 | The Fall by Albert Camus {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices. To make up for this, their number has increased; they are the whole human race. And within the human race, you first of all. Whoever is at hand is always the first.” Addressed throughout (over five days) to a mute companion met in a bar in Amsterdam, as indeed the narrator began addressing the reader in the bar in Amsterdam (draw your own conclusion), and with, throughout, an increasingly intimate tone as it becomes clear that the narrator is including not only this mute companion but the reader who is that mute companion and indeed all humanity in his demolition of ethical frameworks, The Fall is a demonstration of the hypocritical assumption of ethical frameworks used to justify the basest selfish motives, an attempt to comprehend how humans are capable of doing horrendous things to one another, from the personal level to the generalised, and an assertion that all human motives are base and selfish. The stronger the assertion of propriety, the stronger the guilt it ornaments. More than an expression of ambivalence, the narrator undertakes a meticulous erasure of distinction between each impulse and its opposite, between virtues and vices, between propriety and crime, between nobility and selfishness, to the extent that the very concepts of virtue, vice, propriety, crime, nobility and selfishness are nullified not so much by their superimposition as by the fact that there is no border between them, that the extolling of a virtue segues into the justification of a vice with no change of tone or content. The basest self-interest can be presented as a virtue (“I announced the publication of a manifesto exposing the oppression that the oppressed inflict on decent people”) and the narrator throughout is intent on presenting himself either as the victim of the inescapability of his crimes and shortcomings or presenting his crimes and shortcomings as virtues and strengths. Everything that seems like a confession is ultimately a justification, everything that seems like humility is pride. “The question is to elude judgement. I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgement is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune.” But the avoidance of judgement gives rise to a longing for the relief that judgement provides, and this ambivalence, ridiculous in itself, is nullified by the narrator’s ridiculing of the concept of judgement (where the state is sympathetic, the act is unsympathetic). “It is better to cover everything, judgement and esteem, in a cloak of ridicule.” Likewise, freedom pursued without trammel becomes a burden, and the free long for the slavery which would relieve them of choice, blame and guilt. “The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a rogue greater than oneself. When all are guilty, that will be democracy.” Although the narrator glibly justifies his monstrous behaviour, whether than be the taking of water from a dying man in a desert prison camp, or the keeping of a stolen painting or the contempt acted upon his lovers, he also reveals the initial wrongdoing (or wrongnondoing) which began his tumult into justified vice: his failure to respond (because the water was cold) when hearing a woman throw herself from a bridge into the Seine. The way to even the most horrendous actions springs from an instance of culpable inaction. “But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!" |
 | Don't Try This at Home by Angela Readman {Reviewed by THOMAS} Readman's stories in this beautifully presented collection are as savage and precisely thrown as the finest nail-bombs, full of diamond-headed nails. Whether telling of a woman who keeps cutting her boyfriend/husband in half, replicating him until she lives with a myriad possible versions of him; or of the teenager who inherits (literally) the secret of irresistible attraction, and the concomitant pleasure of walking away, from her aunt; or of the girl whose mother has a latent Elvis awakened in her by a young woman as she works at the local fish and chip shop; or of the girl with the head of a dog, Readman serves up stories that are at once surreal and subtle, funny and tragic, crazed and psychologically astute. Several of the stories remind me of those of Angela Carter: children push through into an adulthood that has not had a chance to prepare itself for them, stereotypes are worn inside-out to show their linings, characters crushed by society escape through the cracks opened by that crushing. |
SOME NEW RELEASES WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE
Warm and sharp, Camp's poems step easily from the domestic to the universal yet never stray from the personal, which gives them such buoyancy, such vigour and compassion.
The cat, Bruno, takes life as it comes. When it is too rainy to go outside, he rustles up an inside picnic with his friends. When he meets a fish swimming in the air, he follows it. Why not! When the canary forgets how to sing, Bruno helps out. Six delightful stories - a new favourite!
