VOLUME #27 (10.6.17)
Our latest bulletin of reviews, events and new releases.
Subscribe at right. >>
VOLUME #27 (10.6.17)
Our latest bulletin of reviews, events and new releases.
Subscribe at right. >>
Dani is on a school trip to the zoo, and the teacher tells the children how to stay safe and not get lost. But Dani gets separated from the others. Suddenly another class is rushing up the path and at the back of the noisy crowd is someone she recognizes: Ella! The good friends are so happy to be together again and Ella wants to play. What should Dani do? Follow her best friend in the whole world or do as the teacher said?
>> Read Stella's review.
>> This is the fifth book about Dani and her friend Ella. Have you read the others?
Dani is probably the happiest person she knows. She's happy because she's going to start school. Dani has been waiting to go to school her whole life. Then things get even better - she meets Ella by the swings. After that, Dani and Ella do everything together. They stick together through wet and dry, sun and rain, thick and thin. But then something happens that Dani isn't prepared for.
Dani's been trying her best to stay happy ever since her best friend Ella moved away. But when some girls in Dani's class start being cruel to her, it starts a chain of rather unhappy events. It would all be okay if only Ella would move back.
It's the second-to-last day of school and Dani's so happy she could write a book about it! In fact, that's exactly what she's done, although it's not quite finished yet. Now the book is in her backpack with all the other things she has to take home before the summer break. But then Dani gets some bad news. How will she ever be happy again?
Its Dani's first summer vacation and the best ever! She is staying on an island with Ella, her best friend in the world. Dad is still in hospital but he calls every day, and Ella and Dani stay busy building huts, fishing, exploring, and swimming. Then Dad turns up, but with his new girlfriend! This is not the visit anyone had imagined.
>> Bouncing back!
>> Do you read Swedish?
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See You When I See You by Rose Lagercrantz and Eva Eriksson {Reviewed by STELLA}
Swedish duo, writer Rose Lagercrantz, who has a genius for telling a simple story well, for capturing the small yet significant moments in Dani’s world, and illustrator Eva Eriksson, with her delightful, evocative pen-and-ink drawings, bring us the fifth book in the 'Dani' series, a wonderful Gecko Press series about Dani, a young girl who will steal your heart and appeal to the younger children in your life. We first met Dani in the delightful My Happy Life, and since then we have walked alongside Dani as she has started school, made friends, found out about bullies, lost a friend, got into a few scrapes, been happy and sad, scared and worried. Now, in book five, Dani is well at home at school and she is off to the zoo for a class trip. The rules are clear, and if you get lost you must wait where you saw your class last. Well, Dani does get lost, but when a class from a different school runs by in an unruly manner, who should she see? Ella! Her best friend. And suddenly the dilemma, stay put or follow Ella? Of course, Ella has grand plans that involve them adventuring on their own, and headstrong Ella is difficult to resist. Dani is delightful, loyal to her friend, conscious of what she really should be doing, torn between the rules and what feels best. Alongside this innocent adventure, is another : Dani’s father, still recovering from an accident, is doing his best to get Dani to like Sadie, the new person in his life. Yet he’s not quite getting it right. And why is Ella so upset - why does she think their friendship is in danger? Can Dani make it better? The great thing about this series is the ability of the author to create a character like Dani who doesn’t always do the ‘right’ thing, but is always full of heart, with stories that children will relate to, focusing on their concerns and worries, while also creating a sense of joy and a little mischief. |
 | The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami {Reviewed by STELLA} With the new Murakami collection of stories on my reading pile, I just re-read The Strange Library, a charming illustrated novella about a boy who walks into a library and finds himself in a terrible situation. Wonderfully designed, this book is beautiful: a small hardback with images throughout, laid out perfectly with gorgeous endpapers and compelling details on each page. Yet it is the text that will take you on the best journey. You will open the book and not close it until you reach the end, delving further into the strange library alongside the boy, hoping for an outcome that will deliver you both back to safety. This is Murakami through and through, with its labyrinth of winding passages for feet and mind, and characters who are part-human (the bird girl and the sheep man), its sparseness of text which is somehow expansive, and a sense of unease in which we can place our own fears and apprehensions. Above all it is charming. |
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Phone by Will Self {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Will Self concludes the threesome of novels that comprise his modernist ‘Busner-Project’ with this 617-page bilge of words pumped straight out of the minds of his characters, notably psychiatrist Zack Busner, drifting into a dementia that weakens his grip on the present and delivers him to the breakfast bar of a Manchester hotel without his trousers, and Jonathan De’Ath, spy and secret lover of Colonel Gawain Thomas, about to lead his troops into Iraq. Self’s great achievement and presumed intention is to create, by the breaking and reconstitution of language, a remarkable study of how thought moves in the mind, looping, moving at any one moment on many parallel tracks, in cul-de-sac curlicues and feedback loops. Thought is constantly assailed by interference, often arising from the mechanisms of language itself but also from the instability of referents, and Self’s text is full of rather funny linguistic jokes and precise ironic observations, and is frequently every bit as irritating as your own thoughts. The identities of the narrators segue into one another, Busner’s actual world barely registering on, and having no clear delineation from, the loosely bundled and rebundled memories and urges that hardly pass as personhood, the distance between each stitch of ‘actual’ narrative containing great tangled loops and knots of mental thread. If our thoughts cannot define us, what can be the organising principle of our identities? (if we are to have identities). The mobile phone is a technological intermediary positioned on the membrane between the so-called internal and so-called external parts of our worlds, positioned, in other words, at the only place where identity could be located, a place of interplay and contention. Do we define our identities or can they only be defined for us by others? Not only do we outsource our memories, our communicating faculties, our (illusory) identities to our mobile phones, these mobile phones are linked, at barely a few steps remove, to all other mobile phones, and it could be said that all phones comprise one vast technorganism, a collective consciousness parasitic upon (and formative of) the thoughts and words of the flaffing and ludicrous individual consciousnesses it auxilliarises.
