NEW RELEASES
Any of these new books could be in your hands in a jiffy. 

Animal: A beastly compendium by Remi Mathis, Valerie Sueur-Hermel and Michel Pastoureau     $65
A beautifully illustrated and absorbing compendium of real and mythical beasts with 100 images from the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. 

Knots by Gunnhild Øyehaug       $45
"From my first reading of Knots I have been been captivated by Gunnhild Øyehaug's wit, imagination, ironic social commentary, and fearless embrace of any and every form of storytelling. These are stories to be relished, inspiring in their art and humanity both. How fortunate that we can now read them in Kari Dickson's sparkling and magically faithful English." - Lydia Davis
"Formally playful, poignant, understated, and often acutely funny. A near-perfect collection about the knots we tie ourselves into and the countless ways we intertwine in the pursuit of sex, love, compassion and family." - Kirkus

The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-Yi          $37
On a quest to explain how and why his father mysteriously disappeared twenty years ago, a writer embarks on an epic journey in search of a stolen bicycle and soon finds himself immersed in the strangely overlapping histories of the Japanese military during World War II, Lin Wang, the oldest elephant who ever lived, and the secret world of antique bicycle collectors in Taiwan. 
From the author of The Man with the Compound Eyes. 

Wake Me When I'm Gone by Odafe Atogun        $33
A novel steeped in the folklore and traditions of life in a Nigerian village. 
“A beautiful, dreamlike story which lingers in the mind and heart. There is oppression and tragedy, sincerely conveyed, but there is also remarkable triumph, a stunning rebirth and shimmering hope. A treat - especially for fans of Ben Okri and Elechi Amadi” - Leila Aboulela

Elmet by Fiona Mozley         $35
A beautifully written novel about the relationship between a family and a landscape after the father's decision to withdraw from society. Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. 
"I already feel like I've won." 

Giacometti edited by Frances Morris, Lena Fritsch, Catherine Grenier and Mathilde Lecuyer     $60
A good survey of his work, well illustrated, with a thoughtful alphabetical exploration of themes and influences. 

Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit        $37
Randolph, a successful architect, and his family move into a beautiful apartment in a desirable part of Berlin. Life seems perfect - until they meet the man living in the basement below them. Their downstairs neighbour is friendly at first, if a little strange, but then he starts to frighten them. And the situation quickly becomes intolerable.
"Fear shifts our moral codes. It makes us sympathetic to violent revenge, accessories to murder. Do we want the victim to survive? No, we don't. Long after I had put this book down I still didn't. A great achievement." - Herman Koch

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart          $23
Imogen is an heiress, a runaway, and a cheat. Jule is a fighter, a chameleon, and a liar. Imogen is done pretending to be perfect, and Jule refuses to go back to the person she once was. Somewhere between the mansions of Martha's Vineyard and the shores of Cabo San Lucas, their intense friendship takes a dark turn. From the author of We Were Liars. 

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie           $37
The last decade of life in Manhattan is distilled in the lives of the Golden tycoon family, as seen through the eyes of their neighbour.
"A modern masterpiece. If you read a lot of fiction, you know that every once in a while you stumble upon a book that transports you, telling a story full of wonder and leaving you marveling at how it ever came out of the author's head. The Golden House is one of those books." - NZ Herald
"This is a recognizably Rushdie novel in its playfulness, its verbal jousting, its audacious bravado, its unapologetic erudition, and its sheer, dazzling brilliance." - Thrity Umrigar, Boston Globe

My All by Sophie Calle          $45
A retrospective survey of the projects of this photographer in the form of 110 postcards, one for each of her experiments in the ambivalences of photography and memory.  

Camping on the Wye: Four Victorian gents row the Wye in a randan skiff in 1892 by S.K. Baker        $20
A rather charming facsimile edition of a hand-drawn and hand-lettered account. 

Why Are We Artists? 100 world art manifestos edited by Jessica Lack        $30
This collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Negritude movement in Africa and Martinique to Brazil's Mud/Meat Sewer Manifesto, from Iraqi modernism to Australia's Cyberfeminist Manifesto, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angry, sublime and revolutionary. Some have not been published in English before.

Made at Home: The food I cook for the people I love by Giorgio Locatelli          $60
Locatelli's books are remarkable not only for their exquisite, authentic and achievable recipes, but for the personable way in which he imparts his knowledge of Italian food and food culture. His Made in Italy is a classic in the field. 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit            $25
A new edition of Solnit's fascinating book on the benefits of wandering, being lost, losing yourself and things and other people, and in the uses of the unknown. 
>> Other books by Solnit at VOLUME. 

The Occupation Trilogy (La Place de l'Étoile/The Night Watch/Ring Roads) by Patrick Modiano        $25
Three earl novels recording the authors memories of growing up in occupied Paris, and of the antiSemitism practised by occupiers and occupied alike. The novels also bear witness to Modiano's emergence as a writer. 

Human Rights and the Uses of History by Samuel Moyn        $22
What are the origins of human rights? Who gets to decide what they are? Can human rights be legitimately used as a justification for political or even military intervention? 

Crazy About Cats by Owen Davey         $30
Beautifully illustrated and full of feline facts. 
>> Also available: Smart About Sharks and Mad About Monkeys.

Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Impossibility by Franco "Bifo" Berardi         $37
Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem incapable of producing the radical change that is so desperately needed. Meanwhile the struggle for dominance over the world is a battlefield with only two protagonists: the forces of neoliberalism on one side, and the new order led by the likes of Trump and Putin on the other. How can we imagine a new emancipatory vision, capable of challenging the deadlock of the present? Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination? Is the Slough of Despond just beyond, or on this side of, the Horizon of Impossibility?

Futures of Black Radicalism edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin        $39
Surveys the black radical traditions since the nineteenth century to provide context for the new international wave of protests and awareness, tied to a critique of capitalism, privilege and power. 
>> Angela Davis on TV. 

A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës taught me about life, love, and women's work by Miranda Pennington        $28
What is the relationship between the books we read and the lives we lead?

Basket of Deplorables by Tom Rachman        $24
Almost true stories for a post-truth world. Does being an American mean anything any more? 
"These bang-up-to-the-minute stories feel like essential reading as we get to grips with a bizarre new era." - Guardian

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney         $25
"Like taking a street-level tour through six decades of new York."  - New York Times

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich        $38
"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown. I want to write the history of that war. A women's history." An important oral history of Russian women's experiences in World War Two, in English for the first time. 

The Anatomy of Inequality: its social and economic origins - and solutions by Per Molander       $38
Why do some of the wealthiest countries, such as the US, have the greatest levels of inequality, and the poorest quality of life for many of their citizens? Molander looks widely at the causes of inequality and examines steps that can be taken to address injustice and to rectify inequality and its resulting social ills. 
""For a long time, I've been shaking the most debated book of the spring, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Now, out falls the core: Per Molander's The Anatomy of Inequality." - Aftonbladet

Living with a Dead Language: My romance with Latin by Ann Patty     $35
"Studying Latin for fun in later life is a niche fantasy, but the impulse to do something substantial is a more widely shared experience. So is the desire to repair some deficit of one's youth. Patty's book is an effort on the part of the author to decipher her own life by deciphering two-thousand-year old texts. Most vital are the moments in which Patty lets her word-nerd flag fly." - The New Yorker
>> She doesn't move her lips.

