 | Autoportrait by Édouard Levé {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I am inexhaustible on the subject of myself,” states Édouard Levé in this book which is nothing less than an attempt to exhaust everything that he can think of to say about himself, no matter how banal or embarrassing, with relentless objectivity. In one long string of seemingly random declarative statements without style or development or form (other than the form of the list, if a list can be said to be a form), the details accumulate with very fine grain, but the effect is disconcerting: the author comes no closer to exhausting his observations, and the idea that there is such a thing as a 'person' beyond the details seems more and more implausible. The list is not so much an accumulation as an obliteration: facts obscure that which they purport to represent. “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing.” Levé’s style is deliberately and perfectly and admirably flat throughout (all perfect things should be admired (whatever that means)), like that of a police report. “I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.” The constructions often feel aphoristic but eschew the pretension of aphorisms to refer to anything other than the particulars of which they are constructed. There is no lens formed by these sentences to ‘see through’, no insight, no intimation of personality other than the jumbled bundling of details and tendencies assembled under the author’s name, no ‘self’ that expresses itself through these details or is approachable through these details, because we are none of us persons other than what we for convenience or comfort (or, rather, out of frustration and fear) bundle conceptually, mostly haphazardly, and treat as an entity or ‘person’. The more fact is compounded (or, rather, facts are compounded), the stronger the intimation that any attempt to exhaust the description of a person will never be approach we usually think of as a person. “If I look in mirrors for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.” As well as demonstrating the impossibility of the task which it attempts, description also cancels itself by implying for each positive statement a complementary negative statement. Each statement of the self-description of Édouard Levé functions to include those of us among his readers who are similar and to exclude those who are dissimilar. We find each statement either in accord or in disagreement with a statement we could similarly (or dissimilarly) make about ourselves. The reader is charted in the text as much as the author. The reader is continually comparing themselves to the author, finding accord or otherwise, exercising the kind of judgement concealed beneath all social interaction but typically hidden by content and mutuality. In Autoportrait, the author’s self-obsession is matched by our fascination with him, with the kinds of details that may or may not come to light in social interchange. Because the author is not aware of us and is not reciprocally interested in us, or feigning reciprocal interest in us, as would be the case in ‘real life’ social interaction, we feel no shame in our fascination, our fascination is dispassionate, clinical. He is likewise unaffected by our interest or otherwise in him. But as well as bundling together an open set of details that we may conveniently think of as facts (“Everything I write is true, but so what?”) about Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’), the text also conjures an inverse Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’) who is the opposite to him in every way, the person who nullifies him (in the way that all statements call into being their simple or compound opposites, their nullifiers). Levé’s obsession with identity, facsimile and the corrosive effects of representation reappear throughout the book, and towards the end he mentions the suicide of a friend from adolescence, which would form the basis for Levé’s final book, Suicide (after which Levé himself committed suicide). Édouard Levé was born on the same day as me, but on the other side of the planet. In Autoportrait he writes, “As a child I was convinced that I had a double on this earth, he and I were born on the same day, he had the same body, the same feelings I did, but not the same parents or the same background, for he lived on the other side of the planet, I knew that there was very little chance that I would meet him, but still I believed that this miracle would occur.” We never met and I am not that person. |
>> Simpson (who lives in Golden Bay) shares his love of tōtara.
>> An interview with Philip Simpson.
>> Tōtara are easy to grow (hint).
>> Threats to totara.
>> Totara for the future.
>> The book has been short-listed in the Illustrated Non-Fiction section of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
NEW RELEASES
The story begins when a masked man with “a message both obscure and appalling” appears at the door of the Marquis claiming a matter of life and death, declaring, “I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!”
Dispatched by the Queen of Spells from the Outer Hebrides, the Masked Man’s message was really just a polite request for the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. But the exchange gets botched… badly. And our masked man is now lost in America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing the author that created him.
"A profane wrestling match between high style and low comedy." - Kirkus
“Curtis White is a master of the digressive, philosophical novel. His new work Lacking Character provides another excellent example of this tradition. Lacking Character is very funny, bursting with wit and generosity. It evokes Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and the historical picaresque. There is Rabelais as well as the Soviet fairy tales of Kapek or Kharms, and the French symbolist films of Cocteau or Demy. Lacking Character is funny and heartbreaking.” — Entropy
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet's now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin. Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule - galvanised by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her.