How short can an essay be? What seems at first an assortment of aphorisms on life, failure, &c, builds cumulative force into a kind of thesis on (or even novel-in-potentia of) life, failure, &c.
"A Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis.” - Kirkus Reviews
>> Here's a sample!
“It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.” - Alfred Jarry
What is the relationship between freakishness and art? Is creativity the deliberate courting of chaos to the verge of destruction? What else must be unleashed to unleash the new?
"Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well." — Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
>> Read a sample: 'Self-Portrait as a Werewolf'.
A fascinating and sensitive portrait of two obsessive writers: one the author of tens of thousands of urgently written pages found thrown into a skip, the other Masters himself, unable to rest in his fourteen-year search for the identity and real history of the diarist known only as "I".
"Approaches something ineffable, the span of a soul across the arc of time; the radiant, baffling grandeur of other people." - The New Yorker
“I worship at the altar of this book. Somehow Michelle Tea has managed to write a hilarious, scorching, devastatingly observed novel about addiction, sex, identity, the 90s, apocalypse, and autobiography, while also gifting us with an indispensable meditation on what it means to write about those things—indeed, on what it means to write at all. A keen portrait of a subculture, an instant classic in life-writing, a go-for-broke exemplar of queer feminist imagination, a contribution to crucial, ongoing conversations about whose lives matter, Black Wave is a rollicking triumph.” — Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
In 1994, economist Prue Hyman published Women and Economics, an overview of the status of women in the New Zealand economy. Much has changed since then - but how much?
Acerbic yet compassionate, ironic yet provocative, mordant yet generous, wide-ranging yet with a nose for minutiae, Gill was one of the outstanding journalists of our times. Some of his best work of the last five years is collected in this book.
>> We also have Gill's own account of his pickled life, Pour Me.
Understanding how democracies can fall, often by popular accord, into absolutism may help us to recognise the warning signs that similar forces threaten dearly held ideals. Can an understanding of the past prevent it from being repeated?
A very appealing cookbook, packed with the delicious, fresh, approachable food characteristic of the Tuscan coast, together with plenty of information and anecdote.
In an age of populist politics, media demagogues and policy determined by opinion polls, is there a place for a longer and more considered view?
When a tiny stray kitten turns up on the doorstep, Hina and her mother take the kitten in. Hina makes a home for her and learns all about caring for a living creature. Then one day the kitten goes missing. Beautifully illustrated.
Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a German-Jewish artist primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings 'Life? or Theater?', consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death by the Nazis soon after her arrival. Her life forms the basis of Foenkinos's beautiful, indignant book.
>>Some of her work can be seen here.
Who lived in the shadows of the City of Light? Sante does an excellent job of introducing us to the denizens on whom the back of history is most usually turned.
Vast, sprawling and incisive, Musil's unfinished, unfinishable, incomparable masterwork (the first part of which appeared in 1930) is a multilayered fractalising exploration of what it is like to be a human being in the modern world. Translated by Sophie Wilkins, and with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem. Intellectually, aesthetically and ultimately emotionally enthralling.
Why are there no mirrors in Thomasine's Great-Great-Aunt's old and melancholy house? One day her cousin makes a discovery: a cupboard which contains all the mirrors, through which the children reach a world where one can discover not what one most desires but perhaps what one most needs.
Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger et al meet at cafes to resolve and enlarge the discrepancies between their lives and their philosophies. Lively and informative and now in soft cover.
"A wonderfully readable combination of biography, philosophy, history, cultural analysis and personal reflection." - Independent
Thi Bui's family fled to America following the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s. Her graphic memoir is a story of identity, family, longing and home.
"A book to break your heart and heal it." - Viet Thanh Nguyen
An interesting survey of current New Zealand poetry practice, with representation from the establishment, from the fringes and from emerging voices. The featured poet is Elizabeth Morton, whose collection Wolf will be published later this year.
An obsessive love affair has long-lasting repercussions for two writers and a poet. From the author of the remarkable memoir What Lies Beneath.