The 9th Floor: Conversations with five New Zealand Prime Ministers by Guyon Espiner and Tim Watkin         $40
Geoffrey Palmer (The Reformer); the Trader: Mike Moore (The Trader); Jim Bolger (The Negotiator); the Challenger: Jenny Shipley (The Challenger); Helen Clark (The Commander). 
>> The Podcasts. 

The Rookie: An odyssey through chess (and life) by Stephen Moss       $19
What is the essence of chess? How has chess developed alongside society? What can learning chess teach you about yourself and about how to operate in the world? Can you escape dilettantism in your chosen field and become an expert?  What does in mean to 'win'? Moss alternates 64 'black' and 'white' chapters in this engrossing book.
>> Personality is both the ultimate strength and the ultimate weakness. 

The Less You Know, the Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler       $35
Conjoined twins with very different personalities are trapped with each other and also hidden away s 'defective' in Soviet society. 
>> Based on a true story. 

Sky Full of Stars: Penpals across a century by Sheila Kennard and Harold Musson      $45
Harold Musson wrote almost daily to his wife from the trenches of France during World War One, giving a vivid picture of life under unnatural conditions. Kennard's return letters, written for this book, chart her journey of discovery about her grandfather's life. Local author. 

Consciousness: Confessions of a romantic reductionist by Christof Koch        $45
What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states?

The Teabowl: East and West by Bonnie Kemske        $88
Surveys the wider manifestations of this icon of ceramic art. 
>> The changing context of the teabowl. 

Little Bird Goodness by Megan May           $60
More than 130 irresistible, mostly raw, plant-based recipes from the author of The Unbakery.  

THE 'BOOKER DOZEN'

These thirteen excellent books have been long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. The short list will be announced on 13 September. 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster       $37
Paul Auster’s first book in seven years, 4 3 2 1, follows the life of Archibald Isaac Ferguson born March 3, 1947. It’s not one life though: this Jewish boy born in Newark has 4 lives. Auster tells the story in parts - four strands - in sliding door style. In each part a fateful event at Archibald's father’s business (a burglary, a fire, a tragic accident and a buyout) leads to a change in circumstances for the family, and Archie’s life is determined by how his immediate family respond. Fate plays her part and Archie’s life is altered. The minutiae of Ferguson’s life are delightfully told and, despite the variations in his circumstances, his characteristics along with those of his immediate family keeps the four strands linked together. 

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry        $37
After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. They find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both witness and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when a young Shawnee woman crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges. 
"Days Without End is a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences are so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on. In its pages, Barry conjures a world in miniature, inward, quiet, sacred; and a world of spaces and borders so distant they can barely be imagined." - Guardian

History of Wolves by Emily Fridland        $33

Linda, age 14, lives on a dying commune on the edge of a lake in the Midwest of America. She has grown up isolated both by geography and her understanding of the world, and is an outsider at school, regarded as a freak. One day she notices the arrival of a young family in a cabin on the opposite side of the lake. She starts to befriend them, and for the first time she feels a sense of belonging that has been missing from her life. Leo, the father, is a university professor and an enigmatic figure, perpetually absent. When he returns home, Linda is shunned by the family unit. Desperate to be accepted again, she struggles to resume her place in their home and fails to see the oncoming consequences. 
"So much is accomplished here, not least a kind of trust that this writer will make everything count, including the kind of data that is usually left for dead in a story." - Ben Marcus

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

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor                 $35
A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. One tragedy affects the lives of many people. 
"Absolutely magnificent; one of the most beautiful, affecting novels I've read in years. The prose is alive and ringing. There is so much space and life in every sentence. I don't know how he's done it. It's beautiful." - Eimear McBride 
"McGregor writes with such grace and precision, with love even, about who and where we are, that he leaves behind all other writers of his generation." - Sarah Hall

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack          $23
Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form. 

Elmet by Fiona Mozley         $35
A beautifully written novel about the relationship between a family and a landscape after the father's decision to withdraw from society.  
"An impressive elemental, contemporary rural noir steeped in the literature and legend of the Yorkshire landscape and its medieval history." - Guardian
"I already feel like I've won." 

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy         $38
"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.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders      $33
Is this The American Book of the Dead? Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. This inventive and much-anticipated novel from the author of the Folio Prize-winning Tenth of December has a president, "freshly inclined toward sorrow," driven by grief into communion with the disembodied spirits of the dead in what becomes a meditation on the force of death in personal and collective histories, notably the American Civil War. 
>> Read the review in The New York Times. 
>> Saunders speaks.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie         $27
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. 
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey 

Autumn by Ali Smith          $26
In a nation divided against itself, who is looking to the future and who to the past, and how is love won and lost?
"Transcendental writing about art, death and all the dimensions of love. It's not so much 'reading between the lines' as being blinded by the light between the lines - in a good way." - Deborah Levy 
"Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians." - Financial Times 
"Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting." - The Times

Swing Time by Zadie Smith          $26
Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
"Brilliant." - Guardian
"Superb." - Financial Times 
"Virtuosic and breathtaking." - Times Literary Supplement 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead        $25
A young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia takes the opportunity to escape to the North and freedom aboard the Underground Railroad, which, in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel, is a boxcar railway literally under the ground. A meditation on race and the way that history is perceived. 
"A brutal, vital, devastating novel. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself." - Observer


Come and tell us which book you would choose to win the 2017 Man Booker Prize. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME  #39   (2.9.17)

Our latest newsletter (reviews, news, new releases).

Our Book of the Week this week will takes you places that you have never been and to which you are unlikely ever to go (except by opening this book). Judith Schalansky's ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will is a beautifully produced volume that does everything an atlas can do to engage the imagination: the maps of each island are spare and mysterious and beautifully drawn, the text accompanying each delineates fact but, largely due to the incompletely resolved nature of the histories, there is plenty of room for the reader to activate their imagination to occupy the spaces, and the whole book is well and subtly made. The stories of travellers to or inhabitants of these remote spots of land surrounded by vast oceans are stories of loneliness, refuge and utopianism, of human dreams washed up on rocky shores, of the oddities of nature or society that can flourish only away from the masses, either of land or of people. This is a completely absorbing book. 

>> Keep an eye on our FaceBook page this week, for our daily Remote Island of the Day.

>> "You can tell world history by islands. That is why I call them footnotes to the mainland."

>> "Books are not a form of fetishism."

>> Is the appearance of a book as important as its content? 

>> "I don't even trust my own memory."

>> Schalansky goes to an island.

>> And how many bones are there in a giraffe's neck? 

Minicry   {Review by STELLA} In the case of Minicry, smallness is a gem, a very small zine that will fit into your wallet or purse. I suggest you carry a Minicry with you wherever you go. This special limited edition from the Mimicry literary journal team, is printed in three colours (blue, yellow and pink), hand stitched, illustrated by Kate Depree with line drawings of little bits and pieces (a thimble, a leaf, those bread bag tags, a chess piece (notably just a pawn), a reel of cotton, an ant, a screw, a ring… and more) for the endpapers along with specific drawings to illustrate the texts. The writings include an email message, a tweet, some short poems, a headline and a list. The writers include Ashleigh Young, Kirsten McDougall, Courtney Sina Meredith, Henry Cooke and Uther Dean. Each day I have a new favourite page - today it is the email extract from Guy Montgomery “I had my headphones in, Google maps open and no music playing: the perfect crime.”  Only a few pages long, it is surprising how much pleasure this little publication gives - a reminder that it pays to slow down and look at each page with awareness, to read carefully, to explore, think and enjoy. The hand-made aesthetic definitely adds to the pleasure of Minicry, the illustrations are simple yet spot on, and the writing is brief and thoughtful, full of humour and pathos.

