 | Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders {Reviewed by THOMAS} The Bardo Thodol (generally known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is a Tibetan text describing the fate of consciousness after death, the torments and wonders experienced by an individual due to patterns of attachment built up while alive and the rigours that must be undertaken in order to erase the impediments that comprise the personality in order to prepare for rebirth. Lincoln in the Bardo is, then, a sort of American Book of the Dead, a sort of ghost story told from the point of view of the ghosts, spirits whose attachment to elements of their pre-death existence prevents their dispersal after death, resulting in them thronging the cemetery in which their bodies have been laid, caricatures or exaggerations of themselves, restlessly, compulsively repeating those circuits of existence and patterns of thought to which they were most attached, for better or for worse, unable to admit or accept or perceive that they are dead. Most ghost stories tell of the intrusion of a spirit of a dead person into the world of the living; Lincoln in the Bardo tells of the intrusion of a living person into postmortem territory of the undeparted dead. Abraham Lincoln, stricken by the death of his young son Willie in 1862, paid visits at night to keep company with the boy’s corpse in the sepulchre. In this book, his presence, and his love for Willie, is immensely attractive to the dead, representing the life they are desperate to rejoin. But there is nothing ghoulish about this book; it is both poignant and comic. The author has clearly had an immense amount of fun writing it, and it is a pleasure to read. Just as historical texts often quote other texts or primary sources, the book begins as an assemblage of presumably authentic quotes regarding the night upon which Willie died, which was also the night of a presidential banquet. This form established, unusually for a novel, the book progresses as a multivocal narrative in the voices mainly of various spirits who have not been able to disperse after death, and who, as they converse (and it is conversation that drives this novel), do so in the reported speech of each other. The primary concern of these spirits is the ordinary content of their lives and their relationships, the very things that are usually overlooked by history, especially history of momentous periods such as the American Civil War, during which this book is set (and which provides some of the dead that appear in it). To the extent that this book shines a light upon history, it is a history not of acts but of motivations. Motivations are always both ordinary and individual, and do not much change through history, enabling a real sympathy between these mostly imagined past people and the reader of the book. The writer, like a ghost himself (like any writer to the world of their book), moves in and out of persons, takes up and abandons the voices of others as if they were clothing. There are some tender moments between Lincoln and his son, which enable the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moment which changes everything for the ghosts but also marks the start of Lincoln’s acceptance of his son’s death and a sense of resolution that will carry him forward into his presidency and through the war. Lincoln in the Bardo has just been awarded the 2017 Man Booker Prize. |
 | The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen {Reviewed by STELLA} The new picture book from the award-winning duo of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen is a charmer. I was drawn in by the cover, a wolf between the trees, his two eyes naively drawn on one side of his head. Look a bit closer and you spot the duck and the mouse. The colour palette, sombre blacks, greys and ochres with the occasional lively accent, is classic Klassen. The drawings, with their collage-like characteristics, are atmospheric and playful, and Klassen is adept in capturing the protagonists, giving the story those extra layers of quirkiness. And his style is perfect for this story, a fable-like tale, which starts with misadventure yet becomes a delightful reflection on collaboration, complete with humour. A mouse is travelling through the forest when he meets a wolf and, alas, he is eaten. The wolf, fortunately, swallows this small morsel whole, and just when the poor mouse dreads this is the end, he hears a noise coming from within the belly. A duck is happily ensconced in the belly-home of the wolf, enjoying a very safe and civilised life, yet sometimes giving the poor wolf a guts ache. The duck, a clever fellow, helpfully calls up suggestions for a cure and the companions are well catered-for, including celebratory wine on occasion. All goes along well enough until the hunter comes a-calling…. Delightfully told and wonderfully illustrated with just the right balance of wit and tension, this will be a picture book to enjoy multiple times. |
 | The Missing Pieces by Henri Lefebvre (Reviewed by THOMAS} This book is comprised of one long list of works of literature and art that do not exist, either because they have been lost or destroyed (either by the writer or artist or by external intention or by misadventure or natural disaster) or because they were never completed, or, in some cases, never started. Lefebvre provides a catalogue of holes (and these are just the identifiable holes – the list of things that do not exist is, I suppose, infinite), an incantation of absence, and we are left wondering, How would the cultural landscape be different if these works existed? What sort of cultural force is exerted by absence? Is disappearance the universal primary force against which we all struggle? Human endeavour, even at its most ‘exalted’, is a ragged, tentative and highly vulnerable thing. This is perhaps where its value lies. |
NEW RELEASES
November is upon us and so are these New Releases.
A man of deep ambivalences, contradictions and vulnerabilities, Edward Lear was unable to act on his deepest feelings but produced some of the oddest poetry of his time, as well as a body of art both serious and comic. Jenny Uglow, who could almost be said to specialise in biographies of odd characters who both exemplify and stand apart from their times, is Lear's perfect biographer, forensic yet sensitive to the most hidden corners of his psyche, his playfulness and his melancholy.
"Jenny Uglow has written a great life about an artist with half a life, a biography that might break your heart." - Robert McCrum, Guardian
When a mouse is swallowed by a wolf, a duck already resident in the wolf's belly shows it what a good life can be lived there. How can they defend their home against a hunter?
Two friends travel to Iceland to experience the settings of (and to retell!) the Icelandic sagas they are both so fond of, and to find Gislason's roots. What is the relationship between land and stories, both ancient and modern, both culture-defining and personal? Where are the Vikings now?
>> "Tales of blood feuds and dangerous women, fugitives and warrior poets."
>> How they came to write the book.
An interesting and attractive guide to the food of Lisbon replete with recipes for every meals of the day and with evocative photographs.
>> Mendes tells a little about himself.
The main difference between The Bookshop in Scotland's Book Town of Wigtown and Black Books is that business at The Bookshop proceeds without a script and the odd customers are all (or mostly) actual members of the public rather than actors. As Bythell shows, running a booklover's paradise may not always feel like you're in paradise yourself, but booksellers wouldn't have it any other way (that is to say, they are of no use for any other occupation).
>> A shop with books in.
>> Shaun shows us how to reconfigure with a broken Kindle.