Inconceivably large (actually it's 110 times the size of the earth), immeasurably hot (actually, it's 15,000,000 degrees), quite far away (even though Earth lies within its atmosphere), the sun affects everything in our lives. Although it is too bright to look at, Lucie Green shows us the wonder at the centre of our solar system.
>>Is there a sun behind the sun?
>> More on the Book Awards website.
International Women's Day: Wednesday 7.3.17
Come and choose something from our display!
 | Autumn by Ali Smith {Reviewed by STELLA} Ali Smith’s Autumn is a meditation on time, a book about a friendship, love and the surprising things that the past can reveal to us in the present. Daniel Gluck talks about time travel being real to the child, Emily, and in Autumn, Smith is taking us on a ride that is not linear, that dips us in and out of the life of Mr Gluck through the memories of Emily, and through her friendship with Daniel. The book opens with a wonderful dream sequence, one in which Daniel believed he has died. He is in fact in a care facility moving in and out of consciousness, letting his mind wander to elements of his past. In contrast, we meet Emily in the Post Office dealing with meaningless bureaucracy in her attempt to secure a new passport. As 32-year-old Emily sits at the bedside of her elderly friend we are given a window into her childhood memories of her friendship with her elderly next-door neighbour, a relationship that undoubtedly has been pivotal in Emily’s life, giving her an interest in slices of culture and history that she otherwise would have been unlikely to have had. Yet this isn’t where the success of this novel lies: Smith has cleverly laid out what it means to live in the UK, post-Brexit, by delving into the conventions of the past, by unveiling hypocrisy. Written in Smith’s lyrical yet spare style, this book has left me with plenty to think about: what does time and experience mean, and how does this impact on the way we approach our place in the histories we exist within? Autumn is the first in a ‘seasonal’ series and I’m curious to see where the other three seasons take us. |
 | The Wolves of Currumpaw by William Grill {Reviewed by STELLA} William Grill, the author and illustrator of Shacklelton's Journey, brings us another delight, The Wolves of Currumpaw. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a wolf, Old Lobo, the wolf that no one could capture. This is a famous and fabled wolf-hunting story of The Old West, and Lobo was revered by the peoples of the Currumpaw Valley, where he was known as The King. As settlers moved across North America developing farming, wolves roamed too, attacking their cattle. Lobo and his pack of wolves were known far and wide, a pack that moved through the night, uncapturable and wreaking havoc for the ranchers. Many tried and failed, great hunters were shamed by the clever Lobo who avoided the traps, wasn’t fooled by the disguised poisons and evaded the wolf-hounds and guns, time and time again. In 1893, a respected naturalist and hunter, Ernest Thompson Seton, left New York in a bid to rid the ranchers of Old Lobo and his pack. This wasn’t as easy as Seton thought it would be and after many failed attempts he noticed another wolf, the beautiful she-wolf Blanca, and this ultimately leads to the capturing of Old Lobo. This is a beautifully told story with stunning illustrations, which also reflects on the impact of Seton’s hunt for Lobo, his regret at his success and his growing awareness of the wilderness - the importance of wild places and the animals that belong in them. |
 | Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra {Reviewed by THOMAS} If texts are not completed until they are read, and if the realisation of those texts is largely dependent upon the contexts in which they are read, each reading becomes a test, both of the text and of the reader (the author by this time having taken refuge in the past (a state indistinguishable from death)). In Zambra's clever, ironic and poigant book, a series of increasingly lengthy texts are presented with accompanying multi-choice questions (modelled on the Chilean Academic Aptitude test, a multi-choice university entrance examination [!]) which demand that the reader insert, exclude, suppress, complete or 'interpret' elements of the text. Any provision of choice combined with the restriction to set choices and the impulsion to choose is not only a way of assessing an aspirant but a way of moulding that aspirant's thinking into categories set by whatever is the relevant authority. This thought-moulding, the reader's constant awareness while reading that they will be judged and categorised but not knowing for what, the constant possibility that one's experience may have aspects of it erased or re-ordered by agents of authority (with whom even the reader may be complicit under unforeseen circumstances) but not knowing in advance which aspects these may be have especial resonance