"All my youth I gloried in the wild, exulting, rollercoaster prose and questing narratives of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, but cringed at the misogyny; couldn't we have the former without the latter? We can, because: Lidia Yuknavitch. Buckle your seat belts; it's gonna be a wild feminist ride." - Rebecca Solnit"A raucous celebration, a searing condemnation, and fiercely imaginative retelling of Joan of Arc's transcendent life." - Roxane Gay
>> This Joan's not for burning.
>> The Small Backs of Children is also excellent.
When Alejandro Luque received a set of photographs taken of Jorge Luis Borges on his visit to Sicily in 1984 (two years before his death) in the company of Maria Kodama (his PA and, eventually, wife and literary executor), he decided to trace Borges' steps, see the sights that Borges did not see due to his blindness, and discover what he could learn about his literary hero and about other literary visitors to Sicily. An interesting, very Borgesian travelogue (illustrated with the photographs). Includes a brief appearance by the Mediterranean's most slovenly gorilla.
A monster created from human remains rampages around the streets of Baghdad. What qualifies as human in a city traumatised by war?
"An extraordinary piece of work. With uncompromising focus, Ahmed Saadawi takes you right to the wounded heart of war's absurd and tragic wreckage. A devastating but essential read." - Kevin Powers
"There is no shortage of wonderful, literate Frankenstein reimaginings but few so viscerally mine Shelley's story for its metaphoric riches." - Booklist
A clear and enjoyable expression of Strawson's dismissal of free will, his avowal of the possibility of panpsychism and his consideration of the arbitrary and experiential characteristics of the self (so to call it).
"I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savoury, like love." Als traverses the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Michel Basquiat and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have been so formative of contemporary culture
"White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year." - Junot Diaz
An aging member of the once-vibrant youth culture of the 1980s finds himself increasingly at a loss in a society moving at a different pace and a different direction.
"One of the books of the year, if not the decade. No review could do it justice. Seldom has a novel with so much vicious humour and political intent also included moments of beautifully choreographed, unexpected tragedy. Bold and sophisticated, this thrilling, magnificently audacious picaresque is about France and is also about all of us: how loudly we shout, how badly we hurt." - Irish Times
"This is not just a novel, it's an electrocardiogram." - Figaro
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
>> On Despentes's 'hardcore feminism'.
The machinery of cultural production has been co-opted by institutions, corporations and governments in order to further their interests, maximise profits and suppress dissent. A perceptive account of how advertising, media and politics work today.
Zezé is Brazil’s naughtiest and most loveable boy. His talent for mischief matched only by his great kindness. When he grows up he wants to be a poet but for now he entertains himself playing pranks on the residents of his family’s poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood and inventing friends to play with. That is, until he meets a real friend, and his life begins to change.
How has society's attitude to violence changed through history? Why are some activities frowned upon in some ages and lauded in others? Does a turbulent history make a people more violent or less so?
"Wonderfully entertaining, comprehensive and astute." - The Times
Fleeing his abusive father across the desert towards the only person he thinks will understand him, Jaxie comes across an old recluse living in an abandoned shepherd's hut and begins to re-examine the trajectory of his young life.
"Austere, beautiful and compelling, brilliant and uncomfortable." - Sydney Morning Herald
1953. In order to help protect two shearers whose relationship is exposed, will their foreman be forced to come out about his relationship with a fellow soldier in World War One?
"An erudite exploration of the systematic plundering of libraries and book collections by Nazi invaders. Looting books by mainly Jewish owners, collections, and libraries was an effective way of stealing Jewish memory and history, as this thorough work of research by Swedish journalist and editor Rydell attests. An Engrossing, haunting journey for bibliophiles and World War II historians alike." - Kirkus
"We all know the life, but what do we know of the woman who lived it?" The story of a the teenager who eloped with a poet and wrote a book that brought into existence a modern archetype.
>> Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's own hand.
Calypso was a Wayfarer, a small and very popular class of open dinghy, a boat designed for pottering around coastlines and estuaries during the day. But along with the occasional brave crewmate, Clutterbuck managed to sail her across the English Channel, through the Bay of Biscay, down the French canals and into the Mediterranean, then up into the North Sea and the Baltic to Oslo, living aboard for three months at a time. A real-life Swallows and Amazons.
