SOME NEW RELEASES WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE
Books either anticipated or surprising - just out of the carton. Follow the links for more information, to purchase these books or to have them put aside for you.

A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume     $40
Undergoing a breakdown, an artist moves to her grandmother's cottage in rural Ireland, where she confronts her memories and nature's ineluctable cycles of life and death, pattern and disintegration. An excellent new novel from the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither. 
"Immensely sensitive, carefully calibrated, original and affecting." - Guardian
>> Hear Baume on A Line Made by Walking. 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman        $37
"I'm not Turkish, I don't have a Serbian best friend, I'm not in love with a Hungarian, I don't go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down." - Miranda July

Literature Class by Julio Cortázar       $44
Cortázar's novels and short stories ignited a whole generation of Latin American writers, and had an enthusiastic following through the Americas and Europe. In this series of masterclasses he discusses his approach to the problems and mechanisms of fiction writing: the short story form, fantasy and realism, musicality, the ludic, time and the problem of literary "fate". 
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed." —Pablo Neruda

Lifting by Damien Wilkins      $30

Wilkins' writing is both light and deft as he brings us inside the head and world of Amy, a store detective at Cutty's (for which read Kirkaldie and Stains) in the weeks leading up to the department store's closure. Why is Amy being interviewed by the police? What will change in her unremarkable life? 

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit      $38
In this book, Solnit continues the sharp important work she began in Men Explain Things to Me with this collection of commentary essays on feminism, misogyny, gendered binaries, masculine literary insecurity and related topics. 
"No writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance." - Maria Popova
>> Which other Solnit books have you read? 

Dear Ijeawele: Or, A feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie     $18
Adichie received a request from a childhood friend for advice on how to raise her baby girl as a feminist, and has responded with this considered approach to both the broad issues and the minutiae of raising a child free from sexist conditioning. Much of the advice is pertinent to adults as well, with warnings against Feminism Lite, the dangers of likeability and the conflation of appearances with morality. A follow-up to We Should All Be Feminists. 
>> Adichie discusses this book. 

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth       $37
Kingsnorth's novels have been intimately concerned with the relationship of a person, and of peoples, to the land. In this very individual book, the former green activist argues that the concept of 'sustainability' is a sop that enables humanity to continue living and consuming without guilt rather than decivilise themselves in a way that would make a difference for the planet. By turns provocative, frustrating, inspiring and visionary; always urgent. 
>> Read a sample.
>> The Four Degrees. 

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson       $23
An English governess in Moscow gets caught up in various ways in the Revolution of 1917 and the tangle of idealism and ideology that surrounds it. 

Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan        $32
A novel exploring the psychological and humanitarian crises that face the "guest workers" who enable Dubai to grow and function but who have no citizenship or welfare rights in the UAE. 

Down Below by Leonora Carrington        $30
Painter and author Leonora Carrington's fascinating account of being taken "over the border" into Spain, into insanity and being held in an abusive lunatic asylum in Spain after her partner Max Ernst was imprisoned by the Germans.

>> "The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope."

Little Nothing by Marisa Silver       $25
Drawing inspiration from fairy tales and folklore, Little Nothing is the story of a peasant couple who long for a child, who, when he comes, turns out to be no ordinary child.  
"Marisa Silver delivers a tale as mysterious as anything the Grimm Brothers might have collected. Little Nothing celebrates not only the unruly and lost parts of all our lives but also the possibility of their reordering and comprehension." - Los Angeles Times 
"'Little Nothing is the key to its own box, which opens and opens, transcending the limits of the very tale one thought one was reading. This book is a beautifully realised riddle." - Rachel Kushner

Ravilious & Co: The pattern of friendship by Andy Friend [sic]      $60
Eric Ravilious's wood engravings and watercolours captured the spirit of mid-century England. The group of artists that gathered about him formed an artistic node between their influences and those they inspired. Beautifully produced and profusely illustrated. 

South and West: From a notebook by Joan Didion         $23
Two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks, one tracing a 1970 road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; the other a contemplation of California following the 1976 Patty Hearst trial. 

Red Edits by Geoff Cochrane         $25
Poets disimprove with age and should die young./Should resemble shooting stars./Should trace short arcs of fizz and fire/and then disappear.

Works & Days by Bernadette Mayer       $28
"The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work." — John Ashbery
"The experience of reading Works and Days is exhilarating; it’s like encountering a new, never-before-seen contemporary artwork you know will stand the test of time. It reaches back to the beginning of art by way of its political economy of the everyday, its honest humor about the ridiculousness of the writer’s experience in 21st century life, its emphasis on solidarity with the exploited. There is no other book from this year I’d more like to read again." - Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire

The Truth About Language: What it is and where it came from by Michael Corballis       $40
Corballis argues with both God and Chomsky to persuade us that language is indeed the product of evolution and has its precursors throughout the animal kingdom. 

Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city by Matthew Desmond       $30
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects. Now it paperback. 
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." -  Owen Jones  

Are Numbers Real? The uncanny relationships between maths and the physical world by Brian Clegg       $40
The concept of number arose from our attempts to divide and grapple with the 'real' world, but numbers also exist in a world of their own, independent of the 'real' world. What are the relationships between the two?

The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall      $23
England is in a state of environmental and economic crisis. Under the repressive regime of The Authority, citizens have been herded into urban centres, and all women of child-bearing age fitted with contraceptive devices. A woman known as 'Sister' leaves her oppressive marriage to join an isolated group of women in a remote northern farm at Carhullan, where she intends to become a rebel fighter. But can she follow their notion of freedom and what it means to fight for it? Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. 

A Case in Any Case ('Detective Gordon' #3) by Ulf Nilsson and Gitte Spee      $20
Detective Gordon has retired, and Buffy is the sole detective at the small police station in the forest. It is not easy for a police officer to be alone. Especially when there are strange noises outside the station at night. Buffy decides to seek out Gordon to help solve the mystery. After all, two police think twice as well as one. Two police are twice as brave!
This enjoyable series began, logically, with The First Case, followed, complicatedly, by A Complicated Case. 

Bee Quest by Dave Goulson        $45
Whether he is tracking great yellow bumblebees in the Hebrides or orchid bees through the Ecuadorian jungle, Goulson's wit, humour and deep love of nature make him the ideal travelling companion.

The Ascent of Gravity: The quest to understand the force that explains everything by Marcus Chown        $38
We work against it every day but it holds our lives together. How on earth did we explain its effects before we had the theory?
"The finest cosmology writer of our day." - Matt Ridley
>> Newton's theory has a musical application. 

My Pictures After the Storm by Eric Veille       $23
Sometimes things happen (storms, babies, magic, hairdressers, practical jokes) and things just aren't the same afterwards, and sometimes these changes make us laugh. A very silly before-and-after book. 

What have we been reading this week?
What is the Ockhameter?
What is our next Book of the Week?
Find out by reading our newsletter.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #19 (15.4.17)

This week's Book of the Week is Bill Manhire's first poetry collection for seven years: Some Things to Place in a Coffin. 

>> Read Thomas's review. 

>> Manhire's reading life.

>> The title poem is Manhire's eulogy to his friend Ralph Hotere.

>> Also new from Manhire: Tell Me My Name, a book of poetic riddles (with a CD by Hannah Griffin and Norman Meehan, and photographs by Peter Peryer). 

>> Bill reads a poem. 

>> Manhire at the Curioseum. 

>> In the poetry archive. 

>> "I've eaten Kentucky Fried Chicken and quite liked it."

Some Things to Place in a Coffin by Bill Manhire    {Reviewed by THOMAS} The proximity of death can be noticed not so much in our thinking about death as in the effect it has on the qualities of our thinking about everything else. Why is it that some particulars, either small details of the present or instances from often far in the past, unexpectedly present themselves with a clarity and a grain that familiarity has robbed us of the capacity to see or has prevented us from noticing? Or is it that the intensity of this nothingness bends the light as it drags everything towards it, uprooting these particulars from their quotidian sockets and causing them to be seen with strange clarity as they are drawn towards a point of dissolution, whereas other particulars are shucked of urgency and released into a new inconsequence. In the face of that of which the mind cannot conceive the senses speak with urgency, we experience simultaneously a grasping and a relinquishment, a change in contrast and in texture, if we may call them that, a new sense of purpose indistinguishable from resignation. In this book, Bill Manhire’s first collection in seven years, language dances as death presses at it from behind, agency flees into objects, images draw themselves together on the brink of their own dissolution, small things become final containers for the large. Wearing his art so lightly as at times to resemble artlessness, Manhire tests the strengths of finer and finer threads to very subtle effect. The book is arranged in four sections: firstly a set of poems through the progression of which poetry itself is pared away and memories grasped with the effect of grasping at water, drawing us through a beauty indistinguishable from sadness, a thinness like the distinct threads of gauze that remain after the pile has been worn off fabric. Each line marks the move towards silence: There is a thin, high scraping./ Then no noise of any sort at all. The second section was commissioned to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme and is an achingly beautiful sequence about loss at simultaneously the most specific and most universal scales. The third section is more linguistically playful, sometimes almost desperately so, and includes some pieces with the texture of songs, textures in which chasms open up to underlying voids, and also the title poem, written as an elegy to Manhire’s friend Ralphe Hotere. In the fourth section, ‘Falseweed’, small particles of poetry, dissolved already into the medium which bears them towards silence, converge and recombine in unexpected ways, squeaking out most affectingly before being redissolved. The final poem ‘The Lake’ is a farewell to language and to poetry and to the resisting of the pull to dissolution: Rapture. Quiet canoe. / I am defeated, done with speaking.