with the Chilean dictatorship in which Zambra grew up, but are always all about us for, after all, is not the erasure or addition of detail concerning the past (and these stories are all written in the past tense) an inescapable part of the tussle for reality that takes place constantly all around us at all levels, personal, interpersonal, historical, political? The book is also 'about' writing stories: how does the inclusion, exclusion and ordering of detail affect the reader's understanding of and response to a text? These are considerations a writer is constantly, dauntingly faced with and which they usually in the first instance answer from their own experience as a reader (in this case the author is incapable of benefitting from criticism by being embedded in the past (a state indistinguishable from death) but has made himself immune to judgement by allowing for all possibilities and committing himself to none (or at least seemingly: is this political prevarication or subversive smokescreen?). As well as being 'about' all these sorts of things, the book is fun and funny, and it can also be read with enjoyment on the level of the spectacle. |
 | Occasionally you come across a book that impresses itself upon you so heavily that the next several books you read seem contrived and inconsequential by comparison. Eimear McBride’s story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, the on-going impact of his childhood brain tumour, their mother’s hysterical Catholicism and the narrator’s increasingly chaotic and self-annihilating sexuality is tremendously affecting because of the highly original (and note-perfect) way in which the author has broken and remade language to match the thought-patterns of the narrator. Short sentences like grit in the mind, snatches of unassimilable experience, syntax fractured by trauma, the uncertain, desperately repeated and painfully abandoned attempts to wring a gram of meaning or even beauty out of compound tragedy, to carry on, both living and telling, despite the impossibility of carrying on, situate the reader right inside the narrator’s head. This book is upsetting, intense, compassionate, revelatory, unflinching, and sometimes excoriatingly funny. It gives access to what you would have thought inaccessible.
>> Also in stock: McBride's more recent book The Lesser Bohemians.
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 | Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi {Reviewed by THOMAS} Devi does an excellent job of inhabiting the heads and capturing the patterns of thought that occur just on the brink of consciousness of the four narrators of this account of young lives in the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. Just as a plughole communicates its force at all times to the entire contents of a basin, even to the molecules that have not yet begun to circle or descend, there is throughout the book a sense that a hopeless future is pulling upon the characters, that their descent will be at first slow and then sudden, that the world for them is tilted and greased, that their voices are impermanent, that they will become those that now harm them and are caught by harm. “One day we wake up and the future has disappeared.” In a milieu where the energies of sex and violence already run in the same channels, where currency is extracted in rape, beatings and murder, how can the voices of individuals, and how can moments of happiness and beauty, be preserved as more than corruscations swallowed, first slowly and then suddenly, by future shadow? Is to fight against your fate a way of preserving your independence from it, for a short moment at least, or does fighting it draw it more tightly entangled upon you? |
From 1945, Whites Aviation began producing exquisitely hand-coloured detailed aerial photographs of New Zealand which are prized not only as a record of the country in a different time but for their aesthetic and nostalgic qualities. This is a stunning and desirable book.
>> An introduction to the book.
>> Watch this short film about a woman who was a Whites colourist.
>> Look through the Whites Aviation archive and the National Library of New Zealand.
>>> Get one of these framable Whites Aviation prints courtesy of publishers Potton & Burton when you purchase a copy of the book!!
A DOZEN INTERESTING NEW CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULTS' BOOKS THAT HAVE ARRIVED IN THE LAST WEEK
Triangle sets out to play a mean trick on square, but square has the last laugh. The quality of the illustrations is particularly lovely, as the characters pass between the land where everything is triangular to and from the land where everything is square, through the land where the things are without shape.
Mr Postmouse can't be delivering letters all the time; sometimes he and his family like to travel. However, they can't go around the world without a few parcels to deliver...
Full of charming detail (as you'd expect).
