WINTER @ VOLUME. We are delighted to announce a series of mind-warming book-related events and workshops at VOLUME (the place where books and people meet).
Wednesday 31 May, 6 PM: Alan Carter Marlborough Man Book Launch (see here). All welcome.
Thursdays 8 June - 6 July, 9-11:30 AM (5 sessions): The Writer's Toolkit, a workshop led by Michelanne Forster. This course looks closely at the key craft skills writers use, unpacking complex ideas in a creative and practical way. Booking essential, and places limited. $250.  >> Find out more about the course and Michelanne here.
Saturday 17 June, 2-3 PM: Talking About Books with book binder Rosie-Anne Pinney of Cambria Craft Bindery. Come along for a informal chat about rare, old and special books. Bring along a book that is special to you to share and your questions about care and restoration of books. This is a free event but places are limited so booking is essential. >> Find out a little more here.

Wednesday 21 June, 5-6 PM: Poetry Reading. Poetry students from the NMIT writing course led by Cliff Fell will mark the longest night of the year by reading new and original works. All welcome.

Thursday 22 June, 5-6 PM: MY VOLUME Book group (for adults) in the shop. Come along to discuss Haruki Murakami’s latest book, Men Without Women. Register when you buy the book. 
Thursday 29 June, 5-6 PM: Object Lessons : What do objects mean to us? VOLUME will introduce Bloomsbury's excellent 'Object Lessons' essay series. Jeweller Katie Pascoe will talk about her Possession exchange project. Bring along an object to add to a discussion about objects, their meaning and our relationships with them. All welcome.

This week's Book of the Week is Catherine Chidgey's exquisitely written novel The Wish Child, which has just won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

>> Read Stella's review. 

>> Read an excerpt. 

>> Wrestling with her inner critic. 

>> Two births in one year. 

>> A night at the Ockhams in a not-very-good seat. 

Tuesday 23 May is Book Night! The challenge is to spend an extra 15 minutes reading (easier than spending an extra 15 minutes not reading). >> You can register yourself and go in the draw for some appropriate prizes. >> Indulge in some communal silent reading at the Elma Turner Library from 6 PM. Come and read in the shop any time on Tuesday!

 {Review by STELLA}

Mariana Enriquez’s short story collection Things we Lost in the Fire is as beguiling as it is haunting. Described as ‘Argentine Gothic’, the macabre tales encircle the supernatural, with depictions of demons and ghosts, but it is far from a traditional horror scenario. Enriquez’s characters are fascinating, sometimes eccentric, and you walk alongside them as their curiousity is piqued by the unusual, as they try to make sense of eerie happenings or become disengaged with reality in a bid to push danger away from themselves. In many of the stories the protagonists are young or searching for meaning, trying to grasp what underpins their existence. A woman goes back to live in the now run-down suburb of her childhood and has a fraught interaction with the ‘dirty kid’ who lives on the street with his junkie mother. In another story three young women live a hedonistic lifestyle, vowing allegiance to each other - blood sisters - only to increasingly see that their options in life are limited. They become obsessed with the fable of a ghost girl, a girl who walked off the bus and into the woods. They long to escape. A man, who works on a tourist bus and tells the stories of famous and nasty crimes, starts to see the ghost of a murderer - who then joins in on the antics of the retellings. But only he can see the murderer - the tourists are oblivious. Three children become fascinated with a bricked up house. One of them - the girl with one arm - is absorbed by the house, never to reappear. In all the stories there is a sense of threat and strangeness. Revenge, love, betrayal play their roles, along with superstition and jealousy, but this collection is also about poverty, corruption, political disappearances, and the violent history of Argentina. In a city seething with life, there is an undercurrent that unsettles people living on the edge of the unknown.

There’s nothing better to make a murder mystery extra-chilling than to set it in an idyllic location. Marlborough Man, Alan Carter’s fourth novel, is set in Marlborough, centred on the sleepy village of Havelock. Under all that idyll, crime lurks, along with decades-long grudges. Traffic infringements, firearms misdemeanours, drunken arguments and shoplifting are the usual fare for Havelock’s Sergeant Nick Chester, and life has been reassuring uneventful. Just the way Chester wants it (even if he is a bit bored), hiding out in New Zealand far from his past life in the criminal underbelly of Sunderland. Yet Nick Chester is watching his back, knowing that he is being hunted. Alan Carter and Nick Chester have some things in common: they are both from Sunderland and have been living in the Wakamarina Valley for a few years. While Carter’s not in a witness protection programme and no one is hunting him, he does draw on his experiences of living in a small community, of being an outsider and of observing our society with a candidness which is refreshing, giving Chester a realistic and sharp perspective. Marlborough Man is a murder mystery, yet, as with Carter’s other crime novels (the 'Cato 'series, which is set in Perth), there is commentary about social and political circumstances that gives depth to the plot, and the criminals are psychologically complex, the crimes disturbing. When a young boy’s body turns up beside the ‘shoe fence’, life becomes complicated and past grievances rise to the surface. A murder of a local boy five years earlier gets Chester digging, even though the Wellington detectives are handling the case. As another child disappears the clock keeps ticking. Mix this with the prospect of thugs coming to find him, trying to keep his marriage on an even keel and the ins and outs of the local community, and you have the recipe for a layered and compelling tale complete with an array of intriguing ‘locals’, the tensions between competing and opposing lifestyles, and some wry humour which balances the novel’s darker moments. {Reviewed by STELLA}