Pulse Points by Jennifer Down    {Review by STELLA} Pulse Points could have been named Nerve Endings. Jennifer Down’s short story collection starts quietly, feeling much like many slice-of-life episode tales. It’s not long into the stories that the tempo increases and you are struck by the edginess of these moments. These pulse points. I wondered about the title: why pulse points? As I read on, I felt I was standing beside each protagonist, a silent witness to their loss, despair, realisations and moments of clarity: as a reader taking their pulse - watchful and caring. Often in short stories, the lives of the characters can be fleeting, sometimes forgettable. Down has a knack of making each one count, largely due to her skill at capturing those small moments of anger, self-doubt, love and failing that make us human. There is nothing out of the ordinary here, yet one feels that every moment is special, is defined for just that person, a turning point, a resting point or a moment of connection. In 'Aokigahara' a sister makes a pilgrimage to the final resting place of her brother. The story is evocative and captures the strange forest known as The Sea of Trees, as well as the difficulties of a family dealing with suicide. In 'We Got Used to Here Fast', two siblings are whisked away from their depressive mother to a happier life with their grandparents. On their tedious, long and unsettling journey, they stop for the night in the middle of nowhere, parked in front of a huge satellite dish. Two smaller satellite dishes provide a portal for telling secrets, a connection for Sam and Lally which never falters, despite the hardships that come later in their lives. 'Vox Clamantis' sees Abby having to pretend to be still engaged to the self-centred Johnny. His mother is dying and she is fond of Abby. You sit, on edge, in the car with Johnny, and, like Abby, are riven by both frustration and compassion. These stories are set in both America and Australia, in small towns where characters are simultaneously sucked down, suffocated and protected by the nature of a close community, in cities which are anonymous, free and lonely, and in the suburbs which are safe, yet yell drudgery. The landscapes are rich in emotion and charged with electricity. Yet these dim in comparison to the rawness, the closeness and the sparking dialogue and relationships between the characters, their internal emotional lives, their human failings and achievements, the violence that infiltrates their lives or the sadness that captures them unsuspectingly. These stories at all turns are tragic and tender. Down keeps a fine finger on the pulse.

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba     {Review by THOMAS} “It was once a happy city: we were once happy girls. It was as if we were all one mouth eating the ham, as if our cheese were all the same cheese: wholesome and creamy and tasting the same to all of us.” When a young girl arrives in an orphanage following the deaths of her parents in a car accident, she brings an unhealable wound into the community of girls. The identity of the group, which had hitherto subsisted in a single collective consciousness begins to differentiate by contact with a new and unassimilable member. “Her first triumph was this: we were no longer all the same. It was as if, in a short space of time, we had all become aware of so many things. Those things hurt, they flowed down like a river from upstairs, where the principal and the adults lived.” The otherness of Marina is both threatening and alluring, hateful and attractive, and as the girls rub up against each other both poles of this ambivalence are potentised without being able to discharge their energy. Such Small Hands is narrated alternately by Marina, her immature mind incapable of accepting the death of her parents and accordingly unable to grieve for them, unable to release the hurt that instead grows and spreads under the surface of the whole orphanage society, bringing awkwardness to what hitherto been facile and unexamined, and by the collective voice of the orphans, desperate to retain the integrity of their undeveloped state, their stifling innocence, and at the same time fascinated by the adult knowledge that Marina represents, the scar on her torso, her familiarity with death (though they also are orphans they are preconscious orphans, ‘natural’ orphans, orphans without specific loss). “Marina had been there watching over our mistake. Everything around her was contaminated, and so were we.” Marina is both one of them and an outsider, a watching eye that divides them, both offering and threatening to pull them into awareness of their individuality (an awareness that cannot be distinguished from an awareness of death). “Now we knew we were inescapably the way we were. It was a discovery you could do nothing with, a discovery that served no purpose.” Awareness of one’s separation from the world is the awareness of trauma, or, more specifically, is the trauma. What we think of as our pleasures are those things that relieve us from the awareness of our not being the world we are aware of. Sports and religion and nationalism reinstate the ‘magical’ group thinking of the undeveloped mind, relieving their adherents from individual identity and individual responsibility. The harmony of the underlying unity, without the individualising angst that comes with self-awareness, will at all costs maintain itself in the face of any threat to its claustrophobic innocence, and will commit whatever atrocity will suppress a developmental threat. When the orphans steal Marina’s doll, also called Marina, which had been given to her by the psychologist, presumably to encourage her to express and release her devastation, they dismember it and return it to her in parts. Later, Marina institutes a nighttime game in which each of the girls takes a turn to be a doll, to be passively undressed and dressed and manipulated and treated as a doll, to be ‘small’, depersonalised, objectified, relieved of individuality to become nothing but the projection and plaything of the group, the ‘other’ completely at its mercy, the vector both of the desire for experience and of the simultaneous desire to unmake or unhave that experience. A game, a ritual, a sport, a sacrifice, a mob: each relieves us of the angst of our individual experience and becomes also the collective expression of that angst. When Marina insists on taking a turn as the doll in the nighttime ritual, her passivity, her objectification, allows the discharge of the contradictory forces, the longing and repulsion, that have threatened the immaturity of the group since her arrival. It is “as if the living were suddenly possessed by a violent covetousness of the dead ones’ peace.” Fascination and destruction can no longer be distinguished from one another: “desire was a big knife and we were the handle.” Barba is convincing in his recreation of the inherently psychotic thinking of childhood (no, this is surely too glib: the progression from childhood is one made against the pull of retrograde ‘psychotic’ forces which are discharged when experienced in adulthood by the psychotic/antipsychotic collective rituals of sport, religion, nationalism and so forth or held at bay by angst), the instability of identity and nausea of aetiological inconstancy that is inherent in the horribleness (as well as in the wonders) of childhood.

A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran   {Review by THOMAS} Emil Cioran is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. I thought I would like him more than I do. Perhaps it is that he trumpets his nihilism, that he shouts out the immanence of our demise from the event horizon of whatever black hole we are heading towards, that his pessimism is, above all, dramatic (does this call its authenticity into question? (I don’t think so)), that makes me tire of him (he should perhaps be read (by me, at least) in small doses). Our differences are perhaps more of temperament than of territory; to me the underlying nullity of existence is more irredeemable than tragic, and I am to a degree suspicious of the heroic trappings and lyricism of his despair. That said, Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing). The contents page of this book reads like the publishing list of an American academic publisher (“Genealogy of Fanaticism – In the Graveyard of Definitions – Civilisation and Frivolity – Supremacy of the Adjective – Apotheosis of the Vague – The Reactionary Angels – Militant Mourning – Farewell to Philosophy – Obsession of the Essential” &c, &c), and the book itself contains enough nihilistic aphorisms to fill a lifetime’s worth of anti-inspirational calendars (now, there’s a publishing project…), for example: “One is ‘civilised’ insofar as one does not proclaim one’s leprosy.” Great stuff. >> Six pleasant minutes with the miserabilist. >> "Without the idea of suicide I would surely have killed myself." >> The Apocalypse according to Cioran.

NEW RELEASES
These interesting books seek shelf-space in your home.