An exquisite graphic novel account of the explorations and inner life of the Venetian merchant who travelled through Asia as far as Chine in the thirteenth century.
>> Have a look at Tabilio's website.
The latest advances in neuroscience have bearing on the dilemmas of both philosophy and psychology. Before he died, Sacks drew together some of his incisive essays on consciousness and on the relationship between the brain and the mind, experience and memory, to be presented as this important addition to his oeuvre.
"Some of the best, funniest, bleakest, most unsettling short stories I've ever read." - The Times
"Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences. His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented." - New York Times
"By far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today. Most of all, he is a mesmerising storyteller." Lionel Shriver
Fiennes journeys to Croft Castle & Parkland (Herefordshire), Clapham Common, Northfield Wood, The Weald, Knockwood & Secret Wood (Tenterden), Windsor Great Park, Runnymede (Surrey), Sherwood Forest, Cranborne Chase (Dorset), Kingley Vale (W. Sussex), Kipling's house (South Downs), Wistman's Wood (Dartmoor), Wayland Wood (Norfolk), Queen's Wood (Highgate), Hardcastle Crags (W. Yorkshire), Glover's Wood (Sussex), Smithy Wood (Sheffield). So many woods, and so much history, has been lost.
"Written with a mixture of lyricism and quiet fury, Fiennes's book winningly combines autobiography, literary history and nature writing. It feels set to become a classic of the genre." - Observer
Led by revolutionary foment in Europe, British intellectual and radicals in the 1790s formulated new ways of thinking, feeling and acting that would have far-reaching consequences through literature, art and social dynamics, what Edmund Burke called "the most important of all revolutions, the revolution of the sentiments." The project involved the complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and society, between the individual and nature, between an individual's inner and outer lives.
The outstanding psychogeographer strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. Here is a mesmerising record of secret scholars and whispering ghosts. Of disturbing encounters. Night hospitals. Pits that become cameras. Mole Man labyrinths. And privileged swimming pools, up in clouds, patrolled by surveillance helicopters. Where now are the myths, the ultimate fictions of a many times revised city?
What were the concerns of ordinary New Zealanders during war? The war divided New Zealanders and involved many in acts of brutality that affected their families and communities when they returned. What price did New Zealand pay for the outcome of the war?
"Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing." - David Hill
A Modernist classic only now translated into English, The Weight of Things tells of a traumatised young woman's descent into first domesticity and then suffering. Admired by Jelinek and Sebald, Fritz is a recipient of both the Robert Walser Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize.
"There is a class of artists whose work is so strange and extraordinary that it eschews all gradations of the good and the mediocre: genius and madness are the only descriptors adequate to its scale. Such is the case of the Austrian novelist Marianne Fritz." - Adrian Nathan West
The natural world is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. Convergence suggests that evolution is predictable, and if we could replay the tape of life, we would get the same outcome. But there are also many examples of contingency, cases where the tiniest change - a random mutation or an ancient butterfly sneeze - caused evolution to take a completely different course. So are we humans, and all the plants and animals in the world today, inevitabilities or evolutionary freaks?
Seventeen year old Ivan Isaenko is a life long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely III Children in Belarus. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement. Until Polina arrives. She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her. She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people. Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live.
Excellent retellings, with excellent illustrations. Crossley-Holland's versions are both enjoyable and scrupulous to the sources.
"Kevin Crossley-Holland is the master." - Neil Gaiman
Suggests that the requisites for language, and indeed language itself, were present as early as Homo erectus one-and-a-half million years ago.
Advances in medical science has meant not only that we live longer but that we spend more of that time dying. How has this changed our view of the world and our place in it?
"It's impressive how Tatiana was able to recreate the personality of my mother, including her sense of humour. It is very well written and very moving. I'm sure my mother would have loved this book." - Tessa Montgomery d'Alamein (daughter of Daphne du Maurier)
Twenty-one women, from Boadicea to Nicola Sturgeon, who stood out against their times and provided new ways for history to move forward.
"If someone in every country were to write a book like this, scholars might finally admit there are two things - history and the past - and they are not the same." - Gloria Steinem
"Lynch's wonderful third novel follows a teenage girl through impoverished Ireland at the height of the Great Famine. Lynch's powerful, inventive language intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive." - Publishers Weekly
Why are some films good and the rest rather less than good? 'Gordy Lasure' will show you how cinema works.
"A work of shimmering, glimmering genius." – Stephen Fry
>> The 'Alan Patridge of film' reads from his book.
A beautifully presented and wonderfully quiet cookbook, with 130 plant-based recipes for all occasions.
It's 5pm on New Year's Eve in the Villa Nightmare, and as Shadow Sorcery Minister Beelzebub Preposteror's thumb-striking clock counts down each hour with an "Ouch!", Minister Preposteror draws closer to missing his midnight deadline for fulfilling his annual quota of evil deeds and being "foreclosed".
Pivotal texts from a major thinker of the New Left on Marx and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Althusser, fetishism in Capital, justice, political organisation, revolutionary mass action and party pluralism, and an analysis of the literary power of Trotsky's writing.
"This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end." - Hilary Mantel
"A mishmash, at once merry and pensive, of personal memoir, a history of left politics in postwar England, a portal into a lost Jewish London and a portrait of the artist as a nervy young man." - Guardian
At once a history of and guide to navigating without sextant and almanac.
Essays on sixteen individual animals immortalised by humans.
"I've spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It's a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world. It might be the best book on animals I've ever read. It's also the only one that's made me laugh out loud." - Helen Macdonald, New York Times
Another outstanding and stylish vegetarian cookbook from Anna Jones.
"Brilliant." - Nigel Slater
Very accomplished night and low-light landscape photography from a Nelson-resident photographer and bookseller.
>> While stock lasts, receive a free copy of Barney's previous book Night Visions.
>> Visit the photographer's website.
Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in this new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.
A squirrel drops a nut. After winter a nut tree sprouts. A particularly charming pop-up book.
>> This is how it works.
Cover designs for 25 textbooks used by Harry Potter and the other students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
>> Have a look at the designs.
The pieces that comprise the first three titles of our new series of short interesting texts came to us unbidden in various ways, but each demonstrates the strong connection between memory, identity and place. We are very pleased to be launching our publishing imprint with such excellent work.