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 | A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane {Reviewed by THOMAS} A central concern in Murnane’s writing is the relationship between the fiction he writes and what he calls the ‘image world’ (he insists this is nothing to do with ‘imagination’ in the sense of making things up (he is, he says, incapable of making things up)), and, to a lesser yet strongly implied degree, the relationship between these two and the ‘actual world’, which he seems to regard as little more than an access point to (or of) the image world, and a place of frailties, disappointment and impermanent concerns. When Murnane describes the “chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction… a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy” preferring the image-world relationship he had inside his head with a “certain young woman, hardly more than a girl” he sees every day in the railway carriage in which he travels home from school to the actual relationship he starts to develop (and soon abandons) with her after they eventually start to converse, he underscores a turning away, or, rather, a turning inward to the more urgent and intense image-world. Like some woefully under-recognised antipodean Proust, Murnane is fascinated by the mechanics of memory, which he sees as an operation of the image-world upon the actual, giving rise to the ‘true fictions’ that allow elements of the image-world to present themselves to awareness in a multiplicity of guises and versions. Murnane differs from many theorists of fiction in that he does not attribute primacy to the text but to the image-world to which the text gives access and which may contain, for instance, characters who have access, perhaps through their fictions (their fictional fictions), to image-worlds and characters inaccessible (at least as yet) to us. The million windows (from Henry James: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”) are those of “a house of two or maybe three storeys”, inhabited by writers, all perhaps versions or potential versions of Murnane himself, who look out over endless plains as they engage in the act of writing fiction, or discuss doing so. The multiplicity of this process stands in relation to an unattainable absolute towards which memories and other fictions reach, or, rather, which reaches to us in the form of memories and other fictions. Murnane’s small pallet, his precisely modulated recurring images and his looping, delightfully pedantic style are at once fascinating, frustrating, soporific and revelatory. |
NEW RELEASES !
THESE BOOKS HAVE JUST ARRIVED AT VOLUME.
Click through to find out more and to purchase or reserve your copies.
A melding of text and photographs in the manner of W.G. Sebald marks this interesting and thoughtful work about displacement, statelessness, waiting and mourning. Washes of narrative leave the reader with an indelible residue of impressions.
"How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything." Twenty years after The God of Small Things, Roy's second novel braids together many lives and strands as they pass through harm and healing.
>> "Fiction takes its time."
>> Where do old birds go to die? (an extract from the novel).
>> Roy speaks with Kim Hill.
Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980s: the story of New Zealand can be told through totara.
Living is hard both physically and mentally on a small island off the Norwegian coast. Ingrid's father dreams of building a causeway to the mainland, whereas her mother dreams of moving to a smaller, even more remote island. When Ingrid is sent to work on the mainland she learns that mainland life has trials of its own.
Short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize
"Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read." - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
Fair Borders? Migration policy in the twenty-first century edited by David Hall $15
Do our current and projected immigration policies offer a 'fair go' to recent arrivals and prospective arrivals, and also to those whose arrival may be generations ago?
Dani is on a school trip to the zoo, and the teacher tells the children how to stay safe and not get lost. But Dani gets separated from the others. Suddenly another class is rushing up the path and at the back of the noisy crowd is someone she recognizes: Ella! The good friends are so happy to be together again and Ella wants to play. What should Dani do? Follow her best friend in the whole world or do as the teacher said?
As the 2023 New Zealand election approaches, four cruel and unusual stories expose the inner workings at the heart of Milk Island (former South Island) where a fifth-term Government's legacy project is going very well or very poorly, depending on who you ask. On Milk Island, patriotism and prosperity trumps all else and life matters very little unless you're Milky Moo, the nation's favourite cow. Absurd and unhelpful, and "100% pure fiction" (unless you happen to live in the South Island).
>> Demonstrating the advantages of the herringbone.
>> Demonstrating the advantages of the herringbone.
The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis $37
"Before I had a chance to rebel against the world of my childhood, that world rebelled against me. In truth, confronting my parents, my social class, its poverty, racism and brutality came second. From early on I provoked shame and even disgust from my family and others around me. The only option I had was to get away somehow. This book is an effort to understand all that." "Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Edouard Louis." - LitHub
"An extraordinary autobiographical novel about class, violence and sexuality in France. It's a vivid, often brutal but immensely touching book that restores my faith in the power of literature." - Tash Aw
The physics of matter receive a lot of attention, but what about the physics of nothing and of absence? Both relativity and quantum theory tell us that nothingness can't be infinitely extensive. Nothing, Weatherall shows, turns out to be very similar to something, similarly structured and describable with the same laws.