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a debut novel from Patti Yumi Cottrell. Our unreliable narrator Helen Moran, ironically nick-named Sister Reliability, receives a call while waiting for her flatmate’s new Ikea sofa to be delivered to their tiny apartment. It’s her uncle telling her that her adoptive brother has died. Helen immediately decides to leave New York and head home to Milwaukee with the sole purpose of investigating his death. Estranged from her adoptive parents - she hasn’t seen them for 5 years - she arrives on their doorstep with inappropriate questions, criticisms and demands. This would all seem rather tiresome if it wasn’t for Cottrell’s ability to create a character like Helen Moran. Helen is 32, childless, lives in a tiny shared apartment, and is partially employed as a counsellor helping troubled youth. She, like her brother, who isn’t a blood relation, is Korean and her family members are always referred to as ‘adoptive’ - the adoptive parents, the adoptive brother etc. Helen Moran looks at the world through a lens that is peculiarly off-beat but also probing,  bringing truths that maybe should remain nameless to the surface. At times, being inside Helen’s head felt like a psychotic episode - the author intends you to feel uncomfortable. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a sharp look at what growing up Asian-American in suburbia looks like, how being an outsider - not having a sense of belonging - affects the ways in which you observe the world around, and why unhappiness leads to suicide for some and a determination to embrace life for others. While Helen is hardly likeable, her determination to make the most of what she has - while living in New York, she wrote an essay about how to survive on next to nothing in the city; she cares for troubled youth, breaking the rules of her workplace in an attempt to make meaningful connections - and her unwavering close observations of people to reveal what makes life tick are strangely admirable. When we hear Helen described as looking like a homeless person we are hardly surprised - by this stage we have been in the head of Moran for a while and watched her decide that her parents’ grief is a balding middle aged man who eats pizza; she has taken apart the bouquets of flowers and dumped them a bucket of bleach-saturated cleaning water to be helpful, she has eaten the whole special cake which is meant for mourners, she has rifled through her parents' home in her detective endeavours to make sense of her brother’s suicide. Mostly it’s her behaviour and thoughts that lead you to think she is mad. However, as you read on, the day of the funeral approaches and as relatives and friends arrive with their sentimental pat comments, you wonder who’s deranged? One of the best things about Cottrell’s writing is her ability to embed so much humour, alongside philosophical musings from our odd narrator, into a story about disorientation and dislocation. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is blackly funny and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Nell Zink. {Reviewed by STELLA}   >> Listen to Stella reviewing this book on RNZ National.

The collection of essays, Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole, ranges across literature, art and politics. As a writer, photographer and art historian, Cole ranges widely. The essays, first published in the New York Times Magazine, are 55 moments of lucid thought: some are personal responses to Cole’s travels, his interest in photography and his fascination with several authors, while others are pointed commentary and questions about politics and society and the ways in which artists and writers interpret or present a viewpoint. Teju Cole has his opinions and these are intelligent missives. The essays are arranged in three sections. ‘Reading Things’ includes an interesting interaction with V.S.Naipaul, and a search for W.G. Sebald’s grave which is charmingly reminiscent of Sebald’s own work. As Cole ventures out across Norfolk with Jason the taxi driver, he is simultaneously journeying with Sebald. ‘Seeing Things’ deals with visual observations, predominantly contemporary photography. Here Cole’s ability and knowledge as a photographer gives this section real depth, and his ability to appreciate as well as add critical interpretation of the photographer’s intention raises some thought-provoking questions about the role of visual observation, the ability of a photograph to capture a moment and the lies that images can be. Cole looks at photographers who exhibit in art galleries alongside those who use google and instagram as a platform to communicate their work. The third section ‘Being There’ is firmly rooted in place and travel. The essays are fine examples of ponderings on politics and society, and in many of them Cole ventures into the conversation around racial politics in Africa, America and Europe. His interests range widely in this section - there are essays about drone warfare, terrorism’s personal impact, home and belonging. The first essay in this section, ‘Far Away from Home’, is a gem - Cole is in Switzerland and is overcome with an unexpected fascination with the Alps and the idea of Fernweh (a German expression meaning ‘one simply wants to be far away’). Teju Cole’s essays are places where you can journey - he pulls his ideas together with references to writing, art and history, giving texture to the well-constructed sentences. They are provocative, stimulating and rewarding. Cole will be attending the Auckland Writer’s Festival in May - worth catching if you’re in Auckland.  {Reviewed by STELLA}