These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy           $21
Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries, some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them, Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for Jaeggy, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. >> Read Thomas's review. 

Belladonna by Daša Drndić      $38
The life and health of a retired psychologist have declined to the extent that he gains insight into the disadvantaged of society and into the forces that oppress them, and also into the faculty of memory that can either liberate or condemn the one who remembers. A novel of Sebaldean scope and resonance. 
>>"There are no small fascisms."  

My Dad Used to Be So Cool by Keith Negley       $28
Why doesn't Dad do all those cool things he used to do? Why did he stop? (Could it be because having a child was somehow cooler?) From the author/illustrator of Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. 

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent         $35
Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds. "This is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling." - Stella

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba        $28
A girl arrives at an orphanage after the deaths of her parents in a car accident. Her presence is a wound to the orphans' idea of themselves, and they also begin to have a disturbing effect upon the incomer. What role does the girl's doll play in the hazards that soon beset the inmates of the orphanage? 
"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister. Lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. It is about language, wounding, wickedness; but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that 'nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of its intense fragility'." - Sarah Perry, Guardian
>> "All writers have a corpse in their closet."

Paintings in Proust: A visual companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles       $45
A beautifully presented survey of all the artworks mentioned in In Search of Lost Time, with quotes and contextual notes. 

Franklin's Flying Bookshop by Jen Campbell and Katie Harnett        $28
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea). 

Beg, Steal and Borrow: Artists against originality by Robert Shore       $28
If "all art is theft" (Picasso), what can we make of art that deliberately appropriates, subsumes, samples or reconfigures other art? Interesting. 

The Seabird's Cry: The lives and loves of puffins, gannets and other ocean voyagers by Adam Nicolson        $40
At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores - reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds' home. 
"I was entranced - my mind thrilling to the veers and lifts of thought, to the beautiful deftness of the prose. This marvellous book inhabits with graceful ease both the mythic and the scientific, and remains alert to the vulnerability of these birds as well as to their wonder. It is a work that takes wing in the mind." - Robert Macfarlane

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie         $27
Family, society, love and religion clash in this modern reworking of the themes of Antigone. Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. 
"Home Fire left me awestruck, shaken, on the edge of my chair, filled with admiration for her courage and ambition. Recommended reading for prime ministers and presidents everywhere." - Peter Carey 

Ostro by Julia Busuttil Nishimura         $50
"My approach to food favours intuition over strict rules and is about using your hands, rushing a little less and savouring the details. It's not food that needs to be placed on a pedestal or admired from afar; it is food that slowly weaves its way into the fabric of your daily life - food for living and sharing."
The online slow food phenomenon has now produced this very beautiful cookbook. Very satisfying - even just to look through. 

Petite Fleur by Ioso Havilio         $30
When a young father kills his over-friendly neighbour and discovers that he is alive again the next day, he repeats the experiment on a regular basis and begins to wonder if he is exempt from the laws of causality. What effect does this have on his relationship with his wife and daughter?
"As vertiginous, airtight and intense as a dream." - Yuri Herrera

The Grammar of Spice by Caz Hildebrand         $45
Explains not only the history of every imaginable sort of spice, but imparts an understanding that enables the reader to use and combine them effectively when cooking. Wonderful illuminated illustrations throughout. 

Aukati by Michalia Arathimos         $38
Alexia is a law student escaping the Greek family that stifles her, and Isaiah is a young Maori returning home to find the family he's lost. Cut loose from their own cultures, they have volunteered to help Isaiah's Taranaki iwi get rid of the fracking that's devastating their land and water. The deeper Alexia and Isaiah go into the fight, the closer they get to understanding the different worlds they inhabit.

The Epic City: The world on the streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury           $37
Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Choudhury returned to the city as an adult he found it much unchanged from his childhood, a city of intense localism, very different from the new age of consumption that was revolutionising other Indian cities. Why?
"Beautifully observed and even more beautifully written, The Epic City marks the arrival of a major new talent." - William Dalrymple

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray        $40
Victoria's appetite for life was expressed in her appetite for food: the queen consistently over-ate all her life. Her appetites presided over a revolution in English cuisine. 
"Had me at the first sentence." - Nigel Slater 
"Zingy, fresh, and unexpected: Annie Gray, the queen of food historians, finds her perfect subject." - Lucy Worsley 
>> Gray on the importance of dinner to the British Empire. 

Firecrackers: Female photographers now by Fiona Rogers and Max Houghton         $66
Features 30 cutting-edge women photographers from around the world.
>>fire-cracker.org/

Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters with the mysteries and meanings of language by Daniel Tammet        $37
Interesting and eclectic set of essays about the diverse characteristics of various languages, and of humans' instinct to communicate.

 The King's Assassin: The fatal affair of George Villiers and James I by Benjamin Woolley       $50
Following the death of James I in 1625, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and the king's 'wife' for ten years, was accused of poisoning him. A parliamentary enquiry found cleared him and the circumstance was relegated to the sidelines of history, but Woolley in this groundbreaking book suggests the allegations were in fact true.

 White Bicycles: Making music in the 1960s by Joe Boyd        $25
When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd. Who better to give a deep insight into the creative maelstrom of the '60s music scene than Joe Boyd? 

The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton         $33
"Omar Robert Hamilton brings vividly to life the failed revolution of 2011 on the streets of Cairo, in all its youthful bravery and naive utopianism." - J.M. Coetzee
"I finished this novel with fascination and admiration. It gives a picture of the inside of a popular movement that we all saw from the outside, in countless news broadcasts and foreign-correspondent reports, a picture so vivid and powerful that it gives a passionate life and reality to what might have been perceived only as abstract principles. A thousand vivid details print themselves on the reader's memory: it will be a long time before we read anything so skilfully brought to life." - Philip Pullman
"Few writers could capture the frenetic speed of an Internet-fuelled uprising alongside the time-stopping corporeal reality of bullet-ridden bodies, all while never losing sight of the love that powered Egypt's revolutionary moment. Omar Robert Hamilton can do all that and more. Crossing borders and generations, he brings us into the movement's effervescent hope and its crushing heartbreak, probing timeless questions about what the living owe to the dead. Unbearable. Unmissable. A dazzling debut." - Naomi Klein

On a Magical, Do-Nothing Day by Beatrice Alemagna        $28
A beautifully illustrated invocation of the wonders to be found outside on a rainy day. 

Every Third Thought: On life, death and the endgame by Robert McCrum        $38
"A brilliant, wise, compassionate and consoling account of death and dying in a secular age. McCrum moves seamlessly from personal testimonies to medical case studies to recent developments in neuroscience. He asks profound philosophical questions about mortality, finitude and the unknown. A uniquely beautiful and significant book." - Joanna Kavenna
"Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever and oddly joyous, Every Third Thought is beautiful and - most of all - true." - Kate Mosse

The London Jungle Book by Bhajju Shyam        $30
Bhajju Shyam, an artist from the Gond tribe in central India, was commissioned to paint the walls of an Indian restaurant in London, and spent two months in the city. The book that emerged from the journey is a visual travelogue of his first encounter with a western metropolis. Bhajju brings the signs of the Gond forest to bear on the city, turning London into an exotic jungle.