As he feels impelled towards his own extinction in a retirement village, can Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete, find a was back into existence? This novel is about many kinds of extinction: natural, racial, national and personal, and about how these extinctions may be resisted.
A wonderful selection of Syrian-inspired recipes given by top chefs for this book, which is a fund-raiser (and awareness-raiser) for UNICEF's Syria relief fund.
>> The supper club that became a global movement.
At the Lightning Field by Laura Raicovich $28
Walter De Maria's 'Lightning Field' is an array of 400 stainless steel poles in the desert in New Mexico, designed to attract lightning. Raicovich pays a number of visits and makes a series of subtle philosophical and mathematical observations on time, space, duration, light, change and changelessness.
"Raicovich combines her intimate, studied observations with the writings of a vast array of mathematicians and thinkers, including Benoit Mandelbrot and Gertrude Stein. Attempting to answer the question, How reliable is memory?, the essay is a beautifully chaotic map of thought and experience that both mirrors the experience of a work of art and probes its essence." - Publishers Weekly
"Make a pilgrimage to The Lightning Field by walking the lines of this book and building something beautiful in your mind's eye with the author, who will take you there and many places besides." - Rebecca Solnit
Walter De Maria's 'Lightning Field' is an array of 400 stainless steel poles in the desert in New Mexico, designed to attract lightning. Raicovich pays a number of visits and makes a series of subtle philosophical and mathematical observations on time, space, duration, light, change and changelessness.
"Raicovich combines her intimate, studied observations with the writings of a vast array of mathematicians and thinkers, including Benoit Mandelbrot and Gertrude Stein. Attempting to answer the question, How reliable is memory?, the essay is a beautifully chaotic map of thought and experience that both mirrors the experience of a work of art and probes its essence." - Publishers Weekly
"Make a pilgrimage to The Lightning Field by walking the lines of this book and building something beautiful in your mind's eye with the author, who will take you there and many places besides." - Rebecca Solnit
The Polar Bear by Jenni Desmond $30
A beautifully illustrated book introducing children to this unique animal. Winner of the 2016 Maurice Sendak medal.
>> Look inside the book!
Fragments of Metropolis: Berlin's Expressionist legacy by Christoph Rauhut and Niels Lehmann $65
Berlin was the cultural wellspring of Expressionism and the locus of a rethinking of the relationship between experience and architectural form. Rauhut's and Lehmann's project was to document all the remaining examples of Expressionist architecture with photographs, drawings, maps and descriptions. Impressive.
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask by Sarah Howgate $60
Cahun's photographs from the 1920s onwards tested the performance of identity and gender and, although not then much exhibited, her practice was influential in defining the concerns of Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray. Gillian Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997, has mirrored and furthered many of Cahun's concerns. This is an excellent consideration of the work of both photographers.
A beautifully illustrated book introducing children to this unique animal. Winner of the 2016 Maurice Sendak medal.
>> Look inside the book!
Berlin was the cultural wellspring of Expressionism and the locus of a rethinking of the relationship between experience and architectural form. Rauhut's and Lehmann's project was to document all the remaining examples of Expressionist architecture with photographs, drawings, maps and descriptions. Impressive.
Cahun's photographs from the 1920s onwards tested the performance of identity and gender and, although not then much exhibited, her practice was influential in defining the concerns of Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray. Gillian Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997, has mirrored and furthered many of Cahun's concerns. This is an excellent consideration of the work of both photographers.
Avalanches, best friends, bicycles, cities, daughters, dragons, disempowerment, eruptions, fringed animal skins, ghosties, Herzog, jubilation, little cafes with candles in wine bottles, lycra, self-doubt, snow, super-herodom, temper tantrums, umbrellas, whales.
Poems.
>> McMillan interviewed by some 11-and-12-year-olds. 
Traditional and new concerns combined to enable a rethinking of the fundamentals of residential and community architecture following the cultural trauma of the second world war. This is the first comprehensive survey of the creative flourishing of domestic architecture in this period.
Wolfgang Tillmans, 2017 by Chris Dercon $60
An excellent survey of the last 15 years of the work of this important photographer.
>> Visit Tillmans' website.
New Zealander Agnes Moncrieff was the foreign secretary to the and the YWCA in China during the Sino-Japanese War. Her first-hand accounts of the horrors taking place around her are nuanced and valuable.
Very evocative shots of the Factory and its denizens (both in situ and on the streets), together with other fine examples of street photography.
>> The Velvet Underground live at the Factory.
A much-needed guide to matching food to wine and wine to food.
A sumptuous collection of prime examples of dress, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, with informative text and contemporary illustrations to provide context and extension.
Moving from revolutionary Zanzibar in the 1960s to restless London in the 1990s, Gravel Heart is a story of exile, migration and betrayal.
"Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth." - The Times
"Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain." - Spectator
Billy's got a lot on his mind that he'd rather not think about, so he fills it with facts and David Attenborough documentaries and asks a lot of questions (about facts). At school a bully is hardly making things easy for him. Does a mackerel he meets when swimming have something to tell him?
"Summarising the plot does this assured, silvery writing a disservice. Literary prizes, this way, please." - Guardian
A hopeful and practical guide to overcoming the barriers to addressing climate change.
