NEW RELEASES (13.10.23)

A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:

End Times by Rebecca Priestley $35
In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose, they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first - nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus — they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse. Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz — now a science historian and an engineer — are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake. End Times interweaves the stories of these two periods in Rebecca's life, both of which have at heart a sleepless fear of the end of the world. Along the way she asks: Why do people hold on to some ideas but reject others? How do you engage with someone whose beliefs are wildly different from your own? And where can we find hope when it sometimes feels as if we all live on a fault line that could rupture at any moment? [Paperback]
>>Apocalypse.
>>Granity is falling into the sea.
>>A meditation on apocalyptic thinking.

Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop (translated from French by Sam Taylor) $37
The new novel from the International Booker Prize-winning author of the astounding At Night All Blood Is Black. The Door of No Return, on the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal, is where millions of Africans last touched their home continent's soil, before they were transported to slavery in the Americas. When French naturalist Michel Adanson travels to Senegal in 1749, he hears the story of a woman who passed through the door... but then returned. He begins to search for this fabled woman, and soon his search becomes an obsession that leads him on a desperate journey through a land torn apart by slavery. [Paperback]
 “At once melancholy and luminous.” —Le Monde
”Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose. A love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African.” —Maaza Mengiste
>>Can you conquer death by depicting your life on paper?
>>Read Stella’s review of At Night All Blood Is Black.

In the Temple by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle $35
Following their 2021 collaboration On We Go, artist Catherine Bagnall and poet Jane Sayle return with another collection of watercolours and poems inspired by their contemplation of nature within the context of the feminine sublime. In the Temple maintains a focus on ecological thinking, exploring intense personal connections with the natural world that take the reader into the realms of private ritual and the power and meaning of special places. In the Temple evokes a magical atmosphere, a mythological world of enchanted places with powerful and intangible connections to other living beings and to history. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Darker, or deeper.
>>Read Stella’s review of On We Go.

Remember Me: Poems to learn by heart from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Anne Kennedy $45
”To remember a poem is to carry it with you always – the poem a distillation of thought, feeling, sound. To remember a poem is to go freely, without your keys, your bag, your baggage, yet to possess a valuable taonga. It’s the ability to speak a poem out loud, to yourself, to the air, to your folks. There’s a reason we say ‘off by heart’ when we commit words to memory: to remember a poem is to hold that poem close to your heart.’” —from the introduction by Anne Kennedy
In haka and waiata, sea shanties and ballads, in the words of Sam Hunt and Selina Tusitala Marsh, Hone Tuwhare and Hera Lindsay Bird, the rhythms of poetry have carried our sounds and stories, our loves and losses for generations. Now Anne Kennedy brings together for the first time a selection of over 200 poems from Aotearoa to learn by heart – whakataukī and odes, poems of love and of nature, of whānau, history and politics. For a wedding, a tangi, for a day at school or an evening at home, Remember Me will be a lively poetic companion for years to come. [Softcover]

Urgent Moments — Art and social change: the Letting Space projects, 2010—2020 edited by Sophie Jerram, Amber Clausner and Mark Amery $65
After first occupying vacant spaces in post-stock-market-crash Auckland in the mid-1990s, public art curators Letting Space re-emerged in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Confronted by the thin net of social welfare, the waste of the capitalist system and the climate emergency, it brokered spaces for artists to think and act radically, outside gallery walls. This book chronicles the projects those artists drove. From a grocery store where everything was free to an ATM for depositing moods and a citizens' water-testing lab, they added to the civic dialogue at a time when public space and media were increasingly commodified and under surveillance. Written by writers and thinkers, including Pip Adam and Chris Kraus, Urgent Moments demonstrates the vital role artists can play in the pressing discussions of our times. [Softcover]
>>Look inside, and see the contents!

A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau $25
Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. Until she meets the Bradleys. Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class; everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, A Wreath for the Enemy explores death, morality, friendship and shows just how brittle and chaotic our lives can become once they collide explosively with those around us. [Paperbck]
”A cousin to both Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and Iris Murdoch’s philosophical fiction.” —Daily Telegraph