That Was a Shiver by James Kelman         $33
Short stories written with great precision and sympathy for the emotional depths below the surfaces of everyday life. 
"Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can." - Alan Warner
"What Kelman creates here and elsewhere in this collection is an atmosphere of Kafka-esque anxiety and menace, of things falling apart, of centres unable to hold. Like the best short story writers – James Joyce, Kafka, John Cheever, Alice Munro – he has reinvented the form through his audacity not to conform to the expectations of those who underestimate the intelligence and perceptiveness of the reading public. His stories may concern dossers and delusionists, no-hopers and chancers, petty criminals and serial gamblers, but each one is an individual who has been dealt a hand that he must learn to play or lose his lot. What he is offering are slices of lives that most western literature ignores." - Herald Scotland 

Catching Breath: The making and unmaking of tuberculosis by Kathryn Lougheed         $28
For forty thousand years, TB has accompanied humans in all their migrations and endeavours, keeping pace even with medical attempts to eradicate it. As TB is developing antibiotic resistance worldwide - has humanity met its match? 

The Cocktail Garden: Botanical cocktails for every season by Adriana Picker and Ed Loveday          $30
A beautifully illustrated guide to making the most mouthwatering cocktails from fruits and herbs that might be in your own garden.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1916 by Richard J. Evans         $38
A period in which what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, in which huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and in which, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. Evans accounts for revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but also treats illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy, and a host of other things.

Dr James Barry: A woman ahead of her time by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield         $22
Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, ladykiller, eccentric. He performed the first successful Caesarean in the British Empire, outraged the military establishment and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down at Scutari. At home he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and a terrier. Long ago in Cork, Ireland, he had also been a mother. This is the amazing tale of Margaret Anne Bulkley, the young woman who broke the rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century.

Play With Me: Dolls, women, art by Grace Banks         $55
The inanimate female form has often been used by artists to make statements about the objectification of women and to explore the frontiers of individual identity and the replicability of experience. Banks surveys how artificial women can generate political and ethical debate. 

Psychedelia, And other colours by Rob Chapman         $40
The discovery of the psychoactive consequences of LSD was soon followed by its cultural manifestations. These, however took on quite different characteristics depending on their host culture: the psychedelia of the west coast of the US differed in texture from that of the UK. Chapman's fascinating book explores the territory.
 >> Chapman's playlist to accompany the book. 

Tin Man by Sarah Winman        $30
From the author of When God Was a Rabbit. 
"Tin Man is Winman's best novel yet. The playful subversiveness still bubbles away but there's a new candour there, an acceptance of needs and flaws that proves deeply touching. This is storytelling as cruelly kind as fate itself." - Patrick Gale

The Children of Willesden Lane: A true story of hope and survival during World War II by Mona Gobalek and Lee Cohen        $19
Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura Gobalek escaped Vienna to London on the Kindertransport, where she eventually studies at the Royal Academy. How can she learn the fates of her sisters and the rest of her family she left behind?

The Broken Ladder: How inequality changes the way we think, live and die by Keith Payne         $38
Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we generally associate with poverty: lower than average life expectancies, mental illness and crime. 

Bitch Doctrine: Essays for dissenting adults by Laurie Penny        $27
Penny is ready to confront injustice wherever she finds it.
"I can't really think of another writer who so consistently and bravely keeps thinking and talking and learning and trying to make the world better." - Caitlin Moran
>> A manifesto for change. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME   #38   (26.8.17)

This week's newsletter includes our reviews, news, events, courses, competitions, recommendations, new releases and other things. 

This week's Book of the Week is Olga Tokarczuk's remarkable sort-of-novel, FLIGHTS, published by Text Publishing.

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. {Review by THOMAS}

>> Read an excerpt. 

>> Read another excerpt. (The Fitzcarraldo Editions edition is also available).

>> "Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own." - Guardian

>> Visit Olga Tokarczuk's library (and learn Polish incidentally). 

Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell     {Reviewed by STELLA} When the Queen Mary, a Victorian liner, sinks, a baby with hair the colour of lightning is found inside a cello case floating on the English Channel. She is discovered by eccentric scholar Charles Maxim, who names her Sophie and takes her into his home, much against the advice of the authorities. While Sophie sometimes eats off an atlas or writes her sums on the wallpaper, she is surrounded by music, words, and love. When the inspectors come, despite the best efforts of Charles and Sophie to tidy and clean the house and make themselves presentable, the authorities conclude that now that she is thirteen Maxim is not a suitable guardian, and Sophie is to be moved to an orphanage where she will be taught to be a proper young lady. In a fit of fury, Sophie destroys the cello case that saved her life, only to find a clue, and away they head over the channel to Paris. On the run from the authorities, Charles and Sophie are mother-hunting. Sophie is convinced her mother survived the sinking of the ship and she’s determined to take risks to find her. Risks that involve a strange boy, Matteo, and a band of wayward children who live above the streets of Paris on rooftops or in treetops, eking out a precarious existence - one that is preferable to the orphanage or workhouse. Can Sophie trust these unusual, secretive children? Will she be courageous enough to face physical danger and determined enough to believe in herself? Katherine Rundell creates magic with her cast of characters and description of place. Sophie is a wild child and determined young woman you warm to immediately: stubborn, intelligent, brave and vulnerable. Matteo is a perfect companion: resourceful, secretive and daring. Charles is an adult who brings the rules, lives by the heart and is loyal to the core. Rundell is an exquisite writer, her pace is spot on, the plot inventive and her language witty. You will find it hard to leave Sophie behind when you close the final page of this adventurous and warm-hearted novel. Fortunately,Rundell has several other titles to her name, the latest has just arrived -The Explorer.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent     {Reviewed by STELLA} Many debuts come with much fanfare - some of which creates deflation.My Absolute Darling is not one of those. Author Gabriel Tallent can write in the most lyrical way about the most horrific violence and abuse. Unsurprisingly, My Absolute Darling has been compared with A Little Life and The Sport of Kings. Set against the backdrop of the California coast, in Mendocino (where the author grew up), we meet fourteen-year-old Turtle (Julia) - tough, resourceful, able to handle a gun at six, able to survive in the wilderness with little or no equipment, watchful, lonely. Turtle lives with her father, Martin - her mother disappeared when she was very little. She struggles at school yet in her internal world she is intelligent - knowledgeable and philosophical. Her home life is controlled and confined by a set of predetermined rules and expectations laid down by her disturbed father: a father who believes that the apocalypse is upon them, a paranoid survivalist who insists he is training his daughter to exist against all odds, who loves his daughter more than anything. Tallent does not shy from the abuse which Turtle encounters, and his skill lies in the care with which he portrays the relationship between father and daughter and the beauty of his words. Martin and Turtle both have an understanding of nature, of the physical world around them, and this seems to hold them in some kind of warped isolation together. Julia has no friends at school, knows no other life. Her only other true relationship is with her grandfather, an war vet alcoholic who lives in a trailer on the family property. When Julia is with her grandfather you sense her relax. At all other times, Turtle is overly aware and on edge, expecting a poor outcome, ready to be at fault, ‘a useless slit’. This tension overlays the whole book, so even when things are going well in Turtle’s world you sense that this is the calm before the storm and that the storm will be mighty. The tension is so finely wrought that you find yourself torn between turning away and being compelled to stay with Turtle despite your unease. At the half point of the book, Turtle takes off on a trek cross-country (something she does from time to time to save herself from the constant trauma), to be alone. This time she comes across two boys just a little older than herself who are out adventuring, unwittingly unprepared for the elements and completely lost. Turtle follows them into the night and decides to rescue them, and so makes a departure in her life - real contact with others. This encounter becomes a pivotal point in the story: something changes in Turtle, something that Martin senses and feels threatened by. From this point, you understand that merely surviving will not be enough. Turtle will have to use her sharp and finely tuned instincts to decipher her truth and be tougher than she has ever been. And this is a tough, but an incredible, novel that reveals the internal world of damage and explores the psyche of Turtle humanely and honestly. With a remarkable character, a plot that keeps you wired, lyrical writing about relationships and nature, My Absolute Darling is compelling and unsettling. >>This book will be released this week. Let us put a copy aside for you.