An Overcoat: Scenes from the afterlife of H.B. by Jack Robinson  {Reviewed by THOMAS} In 1819 Henry Beyle, better known by his pen-name Stendhal, is rejected yet again by Mathilde, Countess Dembowska, the woman he loves. He vows never to give up and consequently lives on past his death in 1842 and into contemporary times (that is to say, contemporary with the readers and author of this wonderful little book), an untarnished vector of romantic longing and novelistic acuity. In this subtle and playful text, which exemplifies the virtue of lightness championed by Italo Calvino, Charles Boyle (Boyle/Beyle), writing under his pen-name Jack Robinson, dissolves the distinction between historical fact and creative freedom, allowing each to infect or lubricate the other. Composed mostly of footnotes (and of footnotes to the footnotes), the brief impressionistic sections display and connect a wide experience of reading, thinking, feeling and writing, Boyle and Beyle twitching either end of a web of literary circuitry. Identities are interchangeable, pen-names, however ridiculous, take on personalities of their own that interface with their creators as equals, or replace them, the most quotidian of details are turned over to reveal the unrequited longing that lies beneath, multilayered games are played with the expectations of readers (and the expectations of writers, too). It is appropriate that one of the pioneers of fiction’s capacities to explore the psychological subtleties of fictitious characters should be the putative subject of a book that is really a fictional essay on fiction’s capacities to explore the psychological subtleties of characters both fictitious and ‘real’.

The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet  {Reviewed by THOMAS} Popular culture rightly feels threatened by structuralist criticism, but it has only its own existing weapons (and not the weapon of theory) with which to respond and its understanding of the threat posed upon it is necessarily vague. When Roland Barthes was killed by a laundry van when crossing the road in 1980, his afterlife was up for grabs.* Could this incident be an opportunity to strike back at semiotics through its most vulnerable aspect, the semioticians? What if these philosophers were made to behave in a book, now that they no longer exist in the world, as cartoon caricatures of philosophers? How about introducing a detective, an ordinary fictional detective, resembling or not resembling, who knows, a real detective, who begins to discover that Barthes was killed as part of a high-level international intrigue for the sake of some papers he had written on the seventh function of language, its capacity, when correctly loaded, to irresistibly persuade whoever it is pointed at (useful, at a popular-cultural level). Of course, a detective, like a semiotician, is on a trail of clues and signs, the difference being that a detective believes that behind the signs lies a single story whereas the semiotician knows that interpretation will never exhaust the sign. Which approach is more useful? Which is more true? The more this popular-cultural detective corrals within the limits of his investigations the philosophers who are for him the stand-ins for their philosophy, the more he lays himself open to interpretation from beyond those limits. The satiriser becomes the satirical representation of a satiriser, perhaps for the very objects of his satire. Theory thus ducks the long arm of the law, but this too comes at a cost, the loosening of the bond between the signifier and the signified. Ouch. Structuralist criticism rightly feels threatened by post-structuralist criticism, but it has only its own existing weapons with which to respond and its understanding of the threat posed upon it is necessarily vague. * Barthes was implicated in the death of the author in 1967 but was released without charge as the body was never found. Although this was a cold case by 1980, the possibility of his death being a revenge killing warrants further examination.

BOOKS ON THE BRAIN
A few books from our shelves about the brain, its vagaries and potentials. 

The Brain: The story of you by David Eagleman        $25
The latest discoveries enable neurology to enter the preserves of psychology and philosophy. Eagleman’s descriptions of the behaviour of neurons tell us much about how we generate our idea of reality, our feelings and thoughts, our ideas about ourselves and our capacities. What makes humans so interesting neurologically is that we are born ‘soft-wired’, which means that the function of our brain is formed and reformed by experience. Of the many fascinating things that have been revealed by recent neurology is the fact that we do not attempt to make an idea of the world around us from sensual stimulation but rather that we form an idea of the world around us and only then test it against stimulation, showing our idea of the world to be primarily a creative act, the work of an author (which just happens to be subsequently fact-checked) rather than a piece of reportage. Discoveries like these have profound implications.

A Day in the Life of the Brain: The neuroscience of consciousness, from dawn to dusk by Susan Greenfield          $38
How do our daily activities translate into the pattern of firing neurons and chemical microchanges that we consider somehow analogous to consciousness? Greenfield presents the perfect blend of expertise and compelling writing. 

Patient H.M.: A story of memory, madness and family secrets by Luke Dittrich        $55
In 1953 a neurosurgeon failed to eliminate the seizures that beset Henry Molaison, but the operation did leave Molaison incapable of forming durable memories. Molaison became a celebrated case in the study of neurology, and his profound amnesia gave much to our understanding of memory. Beneath all this neuroscience lies also a tragic human story. 

