 | How Should a Person Be? A novel from life by Sheila Heti {Reviewed by THOMAS} What is the relation between the real-life Sheila and the Sheila of this book, her real-life friend Margaux and the Margaux of this book, between Heti's other real-life friends and acquaintances and their counterparts in this book? These are not interesting questions (unless you happen to be Sheila’s demon-lover Israel (in which case, serve you right)). This book is at once an excoriating self-examination, a pitiless self-satire (although it may in fact not be as satirical as it seems to be) and an unforgivably self-indulgent exercise in self-exposure (and is these things all at once and not by turns). You will be irritated by Sheila, but she is irritating in pretty much the same way that you are irritating to yourself, and you will grow tired of Sheila, but in the same way that you grow tired of yourself. You will put the book aside, but, without really knowing why, you will keep coming back to it in pretty much the same way you keep coming back to vaguely important but imprecise and somewhat irritating aspects of your own life. Sheila nobly asks herself “How should a person be?”, and gets the same unsatisfactory, earnest and ridiculous answers as you would get if you asked yourself the same impossible question. The book contains passages of painful honesty and of vapid bullshit (both at the same time, mostly), and beautiful, sad and hilarious passages, too (again, beautiful, sad and hilarious all at once and not by turns). By asking big questions in a life that contains only small answers, Sheila holds herself up to show us that we don’t know how to be, or how to make our lives the way we want them, or even to know what we want with any sureness or consistency: “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.” |
>> "Young, gifted and political."
>> On Universal Basic Income.
>> Rethinking prison.
>> "A visionary worth following."
>> With Kathryn Ryan on Radio NZ National.
>> Bringing values back to politics.
>> Would civics education result in better political participation from the young?
>> On the politics of love.
>> He blogged.
A SELECTION OF NEW RELEASES
Books either anticipated or surprising - just out of the carton.
Humans are the upright beasts in these stories, doing battle with our darker, weirder impulses as the world collapses around us.
"Lincoln Michel is one of contemporary literary culture's greatest natural resources." - Vice
"Mighty surrealist wonders, mordantly funny and fiercely intelligent." - Lauren van den Berg
"I began the day.." begins each of these short, beautifully textured linked essays exploring Gladman's obsession with conceptual borderlines and the crossing of these. Using exquisite sentences, Gladman takes the most quotidian of tasks or events and uses them as stepping stools to get her head above the clouds.
I am looking forward to reading this. -Thomas.
>> A sample.
>> Gladman reads something aloud.
A woman travels through an unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, a sister mourns her invisible brother, snakes inveigle themselves into people's personal lives. Three haunting, lyrical stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Gift Shop.
A literary mixtape of different styles and effects, Audin's novel focuses on the relationship of two mathematicians through two world wars. The constraints she applies to her text help us to think deeply about the nature of literature and the nature of war. Audin is a French mathematician and a member of OULIPO.
"Polymorphous and fluid, the book considers how our lives find their shape, and which details are amenable to history's telling." - Scott Esposito, Times Literary Supplement
"This is an unconventional novel that has many layers and makes you think about love, history, war, racism, rebellion, caring, and many other things but most of all about telling a story. Highly recommended." - European Mathematical Society
A reimagining of the Ancient Greek Oedipus and Antigone stories, told from the viewpoints of female characters usually overlooked in other tellings. The book also entails a rethinking of mythic and psychoanalytic tropes. Haynes combines her depth of knowledge as a classicist with her timing as a stand-up comic to good effect in this novel.
"It's hard to believe that a year after the astonishing My Name Is Lucy Barton Elizabeth Strout could bring us another book that is by every measure its equal, but what Strout proves to us again and again is that where she's concerned, anything is possible. This book, this writer, are magnificent." - Ann Patchett
"The epic scope within seemingly modest confines recalls Strout's Pulitzer Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge, and her ability to discern vulnerabilities buried beneath bad behavior is as acute as ever. Another powerful examination of painfully human ambiguities and ambivalences-this gifted writer just keeps getting better." - Kirkus
"With its extended figures, its theme-and-variations structures, its spirals and twists away from (and sometimes back toward) ordinary speech, Lockwood's new book rewards rereading. She has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get, a book easy to recommend for people who do read new poetry often - as well as for almost all the people who do." - Stephen Burt, New York Times
Lockhart examines all fifteen species of birds of prey who breed in Britain - each in a different location.