The Plains by Gerald Murnane       {Reviewed by THOMAS} Gerald Murnane writes some of the best sentences in English of any living writer, and his fiction is always pushing at the edges of our knowledge about what fiction is capable of, how fiction relates to actuality, and, in Murnane’s conceptual universe, how fiction relates to a reality which lies somewhere beyond the shared horizon upon which fiction may trace some shared features: “Everything in sight is a landmark of something beyond it.” This is the earliest of Murnane’s books that I have read (it was first published in 1982 and has now been reissued as a pleasing hardback), and it contains many of the themes developed in his later fiction (Inland, Barley Patch, A Million Windows, A History of Books (see my reviews for most of these)). The Plains concerns a filmmaker who arrives in the inland plains of western Victoria, a kind of ‘inner Australia’, contrasted in almost every way with the less authentic Outer Australia of those who live facing the coast. “Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances. My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.” In the first part, which is largely spent waiting for admission to an inner room in a hotel where the wealthy patrons of the plains hear petitioners and occasionally grant patronage to artists and the like, the narrator tells us of the various practices, customs, factions and histories of the plains-dwellers. Because the plains-dwellers are entirely inward-looking, there is no particular that unites them, other than their diametric opposition to the culture and practices of Outer Australia. Their chief characteristics are almost entirely intrinsic (for example, concerning religious sects on the plains: “Men who had watched the sectaries, and even spied on them in their most private moments, had seen nothing that any irreligious plainsman might not have done - and thought ordinary or even trivial.”), with little extrinsic manifestation aside from an obscure system of heraldry. Much of the social anthropology of the plains is ironic and often very funny, although, for Murnane, irony and epiphany are seldom clearly demarcated. Two main parties underlie much of the interactions of the plains-dwellers: the Horizonists, who look towards further plains lying beyond the horizon, and the Haresmen, for whom the world is more deeply revealed in the examination of a contained area of familiar land. This, and indeed pretty much all of the book, can be seen as a commentary of the possibilities and limitations and purposes of the writing of fiction. “Exploration is much more than naming or describing. An explorer’s task is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land. Whether or not he finds that land and brings back news of it is unimportant. He may choose to lose himself in it forever and add one more to the sum of unexplored lands.” The narrator eventually gains admission to the patrons, who have been drinking in the inner bar, and, following a wonderful set of discourse between the landowners, the filmmaker pitches his project. Most of the landowners immediately leave the room (it is clear that the proposed film is quite impossible) except for one, who immediately grants the filmmaker tenure for life (probably because of the impossibility of what he proposes to achieve). The second part takes place largely in the library of the great estate ten years later, and describes the practices of that estate and gives further insights into the culture of the plains (which can be seen as a gentle assault upon, or dissolution of, the mores of Outer Australia (those parts of the country that are inauthentic from being too close to other lands)). A lot of the humour (apart from several aphorisms seemingly ready to be displayed on calendars on the walls of the waiting rooms of dentists of the plains: “Our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.”), as well as many thought-provoking observations on the beliefs and practices of the plains-dwellers, arises from what may be termed Murnane’s philosophy of fiction: “They give all their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond the reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and which has been considered to represent the extinction of all possibility.” This sounds noble enough, but its immediate logical extension is somehow an assault on sanity as we ordinarily conceive of it: “The woman might have considered the chief advantage of so many years spent among unlooked-for plains, with a man who had still not explained himself, to be that it had once allowed her to postulate the existence of a woman whose future included even the unlikely prospect of half a lifetime spent among unlooked-for plains with a man who would never explain himself.” In the third part, ten years later again, the filmmaker, still researching, is further than ever from making his film, ever more isolated, even within the rooms and galleries of the great estate to which he is attached, posing with his film camera to his eye for a photograph which will provide 'evidence' for people of the future of what could hardly be further from the truth. Although he films nothing it is not incorrect to think of him as a filmmaker as it is specifically filmmaking that he is not doing as opposed to all the many other things he is also not doing.

Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox     {Reviewed by THOMAS} “What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like but how it was made.” - Harry G. Frankfurt. To be pretentious is to seek to be something other than what one is, which seems in some ways a core function (or a core risk) of any model of creativity. According to Fox, the pretentious is that which seeks to break free of suffocating mores in society and in the arts, and is quite correctly seen as an assault on the stability of those mores (which are patrolled by snobs (investors in the status quo)). To pretend is not only a rejection of the authentic but also the means of moving towards a new (or deeper) authenticity. This simultaneity of authenticity and inauthenticity provides for a fluidity of identity which is both the reward and the hazard of creative pursuits. I am not entirely confident that many examples of pretentiousness are in fact not nobly overthrowing the structures of the status quo but rather reinforcing those structures by fluidly attempting to belong in an inauthentic place within them. This book will provoke some good discussions.

Tell us what books you like and why. 

Contribute to MY VOLUME: the space for you to recommend and discuss the books you have enjoyed. 

THE OCKHAMETER
The winners of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize will be announced on May 16.

Vote for your favourites now on the VOLUME OCKHAMETER and go in the draw to win a copy of each of the winners.

Share the Ockhameter so your friends can enter too.

Easter hours: We will be open until 7:30 (as usual) on Thursday, closed on Friday 14th, open on Saturday from 8:30 until 3:00 (as usual), closed on Sunday (as usual), open on Monday 17th from 10:00 until 2:00 (you will need more reading material by then), and then back to usual hours from Tuesday.

Read our latest bulletin of news, reviews and new releases.

BOOKS @ VOLUME (#18) 8.4.17

This week's Book of the Week is Nicola Galloway's eagerly anticipated new cookbook HOMEGROWN KITCHEN, which is beautifully presented and full of accessible delicious recipes and the best advice for those who want to eat delicious, healthy, natural, nourishing food every day.


>> Read Stella's review. 


>> We will have signed copies available. 


>> The Homegrown Kitchen's on-line recipe journal. 


>> The joys of growing and making your own food from scratch. 


>> Yoghurt and Honey Panna Cotta with Roasted Strawberry. 


>> Nicola's lovely Instagram gallery. 

Two children's fantasy series reviewed by STELLA. This week at our children’s book group for 9-12-year-olds our topic was fantasy (anything magical: dragons, wizards, witches, ghosts). Why do we love imaginary worlds and what do they tell us about our own world? I chose two books with a similar theme - Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler. I read both of these some time ago, but they still stick with me. In both, the characters literally fall into books and into danger - wild rides where truth is uncovered and obstacles are overcome. Each have interesting girl protagonists, Meggie in the 'Inkheart' series and Alice in 'The Forbidden Library' series; both have a least one missing parent; both explore the need to trust, yet be wary of, strangers; and both have an incredible power - one that will help the characters overcome great obstacles to free the ones they love. Cornelia Funke’s series is a complex, multilayered tale of mythical and magical proportions. When a stranger knocks on Meggie’s door one night, her life is turned upside down. Dustfinger, a fire-eater and performer, has come to find Mortimer (Meggie’s father), a bookbinder with a strange power: he is a Silvertongue with the ability to talk characters out of books. But for every character that comes out, something must go in. Dustfinger comes with news of Meggie’s mother and dangerous times, and Mortimer is pulled back into a world which he has tried to keep hidden from Meggie, who soon learns she has some incredible powers herself. When you see a by-line that says "Books open new worlds. Especially for Alice", you can’t help but be tempted, and this was my introduction to The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler.  When Alice's father disappears, presumed drowned, Alice is sent away to live with the strange Mr. Geryon at his dark and unfriendly home, which includes a mysterious forbidden library. Banned from entering, of course Alice is curious, and so begins a tale of talking cats, books that you fall into, moving shelves, unusual and sometimes frightening creatures, foes and friends, and Alice's discovery of her quite remarkable talents. The Mad Apprentice is the second book in the series, where Alice meets other children like her and learns more about the sorcerers that they are apprenticed to, and the third book, just arrived at Volume, is The Palace of Glass.