Lots of well-wishers come to visit the new arrivals in the neighbourhood. How can they all fit in? The along comes a giant nose. Oh no! Don't tell me it is going to sneeze!
>> Develops a theme by Gogol.
Why do humans continue to make new objects in a world already full of objects? Why do we esteem things that are well made, and why do some people choose to devote their lives to making things well?
>> Peter Korn is the founder and director of the Centre for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine, a model for craft education and a hotbed of craft philosophy.
>> A free lecture from Korn.
>> Hard at work.
>> Techne is its own branch of philosophy, distinct from epistime.
>> Why do we hate cheap things?
>> But 'Is the Object Really Necessary?' (also here)
{Review by STELLA}
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A few years ago I read Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s one of those books that stays with you, and at the time it had me thinking, laughing out loud and completely enthralled for a few days. Set in Morocco, the story opens with our protagonist on a plane avoiding someone – she doesn’t want to be noticed. We are given a glimpse of a life going awry. We know she is preparing to divorce, that she has a secret – a situation that upsets her that she can’t face. On arriving at her hotel her bag is stolen and suddenly she has no credit cards, no passport, and no ID. The police look into it and claim her bag has been recovered. They give her the black backpack – actually they insist she takes it! And then things start getting crazy. She has credit cards, a passport, but she’s taken on someone else’s identity. As she flips through a series of events in Casablanca, she moves through a variety of identities changing her name, her appearance and telling tales. Paranoia, a heightened sense of being found out, and a desire to keep running dictate her options. The reader is taken into her confidence, walking alongside her, sometimes amused, sometimes shocked at her risky and often audacious behaviour. But we can’t help but feel that we are part of this, kind of egging her on to take control, to be autonomous from her past life. This week, I read an earlier work from Vida, The Lovers. This time we are in Turkey, at a small rundown tourist village. Yvonne, recently widowed, goes back to this coastal area in an attempt to recall happier times. From the moment we enter Yvonne’s world we get a sense of foreboding, that something is slightly off-kilter. Arriving at Istanbul, the driver who is to meet her to take her to the holiday house isn’t there. Yvonne at once feels foolishly naive, but after a phone call she finds out she’s just been waiting on the ‘wrong’ side of the terminal. On meeting Ali, the owner of the holiday house, she begins to wonder if she has made a mistake in coming to Turkey. The village isn’t what it used to be and she can’t seem to find a connection to the happy memories of the past. The sudden death of her husband haunts her and her concerns about her adult children weigh her down. Determined to make the most of her holiday, she heads for the neighbouring village, where she strikes up a friendship with Ahmet, a boy she meets on the beach. Back at the holiday house, she is surprised to encounter Ali’s estranged wife, Ozmet, visiting. Ozmet and Yvonne, an unlikely match, confide in each other and Yvonne finds herself revealing her fears and sadness. As things seem to be improving for Yvonne, suddenly we are back with that sense of foreboding, a storm at sea, hostile villagers, a message from her addict daughter. These little unsettling triggers are setting the scene for an incident that will force Yvonne to confront herself and her sense of guilt. Vendela Vida is adept at placing the tragic and the comedic together with a subtly which is beguiling.
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{Review by STELLA}
First in the 'Red Abbey Chronicles' by Maria Turtschaninoff, is Maresi. Named after the narrator, this is an excellent novel for teens, especially if you like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter or Ursula Le Guin. This is a captivating new series where feminism, mythology and magic meet. Maresi, to avoid poverty and certain starvation, is sent to the Abbey from her mountain home, knowing she is unlikely to ever see her family again. The Abbey is on an island where only women live and no men may enter. Fortified by both walls and magic, the Abbey was founded by a The First Women; it is productive, respected and feared. Life is ordered yet idyllic, with a code of conduct and study based on the mythology of the three goddesses, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. Maresi, now thirteen, has lived here for four years, savouring the order, the affection of the women, the companionship of the other novices and. most enchantingly, the wonderful library, when Jai arrives. Jai, inward and fearful, clings to Maresi, becoming her constant companion. Yet Jai brings danger. For Jai comes from a wealthy and powerful family in a society where women have little say in their lives and there is a strict code of conduct that must be adhered to. Jai is smuggled out of her home by her mother fearing that life won’t be safe for her daughter. But even the Abbey’s walls can not stop Jai’s vengeful father. When the men come, Maresi will witness chaos and carnage, but also the strength of the Sisters and a power and knowledge within herself that will harness all her best qualities: bravery, intelligence and compassion, as well as a darkness that will give her strength. The second book in the series, Naondel has just arrived and will be on my reading pile.