"Lockhart's prose is so intimate, urgent, and visceral as to make his darkly resonant ruminations almost unfailingly gripping." - Independent
>> The author reads am extract, a little nervously.
"A new generation of public feminists, including Beth Ditto, Lena Dunham and Tavi Gevinson, cite her as an inspiration, finding in her writing a ribald and ponderous succession to the New York School." - New York Times
"She and her work are unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable. She is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way." - Ben Lerner
"One of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find." -New York Review of Books
>> She reads.
"Passionately fierce but also wonderfully tender." - Andrew Motion
"An inspiring example to future writers, and a gift to lovers of nature." - The Times Literary Supplement
"A literary masterpiece, one of the 20th century's outstanding examples of nature writing." - Independent
Three brilliant misfits, thrown together by chance and a will to self-destruction, travel together to Bavaria, where, in an experimental institution, their relationships and their fragile selves come under increased pressure. Another intense examination of humanity by the New Zealand author of The Conductor.
Fact and fiction, observation and representation start to blur when a young woman moves from England to New York and becomes fixated on a Japanese writer whose life has strange parallels to her own.
"The best fictional account I have read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives." - Observer
"A mind-bending novel that skilfully depicts the bizarre interplay of technology and intimacy with a story that is compassionate, funny, and incredibly alarming." - Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
Dessaix is always lively and charming, so we might actually find his advice amenable as we try to relax and get on with the things we like to do.
A successful writer befriends a woman who, little by little, begins to assume her appearance, identity and function. Insidious.
"If Simone de Beauvoir had written Single White Female with nods to Marguerite Duras, the result might be something like this latest Gallic grip-lit sensation." - Guardian
"All writing is constructed on shifting sands, but I’ve never read a book that makes the complex relationship between reality and fiction both as visible, and at the same time so opaque, as here. I was captivated. Combining the allure of Gone Girl with the sophistication of literary fiction, Based on a True Story is a creepy but unapologetically clever psychological thriller that also aces the Bechdel test (at least two women in a work of fiction, talking to each other about something other than a man)." - Independent
Following the Baileys Prize-winning The Glorious Heresies, McInerey traces her young protagonist's entry into the criminal underworld of Cork City, in 'the arse-end of Ireland'.
"This is as much a love letter to a cruel but curiously buzzing place as a lament. The great strength of this book is its amorality. If you can survive in this world, and learn to live without always watching over your shoulder for danger, it’s not a bad place to be." - Guardian
From haute cuisine to greasy spoons - what makes the London food scene so vibrant? This book is an eatery crawl, with signature recipes.
Kellen is moments away from facing his first mage's duel and the start of four trials that will make him a spellcaster. There's just one problem: his magic is gone. As his sixteenth birthday approaches, Kellen falls back on his cunning in a bid to avoid total disgrace. But when a daring stranger arrives in town, she challenges Kellen to take a different path.
The structure and meaning of work is changing rapidly, not only through the pressures of automation and dwindling resources, but for reasons that make modern political, practical and ethical contradictions difficult to resolve. Avent offers us an analysis and some idea of a path.
"Ryan Avent is a superb writer. Highly readable and lively." - Thomas Piketty
"Writing meant the possibility of embarking towards an elusive goal and fusing the outside world and that subterranean one that inhabits us." A multigenre literary memoir combining fiction and memory to profound effect. The first work by this Mexican luminary to be translated into English.
"Reading him, one has the impression of being before the greatest Spanish-language writer of our time." - Enrique Vila-Matas
Why does a person to spend a lifetime handling other people's brains? No other part of the body is more integral to what makes us human and what makes life worthwhile. A thoughtful memoir from the author of Do No Harm.
>> "Agonisingly human."
When humans started living together in settled groups, they started living on top of where humans had lived before, on top of their figurative ad literal dead. How has this impacted upon our culture and our health? The author, a forensic archaeologist, is perfectly placed to guide us through the less pleasant consequences of urban living.