Homegrown Kitchen by Nicola Galloway    {Reviewed by STELLA} Nicola Galloway’s much-awaited cookbook Homegrown Kitchen is definitely worth the wait. A gorgeously presented book, the cover is enticing with its simple elegance, the photography conveys a feeling of comfort and pleasure in food. Thoughtfully ordered, the book opens with an introduction to Galloway’s philosophy of food and cooking and some preliminary notes about the recipes and your pantry, including information about gluten-free ingredients, sugars and their alternatives, and alternatives to dairy (nuts, seeds, coconut) - approachable and sound nutritional advice that doesn’t get bogged down in particular diet fads. For those that like to have all the essentials at their fingertips, this is a wonderful cookbook - almost half the book is dedicated to processes and recipes that will fill your household with all the nutritional goodness you and your family will need for eating well. There is a weekly kitchen planner to keep everything on track with your making of yoghurts, broths and stocks, sour-doughs, preparations for grains, seed and nut milk, and on preserving and fermenting. The recipes for preserving fruit, making sauces and chutneys look particularly tempting at this time of year when you want to fill the cupboards with bottles of beautifully coloured fruits, giving warmth and nutrition in the coming cooler months. Galloway’s instructions for fermenting are straightforwardly reassuring, and recipes include sauerkraut, lacto-fermented beetroot pickle and  kombucha. And then the recipes, headed up under the categories of Morning, Day, Evening and Sweet, are predominately everyday, interlaced with treats for special occasions. From porridge to poached eggs with a lime hollandaise on a roastie hash, there’s a breakfast that will appeal, the dips all look delicious and there are quick and healthy snack and lunch choices, and the evening dinners are tasty treats made from seasonal ingredients and combining nutritional value alongside the pleasure of food. And Galloway’s book is a pleasure which reflects her interest in nutrition, wellness and the goodness of eating and enjoying food.

The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel   {Reviewed by THOMAS} This novel describes the childhood and adolescence of the author (evidently), who was born with a birthmark covering her right cornea into a Mexican family of uncompromising personalities. Evoked (remembered or ‘remembered’) with great precision, both boldly and delicately, this is an incisive portrait of a girl striving to feel at home in her own self, to overcome her feelings of being a social and familial misfit (she describes herself as a “cockroach” or a “trilobite”) without compromising her individuality. The device of having the story related to a psychiatrist (who makes no contribution (good practice for a psychiatrist)) introduces an interesting tension upon the narrative, a pressure retrospectively applied to childhood by later (here unrelated) experiences.

SOME NEW RELEASES
Books either anticipated or surprising - just out of the carton. Follow the links for more information, to purchase these books or to have them put aside for you.

Attrib. And other stories by Eley Williams       $32
Language and thought wrestle and play as characters try and fail or succeed or fail/succeed to communicate. 
"Fiddling with words, as if playing with them were all that mattered, her characters draw time to a standstill – then they stop, suddenly, blinking and thrilled. It’s beautiful, the way they get lost." - Guardian

Between Wolf and Dog by Sasha Sokolov       $42
Is this the Russian equivalent of Finnegans Wake? Language itself is the default protagonist in a novel in which plot, character, time and death all lack stability. The only thing that never changes is the frozen Russian landscape. 
>> "I thought it would never happen."

Homegrown Kitchen by Nicola Galloway      $50
Beautifully presented and full of accessible delicious recipes and the best advice for those who want to eat delicious, healthy, natural, nourishing food every day, this eagerly anticipated book starts with a section on kitchen essentials, sourdough, fermentation and preserving, the book, as the day, moves on through breakfast, lunch and dinner, and finishes off with an array of delectable sweet treats.  

Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life by Peter Godfrey-Smith       $30
The remarkable intelligence of the cephalopds evolved quite separately from that of homonids and cetaceans. What does this tell us about the nature and evolution of consciousness, and what would it be like to have the mind of an octopus? 
"Brilliant." - The Guardian

Breaking Ranks: Three interrupted lives by James McNeish       $35
Parallel biographies of three New Zealanders who stood up for what they believed in and paid the price: Dr John Saxby, Brigadier Reginald Miles and Judge Peter Mahon. McNeish's work highlights the difficulties of living with integrity against the grain of society. 

The Smile Stealers: The fine and foul art of dentistry by Richard Barnett       $50
A history of dental intervention as evidenced in objects and illustrations, from the Bronze Age to the present. Concurrently attractive and repellent and consistently fascinating.

Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 political poems edited by Philip Temple and Emma Neale      $35
A wide gathering of voices and concerns. Poetry arises from an urgent wrangling between freedom and constraint and between the personal and the societal. It is never far away from being political. 

The New Old House: Historic and modern architecture combined by Marc Kristal      $95
Excellent examples of bold yet sensitive hybridisings of existing structures with modern architecture. 

Town is by the Sea by Joanne Schwartz and Sydney Smith       $28
A young boy describes his life in a small seaside town, all the while remembering that as he is swimming or playing his father is at that moment in the dark under the sea digging for coal. 

Antibiotic Resistance: The end of modern medicine? by Souxsie Wiles      $15
In ten years time, will antibiotics still work? Have we let bacteria get the upper hand in the evolutionary arms race?