Do No Harm: Stories of life, death and brain surgery by Henry Marsh       $28
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut through the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong?

Admissions: A life in brain surgery by Henry Marsh       $38
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. 

How Emotions are Made: The secret life of the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett         $38
What correspondence is there between our experiences and our brain chemistry and neural activities. 

The Case of the Missing Body by Jenny Powell       $30

The story of a young New Zealand woman who has no sense of her body. Working with a physiotherapist, this begins to change. 

The Man Who Wasn't There: Tales from the edge of the self by Anil Ananthaswamy        $32
Recent neurological investigation of conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's, ecstatic epilepsy and Cotard's syndrome, as well as out of body experiences and Asperger's, is helping us to think anew about the Self at a level of detail that Descartes ("I think therefore I am") could never have imagined. 

Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder by Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore        $37
Lithium: the penicillin of mental health, the first effective psychiatric medication, flattening out the lives of bipolar sufferers since 1948. 

The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, And other inspiring stories of pioneering brain transformation by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young          $27
As a child, Arrowsmith-Young read and wrote everything backward, struggled to process concepts in language, continually got lost, and was physically uncoordinated. With iron determination she set about changing her brain function through cognitive exercises she devised herself. Although neuroplasticity is now accepted by the medical mainstream, this has only happened very recently, and Arrowsmith-Young and the other pioneers she treats in this book were operating very much in isolation and against medical resistance. 

The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science by Norman Doidge       $36
A woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole; a woman labelled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises; blind people who learn to see; learning disorders cured; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; lifelong character traits changed: Doidge presents evidence of neuroplasticity that until recently would be labelled as science fiction.  

Override: My quest to go beyond brain training and take control of my mind by Caroline Williams        $38
Williams visits the experts and tries out the latest exercises in plain plasticity, but can she really make a difference to her brain's function? What possibilities and what limitations are there in this area of neuroscience? 

In a Different Key: The story of autism by John Donvan and Carin Zucker      $38
From the first diagnosis 75 years ago to the latest scientific discoveries and difference activism, the history of autism is inseparable from the history of the non-autistic. This book does much to include the experiences of the autistic, parents and doctors, and will help towards a new understanding and acceptance. 

Odd Girl Out: An autistic woman in a neurotypical world by Laura James         $30 
Explores how and why female autism is so under-diagnosed and very different from that seen in men and boys and explores difficulties and benefits neurodiversity can bring.

The Reason I Jump: One boy's voice from the silence of autism by Naoki Higashida         $23
"When we look at nature we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world." This is a very interesting book, written by a 13-year-old autistic boy using a cardboard ‘keyboard’. In response to a series of questions, he gives insights into the usually unreachable world of someone whose mind is so acutely wired that he is overwhelmed by every impulse and whose body is the locus of a frustrating interface with the world. This book not only intimates the life of an autistic mind, but will enlarge your understanding of what it is to exist and be human. "People with autism have no freedom. The reason is that we are a different kind of human, born with primeval senses. We are outside the normal flow of time, we can't express ourselves and our bodies are hurtling us through life. We want to go back. To the distant, distant past. To a primeval era, in fact, before human beings even existed."  

Delusions of Gender: The real science behind sex differences by Cordelia Fine         $29

Splendidly debunks the myth that there is a biological difference between the male and female brain and shows how gendered thinking is solely the result of social conditioning. 

Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds by Cordelia Fine         $33
Brings together evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience and social history to move beyond old 'nature versus nurture' debates, and to explain why it's time to unmake the myth of the 'male' or 'female' brain. 

Pieces of Mind: 21 short walks around the human brain by Michael Corballis        $30
A very personable guide to the facts and myths of the human brain, with explanations of humans' behavioural quirks. 

The Wandering Mind: What your brain does when you're not looking by Michael Corballis          $35
Science has shown that the brain is never idle. When not being goaded towards a particular goal, a lot of interesting things are going on inside our heads. These neural wanderings are important for our personality, creativity and mental health. 

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. How has this development paralleled the evolution of the human brain?

Stammered Songbook: A mother's book of hours by Erwin Mortier       $25
When Erwin Mortier’s mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 65, her loss of memory was also a profound loss of personality and Mortier began to find it difficult to associate the memories he had of his once-vivacious mother with the person whose rapid mental and physical diminishment made her more of a lingering absence than a presence. Mortier’s book is beautifully written, intensely sad, unsentimental, unflinching and tender. His ability to use a tiny detail or turn of phrase to evoke a memory of his mother or his childhood or a step in his mother’s loss of memory and language and personality is remarkable. Written while his mother is still alive in an attempt to fix his memories of her lest they get sucked away in the slipstream of her departure, the book expresses the hope that, following her death, these memories will be freed from the mental decline which currently overwhelms them and that, through words, they may come together again to form an idea of the particular person his mother was. 

When We Are No More: How digital memory is shaping our future by Abby Smith Runsey         $37
The human capacity for memory has given the species an evolutionary advantage and the ability to project forward on the basis of those memories. How are these capacities, and the brain that enables them, being affected by the outsourcing of memory to electronic devices? 