At 7 years old Min Kym was a prodigy, the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At 11 she won her first international prize. She worked with many violins, waiting for the day she would play 'the one'. At 21 she found it: a rare 1696 Stradivarius, perfectly suited to her build and temperament. Her career soared. She recorded the Brahms concerto and a world tour was planned. Then, in a train station cafe, her violin was stolen at a train station. In an instant her world collapsed.
>> They play.
>> What happened when the violin was recovered?
How can the world provide acceptable solutions to the greatest refugee crisis since World War II.
"Betts and Collier offer innovative insights into how to more effectively meet this challenge, with an important new focus on international solidarity and refugee empowerment." - Kofi Annan
Argues that Machiavelli was not so Machiavellian after all.
Approachable yet inspiring, and full of excellent food.
>> Summer Salad could be made in an Indian summer.
How was the mechanism of modern society built, why and for whose benefit?
If not used for shipping they are anything but boring. Pallets are a universal symbol of the globalized world. The properties of this transport platform - standardization, stability, simplicity and internationality - are carried over into the work of architects and designers who use pallets as the material for their own creations.
>> Fast work.
SCHOOL HOLIDAY WOLVES
Usually the wolves turn up in the second week of the school holidays. Here are a few books to help you cope.
When Vanessa's sister Virginia is feeling wolfish and frightens the visitors, Vanessa sets out to calm her. Will Vanessa's drawing skills and imagination do the trick?
A remarkably beautiful book, short-listed for the 2017 Kate Greenaway Medal.
>> Just look at this!
(In case you were wondering, South will be available in June.)
This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a wolf, Old Lobo, the wolf that no one could capture. 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 led 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 wild places and the animals that belong in them.
The wolf is getting dressed. What's he going to do when he is ready? (Clue: he is very hungry). An enjoyable board book to share (clue: it closes with a snap like a wolf's jaws).
It’s Germany, 1956, and Hitler has won the war. Yael, an eighteen-year-old woman, is part of the Resistance and she has a mission – a dangerous one – she is charged with assassinating Hitler. As a child, Yael was in a camp and experimented on – the experiment, which was successful, has given her a gift that can be used against her enemies. In 1956 a famous motorcycle race, for the creme de la creme of youths, crosses Hitler’s Europe. After years of training, Yael is ready to join this often-dangerous race, where allegiances are necessary to survive and to win is difficult. But win Yael must so she can get to the Victors’ Ball. This novel draws you in slowly and then grips you with its teeth and doesn’t let up until the end. Followed by Blood for Blood.
Beautifully written, exciting and unusual. Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods of Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder, and Feo is a wolf wilder in training. A wolf wilder is the opposite of an animal tamer: it is a person who teaches tamed animals to fend for themselves, and to fight and to run, and to be wary of humans. When the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run.
The wolf is coming and (predictably) he wants to eat us. Perhaps if we tilted the book, he might have a hard job of catching us. With a bit of imagination there are quite a few ways we might make things hard for this wolf.
Annabelle has lived in Wolf Hollow all her life: a quiet place, still scarred by two world wars. But when cruel, manipulative Betty arrives in town, Annabelle's calm world is shattered, along with everything she's ever known about right and wrong. When Betty accuses gentle loner Toby - a traumatised ex-soldier - of a terrible act, Annabelle knows he's innocent. Then Betty disappears...Now Annabelle must protect Toby from the spiralling accusations and hysteria, until she can prove to Wolf Hollow what really happened to Betty. There are no wolves in this book.
Wolf and Dog are cousins. In some ways they are similar; in some ways very different. When Wolf finds a book of facts in the library, he thinks he can outsmart Dog. But can he?
What have we been reading?
What will you read next?
BOOKS @ VOLUME #20 (22.4.17)
Our latest bulletin of news, reviews and new releases.