28.10.2017
VOL 001: Overcoats by Eddie Saxon $5
A short autobiography of a long life, told through a succession of overcoats.
VOL 002: Two Visits to Auschwitz by Bernard Redshaw and Michelanne Forster $5
Two visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp end in silence.
VOL 003: Transit in Marrakech by David Coventry $5
A travelling writer makes an unexpected connection with a customs official in Marrakech.
Very many thanks to all of you who helped us celebrateNZ Bookshop Day and the importance of your bookshop to your community. We were overwhelmed with the range of book-positive and bookshop-positive activities you thought up and undertook. Thank you for coming in to see us, bringing in your friends, bringing us coffee and cake and flowers, posting about us on social media, photographing yourselves and your family reading, singing us songs, buying books, making us drawings and models,
reading to us from your favourite books, participating in our Man Booker discussion, attending the launch of our publications, photoshopping us into the Nelson Masked Parade(!), and telling us some really awful literary jokes. The winner of our Bookshop Bingo draw and recipient of a six-month VOLUME Reading Subscription is Amy Shattock. Many thanks to all entrants! A bookshop is the expression of the passion of its community. 
>> Read Stella's review below.
>> Two other books from Lyra's world: Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North.
>> Daemon Voices (Pullman on storytelling).
>> La Belle Sauvage is also available in hardback.
>> "The philosophical underpinning of this book is deeply concerned with how authoritarian regimes take power."
>> Pullman: "'The Book of Dust' is about Dust. ... 'The Book of Dust' is not a sequel or a prequel but an equel."
>> 5 minutes with Philip Pullman.
>> The Golden Compass film was based on Northern Lights.
>> On Dust.
>> He's already finished writing the sequel!
>> Some other books by Pullman.
Review by STELLA:
The first in 'The Book of Dust' trilogy is a triumph. I sat down and read it in one sitting and there was no way anything was going to interrupt me (you have been warned!). It’s been almost 20 years since The Amber Spyglass, the third book in 'His Dark Materials' series, and leaving the world of Lyra was difficult for many. La Belle Sauvage is set 10 years before Northern Lights, Lyra is a baby in the care of the nuns at Godstow near Oxford. We are back in the world of daemons, the struggle between the religious order and scientific learning, and the mysterious questions about Dust. The Magisterium’s power is growing in Brytain and there is an increasing sense of unease in the populace. Here we meet Malcolm, an eleven-year-old boy - curious, inventive and good. He helps out at his parent’s pub, clearing glasses and scrubbing pots, he lends a hand to the nuns across the river and it is here he comes across Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon. While 'His Dark Materials' references Milton’s Paradise Lost, this series belongs to Spenser’s Faerie Queen, with touches of the Biblical Great Flood and Gothic storytelling. It feels like all the questions you still had as a reader after completing the previous trilogy are now going to be visited again, amplified - and maybe some answers might be forthcoming. While many of the characters are familiar, we learn more about them and their ambitions. Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, is ever more daunting and compelling and Lord Asriel, her father, maddening and heroic. We are introduced to the fledgling secret organisation formed to resist the fascist and fanatical power-keepers, and the wonderful Hannah Reif, a reader of the wonderful Alethiometer, as well as the strange and dangerously obsessive former scientist who haunts Malcolm. Malcolm is drawn into a world which becomes increasingly dangerous and complex, and his loyalty toward the child is undaunting. As tensions rise, so do the rivers. It rains and rains, and Malcolm, tipped off by a Gyptian, readies his boat, the beautiful canoe, La Belle Sauvage, keeping an eye on the welfare of the child, Lyra. He rescues her as the walls of the nunnery collapse, and, along with the tough and mealy-mouthed Alice, who works at the pub, they start a journey down the Thames, across a flooded Brytain, in swift and dangerous currents. It’s a perilous journey physically, emotionally and mentally, stretching the youths to the edges of their capabilities. Pullman pulls no punches with La Belle Sauvage, with its allegorical layers and deliberations on science, religion and the psyche. It's dark, compelling and incredibly intriguing. Complex, intelligent writing for children, teens and adults alike.
 | Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman {Reviewed by STELLA} With a title so emphatically sure of itself, you know that something is up and you are curious to find out what. Gail Honeyman’s debut novel,Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, draws you in immediately. You meet Eleanor - an unusual woman in her thirties who lives alone works in an office (the same place she’s been since she finished university), and follows her own particular set of rules which result in an austere, simple life devoid of indulgence or frivolities, friends or family. As we travel alongside Eleanor, some peculiarities come to our attention: she drinks cheap vodka from Friday night until work on Monday and has a weekly call from Mummy on a Wednesday - an event that fills her with increasing discomfort. What starts as a quirky, amusing tale about an oddity becomes more endearing as Eleanor Oliphant becomes besotted with a musician, someone the reader sees clearly for what he is, but poor Eleanor is blind to. Yet this obsession is the making of her: as she plans her fantasy relationship she inadvertently becomes connected with the world around her. This is helped by a coincidental incident where she, along with her workmate Raymond, help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street. This incident leads to a budding friendship with Raymond, an unusual situation for Eleanor, who has never had a friend. As the story goes along, we begin to build a clearer picture of our heroine. Her childhood in foster homes, her contact with social workers, and her horrendous mother. The first part of this novel is called Good Days and we sense that Eleanor is running from something, living in a bubble to protect herself from a past that is haunting her. Honeyman keeps the tone light in this part, with gags, most visited upon and by Eleanor with her odd behaviour and often inappropriate remarks. The final third is the Bad Days, where Eleanor’s fantasy world has crumbled and the influence of Mummy looks as if it might destroy her. But Eleanor Oliphant (not her real name) is made of sterner stuff and while the reveal at the end is a shocker, this novel is ultimately a charmer (even when dealing with the damaging consequences of a disturbing childhood) which embraces the life-affirming power of friendship and care. |
 | Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Writing is a way not to remember but to forget,” suggests Kate Zembrano in this book concerning both her grieving for her mother and her struggle to be free of her mother, who in some ways became more dominating after her death than she was when alive. “Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind,” continues Zembrano. The past dominates the present, not so much in the way in which the present is disposed as in the disposition of our minds towards it: that which we are foolish enough to think of as ourself is dependent utterly upon memory, upon the power of what is not us in the past. This dominance by the lost and unreachable (we cannot assail its moment of power for it lies against the flow of time) is most oppressive when we are unaware of it. Paradoxically, we need to remember in order to escape the past and exist more freely (if existing freely is our predilection). But merely to open ourselves to the past through memory is insufficient to free ourselves of it. To gain control it is necessary to assume authorship, not to change what we cannot reach against time, but to create a simulacrum that is experienced in the place of the experience of the past, a replacement that alters the grammar of our servitude, simultaneously a remembering and a forgetting. “In order to liberate myself from the past I have to reconstruct it. I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them,” said Louise Bourgeois. Since her mother’s death, Zembrano’s thoughts have been increasingly focussed on her loving but dominating mother, to the extent that her mother is taking over her life (“Sometimes my mouth opens up and my mother’s laugh jumps out. A parlour trick”). Very possibly, this influence was operative when her mother was alive, but it was at least concentrated in a person who could be interacted with and reacted against. Now “she is everywhere by being unable to be located.” Zambreno’s perceptive book is a study, through self-scrutiny, of the ambivalences of grief and of memory, and also of a path beyond grief: “If writing is a way of hoarding memories - what does it also mean to write to disown?” Not that either remembering or forgetting does any favours to the departed. Without an actual person upon whom an identity, a history, a character may be postulated, and without the generation of new information, however minor, that is possible only by living, the definition of that person belongs to anyone and no-one. Identity becomes contested in the absence of the arbiter. What remains but the impress, somewhere in the past, the shape of which must henceforth suffice as a stand-in for the departed? For better or for worse the pull is to the past, towards the unalterable occurrences that have what could almost be considered as a will to persist through whatever has received their impress. And the struggle for authorship is complicated by the persistence of objects. Death instantaneously transforms the everyday into an archive. Zembrano’s visits to her parents’ house in the years after the death of her mother brings her into contact with objects that have lost their ordinariness, the possessions of her mother’s that her father wishes to enshrine, objects that have stultified, that have not been permitted to either lose or accrete meaning. Both comfort and trap, the archive preserves the dominance of the pastper se, preserves the fact of loss more than that which has been lost. Advances in medical science have meant that more of our lives, and more of the end period of our lives, has come to be defined by illness. Increasingly few of us reach our end without being overwritten by the story of its approach. Zembrano captures well her mother’s struggle with the disease that killed her, not so much over the her survival or otherwise as over how she would be remembered, over whether the idea others had of her would be replaced by the story of a disease. All memory proceeds as a scuffle between selection and denial, between nostalgia and resentment, between freedom and attachment, between the conflicting needs of actuality and representation. Memory is the first requirement of forgetting. |
 | My Private Property by Mary Ruefle {Reviewed by THOMAS} What is a reader to do when confronted with a set of short, various prose pieces written by a poet who has reached the other side of cleverness and who approaches the inarticulateness beyond from the bank of her accomplishments rather than from that of incapacity? To the problems attendant upon the *facts* of her existence Ruefle applies questions that are inextinguishable by answers. Many of the pieces in My Private Propertyread almost as encyclopedia entries to the ordinary, cataloguing its wonders for some alien to whom the quotidian and the unusual have equal strangeness. This cleansing of the faculties of the grime of familiarity is the essence of the poetic mode. The subjective is left immediate/unmediated, revealing and affirming the value of individual experience and demonstrating the particular, however ordinary, as the haunt of meaning, the profundity of which is not limited by the fact that it does not extend beyond the confines of its domain. There is little of value to be had from a generalisation. In this set of exemplars in a science of the particular, the said subjectivity, isolated as a distillate, is poured by Ruefle into successive containers other than herself, with no loss of efficacy, and it is this transmigration of viewpoint that gives the pieces of My Private Property an exhilaration, a poignancy and a liberty that demonstrate poetry’s essentially astringent quality upon the impediments of identity that cloud our sympathies and shorten our perceptions. |
NEW RELEASES
They're new.
A fragmentary "factless autobiography" attributed by Pessoa largely to his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares but left unedited and uncompleted (if such a project could be completed) at Pessoa's (and, by extension, Soares's) death. The book is a Modernist masterpiece of existential observation and self-observation, with musings on the scattershot distribution of meaning in everyday life.
>> "The weirdest autobiography ever."
>> "A writer in flight from his name."
>> On the destruction of the 'I'.
Fiction addresses itself to fact and fact addresses itself to fiction. These pieces range all over the place, occasionally observing themselves transforming from essay to fiction (or vice-versa), asking themselves, and us, what is the nature, or value, of truth?
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol).
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
"Jenny Erpenbeck's magnificent novel is about the 'central moral question of our time,' and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling 'moving' stories about people who are very different from us. Erpenbeck writes about Richard, a retired German academic, whose privileged, orderly life is transformed by his growing involvement in the lives of a number of African refugees—utterly powerless, unaccommodated men, who have ended up, via the most arduous routes, in wealthy Germany. Erpenbeck uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward." — James Wood, New Yorker
"Profound, unsettling and subtle." - The Guardian
From the author of Visitation and The End of Days.
"These are glowing, moving prose poems of hallucinatory intensity. The wit and bracing honesty of the memories, from awkward to adulatory, take you through a powerfully personal journey (for the reader as much as the writer) in each poem and in the sequence overall. The sense of timing is exquisite. A masterclass in how to turn a scene, a moment, so that it catches the light just so in the final sentence. Connelly combines the autobiographical courage of Heaney and Hill with the symbolic technique and the reach and ambition of the French masters of the form and the effect is mesmerising." - Luke Kennard
Why do humans keep and cherish some animals i their homes and yet regard others as a source of food or sport? Our relationship with animals tells us much about our own nature as a species and as individuals. A thoughtful and enjoyable book.
As it says. Nice dustwrappered hardbacks.
"Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses. Her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive." - James Wood, New Yorker
Interesting and enjoyable considerations of storymaking from the author of 'His Dark Materials', 'The Book of Dust', 'Sally Lockhart', &c.
>>>>> The hardback edition of La Belle Sauvage is now in stock.
99 literary sensations whose stars have set are re-elevated in this charming book.
The world had to reboot itself after the Second World War, but what was to be saved, what could be rebuilt, and what was to be made entirely new? In the first few years of relocations, reinventions and redirections set in place many of the tropes that have defined the world since. In 1947, production began of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior created the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, the first computer bug is discovered, the CIA is set up, Hassan Al-Banna drew up the plan that remains the goal of jihadists to this day, and a UN committee was given four months to find a solution to the problem of Palestine.
What is money and why does debt exist? Where do wealth and inequality come from? How come economics has the power to shape and destroy our lives? An excellent primer, using stories to explain and question the drivers of society.
""The reason Varoufakis seems to have captured the imaginations of so many is that his words about the European crisis speak universal truths about democracy, capitalism and social policy." - Guardian
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
A comprehensive exploration of the concepts behind eight centuries of development of specifically Japanese garden aesthetic. A beautifully produced book.
"The act of seeing, and the concentration of seeing, takes an effort. The gardens impose that effort on you if you want to see them. It's another way of ordering your vision, and it slows down your vision." - Richard Serra
>> See sample pages.
It's the end of the holidays for Mark, Annie and Pudding. They've spent the summer in a cottage on the edge of a forest in the countryside, but they haven't had any really exciting adventures to tell their classmates back at school... Until, on their final visit to see the Frog King of a nearby pond, they find a frightened young girl crying in the woods. The curiously named Macadamia tells them she has lost Clementine, and so the three children set out on a quest to find her. But they are not the only ones looking for Clementine, and a storm is approaching, bringing with it a night full of surprises.
A properly functioning city should be able to address the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.
>> It is all a matter of tuning.
The neoliberal experiment has brought society and the environment to the brink of disaster (and for many, over the brink). But humans are characterised not as much by competitive individualism as by altruism and co-operation. How can these be built into a politics that addresses the crises the world currently faces?
Text and poetry by outstanding writers, atmospheric photography and memorable recipes from the Hawke's Bay vineyard/retreat/bistro known as Black Barn.
Postulates the Parthenon as the focus of cult rituals focussed on human sacrifice and emphasising the difference of Classical civiclisations from the succeeding Western Christian centuries.
A portrait of the late Stuart age, lavishly illustrated with art and objects associated with Pepys and his diaries.
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep. Until very recently, science had only cursory answers to the questions of why we sleep, what good it served, and why its absence is so damaging to our health. Can increasing the amount and quality of our sleep improve our lives?
An Auckland city father's won account of his life, from his birth in Edinburgh in 1817, and covering much of the civic development of Auckland, lavishly illustrated throughout with artworks from his collections.
An impressive collection of masks, costumes, instruments, set paintings and objects provides an excellent introduction to the practices of Noh and Kyogen threatre and their importance in Japanese cultural history.
Scott is one of New Zealand's favourite and longest-serving political cartoonists, columnists and satirists. Find out about the many unsuspected facets of his life.
When his attempt to invade England as King of Scotland ended in defeat by the Republic's forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Charles managed to elude capture (despite the difficulty in disguising such a recognisable man) for over six weeks and escape to exile in Europe.
When Frank is rescued from bullies by the misfit Nick, she makes a friend whose possession of strange secrets leads Frank to discover there is more to life than she had thought.
"Extraordinary. As moving, strange and profound as Skellig." - Guardian
Looking at people who like looking at birds tells as much about people as about birds. Brunner has written an interesting history of an obsession.
"An exquisitely beautiful book. These stories about birds are ultimately reflections on the curious nature of humanity itself." - Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Includes an excellent selection of rarely seen exemplars of veteran workwear. Lots of fresh style inspiration here.
In the decade since Yunus first began to articulate his ideas for a new model of economics, thousands of companies, nonprofits, and individual entrepreneurs around the world have embraced them. From Albania to Colombia, India to Germany, newly created businesses and enterprises are committed to reducing poverty, improving health care and education, cleaning up pollution, and serving other urgent human needs in ingenious, innovative ways. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in alleviating poverty.
Can the Russian classics provide guidance on the personal conundrums of modern life? Possibly. Fun.
Kupe! Thomas Brunner! Freda du Faur! Kieran McKay! Kelly Tarlton! Other people!
Actor Tom Hanks cherishes his collection of vintage typewriters so much that he has written seventeen stories, each featuring a vintage typewriter.
>> A love affair with vintage typewriters.
A very full history of and guide to the notable India Pale Ales of the world.
An observant farmer, Young suggests that there is much we can learn from cattle.
"Delightful. It alters the way one looks at the world."- Alan Bennett
Featured publisher: HARD PRESS
Hard Press is an independent publishing house committed to publishing peripheral and experimental writing not limited to, nor benefiting from, any established convention.
>> Visit the Hard Press website.
Dan Nash's collection of poetry and drawings explores the possibilities of the mind and writing in the liminal space before sleep. Filled with violence, fantasy and tenderness, these prose poems are as unsettling as they are absurdly comical, perverting our desires, the momentary banality of life, and possibilities of poetic meaning.
Manon Revuelta’s collection of poetry and prose writing Girl Teeth conspicuously explores her relationship to the past and its interventionist hum on in the present. Coupling the openness of poetic imagining with intimate essayistic portraits of progenitors, this collection exposes the mechanics of language, the body, and how we might imagine a place in the world with all that has come before to which we’re bound.