Fossilisation, rocks, the water cycle, volcanoes, glaciers, thunderstorms, geology, ecology - a beautifully illustrated introduction to earth science.
"A novel that lays bare the normality of black family life in suburban London, while revealing its deepest psyche, its tragedies, its hopes and its magic. A wondrous book." - Afua Hirsch
>> The author on losing her twin.
As the dust settled after World War II, America controlled half the world's manufacturing capacity. By the end of the Cold War it possessed nearly half the planet's military forces, spread across eight hundred bases, and much of its wealth. Beyond what was on display, the United States had also built a formidable diplomatic and clandestine apparatus. Indeed, more than anything else, it is this secretive tier of global surveillance and covert operations that distinguishes the US from the great empires of the past. But recent years have seen America's share of the global economy diminish, its diplomatic alliances falter and its claim to moral leadership abandoned. Will China become the dominant nation this century?
The work of the leading contemporary ceramicist, resident in New Zealand since 1995, displays a breadth of influence, from the Bloomsbury Group's Omega Workshop, old English pottery, Memphis and Wedgewood to New Zealand and Pacific indigenous and traditional aesthetics.
>> Visit Vonney Ball's website.
Zelie remembers when the soil of Orisha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zelie's Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were targeted and killed, leaving Zelie without a mother and her people without hope. Now Zelie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. YA fantasy steeped in Nigerian folklore.
"The best sort of book: a hugely enjoyable escapist story that makes you re-examine the world around you. It is a miraculous achievement." - The Guardian
Rust never sleeps, it is working away all the time, converting what we though was solid and permanent into something organic and mutable. Rabate's exploration of the meanings of rust ranges from science into psychology, from investigations of the rust belts in China and the US to the use of rust by artists and architects, to strange ruminations on the connections between rust and blood.
Luggage by Susan Harlan $22
What we carry about with us when every gram counts are carefully curated portraits of the selves we want to be and of the selves we are anxious to escape.
A souvenir certifies a journey but also distorts our memory of it. What has been the changing nature of travel relics, and how do they reflect the traveller more than the place in which it was acquired?
The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger's identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
>> Hear an extract read.
>> The book is short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> A review by Eimear McBride in The Guardian.
>> "An intelligent woman is supposed to raise herself above these anxieties."
>> Arnold Schoenberg's Blue Self-Portrait.
>> The book is published by the exemplary Les Fugitives, a press that publishes only books written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. Visit their website.
>> Other titles from Les Fugitives at VOLUME:
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (read Thomas's review)
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (read Thomas's review)
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (just arrived!)
 | My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci {Reviewed by STELLA} Pajtim Statovci explores entrapment, isolation and dislocation through the two main characters in his debut novel, My Cat Yugoslavia. We meet Bekim - a disenchanted, lonely young man - as he surfs a gay chat room looking for a hook-up. His life as an immigrant - he came to Finland from Kosovo with his parents - is a series of incidents in which he tries not to be noticed and denies his past. At thirty he is living alone, estranged from his family, his closest relationship is with his pet, a boa constrictor, until he meets the audacious and, so Bekim thinks, irresistibly attractive Cat at a gay bar. The Cat, a highly unlikable fellow - arrogant, obnoxious, abusive -moves into Bekim’s flat and invades his controlled life. The second voice in this novel is Emine. The story travels back to 1980 rural Kosovo. Emine at sixteen dreams about a life devoid of the boredom and drudgery of her parents. She seems happy until the day it dawns on her that she isn’t a brilliant student, that she won’t be an actress and is unlikely to have any future apart from the dutiful wife. That this future comes so quickly in her life - she is spotted by the dashing Bajram and an arranged wedding is soon underway - is instantly beguiling (a whirlwind of rituals and gold jewellery) and ultimately terrifying. Bajram is the wolf in lamb’s clothing. Yet more violence is to come - the war, homelessness and the fleeing from Kosovo to Finland. Statovci splices the absurd, the comic and the tragic through these chapters and the voices of son and mother. The idea of a sleek, well-dressed Cat as an abusive interloper shouldn’t really work but it does, as an allegorical agent for aggression - racial and homophobic. The Cat is a tidy parallel to Emine’s husband Bajram - both are forceful, violent and righteous. While Bajram is controlling enough within the confines of his own culture and country, as a refugee the