The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr       $34
Does Google make us stupid? How is the use of technology to do things formerly done by our brains affecting and reshaping those brains? Carr compares the focus and concentration enabled by a technology such as the printed book with the rapid multi-focused information assault provided by digital media and speculates a far-reaching change in human nature. Is this book the Silent Spring  for our brains?

Deep Thinking: The human future of artificial intelligence by Garry Kasparov       $38
In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten at chess by a supercomputer named Deep Blue. This experience led him to consider the vast scope and uses of artificial intelligence and also the human capacities (including the capacity for useful error) beyond the reach of machines. Is AI a threat or an opportunity for the human brain?

To Be a Machine: Adventures among cyborgs, Utopians, hackers and the futurists solving the modest problem of death by Mack O'Connell       $33
Technological transhumanism is causing us to rethink what it means to be human and is enabling us to rethink old problems in new ways. 
"A beautifully written powerhouse of a novel that defies all expectations." - Independent 

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? 

 

 

The winners in the OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS have just been announced.

The Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize: The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey




Royal Society Te Aparangi Award for General Non-Fiction: Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young






Illustrated Non-Fiction: A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes






Poetry: Fits & Starts by Andrew Johnston






Best First Book Awards:
Illustrated Non-Fiction: A Whakapapa of Tradition: 100 Years of Ngati Porou Carving, 1830-1930 by Ngarino Ellis
Poetry: Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird
General Non-Fiction: My Father's Island by Adam Dudding
Fiction: Black Ice Matter by Gina Cole

The winners in the Ockham New Zealnd Book Awards and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize will be announced on Tuesday. As the excitement mounts, we are delighted to announce the results of our OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer) survey to find the most popular finalists. >> Click for the results.
Poetry: Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press)
Fiction: The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press)
General Non-Fiction: Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young (Victoria University Press)
Illustrated: A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brooks (Bridget Williams Books)
The winner of a copy of each of the winning books courtesy of the publishers (wait for Tuesday to find out which) is Hugh Rennie. Congratulations, and thanks to all participants!

What have we been reading in the lead-up to the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards?
What will you be reading after you have finished reading what you are reading now?

Read our latest bulletin of news, reviews and new releases: 
BOOKS @ VOLUME #23 (13.5.17)

Scroll through a selection of the interesting
NEW RELEASES that have arrived at VOLUME this week, or drop into the shop and pick up a copy in printed form. Books can be purchased from our website or from our shelves, and sent anywhere. 

This week's Book of the Week is My Father's Island by Adam Dudding (published by Victoria University Press).
Adam Dudding's book is a memoir of his father, Robin Dudding, a foremost literary editor of his time, catalyst to a generation of New Zealand writers, resolute bohemian, devoted but flawed father and husband.

>> Read Stella's review.

>> The book has been short-listed for the General Non-Fiction section of the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

>> An extract from the book.

>> An interview with Adam.

>> Adam Dudding chats with Kim Hill.

>> An obituary for Robin Dudding, groomed by Charles Brasch as editor of Landfall and founder of the literary journal Islands.

With the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards announcement just around the corner, and with our melee just behind us, at VOLUME we have been keeping up with the finalists. Added to STELLA's reading of the Acorn Fiction Prize - three of the four sorted - this week is Emma Neale’s Billy Bird. Emma Neale’s latest novel looks at trauma and its effect on a family. At the heart of this family is Billy, a thoughtful and intelligent young boy who desires to be a bird, as if becoming a bird will right all the wrongs that surround Jase. When Billy is two his cousin becomes part of the small nuclear family, after Jase’s parents die. For Billy and his parents, Liam and Iris, this begins a period of readjustment, acceptance and coping. For Billy, he has an almost-brother, one who becomes increasingly important to him. Fire ahead six years to a day of showing off and a terrible accident and all is thrown into chaos. Will Liam and Iris be able to save their marriage and stop their destructive patterns heightened by grief and loss?  Will Billy find a way to cope with his parents’ despair as well as his own feelings of guilt and sadness? Neale has created characters that will resonate with many. Liam is trying hard to make the most of things by battling through and attempting to look to the future, but keeping his grief under control leads to frustration and a realisation that there are some things you can’t keep running from. Iris, always wanting to be the perfect parent, rides herself hard, to the point of being unable to struggle through the day without feeling emotionally and physically drained. When Billy’s bird-like antics threaten his safety, Iris and Liam have to face each other and the grief that has been tightly controlled. Neale weaves humour, understanding and sentiment into this tale about family and loss, but at times, although thoughtful, it feels a little contrived. Another fiction contender dealing with the human condition is Owen Marshall’s Love as a Stranger. The premise is good. Sarah, in Auckland with her ill husband, meets Hartley on one of her many walks. Understandably, a friendship begins and then blooms into a love affair.  Sarah’s husband is preoccupied with treatment, hospital and assessing his life, sorting the archives and photographs, leaving Sarah lonely and vulnerable. Hartley, who is slowly revealed to us, is a broken man and his new-found friendship becomes increasingly important to him. As the pressure increases, Sarah finds herself torn between her loyalty and love for her husband and her fascination with the possibility of life with Hartley. However, note the 'stranger' element in the title. All is not as expected. While the ideas are good here, Marshall’s short stories far outshine this novel. Catherine Chidgey’s The Wish Child remains the front-runner for me. Still to read: C.K. Stead's The Name on the Door is Not Mine.