The only words generally accepted to be actually written by Cleopatra VII of Egypt herself are “ginesthoi” or “make it so”, signing off a series of tax exemptions for Publius Canidius, one of Mark Antony’s generals. Although the exemptions and privileges are unromantic, and ordinary enough for a Ptolmaic court, the legendary and literary loading of the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony freight these words with subtexts and implications that exceed their denotation. The correlation or disjunction of inclination and obligation, of power and desire, of declaration and implication are themes that run also through Ginesthoi, a collection of poems by Evangeline Riddiford Graham published by the tiny and interesting Hard Press in Auckland. Presented as a series of fragments, much in the manner of the scraps of text discovered by archeologists, these poems are partial unearthings of an emotional life as intent upon concealing itself as it is upon revealing. What are we make of these twists of words, half earnest, half mocking, leaping back and forth across millennia, overlapping past and present while simultaneously reinforcing and dissolving the distinction between the two? There are two moments of awareness, one sealed in the past, encased in a museum cabinet or a memory, isolated from its context but preserved beyond a healthy span, resonating compulsively in its isolation until it has become little more than this resonation, and the other pausing in the present, gazing at the artefact in its current out-of-context context, attempting to make contact with the past moment, the past awareness or experience, to catch its eye, to pretend that the past reciprocates the gaze, or glimpse, or at least entertains the possibility of such a gaze or glimpse, to make believe, even to believe, if one can make oneself believe, that one can be not only aware of oneself in the past but that that past self can be somehow aware of the present self being aware of it, a game of memory working in both directions. In fact this is what we always do with memory: we are caught in a trap of tense, completed actions in the past are restrained there, playing in our memories or in our imaginations, if memories and imaginations can be distinguished from one another, but sealed in the perfect tense, whereas, though our present awareness may enter this case, cast itself backwards, project itself into the past, it can do so only at the expense of losing the capacity to act, to make things different to any effective degree. Expression is always ambivalent: to share a thought is to isolate oneself, to shut oneself within that thought; or, rather, perhaps, expression is quadrivalent: to share a thought is to shut oneself within that thought but, as the sharing of a thought is dependent upon a medium which necessarily replaces whatever is it applied to, both for the one to whose thought the medium is applied and the one, either specified or more generally implicated, to whom the sharing is directed, the act of sharing creates always a counterfeit artefact, at best a gloss, or label, upon the authenticity it causes to be lost. If poetry is the archeology of subjective experience, the poems of Ginesthoi are artefacts with all the clarity, obscurity and productive ambiguity of the papyrus fragment of Cleopatra VII to which they so playfully refer. {Review by THOMAS}
>> Some photographs from Evangeline Riddiford Graham's recent reading at VOLUME.
Our latest NEWSLETTER (21.10.17).
Find out what we've been reading.
Find out what's happening at VOLUME on N.Z. BOOKSHOP DAY.
Find out about some interesting new releases.
Find out about other things you'll have to click through to find out about.
>> This is how the book works.
>> Enter the pyramid of Cheops.
>> Meet some gods.
>> The real life of Ancient Egypt.
>> Listen to some Ancient Egyptian music.
 |
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund {Reviewed by STELLA}
Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves was the surprise listing on the Man Booker shortlist. A debut novel, it pushed out several contenders (Sebastian Barry’s Costa-winning Days Without End, the popular Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, and the much-hyped second novel from Arundhati Roy,The Ministry of Utmost Happiness), and highlighted the surprising omission of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. This is the sixth and final of the Man Booker shortlist I’ve read and has the disadvantage of comparison with those that went before. Saying that, it is an assured debut with some fine writing and sharp observations about family, belonging and the ability to hold the truth at bay. Set in Minnesota, it’s a coming of age story with a hint of menace. We know from the beginning that things are not going to turn out well. Linda, a fourteen-year-old misfit (she’s an outsider at school referred to as ‘freak’ or ‘commie’), lives a semi-wild existence in a ramshackle cabin with her parents on the edge of a lake hemmed in by forest. The small family is all that remains of an idealistic commune long broken down. Linda is unashamedly robust, practical and unconventional, and you sense that little could phase her. Yet, under the surface, she is vulnerable, achingly sad and sometimes naive. Fridlund pushes our emotions around here - is Linda really as unaware as she makes out? She is observant, smart enough to recognise the predatory behaviour of a teacher. The change in Linda’s isolated lifestyle comes about with the arrival of a city family to their holiday home across the lake. Leo, Patra and their young child, Paul, arrive for time out from the city. Leo quickly leaves to get back to his work and Linda soon becomes the babysitter, taking Paul on walks into the forest and indulging his fantasy worlds. Patra, adoring and obviously fraught (you sense that not all is right in this little world) is fascinating to Linda. There’s a tense awareness and sexual tension between the two young women, one that mostly exists in Linda's head. She is obsessed by being wanted and noticed. A desire to belong to someone, to a family. Devoid of emotional care from her own parents and lacking close friendships, Linda’s ability to close her eyes to what is happening in front of her is stunningly brutal to herself and for those close by. This psychological emptiness continues to play out in Linda’s later life, accentuated by the incident that results in the death of a young boy. Fridlund allows us many glimpses into ‘what happens’, so there are no surprises, yet we are left with plenty to ponder on - religion, obsession and denial. |
 | Elmet by Fiona Mozley {Reviewed by THOMAS} Elmet was the name given to a separatist Brittonic kingdom that flourished in what is now Yorkshire from the 5th century CE until the early 7th, when it was destroyed by the neighbouring Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. As well as studying for her doctorate in early medieval history, Fiona Mozley grew up in Yorkshire and has written a remarkable (Man-Booker-shortlisted) first novel set on the outskirts of a small rural community there. 14-year-old Daniel (the narrator), his 15-year-old sister Cathy and their father squat in a copse on land that had belonged to the children’s mother, in a house built by Daddy, beyond the notice of the community (other than Vivien, a woman from whom Daniel learns a love of literature, and Mr Price, the landowner). Daddy’s immense physical strength and mental tension have earned him a legendary reputation as a winner of illegal prize fights, and as a heavy (an employment he has turned his back upon to protect his children in their woodland existence after growing tired of being treated as outsiders in town). Daddy and Cathy are brute phenomena, inexpressive, physically focussed to the point of fanaticism, amoral forces akin to earthquakes or lightning, survival engines, whereas Daniel is altogether softer, more evidently sensitive and impressionable. The past-tense portions (the majority) of the book are full of Daniel’s luminescent descriptions, with indelible details and observations that reveal information to the reader beyond the knowledge into which Daniel is emerging (knowledge of himself and of ‘what life has to offer’ (largely injustice, class prejudice and exploitation at the hands of the landowners, resulting in a form of modern feudalism unmitigated by reciprocal obligation)). Beneath the immediacy of the narrative, the reader can sense deep threat like a bowstring being drawn, the tension increasing as the narrative develops, fed by the sadistic Mr Price, towards the terrible moment at which, when the tension can no longer be borne by the reader or by the narrative or by the characters, all that tension is discharged in an episode of near-mythic violence for which Mozley can be justly compared with Cormac McCarthy. This moment explains the present-tense frame narrative, dispersed throughout the novel, in which Daniel is travelling and searching for his sister. Elmet is at once both delicately beautiful and compellingly brutal, and is entirely memorable because of this. |