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A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes {Reviewed by STELLA}
A History of New Zealand Women is a major narrative history. Professor Barbara Brookes' achievement is phenomenal, spanning two centuries from 1814-2015. Looking at our society through the stories of women, the book tells the political and social history of New Zealand from a female perspective. In the early chapters Brookes covers Maori women’s place within Maoridom and early Paheka contact, early settler roles as missionary wives and traders, the colonial era where roles for both Maori and Pakeha women were altered by the circumstances of a new country, the tensions that arose and the changes to female roles either by design or necessity. The tone is perfectly set - readable, interesting history with enough analytical depth and a wealth of knowledge that places this work among our best histories. The overarching themes are dotted with specific examples of women and their lives in early New Zealand, giving both a depth of analysis and fascinating insights on a personal level, bringing history alive. These vivid accounts are well-illustrated with photographs, sketches, paintings, and maps on most pages. The book is laid out chronologically and moves through periods in a rational progression from colonial settlement to new government to the turn of the century, the world wars and the times between, the moral liberations of the 1960s and 70s and into the more contemporary histories from the 1980s onwards. Brookes explores a multitude of themes, focusing on the ever-changing roles and expectations of the female population, including the impact of the land wars, the challenges and opportunities for migrant women, the political role of women, the changing nature of the family and the place of women in the workforce. There will be women you know of in this book; you will be introduced to many more who have made a contribution to our history, whether this is at an international level or on the ground, fighting for equality or as successful cultural contributors or as stalwarts of fair and frank discussion or as representatives of the everyday. A History of New Zealand Women is an important and fascinating account of the lives of women and a valuable to contribution to herstory.
Finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. |
 | Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Fear (as opposed to anxiety, terror, horror, angst and its other cousins) clarifies perception and heightens the significance of details, much as does good writing, building an electrostatic charge which almost craves, yet ultimately resists, the release offered by the revelation of the feared. Schweblin’s short novel is like a Van de Graaff generator, building a textual charge that can be felt up the spine long after the book is finished. The book sustains three narrative levels most of the way through: Amanda, a woman apparently on her deathbed in a clinic, is urged with increasing intensity by David, someone ostensibly a child, to narrate a seemingly recent series of events when Amanda, who was on holiday with her young daughter Nina in the environs of a small Argentinian town, spent some time with Clara, the mother of her interrogator. The third narrative level is provided by Amanda reporting the stories told to her by Clara, largely concerning David’s contact with the environmental poison that contaminates the whole novel and is the cause of the deaths of animals and humans in the area and the cause of deformities, illnesses and eldritch personalities among the children who survive. A fourth narrative layer is occasionally provided by Amanda reporting Clara’s reports of things told to her by her husband. In the surface layer, David’s demeanor, demands and speech are very unchildlike, bringing into question his status as a child, and also the length of time since the events narrated by Amanda occurred. He seems very like the part of an author that drives the narrating part to narrate and we cannot be sure how much of the story has a ‘factual’ basis. In addition, the narrator is apparently suffering a high fever, and the heightened but narrowed perceptions destabilised by hallucination, or by the uncertainty about whether what is perceived is a hallucination or not (which is the most frightening thing about hallucinations), combined with the compelling fear is both typical of fever and a further destabilisation of the narrative. Towards the end of the book, the David character ceases to question Amanda, and Amanda goes on, unguided, to narrate her husband’s visit to Clara’s husband some time after, presumably, both Amanda’s and Clara’s deaths, a visit that she cannot know about, further undermining the veracity of the narrative and deepening doubts about Amanda’s relationship to it. Amanda’s story demonstrates that being within ‘rescue distance’ is not enough to save those we love when the world is saturated in literal and metaphorical poisons, and we lose those we love by letting them slip from their places in our narratives and losing the specificity of their identities.
Fever Dream has just been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize.