In the non-fiction section, there are some strong contenders. We’ve reviewed Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? and Anthony Byrt’s This Model World. I’ve had Adam Dudding’s My Father’s Island in my sights for a while and I’m pleased it moved up the reading pile this week. This is very, very good: a fascinating insight into the highly regarded literary editor Robin Dudding from the perspective of his son Adam. Editor, journalist, founder of the important and respected literary magazine Islands (1972-1988), editor of Landfall (1966-1972) and Mate (1957-1966), Robin Dudding played a pivotal role in the development of New Zealand writing and the publishing landscape, giving many of our well-known authors exposure, opportunities and feedback. This is a memoir: personal, telling and searching, critical yet affectionate, candid and laced with wit, sadness, anger and admiration. It is a story of a brilliant mind and an important influence in New Zealand’s writing culture throughout the 60s & 70s and reveals Robin Dudding’s struggles both literally, the family lived in abject poverty throughout much of the 1970s, and psychologically, reflecting Dudding’s dilemmas and frustrations with the literary establishment and his obsession with his calling, often to the detriment of his family and marriage. And it is more than this, it is an insight into being a child in this bohemian family of six children (Adam is the youngest) through the 1970s and 80s, of living in run-down houses and makeshift fixes, of not having quite the right shoes, yet being at the elbow of his father, guided in the language of the editor, being immersed in a world of erudite ideas and fascinating people. Adam Dudding doesn’t romanticise anything in his account: it is brutally honest and he doesn’t shy away from telling it as it was. His father’s anger and self-destructive behaviours, especially throughout the 80s when a teenage Adam witnessed Robin’s callous behaviour toward Lois, his wife, and his general disappointment with life, had a profoundly negative effect on the family and on Robin's relationships with those closest to him. Adam Dudding has interviewed family, colleagues and writers, pulling together loose threads, interesting anecdotes and remarkable insights, mostly getting to the nub of matters but the 'truth' doesn't always out. As Dudding himself points out memory isn't always reliable (Adam recalling a childhood memory, realizes, while editing his book, that it's not quite as he remembered) and sometimes there is a tendency to be elusive, willfully forgetting, raising more questions than answers. The delights in this memoir come from its very personal nature, its clarity of thought, honesty in the headlights of the unpleasant, and Adam Dudding’s ability to write a gripping, fascinating tale about his father. {Reviewed by STELLA}

A cursory survey by THOMAS of the poetry section finalists in the Ockham New Zealand Books Awards: Fits & Starts by Andrew Johnston Johnston’s poems seek to capture something of the crystalline qualities of haiku, the difference being that haiku know when to stop. These poems sometimes seem overly reliant on their poemishness, and I did feel, reading this collection, that the racking of poems by titling them as a) books of the Old Testament and b) the radio alphabet did not help to make the poems feel necessary. I must admit that, unlike Johnston (and indeed many poets, I suppose), I do not attach much semantic significance to either rhyme or pun. A nicely presented collection, though. Fale Aitu by Tusiata Avia What Avia’s poems sometimes lack in subtlety they certainly make up for in vigour. Muscular, energetic, angry, mocking, sometimes bitter but shot through with sudden humour, the poems confront social, sexual, racial and political injustice, rape, trauma and the insecurity of feeling home to be a place of threat. Clearly written for performance, Avia draws on Samoan tradition for the incantatory form of many of these poems. Sometimes the form outweighs or overly dictates the content, flattening the effect, and sometimes it is the effect. This Paper Boat by Gregory Kan “I didn’t know anything about / the past except / for what the past has left me.” The strongest poems in this collection are the series which imagine the experiences of the poet’s parents in Singapore, China and New Zealand. The strong emotion that Kan unearths avoids the sentimentality usual in such enterprises by tending to slip into ethnographic or historical or scientific matter-of-factness at just the right moments (some of these pieces are written, appropriately, in paragraph form), and the splicing of the experiences and words of Iris Wilkinson/Robin Hyde with threads personal to Kan’s family adds an extra suppleness to these poems. Occasionally Kan walks an uneasy line between too light a touch and too heavy, and I wonder about the inclusion of an italicised sequence in the latter half of the book, but generally Kan is revealed as an subtly gifted and serious poet. Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird Before this book was published I was asked to interview Hera at last year’s Nelson Readers and Writers Festival. She had already achieved an enviable notoriety through the publication of some of her poems on-line, but by the time of the festival she had burst fully and extravagantly upon the world, with The Guardian and iD according her the responsibility of resuscitating poetry for a new generation. The ambiguity of being a phenomenon at risk of being overshadowed by an epiphenomenon is entirely appropriate to Bird’s poetry: just as the book takes the name of the poet and thus becomes a replacement for the poet, throughout the book persona replaces identity, poetry replaces experience (“Writing poetry about fucking / When you could be fucking / Is the last refuge of the stupid.”), and the authentic and the ironic are revealed to be reflexive halves of an unstable whole. Often painfully funny, the poems leap across and back over existential vacuums (so to call them), revealing and reconcealing to great effect the kinds of experiences seldom thought of as literary and lampooning those that are. The book’s cover is perfect: the poet on a parched lawn dressed for rain. Bird throughout demonstrates the virtues of being inappropriately prepared: “I wrote this book, and it is sentimental / Because I don’t have a right-sized reaction to the world. / To write a book is not a right-sized reaction.” My pick to win the poetry prize at the Ockhams.