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99 Stories of God by Joy Williams {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Joy Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, yet shows great sympathy for the ways in which her characters attempt to shore up their dissolving realities, and a sharp eye for the tiny details which form the pivots upon which great weights of existence turn. A few years ago The Visiting Privilege introduced many of us to four decades’ worth of work from the underknown Williams, one of America’s finest short story writers, and 99 Stories of God shows her now becoming even sharper, stranger, more despairing and compassionate. The stories, few more than a page long, many a single paragraph or even a sentence, are each written such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain. Sparely, flatly written, using the language of the newspaper report or the encyclopedia entry, trimmed utterly of superfluities, the stories read like jokes that make us cry instead of laugh, or like laments that make us laugh instead of cry. Comparison may be made with Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, the scalpel-work of Lydia Davis or the Franz Kafka of the Zurau Aphorisms, but Williams’ sensibilities and turns of phrase are very much her own: she comes upon her subjects at unexpected angles, giving insight into the strangeness hung on the most ordinary of details (and, conversely, making the strangest of details seem necessary and familiar). The 99 stories have the texture of Biblical parables or Aesopian fables but they are not parables or fables due to the indeterminacy of their meanings (unless they are parables or fables which eschew lessons and morals and return the reader instead to the actual). The title of each follows the story and often sits at odds with the reader’s experience of the story, forcing a further realignment of sensibilities. Brevity, sparsity, clarity: these are distillates of novels, tragedies told as jokes, aqua vitae for anyone who reads, observes, thinks or writes. >> Read Williams on what writing is for. |
 | Flights by Olga Tokarczuk {Reviewed by THOMAS} When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of the peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. |
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SOME NEW RELEASES WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE
What is the relationship between human psychopathology and technological progress? Self continues to extend the capacities of the modernist novel in an attempt to make language more resemble thought.
"A triumph of joined-up thinking, Phone is the final instalment [following but independent of Umbrella and Shark] in what has shown itself to be one of the most ambitious and important literary projects of the 21st century. It will be a challenge to those whose minds have been eroded by the permanent present of the smartphone. But I can’t think of a better way to spend your time. " - Guardian
>> Have we lost the need to communicate?
To move is to exist. To be unsettled is to push always at the edges of being settled, to strive to burst into new zones of existence. Tokarczuk has written a collection of short and long texts, all concerning movement and travel, change and stasis, and the effect of these upon identity. Beautifully written, the book is bristling with ideas and memorable images.
For the People’s Republic of the Congo, the Marxist-Leninist revolution of 1970 heralded a new age. Fleeing the relative safety of the orphanage, the only home he’s ever known, Moses makes a life for himself among the villainous “Merry Men” in Pointe-Noire and the friendly Zairean prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. It is far from a peaceful existence, and pursuit by the authorities ultimately sends Moses over the edge into madness.
"Africa's Samuel Beckett. One of the continent's greatest living writers." - Guardian
Bleaker House: Chasing my novel to the end of the world by Nell Stevens $38
A young writer achieves total solitude on Bleaker Island in the Falklands (official population: 2) and writes a book (this book) about how total solitude is not a good way to write a book. Sharp.
99 Stories of God by Joy Williams $28
99 stories, most less than a page long, each written with such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain.
"Radically compressed. New territory for Williams, with a brevity and a strict whimsy you might encounter in Lydia Davis's work. Easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb." - New Yorker
"A collection of tiny, wry masterpieces." - New York Times
>> "There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process."
Aberrant by Marek Sindelka $39
A heady concoction of crime story, horror story (inspired by the Japanese tradition of kaidan), ecological revenge fantasy, and Siberian shamanism. The book explores the rickety foundation of illusions on which our relationship to the environment, and to one another, rests, and guides us through a world of aberrations, anomalies, and mistakes.
The Red Thread: Nordic design $110
200 objects, from the everyday to the consciously positioned, intimating the wellspring in Scandinavian and Finnish culture that gives rise to a material culture that enhances, both practically and aesthetically, the small and large aspects of the tasks and pleasures of living.
October: The story of the Russian Revolution by China Mieville $33
The radical realignment of society from an autocratic monarchy to a socialist state that occurred in the upheavals of 1917 has long fascinated Mieville and served as a braising pan for his fiction, which is full of extreme characters, new ideas and byzantine thinking. Here he puts his skills as a novelist to work in a history of what was a revolution in human ideas as it was in events played out in the world.
The Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers confront the occupation edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman $33
26 writers (including Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien and Eimear McBride) from 14 countries bear witness to the human cost of the 50-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
"Moving, heartbreaking, and infuriating, testifying to the chilling cruelty of Israel's policy toward Palestinians. Deeply unsettling and important." - Kirkus
>> Trailer.
Free Speech: Ten principles for a connected world by Timothy Garton Ash $28
With the internet providing instant audience for any statement, how are we preserve our freedoms and also progress to a more humane and inclusive mode of discourse?
"Garton Ash's larger project is not merely to defend freedom of expression, but to promote civil, dispassionate discourse, within and across cultures, even about the most divisive and emotive subjects." - Guardian
Graphic: 500 designs that matter $45
A handbook of successful design across the world and across time.
99 stories, most less than a page long, each written with such sharpness and lightness of touch that they draw blood unexpectedly and without pain.
"Radically compressed. New territory for Williams, with a brevity and a strict whimsy you might encounter in Lydia Davis's work. Easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb." - New Yorker
"A collection of tiny, wry masterpieces." - New York Times
>> "There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process."
A heady concoction of crime story, horror story (inspired by the Japanese tradition of kaidan), ecological revenge fantasy, and Siberian shamanism. The book explores the rickety foundation of illusions on which our relationship to the environment, and to one another, rests, and guides us through a world of aberrations, anomalies, and mistakes.