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 | Home-Made Europe: Contemporary folk artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov {Reviewed by STELLA} If you like poking around at auctions or in second-hand shops and at the recycling centre at the dump (lovingly referred to as 'Mitre 11' by some) for odd contraptions, or if you are even a maker of DIY solutions, you will enjoy Home-Made Europe. In this illustrated book, the author Vladimir Arkhipov from Ryazan has travelled across Europe seeking examples of idiosyncratic objects. On each page of this book, an object is presented with an accompanying photograph of the maker and text explaining the purpose of the object. The objects themselves as a photo essay are compelling, but it is in the text that the passion for making, for creating from scratch or for cannibalising other objects, and the pleasure and pride in creating a successful and useful object is revealed. Some things will be familiar - examples of Go-Karts made from old prams, bits of wood and odds and ends - others will be bizarrely ingenious. A fire-fuelled heater made from old pipes and an engine from an old wall-mounted air-conditioning unit that looks like something you might find in a scrap pile but can, in fact, heat water. A Ski-Bob made from a bicycle frame, some chunks of wood and parts of a ski. An oddly leaning ladder of welded together pieces of scrap metal initially for cutting back vines - the ladder looks as though it would hardly stand let alone take a person’s weight. A grill made from a cluster of tea candles huddled beneath a tangle of wire which is a work in progress for cooking a corn cob (adjustments are required): “ It doesn’t taste so good, it tastes like it’s not completely cooked.” Delightfully made, the aesthetic of these objects is clumsy, quirky and oddly appealing, reminding us that there is a place for the home-made, for folk art in a time of slick, mass production. |
 | Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Cleanly written and quickly read, this novella conjures a series of presumably autobiographical vignettes from Wiola’s childhood in a village in rural southern Poland in the 1980s, when tradition, superstition, Catholicism, poverty and Communism had roughly equal pulls upon village life. To say the book is without residue is not to say it is not memorable; the moments caught in Greg’s deceptively simple prismatic prose are clear and vivid and the development of her individual character from childhood into adolescence against the adult world and its limitations is subtly and convincingly portrayed.
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 | 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” states Manguso in one of the 300 aphorisms and ‘arguments’ (as in ‘the argument of the story’ rather than a disputation) that comprise this enjoyable little book. Indeed the whole does feel as if it bears some relation to another considerably longer but nonexistent text, either as a reader’s quotings or marginalia, or as a writer’s folder of sentences-to-use-sometime or jottings towards a novel she has not yet written (“To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say that it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer”). Many of the aphorisms are pithy and self-contained, often dealing with awkwardness and degrees of experiential dysphoria (so to call it), and other passages, none of which are more than a few sentences long, are distillates or subsubsections of stories that are not further recorded but which can be felt to pivot on these few sentences. Some of the ‘arguments’ reveal unexpected aspects of universal experiences (“When the worst comes to pass, the first feeling is relief” or “Hating is an act of respect” or “Vocation and ambition are different but ambition doesn’t know the difference”) and others are lighter, more particular (and, I'm afraid, a few do belong on calendars on the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms). Some of the arguments are just singular observations: “The boy realises that if he can feed a toy dog a cracker, he can just as easily feed a toy train a cracker” or “Many bird names are onomatopoeic - they name themselves. Fish, on the other hand, have to float there and take what they get.” To read the whole book is to feel the spaces and stories that form the invisible backdrop for these scattered points of light, and the reader is left with a residue similar to that with which you are left having read a whole novel.
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Tickets are selling fast for the 2017 Nelson F
ringe Festival (29 April - 7 May). We have 'adopted' Mr Beckenbauer's Unfortunate Encounter with Enlightenment by local youth theatre company Ironic Theatre of the Absurd, but there are lots of other excellent shows and workshops, too. We are also supporting the Nelson Fringe Visual Arts Project. 
>> A quick survey of our shelves revealed them to be loaded with books that have feisty, adventurous girl protagonists who take their destinies into their own hands. Here's a small selection - recommended reading for children and young adults of all genders.
>> We found to our delight that the gender-bias assessment undertaken in this video did not apply to the books on our shelves (if anything, the reverse!). We would also contend that it is not only girls who need books with girl protagonists - boys can enjoy them too.
Our featured Rebel Girls this week:
Monday: Policarpa Salavarrieta
Tuesday: Wang Zhenyi
Wednesday: Grace O'Malley
Thursday: Zaha Hadid
Friday: Lakshmi Bai
Our featured Rebel Girls this week:
Monday: Policarpa Salavarrieta
Tuesday: Wang Zhenyi
Wednesday: Grace O'Malley
Thursday: Zaha Hadid
Friday: Lakshmi Bai
PROGRESS REPORT ON THE VOLUME OCKHAMETER
We are asking everyone to have their say on which books should win at the Ockham New Zealand Books Awards on May 16.
Click here to see which horses are currently in the lead.
Click here to back your favourite and have a chance at winning the sweepstakes.
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.
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.
"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
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
Poets disimprove with age and should die young./Should resemble shooting stars./Should trace short arcs of fizz and fire/and then disappear.
"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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
>> 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. |
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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}
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