The Assistant by Robert Walser  {Reviewed by THOMAS} “What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits?” When Joseph is hired as a clerical assistant by Tobler, inventor of the ‘Advertising Clock’ and the ‘Marksman’s Vending Machine’, he moves into Tobler’s hilltop villa, where he enjoys the meals, the views and the presence of Tobler’s wife, who is suffering from an illness of the neck. As Tobler’s enterprise slides towards bankruptcy, Joseph dedicates himself to the role of serving his employer, a role which he assumes inconsistently but with such text-book self-abnegation that he effectively absents himself from the relationship and is unable to contribute in any meaningful or consequential way. He expresses, rightly, doubts about his worth as an employee, but his introspection is limited by his inability to generalise, which keeps him from despair but also precludes effective action and constructive change. Tobler’s own inadequacies as a businessman, and the banal eccentricities of his inventions, mean that Joseph is playing to a void, neither giving nor receiving in any sense beyond the immediate. Both Tobler and Joseph are fantasists: their roles take no shape from them and their characters are necessarily inauthentic. Walser has a knack of emptying bourgeois values of meaning by playing them out with deadpan enthusiasm. Joseph’s (and Walser’s) over-enthusiastic celebration of the small and the particular and frighteningly declutched avoidance of the large and general give the novel a fragile immediacy: each enthusiasm or assertion merely underscores its own transience. The programmatic naivety and over-asserted cliché present as irony: each enthusiasm seems awkward and off-key; every assertion, by being made, invalidates and mocks the impulse for making it. As the Toblers near their nadir, Joseph leaves, fed but unpaid, neither harmed nor improved by his presence in a decline that he neither exacerbated nor assuaged.

NEW RELEASES
A few books just out of the carton that we think you'll like.
Click through to find out more, and to reserve or purchase copies from our website, 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami          $45
"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden." 
Seven stories of men choosing loneliness as a way of avoiding pain, even if it brings them close to self-erasure. Contains all your favourite Murakami signatures (cats, pasta, baseball, music, mysterious women). 
>> The playlist for this book. 

The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet         $35
Another remarkable novel from the author of HHhH. What if the death of Roland Barthes in 1980 was not an accident but an assassination? What if the cultural theorist's death of the was part of an international intrigue, involving the use of language as an irresistible convincer (its ultimate 'seventh function'). Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a global chase that takes them from the corridors of power and academia to seedy back streets. Both brainy and fun.
"This is a novel that establishes Laurent Binet as the clear heir to the late Umberto Eco, writing novels that are both brilliant and playful, dense with ideas while never losing sight of their need to entertain. The 7th Function of Language is one of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you’ll read this year." - Guardian

The Teeth of the Comb, And other stories by Osama Alomar      $30
The short fable-like tales from this Syrian writer often have sly morals or sharp comments about politics or society. Personified objects find they have a lot to tell us. 
"Elegant masterpieces of compression, fables worth of Kafka: swamps and streams, lightning and dogs all play a part in these beguiling, suggestive fables. These stories are of perfect length, but one wishes the book went on for much longer." - Kirkus

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills        $33
Two enthusiasts form a society for the minute appreciation of recorded music. The society becomes unexpectedly popular, and a schism develops in the ranks. "A spectacularly disingenuous exploration of power, fanaticism and really, really good records." An Animal Farm with turntables, perhaps. 

Headspace: The psychology of city living by Paul Keedwell     $37
Our built environments are expressions of the way we think, and, in turn, they shape the way we think. This interesting book help us to consider the psychological effects of city living, and the forces at play in our constructed habitats. 

An Overcoat: Scenes from the afterlife of H.B. by Jack Robinson         $33
In June 1819 Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal) is rejected by the woman he loves. Beyle finds himself stranded in an afterlife populated by tourists, shoplifters and characters in novels he hasn't yet written. Footnoting a host of other writers, An Overcoat is an obsessional play upon the life and work of one of the founders of the modern novel.
"An Overcoat takes intellection as seriously as, say, being able to make a three-point turn in traffic; perhaps less so. This is the book’s charm, and possibly its point. It’s a mind at play, and Boyle’s silly pseudonym is a deliberate act of self-sabotage – as well as a nod to Stendhal’s fondness for different identities. I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now." - Nicholas Lezard , Guardian

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy        $37
The author of Remainder and the Booker-shortlisted Satin Island presents a selection of his essays, many of which appeared in The Believer, London Review of Books  and elsewhere, on, among other things, Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kathy Acker, London weather, Gerhard Richter, David Lynch, and Sonic Youth.