200 objects, from the everyday to the consciously positioned, intimating the wellspring in Scandinavian and Finnish culture that gives rise to a material culture that enhances, both practically and aesthetically, the small and large aspects of the tasks and pleasures of living.
The radical realignment of society from an autocratic monarchy to a socialist state that occurred in the upheavals of 1917 has long fascinated Mieville and served as a braising pan for his fiction, which is full of extreme characters, new ideas and byzantine thinking. Here he puts his skills as a novelist to work in a history of what was a revolution in human ideas as it was in events played out in the world.
26 writers (including Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien and Eimear McBride) from 14 countries bear witness to the human cost of the 50-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
"Moving, heartbreaking, and infuriating, testifying to the chilling cruelty of Israel's policy toward Palestinians. Deeply unsettling and important." - Kirkus
>> Trailer.
With the internet providing instant audience for any statement, how are we preserve our freedoms and also progress to a more humane and inclusive mode of discourse?
"Garton Ash's larger project is not merely to defend freedom of expression, but to promote civil, dispassionate discourse, within and across cultures, even about the most divisive and emotive subjects." - Guardian
A handbook of successful design across the world and across time.
The Story Cure: An A-Z of books to keep kids happy, healthy and wise by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin $45
Books to nourish and restore every part of a young reader's mind, usefully arranged by 'ailment'.
In Writing: Essays on literature by Adam Phillips $40
Phillips plausibly posits that the insights gained from literature and from psychoanalysis can together provide better understanding of the predicaments and pleasures of being human than either approach can provide alone. Includes consideration of W.G. Sebald, Barthes, Byron, Emerson and Shakespeare.
A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert $35
A novel correlating Jewish, Ukrainian and German experiences in the days following the Nazi invasion of a small town in the Ukraine in 1941, and seeking comprehension of the guilt burden still passed down through generations.
>> "My grandparents were Nazis."
Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The stroke that changed my life by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee $50
In the months following her stroke in 2006 at the age of 33, Hyung-Oak Lee outsourced her faculty of memory to the small notebook from which this narrative is constructed. As she recovered, the realignment of her sense of time led her to think deeply about what she thought of as herself.
>> How did the stroke affect her vision and proprioception?
In the months following her stroke in 2006 at the age of 33, Hyung-Oak Lee outsourced her faculty of memory to the small notebook from which this narrative is constructed. As she recovered, the realignment of her sense of time led her to think deeply about what she thought of as herself.
>> How did the stroke affect her vision and proprioception?
Modernism in the Streets: A life and times in essays by Marshall Berman $43
Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and author of All That is Solid Melts into Air, a key work on modernism. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical '60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification, and forms a sort of intellectual autobiography. 
Is terrorism ever a useful tactic? Can imperial wars ever be supported? What sort of political party do we need? What is the moral justification for seizing power? How does one overcome the burden of history? What role does friendship or love play in revolution? How do you establish a legacy that lasts? Tariq Ali provides an insightful picture of the dilemmas Lenin faced a hundred years ago, dilemmas that are also relevant today as we face another urgent need for change.
Sounds and Sweet Airs: The forgotten women of classical music by Anna Beer $22
Explores the life and work of eight female composers from the 17th to the 20th centuries and the reasons for their contemporary and subsequent obscurity.
"A meticulously researched, engrossing read, vividly bringing its eight subjects to life. It should appeal not only to music connoisseurs but to anyone interested in social and cultural history." - Financial Times
Pieces of You by Eileen Merriman $20
"A wonderfully compelling story suffused with heartbreak and humour about first love, about sexual awakening and the lives of teens: the decisions they are confronted by, as well as the dangers and difficult situations that young people can find themselves in, and how to cope with these." - Stella
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Edde-Lodge $30
An attempt to wrest control of discussions about racism back from those who are not personally affected by it, a call to see and act against systemic and institutionalised racism, and an exploration of race's relationship to other issues of identity politics.
Client Earth by James Thornton and Martin Goodman $40
The organisation Thornton founded in 2007, ClientEarth, uses advocacy, litigation, and research to address the greatest challenges of our time - including biodiversity loss, climate change, and toxic chemicals. It now has sixty lawyers working full-time - finding, taking on, and winning cases across a broad spectrum.
Who Will Catch Us As We Fall by Iman Verjee $20
A novel exploring the nuanced, layered intricacies of racial politics in east Africa beyond black and white, focusing on the tensions between Africans and Indians living in post–British imperialism Kenya.
The Fate of Gender: Nature, nurture and the human future by Frank Browning $30
"In this daring examination of the complexities of modern gender, Frank Browning gives the scientific evidence that gender is a construct rather than a biological reality. Our notions of masculinity and femininity are becoming more fluid and not less, as science defers to social reality instead of the other way around. Scholarly, wide-ranging, and deeply imagined, this unsettling book limns the triumph of nuance over a binary that was never based in authenticity." - Andrew Solomon (author of Far From the Tree)
Who Runs the World? by Virginia Bergin $18
Sixty years after a virus has wiped out the male half of the human species, 14-year-old River meets Mason. She thought all boys were extinct...
From the author of The Rain.