These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy      {Reviewed by THOMAS} The desire to understand must not be confused with the desire to know, especially in biography. Too often and too soon an accretion of facts obscures a subject, plastering detail over detail, obscuring the essential lineaments in the mistaken notion that we are approaching a definitive life, whereas such a life, even if it were possible, could not be understood. Instead a labour of whittling is required, a paring from the mass of fact all but those details that cannot be separated from the subject, the details that make the subject themself and not another, the details therefore that are the key to the inner life, so to call it, of the subject and the cause of all the extraneous details of which we are relieved the necessity of acquiring (unless we find we enjoy this as sport). Jaeggy, whose brief fictions, such as those in I am the Brother of XX, remain as pleasant burrs in the mind long after the short time spent reading them, has here written three brief biographies, of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and Marcel Schwob, each as brief and effective as a lightning strike and as memorable. Jaeggy is interested in discovering what it was about these figures that made them them and not someone else. By assembling details, quotes, sketches of situations, pin-sharp portraits of contemporaries (some of which, in a few words, will change the way you remember them), Jaeggy takes us close to the membrane, so to call it, that surrounds the known, the membrane that these writers were intent on stretching, or constitutionally unable not to stretch, beyond which lay and lies madness and death, the constant themes of all Jaeggy’s attentions, and, for her, the backdrop to, if not the object of, all creative striving. How memorably Jaeggy gives us sweet De Quincey’s bifurcation, by a mixture of inclination, reading and opium, from the world inhabited by others, his house a place of “paper storage, fragments of delirium eaten away by dust”, and poor Keats, whose “moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes,” and Schwob, with his appetite for grief tracing and retracing the arcs of his friends’ deaths towards his own. These essays are so clean and sharp that light will refract within them long after you have ceased to read, drawing you back to read again. Is the understanding you have gained of these writers something that belongs to them? Too bad, you will henceforth be unable to shake the belief that you have gained some access to their inner lives that has been otherwise denied.

Letters from a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake  {Reviewed by THOMAS} “You will understand, unless you are very stupid, how exciting it is after so many years spent in searching for the White Lion, to feel so close to him.” The characters of Peake’s fictions, finding conventional society too narrow to contain them, turn their backs upon all that is familiar, traditional and expected of them and choose the path of loneliness that is the only alternative, monopraxis establishing no maps to variance, to learn that the path of loneliness is one to be beaten for oneself. Where there is no route forward a route must be made forward, and to carry on is to carry on with no companion but perhaps an oddity not of the same order of being as oneself. This is a melancholy path but it would be gritless to despair for to despair is the intended fate of all who turn their backs on lit windows and dining tables. One such wanderer, a “lost uncle”, though to whom he is lost is unclear, finds himself, one-legged but with a useful spike to complete his complement of limbs, more suited to the hazards and loneliness of arctic wastes than he is to human company, and travels north in search of the White Lion, whose image he has seen on a stamp. The longing of the Peakesean wayfarer draws him to the cold far edges of the mind, where snow may be swept by wind into a vast column, clearing the underlying ice so that the monsters that swim beneath may grin up as he passes. He has only a mutant turtle-dog named Jackson for company and to carry his gear. And the lion? Single-mindedness such as the uncle’s cannot fail, but the prize is bound to disappoint, the White Lion to be vast but old and on the point of death, the animals of the North all gathered for its farewell. And out of such loneliness, from this nowhere to which such uncles belong, from these experiences from beyond the usual ambit of experience, why these letters posted back to an undifferentiated nephew, these, in this case, distinctive pencil drawings with typewritten scraps of text pasted on? Does the letter, the book, the artefact, the text perform an inward urgency, tethering the sojourner to a sanity from which they might otherwise be distant? Or is there a magnanimity in production when to not produce would be less draining: does a writer imagine that the world might somehow be better (or worse) for their imposing their words upon others or upon at least the possibility of others? The task of an explorer is to explore. Is there any quest that does not leave a trace?

Contestants were required to choose a piece of spam, junk mail or advertising and to write a poem using only the vocabulary of their chosen junk. We were overwhelmed with the number of entries - many thanks to everyone. 


Winner: Janine Martig 

I + Work = Audrey

Flawless Audrey
Seamless
Perfect
Confident

I can be you
As perfect as you
I correct my errors
to be as flawless as you

I can be you
I + work = you
It's the way

All that work
to be you

All that work to be
Perfect
Seamless
Flawless
To be Audrey

Can I be as confident 
as you?

Audrey?

Can I?

Audrey?

All that work...


Judges' comment: This poem uses the limited vocabulary of the advertisement to wring a huge amount of pathos out of the fact that grammatical insecurity is merely a manifestation of personal insecurity.





Commended: Joe Papps

Volume

An unsolicited open-access map,
the map with no connections between national places,
separate locations,
there is no limit.

A sheet, a copy,
originating from various wandering locations,
mobile encounters,
there is no limit.

Following the day,
you associate streets with volumes of phantom space,
virtual tours,
there is no limit.

Contribute to this new piece,
ensure your billstickers amount to your name,
send or deliver,
there is no limit.

A junk arrangement,
you will no doubt amount to the spam you receive,
estimate twenty years,
there is no limit. 


Judges' comment: This poem cleverly appropriates the vocabulary of the competition instructions to explore the existential threats and opportunities of the concept of the limit (or the constraints of its absence). 'Phantom space' is a concept that deserves a whole book.






Commended: Jeannette Cook

Free Range

Black chook
you are luscious,
velvet smooth, sumptuous, silky,
elegant as you run by the river
below our cellar door.

We are impressed by the red-gold
of your powerful head,
your beautifully structured form
as you scoop ripe fruit
onto your palate.

Big, weighty, generous,
a champion layer delivered to us laden.
Today we collected two -
smooth in the hand they lay
like white stars.

We lovers from across the world

built on this estate below the range
to share our passion
for simple things. Your delicious offer
has made us rich. 




Judges' comment: This poems nicely turns the adjective-laden vocabulary of advertising inwards to construct a carefully patterned and very personal poem.

NEW RELEASES
These books have come in asking for you.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk         $37
We have in us 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. 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.
>> Read Thomas's review. 

Sleeps Standing / Moetū by Witi Ihimaera and Hēmi Kelly       $35
The three-day siege of the Battle of Orakau in 1864, in which 1700 Imperial troops laid siege to a hastily constructed pa sheltering 300 Maori men, women and children, marked the end of the Waikato War. Ihimaera tells the history from the point of view of a Moetu, a boy on the side that refused to submit and fought to the end. With facing texts in English and Maori (by Hemi Kelly). First-hand accounts and documentary illustrations appended. 