"Reading Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish is like receiving a map of all the space that art, literature and culture have carved out for each other. This is the kind of book that deepens your appreciation of the subjects you've previously encountered, and send you to seek out the ones you haven't." - Publishers Weekly

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez        $33
Short stories from the world of Argentine Gothic: sharp-toothed children; women racked by desire; demons lurking beneath the river; stolen skulls and secrets half-buried under Argentina's terrible dictatorship.
"Hits with the force of a freight train." - Dave Eggers

Hostage by Guy Delisle         $48
As astounding graphic novel recounting the fate of Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe Andre, who was kidnapped by armed men in Chechnya and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus in 1997.  
"Another reason why Delisle must be counted as one of the greatest cartoonists of our age." - Guardian

The One Cent Magenta: Inside the quest to own the world's most valuable stamp by James Barron        $29
When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. In 2014, this tiny square of faded red paper known as the one-cent magenta sold at Sotheby’s for nearly $US9.5 million, the highest amount ever paid for a postage stamp at auction. One-cent magentas were provisional stamps, printed in British Guiana when a shipment of official stamps from London failed to arrive. They were intended for periodicals, and most were thrown out. But one stamp survived. It has had only nine owners since a 12-year-old Scottish boy discovered it in 1873 (and sold it for what would be $17 today). 

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher       $23
Some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. Includes consideration of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner, Margaret Atwood, Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

Beyond Infinity: An expedition to the outer limits of the mathematical universe by Eugenia Cheng       $37
Numbers are infinitely extensive but also infinitely divisible. Can one sort of infinity be said to be larger than another? 

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malek       $40
When Rene Hargreaves is billeted to Starlight Farm as a Land Girl, far from the city where she grew up, she finds farmer Elsie Boston and her country ways strange at first. Yet over the months Rene and Elsie come to understand and depend on each other and soon can no longer imagine a life apart. But a visitor from Rene's past threatens the life they have built together, a life that has always kept others at a careful distance.

Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones       $25
Hold, a Welsh fisherman, Grzegorz, a Polish migrant worker, and Stringer, an Irish gangster, all want the chance to make their lives better. One kilo of cocaine and the sea tie them together in a fatal series of decisions and reactions.

War Primer by Bertolt Brecht          $28
During World War 2, Brecht took photographs from newspapers and magazines and captioned them with an epigraph in verse in a singular attempt to deconstruct propaganda and show the miseries of war for the ordinary person. 
>> Mother Courage. 

My European Family: The first 54,000 years by Karin Bojs          $30

The story of Europe and its people through its genetic legacy, from the first wave of immigration to the present day, weaving in the latest archaeological findings, genetic sequencing and new evidence of prehistoric migrations. 

Redemption and Utopia: Jewish libertarian thought in Central Europe by Michael Lowy        $22
Examines the confluence of religious and secular antiauthoritarian thought that did much to set the groundwork such remarkable twentieth century thinkers as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs.

Freeman's, The best new writing: Home edited by John Freeman      $38
Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a haunting piece of fiction about those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine leaves his mother's Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are rebuilding a semblance of normalcy, even beauty. Nir Baram takes us on a journey to the West Bank. Gerald Murnane celebrates winning a literary prize named after his home town. Danez Smith explores everyday alienation in a poem about an encounter at a bus stop. Kerri Arsenault returns to the ailing mill town where she grew up. Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village.

The Non-Jewish Jew, And other essays by Isaac Deutscher         $22
Essays on Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Chagall, and on the Jews under Stalin and of the 'remnants of a race' after Hitler, as well as on the causes and results of Zionism.
"Exceedingly vivid." - TLS

Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt          $21
12-year-old Jack's family is caring for off-the-rails 14-year-old Joseph. The two boys set off in the middle winter to find the baby Joseph has fathered. 
"Beautiful, tragic and heartbreaking." - Guardian, 'The Best New Children's Books'
"Schmidt uses beautifully sparse language to tell a big story. This is a punchy and emotional book which will draw you in then spit you out crying at the end." - Scotsman

In a Different Key: The story of autism by John Donvan and Carin Zucker      $38
From the first diagnosis 75 years ago to the latest scientific discoveries and difference activism, the history of autism is inseparable from the history of the non-autistic. This book does much to include the experiences of the autistic, parents and doctors, and will help towards a new understanding and acceptance. 

Between Them: Remembering my parents by Richard Ford       $23
Very Fordian in its perceptions and texture, Ford's memoir of his parents, whose lives were considerably altered by his arrival, is a considered portrait of mid-twentieth century American life. 
"Ford is possessed of a writer's greatest gifts: pure vocal grace, quiet humour, precise and calm observation. Ford's language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within." - Lorrie Moore
>> A good memory is not always a good thing. 

Mulgan by Noel Shepherd      $25
A novel exploring the last months of Mulgan's life, leading up to his suicide in Cairo in 1945. Although Man Alone had been published in 1939, almost the entire print run was destroyed in the London blitz and Mulgan never knew the place the book would hold in the New Zealand literary landscape.

