, stuffed in a hole in its trunk. Nyx finds the note, and writes back. The girls begin a correspondence across two different time periods and they form a friendship that defies the logic of time. When Nyx faces life threatening fire and then floods, she must turn to her friend Bea to change the future.