Visible Cities: Lockdown to liberation, stress to sustainability: Aotearoa fiction inspired by Italo Calvino edited by Marco Sonzogni, Sydney J Shep, and Daniel K Brown; illustrated by William du Toit $30
The celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities explores the intersection of reality and imagination through 11 startling themes, from 'Cities and Desire' to 'Trading Cities' to 'Cities and the Dead'. A hundred years after his birth, 11 writers from Aotearoa have each taken a city from their own country and written a short story that pays tribute to Calvino's work while addressing the themes that besiege our cities in the twenty-first century. Stories from Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Russell Boey, Dinithi Nelum Bowatte, Jack Remiel Cottrell, Erin Donohue, Madison Hamill, Melanie Kwang, Marlon Moala-Knox, Nkhaya Paulsen-More, William Pigott, and Elsie Uini. [Paperback]

Femina: A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it by Janina Ramirez $40
The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings: a patriarchal society which oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the 'dark' ages were anything but. Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women's names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burnt, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated. Only now, through a careful examination of the artefacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women like Jadwiga, the only female King in Europe, Margery Kempe, who exploited her image and story to ensure her notoriety, and the Loftus Princess, whose existence gives us clues about the beginnings of Christianity in England. [Paperback]
”Ramirez shows again and again that dark age Europe was a far more various place than we like to believe.” —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
”Beautifully written, wonderfully free-ranging and gloriously original, Femina makes us look into the mists of history in new, exciting and provocative ways.” —Frankopan

This Is Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross $45
A journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts — and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>The authors introduce us to neuroaesthetics (and show us how to live longer and better).

Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation by Anton Zeilinger $30
What is the true nature of reality? To find out, Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger takes us (along with his fictional students Alice and Bob) on a voyage through a quantum wonderland, explaining entanglement, teleportation, time-travel paradoxes and why our view of the world must change. Originally published in America in 2012, a new Afterword in the light of the author's 2022 Nobel Prize means the book brings readers up-to-date with the most recent developments in quantum teleportation. This describes the author's collaboration to perform the first intercontinental video call encrypted using quantum cryptography, and how Chinese scientists teleported entangled quantum states to an orbiting satellite. Readers also learn how both volunteer humans and astronomical objects billions of light years away have been part of experiments to conclusively prove that quantum states cannot provide a full description of reality at a local level. Einstein had always refused to accept aspects of quantum theory, deriding the notion of instantaneous communication between faraway 'entangled' particles as 'spooky action at a distance'. However, this playful yet deep book takes readers through a series of ingenious experiments conducted in various locations that demonstrate entanglement is indeed real, and speculates that information is an essential part of reality. From a dank sewage tunnel under the River Danube to the balmy air between a pair of mountain peaks in the Canary Islands, with various time-travel paradoxes explained along the way, the author and his fictional physics students Alice and Bob demonstrate the true nature of quantum entanglement and teleportation using photons, or light quanta, created by laser beams. The ideas described have laid the foundations for a new era of quantum technology, including the development of quantum computers and much more. [Paperback]
>>The book has even inspired a performance piece.

The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross $38
Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices — from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction — and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles.
Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipator initiatives and desires. The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life explores our attempts to represent our lived reality in media such as painting, literature and film, paying particular attention to contemporary transformations in the genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of ordinary life: detective fiction. Elsewhere, in Ross's investigation of the present-day politics of ecological occupations, such as the zad at Notre-Dame des Landes, the everyday emerges as a repository of rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity. [Paperback]
”In these remarkably lucid essays, real critics, rebellious farmers, artisans, and diverse character-types are summoned to remind us of moments of conformist immobility, disavowals of colonialism, violence and class difference; but also, of how French cultural history offers paths toward public beauty, collectivity, ecological ways of living. Ross has an uncanny ability to zero in on what matters in the forms of the Paris Commune and beyond, letting participants speak without the usual virtue-signaling.” —Karen Pinkus
”Kristin Ross's work is a necessary point of entry into the infinite insurrection of everyday life envisaged by Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre, Arthur Rimbaud and Jacques Ranciere, variously enacted from the Commune to May 68, and that animates the rural radicalism of today's Zad. Anyone interested in altering the questions of our day towards a new everyday life will find here an abundant reservoir to think and do anew.” —Manu Goswami

Glass Houses $80
Glass Houses presents 50 stunning architect designed homes that utilize glass to maximum effect. The international selection includes early modernist houses from the 1930s, such as Philip Johnson's Glass House and Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, and glamorous mid-century LA villas like Pierre Koenig's Case Study #22, alongside outstanding contemporary examples, where new innovations have made even more daring glass structures possible. Includes works by Tatiana Bilbao, Lina Bo Bardi, Ofis Arhitekti, Herzog & de Meuron, Hiroshi Nakamura, Kazuyo Sejima, Philip Johnson, Mecanoo, John Lautner, Richard Rogers, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Very impressive. [Hardback]
>>Look inside (and resist it if you can)!