Yoshio wants to find the most beautiful sound, the sound of silence, but everything has a noise, especially in a big city. Where will he find the sound of silence? Beautifully illustrated.
In a story drawn from Arthurian lore, Yvain kills a lord in battle and finds his fate entwined with that of the slain man's widow and that of her maid. Luminously drawn, this graphic novel is both an exploration of knightly virtues and of the lives of medieval women.
"A thoughtful, entertaining, and provocative presentation of this centuries-old story." - Booklist
Seventeen-year-old Jacob has grown up in the insular world of a separatist cult. His allegiance to the Grace starts to unravel as he develops feelings towards Lynna, a girl from the neighbouring range who he meets when patrolling Nodd's borders. As the End Days grow ever closer, will Jacob be tempted to sample forbidden Worldly Pleasures?
Eleven-year-old Noah's life suddenly changes when his parents whisk him off on a secret mission in East Berlin in 1989. With a new name and identity, he must make a new life in a city where 'they' may be listening at any time, and where his friend Claudia's parents have suddenly disappeared....
A stunningly lovely graphic novel based on the life of the man whose passion for birds drove him on an epic quest across North America at the start of the 19th century. What would the world make of his illustrations upon his return?
When Virginia wakes up feeling wolfish and starts making noises that frighten the visitors, will her sister be able to charm her back to humanity by painting her a garden called Bloomsberry?
In 1941 Emmaline is evacuated from London to Briar Hill hospital in Shropshire. There she discovers a hopeful deep secret: there are winged horses that live in a world through the hospital mirrors.
"A remarkable book." - Michael Morpurgo
Biesty's incredible cross-sections add an extra dimension to this history of exploration of the final frontier (even though we're not too sure that space is the final frontier).
When Ani is told she has tested positive for the plague that is sweeping her country, and sent to quarantine on an island (where the sufferers and condemned (supposedly) so that the populace may be saved (supposedly)), she discovers that all is not quite what it seems, neither the plague, nor the colony, nor the way in which her country functions. What is going on?
Will twelve-year-old Willow's mathematical genius help her to build a new life when everything goes wrong?
Being a dragonkeeper is a lot more difficult than Tao could have imagined. When he and Kai reach the dragon sanctuary at last, nothing is as they imagined it would be, and danger is always at their heels. Bronze Bird Tower brings to a close this wonderful series in which young protagonists in ancient China must make difficult choices in the face of immediate and structural dangers. Start with #1: Dragonkeeper. Recommended!
Match the cards and enjoy the company of Simon the cheeky rabbit. Fun.
>> "A thoughtful, fast-paced adventure with a wonderful heroine." Read Stella's review.
>> Maurice Gee gives a rare interview.
>> Read some other excellent books by Maurice Gee.
>> Maurice talks about writing The Halfmen of O.
>> Watch out for Wilberforces (at least they dress well).
We have a signed copy of The Severed Land to give away (also courtesy of Penguin Random House). To go in the draw, just let us know which book by Maurice Gee is your favourite (and, if you like, why).
 | Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff is intriguing – a novel told in two parts from the perspectives of married couple, Lancelot (Fates) and Mathilde (Furies). Kicking off, Lotto is an unruly teen sent away to school - his story is one of a popular and successful student with mother issues. Just two weeks after meeting Mathilde they are married. Estranged from the family money, Lotto (Lancelot), desperate to be a famous actor, strives in vain to be a famous actor until he has his epiphany that play-writing is for him. Mathilde, the good wife, works to bring in the cash. They are poor but happy. They have a great, exuberant circle of friends who join with them in their successes and failures, but it’s not always friendly. As Lancelot’s success grows so does their uphill climb to money and a comfortable lifestyle. But not all is as it seems. Underlying this charmed life is the estrangement from Lancelot’s family, the mystery of Mathilde’s past, Lancelot’s desire for a child (and Mathilde’s lack of interest) and, more impressively, Lancelot’s continuous need for attention and affirmation of his importance from those around him, particularly Mathilde. When Lancelot dies suddenly at 46, Mathilde is abandoned. And so begins Mathilde’s story... And from here you will be completely hooked if you weren’t already! She is a complex, intriguing character who is loving, ruthless, striking and sharp. Her furies are dazzling
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{Reviewed by STELLA} |
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Idaho by Emily Ruskovich is a haunting debut. The novel has at its heart an act of incomprehensible violence, an act that leaves one child dead, and another missing. This single act devastates a family. Ann, our eyes and ears in this story, is the second wife of Wade, who is battling dementia. As Wade loses his memory she navigates us through his life, and that of Jenny - his first wife - and their two children, May and June. She is the keeper of the secrets, of the history of this family and all that has befallen them. Some memories she pieces together, others she re-imagines, coming to a place in her own life where she is the bearer of this sadness, the person that holds the responsibility for attempting to redeem the family, as well as herself.