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss           $30
A dazzlingly intelligent dual-narrative novel concerning, on the one hand, a retired New York lawyer who 'disappears' to Tel Aviv, and, on the other, a novelist named Nicole Krauss who comes home to find herself already there, and so sets off towards the point the narratives meet. Elegant and replete with Kraussian themes of memory, solitude and Jewishness.
"Restores your faith in fiction." - Ali Smith
"Charming, tender, and wholly original." - J. M. Coetzee
>>"What is ‘real’ and what isn’t, and do such questions even apply, really, to something that is entirely a construction, from beginning to end?" 

Late Essays, 2006-2016 by J.M. Coetzee        $38
As well as being a deeply thoughtful writer, Coetzee has always been a deeply thoughtful reader, and his essays are helpful in unlocking the work of other writers, including, here, Beckett, Walser, Murnane, Goethe and Kleist. 

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard          $38
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Following the remarkable quasiautobiographical 'My Struggle' series, Knausgaard has begun to produce an impressionistic personal encyclopedia of the world to appear in four seasonal volumes. The first begins as a letter to his unborn daughter and proceeds to catalogue the wonders and banalities of elements of the natural and human worlds, and of their effect on each other. Illustrations by Vanessa Baird. 
>> The sun: "utterly unapproachable and completely indifferent."
>> "I am back writing good sentences."

The Book of Dirt by Bram Presser        $37
"Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival." - Mireille Juchau

Twins by Dirk Kurbjuweit          $24
"We didn't want to be like twins-we wanted to be twins. We wanted to be absolutely identical. But because we hadn't been born twins, we had to make ourselves the same-and part of that, of course, was having to go through all our most important experiences together." Rowing partners Johann and Ludwig are best friends, but that's not enough. To defeat the region's current champions, identical twins from a nearby town, they must become twins too. Ludwig has a plan: they will eat, sleep, breathe and even think in perfect harmony. Only then will they have a chance of winning. But Johann has a secret he's been keeping from his friend-and when Ludwig begins acting strangely, Johann realises that his 'twin' wants to put their bond to the ultimate test.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang      $27
Centred on a community of immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life on the poverty line in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the many ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up.
"As I read, I quickly realized this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world, not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang's version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into a bold, startling brilliance. Get ready." - Miranda July 
"Obscene, beautiful, moving." - The New Yorker
>> Jenny Zhang and Lena Dunham.

The Explorer by Katherine Rundell         $19
From his seat in the tiny aeroplane, Fred watches as the mysteries of the Amazon jungle pass by below him. He has always dreamed of becoming an explorer, of making history and of reading his name amongst the lists of great discoveries. If only he could land and look about him. As the plane crashes into the canopy, Fred is suddenly left without a choice. He and the three other children may be alive, but the jungle is a vast, untamed place. With no hope of rescue, the chance of getting home feels impossibly small. Rundell, author of The Wolf Wilder, writes beautifully as always.

Edmund Hillary, A biography by Michael Gill         $60

Exhaustive and magisterial, this biography benefits from its author's first-hand knowledge and from his access to Hillary's personal papers. It reveals dimensions of Hillary's life not hitherto examined. 

Democracy and its Crisis by A.C. Grayling         $37
Why are the institutions of representative democracy seemingly unable to sustain themselves against forces they were designed to manage, and why does it matter?

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting       $38
When a beautifully made coffin turns up for Edvard's grandfather, whose death is nowhere in sight, Edvard begins to unravel the mystery of his lost uncle and dead parents, an unravelling that takes him from the remote Norwegian farmstead where he grew up to the Shetland Islands, to the historic battlefields of France. The novel is neatly dovetailed throughout, just like the woodwork that runs through it. From the author of the incomparable Norwegian Wood. 
>> Mytting speaks with Kathryn Ryan. 

Ragnar Redbeard: The antipodean origins of radical fabulist Arthur Desmond by Mark Derby         $20
The first concrete evidence for Desmond arrives when he stood for parliament in Hawkes Bay in 1884 (coming last of three candidates). He continued to campaign against landlords, bankers and monopolists, and for Maori against the settlers (and aligning himself with Te Kooti). By the time he left New Zealand in 1892, Desmond had already formulated the first version of Might is Right, his notorious manifesto of extreme social Darwinism, in which he proposed that the strong have an evolutionary duty to uproot and supplant the weak (including Christians).

The Library: A catalogue of wonders by Stuart Kells       $38
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind. 

The Complete Guide to Baking: Bread, brioche and other gourmet treats by Rodolphe Landemaine        $65 
Everything from the fundamentals (types of flours and starters; stages of fermentation; basic doughs and fillings) through to recipes for breads (baguettes, sourdoughs, speciality breads, flavoured breads, oil breads and milk breads), Viennese pastries (croissants, pains au chocolat, apple tarts) gateaux (flan patissier, pistachio and apricot tart, spice bread), brioches (Parisian, praline, plaited, layered and cakes) and biscuits (sables, madeleines, almond tuiles).  

Veneto: Recipes from an Italian country kitchen by Valeria Necchio        $45
Authentic and achievable recipes from the northeast of Italy, attractively presented. 

The Museum of Words: A memoir of language, writing and mortality by Georgia Blain         $38
In 2015 a tumour in the language centre of her brain robbed Blain of her ability to speak. After the rigours of treatment, she set about rebuilding her linguistic capacities through writing. At the same time, her mother was losing her faculties to Alzheimer's disease. An interesting meditation of the place of language in our conception of ourselves.  

The Inhabitable Boy by J.M. Moreaux         $24
Being a teenager is hard enough without someone else using your body to commit murder. With the help of his 'ghost pimp,' Andy earns extra cash renting his body to spirits hungry for a taste of the corporeal world. But one day his body is returned battered and bruised, and he finds himself accused of a murder he doesn't remember committing. With the police on his trail and time running out, Andy must embark on a dangerous quest to catch the spectral killer, unaware he's a pawn in a larger conflict between supernatural forces. Exciting YA fiction from local author Mike Moreaux.

Casting Off: A memoir by Elspeth Sandys          $35
Continues the project begun in What Lies Beneath into the sixties, sexual liberation, literature and Thatcherism. 

How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus       $37
Ten years old and irrepressibly curious, Ellie lives with her fisherman father, Peter, on the wild North Yorkshire coast. Her mother's breakdown is discussed only in whispers, with the promise 'better by Christmas' and no further explanation. Steering by the light of her dad's sea-myths, her mum's memories of home across the water, and a fierce spirit all her own, Ellie begins to learn how her world is put together (or pulled apart).

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee     $35
The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many layers, shades and divides. 
"Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing. As easy to devour as a 19th-century romance." - New York Times
"This big, beguiling book has all the distinguishing marks of a Great American Novel. A remarkable writer." - The Times

The Man Who Climbs Trees: A memoir by James Aldred       $35
Nature writing from a professional tree-climber whose work has taken him into the upper strata of forests around the world. Beautifully written.

The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk       $38
Orhan Pamuk’s tenth novel, The Red-Haired Woman, is the story of a well-digger and his apprentice looking for water on barren land. It is also a novel of ideas in the tradition of the French conte philosophique. In mid-1980s Istanbul, Master Mahmut and his apprentice use ancient methods to dig new wells. This is the tale of their back-breaking struggle, but it is also an exploration—through stories and images—of ideas about fathers and sons, authoritarianism and individuality, state and freedom, reading and seeing. 

A Crack in Creation: The new power to control evolution by Jennifer Doudna and Sam Sternberg          $40
Doudna's discovery of the genome editing capacities of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) has provided scientists with potentially the most powerful interventional tool yet in the field of genetics. 