Other Russias: Stories and drawing from the age of Putin by Victoria Lamasko $50
What is it like to live in Russia? For eight years graphic novelist Lamasko travelled around Russia, collecting the stories, dreams and frustrations of the diversity of people who have not found places of advantage in the post Soviet structures that dominate post-Soviet society.
"Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings have an on-the-spot immediacy that I envy. She is one of the brave ones." - Joe Sacco, author of Palestine
The Voices Within: The history and science of how we talk to ourselves by Charles Fernyhough $28
As soon as we evolved language our minds assailed us with voices that could not be heard by anyone else. What do these voices tell us about the workings of our minds, the structures and function of language, and about our conception of ourselves and our place in our world?
>> Not I.
The Age of Inequality: Corporate America's war on the working people by Jeremy Ganz $33
928 Miles from Home by Kim Slater $18
When 14-year-old Callum's father brings home his new Polish girlfriend and her son Sergei, Callum starts to re-examine some of the attitudes prevalent with his friends at school.
Ink: The mark of human identity by Ted Bishop $35
Without ink, what would have carried human history along its course?
A novel exploring the nuanced, layered intricacies of racial politics in east Africa beyond black and white, focusing on the tensions between Africans and Indians living in post–British imperialism Kenya.
"In this daring examination of the complexities of modern gender, Frank Browning gives the scientific evidence that gender is a construct rather than a biological reality. Our notions of masculinity and femininity are becoming more fluid and not less, as science defers to social reality instead of the other way around. Scholarly, wide-ranging, and deeply imagined, this unsettling book limns the triumph of nuance over a binary that was never based in authenticity." - Andrew Solomon (author of Far From the Tree)
Sixty years after a virus has wiped out the male half of the human species, 14-year-old River meets Mason. She thought all boys were extinct...
From the author of The Rain.
What is it like to live in Russia? For eight years graphic novelist Lamasko travelled around Russia, collecting the stories, dreams and frustrations of the diversity of people who have not found places of advantage in the post Soviet structures that dominate post-Soviet society.
"Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings have an on-the-spot immediacy that I envy. She is one of the brave ones." - Joe Sacco, author of Palestine
As soon as we evolved language our minds assailed us with voices that could not be heard by anyone else. What do these voices tell us about the workings of our minds, the structures and function of language, and about our conception of ourselves and our place in our world?
>> Not I.
When 14-year-old Callum's father brings home his new Polish girlfriend and her son Sergei, Callum starts to re-examine some of the attitudes prevalent with his friends at school.
Without ink, what would have carried human history along its course?
Wild Animals of the South by Dieter Braun $45
A wonderfully illustrated compendium of fauna found in the southern hemisphere, and a companion volume to the equally stunning Wild Animals of the North.
The Writer's Toolkit
All writers can do with an occasional tune-up. Our 5-week writing course The Writer's Toolkit, led by the inspirational Michelanne Forster, begins on June 8th. Places are limited to ensure individual attention. Click here to find out more.
Here a few books from our shelves that would be good additions to any writer's shelf:
Barry teaches a method of writing that focuses on the relationship between the hand, the brain, and spontaneous images, both written and visual. Collaged texts, ballpoint-pen doodles, and watercolor washes adorn Syllabus 's yellow lined pages, which offer advice on finding a creative voice and using memories to inspire the writing process.
"Language is a body, a living creature, and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate."
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
Why are some ways of saying things better than others? The Elements of Eloquence is a relentlessly entertaining guide to the figures of speech that are the neglected sharp end of rhetoric. Forsyth believes our overconcentration on content has blinded us to the craft of making even banal statements memorable and effective. For example, I now know that when I say, “Get off the computer and ready to go,” I am employing syllepsis, a flower of rhetoric, and am not just being an old nag.
Gladman's essays start out being about not very much, small ordinary particulars of Gladman’s life, or small observations such as a poet might make about the ordinary particulars of life, but really they are not so much about these things as they are about the writing about these things, that is to say about the relationship of a writer to her experience and to her work and about her trying to decide what sort of relationship there might be, both actually and ideally, between this experience of hers and this work.
Synthesises her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and "black belt sinner," providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.
Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterwards, true mastery had always eluded her. Seeking full immersion, she decided to move to Rome with her family, for 'a trial by fire, a sort of baptism' into a new language and world. There, she began to read and to write - initially in her journal - solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice.
Create your own series of 'personal books' that provide a home for your mind, savouring life's moments with scissors and gluestick at the ready.
Being a writer is good because you get paid to write stuff up, you can stay home and work in your pajamas and you get to travel because it's research. Being a writer is bad when you're sitting all by yourself staring at a blank page. Brigid Lowry knows the highs and lows of being a writer, but she still thinks it's a joy. In this book she takes you on a journey to discover yourself and what you really want to say AND how to make it juicy and original.
Letters to a Young Writer by Colum McCann $25
"A lot can be taken from you—even your life—but not your stories about that life. So this, then, is a word, not without love and respect, to a young writer: write." Some considered practical and philosophical advice.
"An intensely literary writer, his prose thrums with echoes of Beckett, Yeats and Joyce." - Sunday Times
The Exercise Book: Creative writing exercises from Victoria University's Institute of Modern Letters edited by Bill Manhire, Ken Duncm, Chris Price and Damien Wilkins $35
A wonderful array of writing exercises, prompts and constraints that will help writers at any stage in their career.