Wade's dementia is a cruel genetic inheritance, one that has taken both his father and grandfather early in their lives. He feels it creeping up on him, but he is unable to delay it despite his efforts to escape from it both physically, by moving from the plains to the mountains, and mentally, by learning the piano (from the local school's music teacher, Ann), and, as it advances, his memories of the children fade but his feelings of grief and anger intensify and confuse him. An anger that shows itself in violent outbursts, often placing Ann in danger, followed by wallowing regret.
As the story continues, Ann becomes more fully focussed on the missing child, who would now be a young woman, and the role of the mother in this tragedy. Piecing together snippets of information, day-dreaming in the truck parked beyond the house, coming across small mementos of the past, leads Ann to strike up a covert connection with Jenny. This unusual bond between the two women formed in an environment of guilt, loss and a desire for redemption is strikingly affecting.
Rushovich's writing is rich and descriptive - the heat bears down with its itch-making insects, the snow deadens their lives, engulfing the humans who live on the mountain in a cloak of silent threat. Place, in this novel, not only acts as a catalyst for damage but is also a metaphor for the psychological landscape. The attention to small details and glimpses of perspective build a textured canvas, which both reveals and conceals. This is a novel that will stay with you, and, while gruelling in parts, although never grotesque, it is a fascinating portrayal of how people make new landscapes, both real and imagined, from their personal tragedies, and their desire to outlive their trauma.
{Reviewed by STELLA}
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 | The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner {Reviewed by THOMAS} Whereas it may not be certain whose hatred of poetry is greater, that of the poetically unattuned or that of the poet, it is clear, to Lerner at least, whose hatred of poetry is more instrumental to the writing of poetry.* Lerner, an accomplished poet (and novelist), posits that it is the failure of poetry to actualise its intentions that perfects, or at least gives shape to, or at least conveys some intimation of, those intentions - for poetry to convey something unconveyable - the very precision, or at least potential, or attempted, precision of its failure succeeding in defining, or, at best, clearing, a space in which unwordable experience may dance or move or do whatever it is that it does that cannot be caught with a word. The dislike of ordinary readers is nothing to the dislike of poets for actual poems, those blunt clumsy masses upon which sparks are struck and edges sharpened, those necessarily failed attempts to embed virtual poems, if such things may be thought of as poems, in the actual common muck of words. To progress by contrary motion, to locate a threshold by being unable to cross it, to point with a limp finger at a target in the dark, to squeeze brine from a bag of unknown contents, these are deeper functions of poetry, and the hatred of poetry espoused by Lerner is a symptom of either enthusiasm of compulsion, burden or useful luggage (who can tell?), clearing space for love. Through the spine of his essay, which blossoms with ambivalences and ambiguities, Lerner has threaded the poem 'Poetry' by Marianne Moore: I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. [&c]
*Or maybe not so clear.