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker dwarf who became the first revolutionary abolitionist by Marcus Rediker $39
The transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man — a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life. [Paperback]
>>The Quaker Comet.

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek myth by Natalie Haynes $40
a female-centered look at Olympus and the Furies, focusing on the goddesses whose prowess, passions, jealousies, and desires rival those of their male kin, including: Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father's brow, the goddess of war and provider of wise counsel. Aphrodite, born of the foam (and sperm released from a Titan's castrated testicles), the most beautiful of all the Olympian goddesses, the epitome of love who dispenses desire and inspires longing — yet harbours a fearsome vengeful side, doling out brutal punishments to those who displease her. Hera, Zeus's long-suffering wife, whose jealousy born of his repeated dalliances with mortals, nymphs, and other goddesses, leads her to wreak elaborate and often painful revenge on those she believes have wronged her. Demeter, goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone; Artemis, the hunter and goddess of wild spaces; the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; and Hestia, goddess of domesticity and sacrificial fire. [Paperback]
”Cheerfully erudite and academically rigorous, combining immense scholarship with a sarky easy-going tone.” —The Times

Ngā Kaihanga Uku: Māori Clay Artists by Baye Riddell $70
The rise of an impressive ceramics movement is one of the more striking developments in contemporary Māori art. Clayworking and pottery firing was an ancient Pacific practice, but the knowledge had largely been lost by the ancestors of Māori before they arrived in Aotearoa. After the national clayworkers’ collective, Ngā Kaihanga Uku, was established in 1987, traditional ancestral knowledge and customs and connections with indigenous cultures with unbroken ceramic traditions helped shape a contemporary Māori expression in clay. This book is the first comprehensive overview of Māori claywork, its origins, loss and revival. Richly illustrated, it introduces readers to the practices of the five founders of Ngā Kaihanga Uku and also surveys the work of the next generation.
>>Look inside!
>>”It’s not just about pottery, is it?”

The Korean Cook book by Junghyun Park and Jungyoon Choi $80
This definitive collection features more than 350 recipes organized into traditional Korean meals, including pantry staples, fermented foods, rice, vegetable dishes, raw food, noodles, stir-fries, grilled meats, soups, stews, hotpots, noodles, dumplings, porridges, rice cakes, and desserts. Acclaimed Atomix chef JP Park and culinary historian Jungyoon Choi share their years of research and expertise, together with their knowledge of the ingredients, culture, and traditions of Korean food in this, the first comprehensive book on Korean home cooking, expansive in breadth and approach and filled with tasty and achievable authentic recipes for the home cook. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson $37
In this first short story collection in twenty years, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.
”A brilliant and profoundly original writer.” —Rachel Cusk

Bon Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien $90
Flight Path follows the painter from Te Henga / Bethells Beach — his artistic turangawaewae — through his years of wandering not only the length of Aotearoa but as far afield as Latin America and Europe. Drawing extensively on Binney's letters, journals and other writings, O'Brien takes us into the world of this gifted but paradoxical artist. Richly illustrated with Binney's paintings, drawings and prints — alongside photographs and documentary materials — this is the first full-length monograph on one of New Zealand's most iconic twentieth-century artists. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!

The Only Girl in Town by Ally Condie $25
What would you do if everyone you love disappeared? What if it was your fault? For July Fielding, nothing has been the same since that summer before her senior year. Or that late-August night at the jump. Before, she had Alex to be her loyal bestie, always up for playing endless rounds of minigolf or trying every ice cream flavour at local favourite, Verity. She had Sydney, who pushed her during every sweaty and wonderful cross-country run, and who sometimes seemed to know July better than she knew herself. And she had Sam. Sam, who told her she was everything and left her breathless with his kisses. Now, July is alone. Every single person in her small town of Lithia has disappeared. No family. No Alex or Sydney. No Sam. July's only chance at unravelling the mystery of their disappearance is a series of objects, each a reminder of the people she loved most. And a recurring message that begins to appear all over town: GET TH3M BACK.

Mangō: Sharks and rays of Aotearoa by Ned Barraud $35
The oceans surrounding Aotearoa are home to over a hundred astonishing and strange species of sharks and rays. This fact-filled book takes you down into the fascinating underwater lives of these expert hunters, illustrates their evolution and explores their place in our culture. And it explains why these ancient fish and their environments need our kaitiakitanga more than ever. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.