Writing True Stories: The complete guide to writing autobiography, memoir, personal essay, biography, travel and creative non-fiction by Patti Miller $40
Provides guidance and inspiration on an array of writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice, build a vivid world on the page, create structure, use research, and face the difficulties of truth-telling.
The Story Cure: A book doctor's pain-free guide to finishing your novel or memoir by Dinty W. Moore $35
A collection of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterisation issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir. Includes prescriptions for diagnoses such as character anemia, flat plot, and silent voice.
Provides guidance and inspiration on an array of writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice, build a vivid world on the page, create structure, use research, and face the difficulties of truth-telling.
A collection of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterisation issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir. Includes prescriptions for diagnoses such as character anemia, flat plot, and silent voice.
Dirty-But-Clean burst onto the literary scene from a nonliterary background with publication of Vernon God Little in 2003. Find out how he learned everything the hard way.
Take one small banal story about a man on a bus and a remark about a button, and rewrite it ninety-nine times according to different constraints, from sonnet to antiphrasis, from onomatopoeia to metaphor, from Dog Latin to double entry, from the gastronomical to the abusive, and you come up with a book that is inventive, erudite and very funny. Raymond Queneau is a verbal acrobat of the first order. Reading this book is to attend a circus of rigours - be prepared to be exhilarated.
When Nell Stevens was given the opportunity to spend three months in a location of her choice in order to write her novel, she was determined to rid herself of all distractions. So Nell decided to travel to Bleaker Island (official population: two) in the Falklands where she would write 2,500 words a day. But Bleaker House is not that novel. Instead this is a book about a young woman realising that the way to writing fiction doesn't necessarily lie in total solitude (though total solitude may well be a good way to write a book about how total solitude is not a good way to write a book).
Is your writing flabby or fit? >>Take the test. Helen Sword's book is a useful guide to producing clear, crisp, effective prose.
>> "How art helped me see the beauty in loneliness."
>> "What is so shameful about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?"
>> Olivia Laing's playlist for The Lonely City.
>> An interview with the author.
>> Some statistics about self-perceived loneliness in New Zealand.
>> More than one million lonely New Zealanders.
>> Laing's previous book: The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking.
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Patrick Ness’s new YA novel Release, like several of his recent books, mixes teen issues with a supernatural element. In Release the tie is more tenuous than his previous books, The Rest of Us Just Live Here and More Than This. With a single action, the prick of a rose thorn, a link is created between Adam Thorn and a murdered girl who rises from the lake. Adam, the son of a fundamentalist preacher, wants out of the ‘Yoke’ - the stranglehold that his family have on him: he’s tired of living a life of deception. Gay, already having experienced a fraught relationship and finding out about a deeper love, Adam is essentially a great guy who would like nothing more than to be open to his family and accepted unconditionally by them. One Saturday things come to a head, and things in Adam’s life are turned upside down. There’s a going-away party for Enzo, the boy he once loved; his best friend has announced she’s leaving to spend a year in Europe; his sleazy boss is coming on to him; and on top of this, his brother, minister-to-be, has just dropped a bombshell. You can’t help but like Adam and his friends, and care about Adam’s eventual confrontation with his father, and his growing awareness of relationships, first love and what is a meaningful relationship can offer him. Running alongside this story is the surreal tale of the murdered girl/The Queen who rises from the lake seeking revenge. She’s watched over by a 7-foot faun who follows her through the town as she creates chaos and confusion. This element of the book allows Ness to show the flipside of teen life in this town, sadness, anger and abuse. Release is an intriguing book of two part. While it doesn’t always work, it’s beautifully written and Ness’s portrayal of a young gay man confronting his authoritarian father and developing an understanding of youthful love is superbly told.
{Reviewed by STELLA} |
 | Pieces of You by Eileen Merriman is brilliant, reminiscent of John Green and Jennifer Niven. The book deals with the hard issues of sexual abuse, self-harm and depression. Don’t be put off by this, as it’s not all doom and gloom: it’s also a beautiful love story, and about seeing the best in yourself and learning how to overcome obstacles. Becs has moved to a new city with her family. It’s impossible to fit in, the boy next door is cute, but Becs thinks she herself’s awful. To a teenager this will all sound familiar: the awkwardness of being new at a school, of looking in a mirror (or avoiding looking) and seeing a failure, of being perpetually embarrassed by (almost) everything. Unlike some teenagers, Becs is also suffering from something she can’t seem to overcome, an action that will keep having repercussions until she is brave enough to deal with it. As her relationship with Cory becomes increasingly serious, her confidence grows and she realises that she can be happy again. Slowly she gains friends and starts to feel at home at school and in her new city. Author Eileen Merriman does a brilliant job of walking in a teen’s shoes: Becs, along with her friends and foes, are convincing. Pieces of You is a wonderfully compelling story suffused with heartbreak and humour about first love, about sexual awakening and the lives of teens: the decisions they are confronted by, as well as the dangers and difficult situations that young people can find themselves in, and how to cope with these. At the close of the book is a useful list of agencies and helplines. Merriman, a consultant haematologist at North Shore Hospital, is a New Zealand author to keep an eye on. |