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 | Inland by Gerald Murnane {Reviewed by THOMAS} “There are other worlds, but they’re all in this one,” wrote Paul Eluard, quoted by Murnane (in a slightly different translation) in Inland. The multiplicity and porosity of identity, not only of personage but also of occurrence and of place (the overarching (or underarching?) predominator of Murnane’s writing), destabilises received notions of ‘the novel’ and deprives the reader of the tools traditionally used to work on text whilst keeping it at a safe, ‘practical’ distance. Instead, in a world in which “each thing is at least two things”, in what Murnane elsewhere calls the ‘image world’, the image, usually, in Murnane’s case, deeply saturated with old longing, is the determinant, its expected anchors or referents plunging through so many layers of fiction and memory (so to call them) that the distinctions between these are dissolved, the resonating image, that which is (mis)taken for an impression but which is more the last upon which both fiction and actuality receive a form, retained at least for the duration of contact but more often sufficiently long to be cupped together with other fictional and actual layers similarly impressed, is what both shapes the text and disavows the possibility of shape. Inland begins with a Hungarian writer who has been written by another writer who appears to be some written version of Murnane, telling the reader that he is anticipating his translator (for whom he yearns romantically (there is contradictory evidence as to whether they have never met or have shared a past)) reading what he is writing, thus, since it is implied that we are reading the text as purportedly translated by the said translator, adding another layer to the cocoon of text which stifles the postulated Murnane in his very attempts to make contact with the world beyond himself. During the course of the book, the layers of obfuscation are wound away, a process during which Murnane abandons (for good) fiction as usually understood, and replaces it with a multileveled examination of the nature and behaviour and mutability of memory, an examination of the potency of an image over time. Wound in the centre of this book and revealed towards the end is what the narrator (the purported Murnane (a constructed personage just like any other)) ‘remembers’ of his twelve-year-old self, of his undeclared love for a “girl from Bendigo Street”, who, according to a mutual friend, liked him “very much”, the closest the narrator gets to actual contact with a fellow person, though he is aware that each of them was almost certainly perceiving and relating primarily to someone in the image world rather than an actual person. Murnane continued his examination of the relationship between images, memory and ‘reality’, and into the way in which text reaches out to and yet pushes further away the world inhabited by others, in Barley Patch and A Million Windows. Apart from all this, and in fact necessitated by all this, or at least indistinguishable from all this, Murnane writes beautiful, exquisitely pedantic, sad, subtly barbed and often very funny sentences, and I might well agree with him when he stated in a recent interview, “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime. The previous sentence is a fair average sample of my prose", even though the ironic valency of his statement is highly uncertain. |
A DOZEN NEW RELEASES FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
(Just click through to find out more (and to purchase or reserve the books))
"The funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written. If The Evenings had appeared in English in the 1950s, it would have become every bit as much a classic as On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye." - Herman Koch
Two protagonists (both named Joshua Cohen) orbit each other's fates in a novel about pretty much everything.
"Joshua Cohen's novel Book of Numbers reads as if Philip Roth's work were fired into David Foster Wallace's inside the Hadron particle collider. Book of Numbers is more impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade." - The New York Times
"A hugely ambitious novel set in the high-tech world of now. It is a verbal high-wire act, daring in its tones and textures: clever, poetic, fast-moving, deeply playful, filled with jokes, savvy about machines, wise about people, dazzling and engrossing." - Colm Toibin, Guardian
Eight stories from the author of the remarkable (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) The Sympathizer, each dealing with the experiences of immigrants straddling two worlds: those in their homeland and those in the societies in which they find themselves welcome, unwelcome or ignored. What can be healed and what cannot?
"The Refugees comes at a time when Americans are being forced to reckon with what their country is becoming. It's hard not to feel for Nguyen's characters, many of whom have been dealt an unfathomably bad hand. But Nguyen never asks the reader to pity them; he wants us only to see them as human beings. And because of his wonderful writing, it's impossible not to do so. It's an urgent, wonderful collection." - NPR
How can we explain, let alone remedy, the wave of paranoia, racism, nationalism and mysongeny that is sweeping the world and manifesting as reactionary government, violence and demagoguery? Mishra shows how disaffection has wide roots in our economic and social structures.
"Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely. Throws light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up to transform the world we thought we knew." - John Banville
A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Lewis's 1935 novel is suddenly incredibly relevant.
"Eerily prescient." - Guardian
"One of the most important books ever produced in the United States." - New Yorker
Fifteen authors from around the world (including Ali Smith, Dorthe Nors, Yiyun Li, Ian Sansom, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Daniel Kehlmann, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair and Pankaj Mishra) tell their stories of the importance to bookshops to them and to society.
How does a horrific act resonate along the lines of love and memory that link (and divide) a family? What changes, what endures? What can be recovered, and what must be constructed?
"That an act of brutality inspires storytelling as beautiful as this is reason enough for this novel to stand out from the crowd. To discover the sheer exquisiteness of Ruskovich’s prose is an unforeseen added bonus. There’s a rare, rich plangent quality to her sentences, as present in the spaces between the words, in what’s not said, as much as in what is articulated." - Independent
>> An interview with Ruskovich.
The former Greek finance minister and "rock star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising" (Telegraph) shows that the roots of European economic collapse run deeper than officially acknowledged or addressed. Is the European Union a financial pyramid scheme? Are international fiscal practices structurally flawed?
Is travel writing dead? What are the ethics of writing about a place you visit only briefly and view with the eyes of an outsider?
Includes Geoff Dyer, Edna O'Brien, Emily Berry, Robert Macfarlane and Pico Iyer.
The author of the excellent The Lebanese Kitchen widens her scope to present 150 dishes from a region steeped in traditional vegetarian recipes.
15.8 million people taking anti-AIDS drugs today are alive thanks to a de facto collaboration between social activists and medical scientists.
"Epoch-making: the whole social and scientific history of AIDS, brilliantly told. Informative, entertaining, suspenseful, moving, and personal." - Edmund White
"A contemplation not so only of an epidemic of illness but also of an epidemic of resilience." - Andrew Solomon
"Rabasa's novel is built much like the sprawling housing complex it portrays: a complex but self-contained set of ideas populated by funny and frightening characters. Rabasa has crafted an Orwellian satire of low-level bureaucrats, urban dreamers, and political power." - Publishers Weekly
>> Zero sum games explained (but aren't all games zero sum games when seen in a wide enough context?).
Selected by (intelligent, engaged) secondary school students for (intelligent, engaged) secondary school students. Includes Jesse Ball, Marilynne Robinson, Adrian Tomine, Dana Spiotta and several interesting writers you haven't yet discovered.
Did Ingrid kill herself? Was Gil a charming womaniser or a monster? Will Flora be able to lay the ghosts of her past to rest? How does miscommunication between people close to each other make love an obstacle to understanding as much as it is a bond?
“Swimming Lessons has all the observational touches that show Fuller to be a serious novelist with an acute awareness of the nuances and patterns of human speech and behaviour." - Guardian
“Claire Fuller has captured love in its fullest form, nursed on betrayal and regret and guilt. Swimming Lessons is so smoothly, beautifully written. The human failures here are heartbreaking." - David Vann
In January 1898 the newspaper l'Aurore published 'J'accuse', an open letter from Zola accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the treatment and unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus. The letter was successful in provoking the government to sue Zola for libel, thus reopening the Dreyfus case, and, following his conviction and to avoid jail, Zola fled to London, where he continued to defend Dreyfus until his death from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a blocked chimney. Rosen fills in all the details and the colour.
"I couldn't put this fascinating book down. Gripping from page one with its insight, vivid writing, and panoramic sweep,it is also a book of urgent importance, revealing how our preeminent industries work to fleece our consciousness rather than help us cultivate it." - Amy Chua
"A profoundly important book. Attention itself has become the currency of the information age, and, as Wu meticulously and eloquently demonstrates, we allow it to be bought and sold at our peril." - James Gleick
>> Who is creating your reality?