Speaking of Universities by Stefan Collini       $37
An impassioned and informed defence of tertiary education in the face of the business model that has been forced upon it, both in Britain and New Zealand, and a reassertion of the role of the university as a a public good, first and foremost. 

Buying Time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck       $28
Capitalism is by definition an unsustainable model, but, since the 1970s, governments have acted widely to defer the consequences of capitalism's inherent pressures. This has caused the pressures to build. How will they be released? Which will ultimately survive, capitalism or democracy?
"When political passion connects with critical exposition of the facts and incisive argument, Streeck's sweeping and empirically founded inquiry reminds one of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." - Jurgen Habermas

A Wary Embrace: What the Russia-China relationship means for the world by Bobo Lo        $13
Despite their new prominence in world affairs, Moscow and Beijing have shown no capacity to cooperate on grand strategy or establish new international norms. Theirs is a partnership of strategic convenience: pragmatic, calculating and limited.

 The Accusation: Forbidden stories smuggled from inside North Korea by Bandi      $33
What is life really like for ordinary and not-so-ordinary people in North Korea? These stories by the anonymous 'Solzhenitsyn of Pyongyang' depict a country operating over the edge from sanity and under the sway of a demagogue. 
"Very rare fiction to emerge from the secretive dictatorship. On its way to becoming a literary sensation." - Guardian

Gastrophysics: The new science of eating by Charles Spence      $38
Full of surprising information, Spence's book is an examination of the  multisensory experience of eating and the roles it plays in our multifaceted lives. 

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner     $24
The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. This essay is a challenge to current application-based funding models.

The Best of e-Tangata edited by Tapu Misa and Gary Wilson        $15
The e-Tangata website is a focus of discussion for Maori and Pasifika issues in New Zealand. This selection brings together sharp commentary on political and social issues, history and popular culture. 

Oreo by Fran Ross         $28
A playful, modernised parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery. First published in 1974. 
"A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious, Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout." —Kirkus

The Plains by Gerald Murnane        $32
A pleasing new hardback edition of Murnane's 1982 novel, exploring, with his signature perfect sentences and idiosyncratic genius, a sort of "inner Australia", a place under the surface of but also separate from the "outer Australia"; a dimension of existence that reveals its subtleties best against the emptiness of the inland plains. The narrator is an filmmaker attempting to film the plains in a way that will reconcile the opposing worldviews of two cliques of plainsmen who use their wealth to support an elaborate system of patronage whereby artists are employed to interpret or represent the meaning of their jealously guarded and endlessly elusive landscape.
>> Introduction by Ben Lerner. 
>> Meet Gerald Murnane. 
>> Thomas recommends books by Gerald Murnane. 

Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz       $24
A dialogue between history and science, re-evaluating the factors that have tipped the planet into a new geologic age, one in which human actions are the major determining factor for environmental conditions.

Trees by Lemniscates       $28
"Trees cannot change their place in the world so they are patient and learn to live where they are."

Exit West by Moshin Hamid          $37
What place is there for love in a world torn by crisis? From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 
"Exit West is a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality. It is animated by a constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future." - The Guardian

Things That Helped: Essays by Jessica Friedmann      $38
A multifaceted examination of post-partum depression, drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience. 

The New Zealand Project by Max Harris         $40

New Zealand faces some urgent issues: climate change, wealth inequality, political populism, the degradation of health and education, housing affordability, racial tension. How are we going to grapple with them when our media and political discussion is so frustratingly superficial? 

War: An enquiry by A.C. Grayling       $45
Are wars avoidable? Grayling examines, tests, and challenges the concept of war and proposes that a deeper, more accurate understanding of war may enable us to reduce its frequency, mitigate its horrors, and lessen the burden of its consequences. 

Elizabeth and Zenobia by Jessica Miller      $21

What happens when Elizabeth and her unusual friend Zenobia enter the forbidden wing of the great house and find a room in which the wallpaper seems to be alive and they find a strange book that contains a different story every night? 

Home-Made Europe: Contemporary folk artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov     $34
A fascinating collection of objects made because the maker lacked the correct tool, the relevant source, sufficient money, or the requisite common sense to solve their problem or fill their needs in any other way. Endlessly inventive, often hilarious or sad, always interesting, each object is accompanied by a photograph of its maker and a description of its necessity and making in their own words. 

Alvin Lustig Postcards        $30
50 stunning designs from books published by New Directions between 1941 and 1952. 
>> Excellent Alvin Lustig website. 

UNDERSTANDING AMERICA

If rationality is not to be the motor of politics (a disconcerting realisation for thinkers across the political spectrum), what forces drive change and whose end does that change serve? We have laid out a few books that might help us get our heads around the current plight of the United States of America.

Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and a culture in crisis by J.D. Vance      $35
Vance's account of growing up in a Rust Belt town reveals the slow -and then fast- growth of disaffection in the poor white communities which formed the core Trump's support.
"You will not read a more important book about America this year." - Economist

Things That Can and Cannot Be Said by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy     $16
Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.

Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city Matthew Desmond     $30
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." -  Owen Jones 

Pussy: A novel by Howard Jacobson       $32
Written in a "fury of disbelief", Jacobson's cathartic satire is the tale of the unlikely Prince Fracassus. Idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic, he has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?
>> "The consolation of savage satire". 

The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston       $35
The culmination of nearly 30 years of reporting on Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston takes a revealingly close look at the mogul's rise to power and prominence. Covering the long arc of Trump's career, Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, NY would become an entirely new, and complex, kind of public figure.

Direct Action: protest and the reinvention of American radicalism by L.A. Kauffman       $22
A wide survey of disruptive protest in the US in the last forty years, drawing parallels between the efforts of environmentalists, black and indigenous activist, feminists and radical queers. What effect has protest had on shaping society, and what are the potentials for protest now?

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis          $28
A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, 'Professional Common Man', who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path.

"They Can't Kill Us All": The story of Black Lives Matter by Wesley Lowery     $28
"A devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter. Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America. Essential reading." - Junot Diaz, The New York Times

Age of Anger: A history of the present by Pankaj Mishra       $40
How can we explain, let alone remedy, the wave of paranoia, racism, nationalism and misogyny 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

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell       $21
Doublethink: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Ranciere        $25
As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracy - government by all - is held in profound contempt by the new ruling class.
"In our time of the disorientation of the left, Ranciere's writings offer one the few consistent conceptualizations of how are to continue to resist." - Slavoj Zizek

Citizen: An American lyric by Claudia Rankine       $28
This set of furiously affecting prose poems exposes racial prejudice and violence in various situations and contexts, from the everyday to the critical.
"Wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic, in her layering of incident, Rankine finds a new way of writing about race in America." - Nick Laird, New York Review of Books

Our Revolution: A future to believe in by Bernie Sanders         $33
Other paths could have been taken. 

On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century by Timothy Snyder       $24
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and established rule by an elite with a monopoly on truth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Only a thorough knowledge of their failings can protect us from repeating them.

Hope in the Dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities by Rebecca Solnit        $25
A paean to optimism in the face of an increasingly desperate world. Change is made by the hopeful.

Just Mercy: A story of justice and redemption by Bryan Stevenson     $40
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 in the early 1970s to more than two million now. One in every 15 people is expected to go to prison. For black men, the most incarcerated group in America, this figure rises to one out of every three. Bryan Stevenson grew up a member of a poor black community in the racially segregated South. He was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of the US's criminal justice system. 

The Trump Survival Guide: Everything you need to know about living through what you hoped would never happen by Gene Stone     $18
As it says.

Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi       $40
"The thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks, we'll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end." Incisive articles, many of which first appeared in Rolling Stone. 
"Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power." - Bernie Sanders

Another Day in the Death of America: 24 hours, 8 states, 10 young lives lost to gun violence by Gary Younge      $33
On Saturday 23 November 2013 ten children were shot dead. The youngest was nine; the oldest was nineteen. They fell in suburbs, hamlets and ghettos. None made the national news. It was just another day in the death of America, where on average seven children and teens are killed by guns daily.

Why I March: Images from the Women's March around the world      $28
On January 21st, 2017, five million people in 82 countries and on all seven continents stood up with one voice. The Women's March began with one cause, women's rights, but quickly became a movement around the many issues that were hotly debated during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign: immigration, health care, environmental protections, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, freedom of religion, and workers rights, among others.
>> Hope.

Read our latest bulletin of reviews, news and new releases.

BOOKS @ VOLUME (#17) - 1.4.17

This week's Book of the Week is Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton, a novel based on the completely extraordinary life of 17th century aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

>> Read Stella's review. 

>> "A small miracle of imaginative sympathy."

>> "Prickly, shy, arrogant, imaginative, contradictory, curious, confused, melancholic, ambitious, restless."

>> A Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (which inspired The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt).

>> The philosophy of Margaret Cavendish.

>> And now in PowerPoint.

>> A sampler of Margaret Cavendish's works. 

>> Danielle Dutton: "One of the most original and wonderfully weird prose stylists of our time".

>> Dutton is also a publisher at the very excellent The Dorothy Project.