 | Ginesthoi by Evangeline Riddiford Graham {Reviewed by THOMAS} The only words generally accepted to be actually written by Cleopatra VII of Egypt herself are “ginesthoi” or “make it so”, signing off a series of tax exemptions for Publius Canidius, one of Mark Antony’s generals. Although the exemptions and privileges are unromantic, and ordinary enough for a Ptolmaic court, the legendary and literary loading of the relationship between Cleopatra and Antony freight these words with subtexts and implications that exceed their denotation. The correlation or disjunction of inclination and obligation, of power and desire, of declaration and implication are themes that run also through Ginesthoi, a collection of poems by Evangeline Riddiford Graham published by the tiny and interesting Hard Press in Auckland. Presented as a series of fragments, much in the manner of the scraps of text discovered by archeologists, these poems are partial unearthings of an emotional life as intent upon concealing itself as it is upon revealing. What are we make of these twists of words, half earnest, half mocking, leaping back and forth across millennia, overlapping past and present while simultaneously reinforcing and dissolving the distinction between the two? There are two moments of awareness, one sealed in the past, encased in a museum cabinet or a memory, isolated from its context but preserved beyond a healthy span, resonating compulsively in its isolation until it has become little more than this resonation, and the other pausing in the present, gazing at the artefact in its current out-of-context context, attempting to make contact with the past moment, the past awareness or experience, to catch its eye, to pretend that the past reciprocates the gaze, or glimpse, or at least entertains the possibility of such a gaze or glimpse, to make believe, even to believe, if one can make oneself believe, that one can be not only aware of oneself in the past but that that past self can be somehow aware of the present self being aware of it, a game of memory working in both directions. In fact this is what we always do with memory: we are caught in a trap of tense, completed actions in the past are restrained there, playing in our memories or in our imaginations, if memories and imaginations can be distinguished from one another, but sealed in the perfect tense, whereas, though our present awareness may enter this case, cast itself backwards, project itself into the past, it can do so only at the expense of losing the capacity to act, to make things different to any effective degree. Expression is always ambivalent: to share a thought is to isolate oneself, to shut oneself within that thought; or, rather, perhaps, expression is quadrivalent: to share a thought is to shut oneself within that thought but, as the sharing of a thought is dependent upon a medium which necessarily replaces whatever is it applied to, both for the one to whose thought the medium is applied and the one, either specified or more generally implicated, to whom the sharing is directed, the act of sharing creates always a counterfeit artefact, at best a gloss, or label, upon the authenticity it causes to be lost. If poetry is the archeology of subjective experience, the poems of Ginesthoi are artefacts with all the clarity, obscurity and productive ambiguity of the papyrus fragment of Cleopatra VII to which they so playfully refer. >> Click through for some photographs of Evangeline Riddiford Graham's reading at VOLUME last week. |
NEW RELEASES
This silly, inventive picture book by the outstanding graphic designer of the protopsychedelic era will make your brain turn somersaults. Facsimile of the original 1960 edition.
An excellent and enticing survey of a period of great fertility and change in dustwrapper design, which started off as a way to protect bindings but soon became the arena in which the book's design first and most effectively attracts the eye of readers and buyers.
Urban teenager Cameron arrives in an uninhabited Arctic island. He's prepared for ice and storms and, stripped of his smart technology, possibly boredom. But he's not prepared for 24-hour daylight and erupting graves. At first Cameron believes the explanations of his scientist mother. But, as the island reveals itself to him, he begins to see, and hear, things that push him right to the edge of the possible. One of them is an Inuit girl. The other is a large white bear.
"Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough - I am never brave enough - I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood."
Death, loss, memory, grief. Writing into and against silence, Zambreno's great project is to excoriate her own life and correlate its residue with works of art and literature that manifest similar equations of value and loss.
A collection of devastating short prose pieces from on of America's sharpest poets.
"The property that Ruefle deems private is the impalpable nature of the inner life we all share; it is at once ours and everyone's. Ruefle has shown a talent for elevating her acute observations and narrative inclination well above mere anecdote to create quietly disquieting moments. A literature of barbed ambiguity and unresolved disruption." - Bookforum
"Ruefle can seem like a supernally well-read person who has grown bored with what smartness looks like, and has grown attracted to the other side." - New York Times
The much anticipated first novel of a wonderful new series from the world of 'His Dark Materials', set ten years before Northern Lights and telling of the strange events surrounding Lyra Belacqua.
A gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse from poet Matthew Rohrer. In a Russian-doll of fictional episodes, we follow a midlevel publishing assistant over the course of a day as he encounters ghost stories, science fiction adventures, Victorian hashish eating, and robot bigfoots. Rohrer mesmerizes with wildly imaginative tales and resonant verse in this compelling love letter to storytelling.
Can you be lost and not know it? Can other people stop you from being lost? 17-year-old Caleb’s world is disintegrating, his walls are closing in, his sky is threatening to fall. He’s barely holding on.
"A tremendous debut novel, both delicate and muscular, artful and honest. It’s changed the way I attend to those I teach. I cannot give it higher praise than that." – Bernard Beckett
"This novel is a striking chronicle of a young person watching the wall between himself and the world grow ever taller, and the small moments of brightness that reach him through the gaps." – Ashleigh Young
Cezanne wanted to emphasise the flatness of the picture plane and free our visual practices from the Renaissance conventions of perspective. Meyerowitz has photographed a series of Cezanne's still extant objects against the 'Cezanne grey' walls of his studio, undermining the traditional relationship between the subject of a painting and its background. One of the most quiet and beautiful books of the year.