Ferment: A guide to the ancient art of culturing foods by Holly Davis         $50
Bread, vinegar, kvass, yoghurt, butter, sauerkraut, kimchi, natural sodas, scrumpy, mead, pickles, kefir, creme fraiche, buttermilk, kombucha, cheese, miso, tempeh: you can make it all. Gentle and thorough. 

First Fox by Leanne Radojkovich       $23
"Like a fox running over snow there is a lightness, a poetic grace and a keen focus to these stories. Sharp, true and always hinting at a larger world, the work has a fable-like quality. Devour this delightful book in one sitting, then savour the stories all over again. " - Frankie McMillan
Illustrations by Rachel J. Fenton.
>> The back of a woman walking away. Radojkovich's flash fiction.

Footsteps: Literary pilgrimages around the world, from Farrente's Naples to Hammetti's San Francisco from The New York Times         $38
Engaging columns on literary travel.

The Kite and the String: How to write with spontaneity and control - and live to tell the tale by Alice Mattison         $35
"An insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher.
A book-length master class." - The Atlantic 

What's Up Top? by Marc Martin            $28
What is at the top of the ladder? Who knows.

Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America by Nancy MacLean          $40
Exposes political economist James McGill Buchanan as the architect behind the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatise public education, and curb democratic majority rule.

The Water Kingdom: A secret history of China by Philip Ball       $30
A grand history of China's deep and recent history told through its relationship and management of water.

The City of the Secret Rivers by Jacob Sager Weinstein        $23
London is crisscrossed with sewers and underground rivers. Can Hyacinth, recently arrived from the US locate the magically charged drop of water that will prevent another Great Fire? Who can she trust? 

Do You, Mr Jones? Bob Dylan with the poets and professors edited by Neil Corcoran        $30
Serious critical consideration of the 2017 Nobel Literature laureate from Simon Armitage, Christopher Butler, Bryan Cheyette, Patrick Crotty, Aidan Day, Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Hugh Haughton, Daniel Karlin, Paul Muldoon, Nicholas Roe, Pam Thurschwell and Susan Wheeler. A new edition, with a perceptive introduction by Will Self. 
>> You know something is happening. 

The Choice by Edith Eger         $35
The psychologist specialising in PTSD recounts her own experiences surviving Auschwitz (where she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele) and those of the people she has helped. 
"The Choice is a gift to humanity. Dr. Eger's life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others." - Desmond Tutu

Los Angeles Cult Recipes by Victor Garnier Astorino        $55
Spices, grilled food, health food, vegan food, caramel, hamburgers, chilli hot dogs, avocado cheeseburgers, granola, lobster rolls, hamburgers, French-style tacos, fro yo, hamburgers, kale pizza, acai bowls, shrimp pad thai and hamburgers. Excellent photographs; part of the 'Cult Recipes' series. 

Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what you'll be reading next.
Find out about our Writing for Children workshop.
Find out about the Mapua Literary Festival.
Find out about National Poetry Day.

BOOKS@VOLUME #37   (18.8.17)

Our Book of the Week this week is only 60mm x 75mm large (or small). 
Minicry is a microscopic 24-page minizine illustrated by Kate Depree, featuring mini-things like haiku, jokes, tweets, poems, lists and more by Zarah Butcher McGunnigle, Courtney Sina Meredith, Uther Dean, Ashleigh Young, Guy Montgomery, Ruby Mae Hinepuni Solly, Alice May Connolly, Kirsten McDougall and Henry Cooke. 

>> Brought to you by the people who bring you Mimicry. 

>> Visit the Mimicry FaceBook page and like it.

>> Twittering tweets. 

>> New voices in poetry are sought. 

>> Are you hungry now?

We have full-size books from some of the contributors to Minicry:
Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young
Tess by Kirsten McDougall
Tail of the Taniwha and Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick by Courtney Sina Meredith
and several of them are into Sport. 

>> Holly Hunter was inspired to make Minicry by Peach Spell. 

Now make your own minizine and come and show us. 

Friday 25 August is National Poetry Day. Make some resolutions now as to how you will mark this day with your friends and family. We will be announcing the winner of our Poetry Spam competition (you will be able to read the winning poem in next week's newsletter). Thank you for all the entries! 
On Friday, go out and about with your mobile device and read poems at the locations people have tagged them to on the Nelson Poetry Map - you may well meet other poetry readers reading there. In the mean time, keep adding poems (your own or those by others).
On Friday, come and have a look at our Poetry Day display and receive a swingeing discount if you are prepared to read a verse from the poetry book you want out loud.
Participate in, or just go along to listen to, the 'open mic' poetry event at the Elma Turner Library, 27 Halifax Street, Nelson, from 12 noon to 2 PM on Friday 25th. There are events all around the country.
20/20 Collection. To mark 20 years of National Poetry Days, 20 poets have been chosen, who each feature one of their poems and each has chosen another poet, who also have a featured poem. Click through to have a look. Nelson-resident poet David Kārena-Holmes is Bluff-resident poet Cilla McQueen's chosen poet. We have a range of David's work in stock, and editions by him and others from his tiny peripatetic Maungatua Press. 

Reviewed by STELLA

Tess by Kirsten McDougall is a finely crafted novel that hooks you from the moment you meet the young woman hitch-hiking her way into small-town New Zealand. Tess is uneasy, troubled by something and wary of anyone that tries to help her. When Lewis, a middle-aged dentist, picks her up, he is distinctly wary too - he doesn’t wish to be seen as predatory. It’s raining and the young woman on the side of the road is soaked and reminds him of his daughter who he’s recently had a falling out with. Lewis is also dealing with his own grief and loneliness. His mother is in an old folks' home and doesn’t recognise him, although occasionally asking after his pretty wife, unknowingly rubbing salt into a wound. Lewis’s wife was the victim of an accidental death, one we learn later in the book has disrupted his family and made their lives unbearable for several years with secrets, blame and guilt. When Lewis ends up inadvertently looking after Tess, who becomes briefly ill with a fever, each of their lives is affected by the other. Both are lost and running from pain in their own way. Lewis needs to find a way back to his adult children, to rebuild his relationships with them, ease his way back into life rather than an alcohol-dulled semblance of one. Tess needs to face herself and her own secrets and fears. The novel is described as a "gothic love story", and there is an unusual element to this tale of relationships. Tess has an inherited supernatural power which she finds a curse as well as a curiosity. In the hands of a less able writer, this would have felt forced or unbelievable, but McDougall weaves this aspect into the novel convincingly and without guile. As Lewis and Tess muddle along, we are drawn into their stories, each revealed piece by piece through the conversation between the characters, flashbacks and observation. Life moves into a calm pattern, one in which Tess gardens and rights the neglected home and Lewis is relieved of his loneliness. There are times when the relationship is almost derailed, yet somehow they find the companionship or safety they need. So, just as everything seems to be running smoothly until Lewis’s tumultuous daughter, Jean, arrives on the scene and all turns on its head. Confrontations on various levels arise, between daughter and father; between the guest, Tess, and Jean; and Tess’s past catches up with her. This a novel about vulnerability, about women and power (or lack of it), about how anger can take you in the wrong direction yet also empower you to make the right choices and be courageous. McDougall writes convincingly, edging you closer to the truth: here is an observation of love, of surviving and of letting go of hurt. It’s also a novel of surprises - definitely worth delving into.