Zeustian Logic by Sabrina Malcolm       $25
A mountain-climbing accident, a petrol-head neighbour, a troubled little brother - what boy wouldn't prefer the company of Greek gods, astronomers and his best friend, Attila the Pun? 

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier         $37
The latest in the excellent Hogarth Shakespeare series, rejigging the plays into modern-day novels.
"Chevalier's modern interpretation of Othello deftly explores race relations in the schoolyard in 1970s suburban Washington, and captures how it feels to be an outsider." - Anita Sethi, '2017 Books of the Year'

The Sky Over Lima by Juan Gomez Barcena       $20
A novel on an actual literary hoax concocted in 1904: a romantic correspondence between rising young Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiménez (eventual recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize) and two Peruvian men pretending to be a young female fan.
"Here's a tale with the subtlest of stings in it, dark wit and telescopic perspective aplenty. And then there's the intoxicating folly of the games that the protagonists play with fantasy and fact, malice, tenderness, ambition, envy and other forces that strike at our most vulnerable selves. I'll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time." - Helen Oyeyemi

Fractured Lands: How the Arab world came apart by Scott Anderson       $25
How has the Middle East been transformed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
>> Sampler. 

Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan       $23
At the start of the twentieth century, a young girl and her family emigrate from Lithuania in search of a better life in America, only to end up in Ireland by mistake. In 1958, a mute boy locked away in a mental institution outside of Dublin forms an unlikely friendship with a man consumed by the story of the love he lost nearly two decades earlier. And in present-day London, an Irish journalist is forced to confront her conflicting notions of identity and family when her Jewish boyfriend asks her to make a true leap of faith. Three strands weave diverse stories of Jewish immigration to (and from) Ireland.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura          $33
A woman searching for her estranged husband in a Greek fishing village is revealed to be the ultimate unreliable narrator - how much of what she tells us is true? 
>> Writing ugly. 

To Be a Machine: Adventures among cyborgs, Utopians, hackers and the futurists solving the modest problem of death by Mack O'Connell       $33
Technological transhumanism is causing us to rethink what it means to be human and is enabling us to rethink old problems in new ways. 
"A beautifully written powerhouse of a novel that defies all expectations." - Independent 

Hubert by Ben Gijsemans           $55
A gentle graphic novel about a lonely man whose life revolves around visiting art galleries, painting copies of artworks in his room and thinking about the woman in the apartment blcok opposite, but who can make no real contact with others. 
"This beautiful, moving book isn't only about what it is like to be too much alone; to turn its almost wordless pages is briefly to replicate the experience. The deafening silence of its frames are at moments as crushing as lead. This book's emotional and visual economy is extraordinary, Gijsemans showing such (precocious) daring when he devotes six, nine, even 12 frames to the smallest ceremonies. His drawings, washed out but somehow lush, too, are so tender and telling." - Rachel Cooke, Guardian 

Heloise by Mandy Hager         $38
One of history's most tragic and inspiring love stories, that of the academically brilliant Heloise and her equally brilliant and unconventional tutor Peter Abelard, is treated from Heloise's perspective in this novel for adults by this New Zealand author.

Hypatia: Mathematician, philosopher, myth by Charlotte Booth        $50
Starting with contemporary sources, the legends surrounding this remarkable woman, who flourished at the turn of the fifth century in Alexandria, have threatened to obscure the facts. Booth compares the stories with the evidence. 
>> Hypatia's death (2009).

Familiar Things by Hwang Sok-yong       $35


On the outskirts of South Korea's glittering metropolis is a place few people know about, a vast landfill site called Flower Island. Populated by those driven from the city by poverty, is it here that 14-year-old Bugeye and his mother arrive, following his father's internment in a 're-education camp'. 

Granta 139: The Best of Young American Novelists        $28
The third decade issue of Granta's selection of the most exciting younger voices in American fiction. 
>> Who is on the list?

The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road by Steve Braunias        $25
Steve Braunias entered Auckland's Lincoln Road a moderately healthy middle-aged man, and emerged from the other end infused with sugar and saturated in fat, having eaten at every food joint along the strip. Never shying from a public service, what can we learn from the rigours of his experience? A journey through the belly of New Zealand culture. 
>> The difficult birth of the man who ate Lincoln Road. 

What have we been reading? What will you read next?

BOOKS @ VOLUME   #22 (6.5.17)

Our latest bulletin of reviews, news and new releases. 

This week's Book of the Week is Colm Tóibín's House of Names. In retelling the legendary clusters surrounding Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra and Iphigenia, Tóibín re-evaluates received notions, reassesses characters and motivations, and gives these ancient Greeks and their stories a vitality and urgency that speak directly to the modern reader.

>> Read Stella's review. 

>> Toibin "endows Clytemnestra with a hybrid voice that sounds both strangely modern and ancient."

>> "He loves long nights, sing-songs and money but is deadly serious about his writing."

>> Toibin and cat. 

>> The Oresteia. 

>> Some other recent novels reclaiming viewpoints of suppressed or vilified female characters. 
- Bright Black Air by David Vann (Medea, Jason) 
- The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes (Oedipus, Antigone)

- The Story of Antigone by Ali Smith