A photographer and independent woman in the London bohemian circles in the 1930s, Joan Eyres Monsell met Patrick Leigh Fermor when she was on assignment in Egypt during the Second World War. At last we have a biography of this interesting free-thinking woman, whose photographic work supported Patrick in his writing.
"Engrossing." - Guardian
A very clear guide to the production of perfect patisserie, up to Michelin level (absolutely breathtaking).
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This book is one long list of works of literature and art that do not exist, either because they have been lost or destroyed (either by the writer or artist or by external intention or by misadventure or natural disaster) or because they were never completed, or, in some cases, never started.
When Maori were defeated at Orakau in 1864 and the Waikato War ended, Tawhiao, the second Maori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed exile in the Rohe Potae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state - a land governed by the Maori King where settlers and the Crown entered at risk of their lives. For twenty years, representatives of the King and of the British Queen engaged in a dance of diplomacy involving gamesmanship, conspiracy, pageantry and hard headed politics, with the occasional act of violence or threat of it.
Sally Jones is not only a loyal friend, she's an extraordinary individual. In overalls or in a maharaja's turban, this unique gorilla moves among humans without speaking but understanding everything. She and the Chief are devoted comrades who operate a cargo boat. A job they are offered pays big bucks, but the deal ends badly, and the Chief is falsely convicted of murder. For Sally Jones this is the start of a harrowing quest for survival and to clear the Chief's name.
"I don't know when I last read a book with such pure and unalloyed pleasure. It's ingenious, it's moving, it's charming, it's beautiful, it's exciting, and most importantly the characters are people I feel I know like old friends." - Philip Pullman
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Gessen follows the lives of four Russians born in the last days of the Soviet Union and considers how their prospects have dwindled as the country has descended into what is effectively a Mafia state.
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Winner (in French) of the Prix Femina, 2014.
A graphic novel about a refugee boy's journey of hope and desperation.
On Thursday 17 August, 1860, wealthy widow Mary Emsley was found dead in her own home, killed by a blow to the back of her head. What followed was a murder case that gripped the nation. A veritable locked room mystery, there were an abundance of suspects, from disgruntled step children concerned about their inheritance and a spurned admirer repeatedly rejected by the widow, to a trusted employee, former police officer and spy, until he was sent to prison for robbery. During the police investigation there were several twists and dramatic discoveries, as suspects sought to incriminate each other and fresh evidence was discovered at the last minute. Eventually, it led to a public trial dominated by surprise revelations and shock witnesses, before culminating with one of the final public executions at Newgate. Years later the case caught the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle, who was convinced that an innocent man had been convicted and executed for the crime. But Conan Doyle was never able to find the real murder. Now the case has been solved.
The Ghost: A cultural history by Susan Owens $45
"Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." - Samuel Johnson
A fascinating look at the literature and art that have been engendered or shaped by the belief or otherwise in the phenomenon, or should that be pseudophenomenon, of ghosts.
"A work of profound scholarship and imaginative engagement, beautifully written and elegantly constructed. It's the finest study of its kind I've read." - The Literary Review
"Angela Saini has written a powerful, compelling and much needed account that challenges deeply rooted preconceptions about sex differences - some blatant misogyny, others buried in thousands of years patriarchy. Inferior shows that both are fundamentally flawed, and beautifully illustrates how science is just beginning to tackle this staggering imbalance." Adam Rutherford
How have artists envisaged human and prehuman life in prehistoric times? Perhaps you have been moved or amused by the often poignant depictions of dinosaurs, mastodons or hominids in the books of your childhood. This vast volume collects the best of such art, in all its poignancy and ludicrosity, from 1830 to 1990. Beneath the dustwrapper, the book is bound in real dinosaur skin (or something very like it).
>> A tour through the book (then resist it if you can).
Pierre Niox is rushing through life, but life seems to be passing him by. Can he slow down enough to win the heart of languid Hedwige?
"Without doubt the best French writer of the twentieth century." - Philippe Sollers
"Admired both by Ezra Pound and by Marcel Proust as a pioneer craftsman of Modernist French prose. The sheer shapeliness of his prose recalls Hemingway; the urbanity of his self-destructiveness compares with Fitzgerald's; and his camera eye is as lucidly stroboscopic as that of Dos Passos." - The New York Times
First published in Spanish in 1975 and previously untranslated, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires is Julio Cortazar's genre-jumping mash-up of his participation in the Second Russell Tribunal on human rights abuses in Latin America and his cameo appearance in issue number 201 of the Mexican comic book series 'Fantomas: The Elegant Menace'. With his characteristic narrative inventiveness, Cortazar offers a quixotic meta-comic novella that challenges not only the form of the novel but its political weight in contemporary cultural life.
Death is common to all people but there is huge cultural variation in our relationship to the inevitable. This splendidly illustrated volume surveys the attitudes and practices and art relating to dying and the dead, both in memory and concerning the remains, through the world and throughout history. Compelling. Forward by Will Self.
A charming picture book from the author of The Lion and the Bird and the 'Mr Postmouse' books.
For Londoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whatever their walk of life, the Marchelsea Debtors' Prison was only one step of misfortune away. White introduces us to the actual inmates and tells stories that give insight into a sphere of social history that is too-often suppressed by the families to which they pertain.
What if the universe was just a little bit different (or quite a lot different)? How would this affect the rest of the universe? New Scientist introduce us to alternative universes that are just as scientifically plausible as our own.
What can people's attitudes to food tell us about them and about the times in which they lived? Six women famous in their time (Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym and Helen Gurley Brown) show a surprising correlation between eating habits and social change.
A chorus of voices, from mudlarkers and fishermen to radio pirates and champion racers, capturing the diverse community of people who live and work in this ancient, wild and mesmerising place.
A wonderfully contrarian and satirical ABC. It is hard to share the planet with fools, pedants and nincompoops. Facsimile of the 1953 edition.
>> Visit the Themerson archive.
>> A microdocumentary about Franciszka and Stefan Themerson.
BOOKS@VOLUME #45
Our weekly NEWSLETTER of our reviews and recommendations, events, competitions and new releases.
14.10.17.