associated humiliations, lack of power and sense of belonging fuel the worst in his behaviour for both Emine and Bekim. Interestingly, the lives and loves of both mother and son run the same gauntlet - similar emotional minefields: they both crave a romantic love relationship based on an ideal, yet find themselves victims of abusive and controlling partners. Statovci like Bekim is Kosovo-born and lives in Finland and, unsurprisingly, his first novel draws on this fractured past. My Cat Yugoslavia draws away from other novels I’ve read set during the Yugoslav War, which have tended to focus on the chaos of the crisis and the abject behaviour of humanity. This novel focuses on the repercussions of war through generations: violence which impacts on the ability to form relationships. Bekim is a gay immigrant unable and unwilling to fit in. He is socially isolated, neither a Kosovar Albanian nor Finnish, not a Muslim yet fingered as different, bereft of a family. It is not surprising that he feels closest to a reptile, his boa constrictor. Emine's story is just as captivating - from her rural, naive beginning to her new life as a wife, and to the unexpected consequences of war - the spirited sixteen-year-old eventually rises again. Statovci writes with a light touch, curling intense emotion into crisp sentences and using the absurd to lead us through disarray. |
 | Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is overwhelmingly, facetiously tempting to call Gaudy Bauble a detective novel, principally because it is one (a fake detective novel is just as much a detective novel as a non-fake one, if there can be such a thing as a non-fake detective novel). In Gaudy Bauble the detectives, so to call them, never actually detect anything, they never leave their flats (except for dental repairs, &c), they are effectively ineffectual, placebos, and, when the lost budgerigar that triggered the investigation, so to call it, returns, it is not due to any detecting on their part. “Is not detective work labelling work?” states a voice, presumably that of P.I. Belahg, a writer mainly not writing the script for a television series seemingly entitled Querbird, being filmed by Blulip, Belahg’s lesbian Gilbert-and-George-like double, a film-maker whose ideas change faster than they can be realised. The investigation gains no traction not because there is a lack of evidence but because there is too much. Everything is evidence of something (or of everything). The investigation gains no traction because it is too thorough. The details are too much evidence to amount to anything in particular, only to everything. Every detail, every association, every etymological permutation, every taxonomy, every history, every identity is interrogated and dissolved, every distinction is ruptured, the narrative, so to call it, constantly derailed by detail and by the refusal of detail to retain a fixed identity. In total flux, attributions and prescribed identities function as little more than costumes (clothes have more stable identities than persons), everything mentioned becomes activated by that mentioning, becomes a protagonist, pulls the plot, so to call it, towards it, off course, if it could be said ever to have had a course, or to be a plot. The world, after all, consists not of plot, which is always a fictive result of arbitrary interpretation of an unjustifiably normative kind, but of details, details about which little of certainty can be said without making similarly normative transgressions against their true nature, which lies not in identity but in momentum. In flux, in the tohubohu which is the natural state of all entities and from which entities become exiled at the moment they become entities, the state to which all entities long to return, the only certainty that can be maintained is that of momentum, if a certainty can be maintained at all. Gaudy Bauble retains all the excitement and pace and rigour of a detective novel. More and more characters appear, change names, blur their distinctions, overwhelm the narrative from locations in its margins or beyond: “There can never be too many crackpot agents. There could never be too much hyperactive riffraff interfering with events.” The dichotomy between the performative and the authentic is constantly ruptured, as if this dichotomy were a wall set to measure and constrain us, against which it is our nature to rebel, to seek release into illimitable inclusivity. The conflation of the performative and the authentic manifests in a doubling of entities, not only of P.I. Belahg and Blulip, but of the actual and the representation: budgerigar and statuette, tooth and denture, the characters and their appearances on the TV show Querbird. All categories are in flux. There may be a lost budgerigar, a broken tooth, statuettes, and so forth, but these categories are not exclusive of other categories, and tend always, by ontological clinamen, towards these categories. This ontology, since something must be said, or since the author, in choosing to write the novel, has put it about that something must be said in order for the novel to be written, makes language the territory in which this clinamen, this queerness in the nature of the particles, will in this instance be traced. All presences, all absences, all substances, all entities, all dissolutions, all metamorphoses, all wounds and all healing of wounds, are exercises of language, are both problems of language and solutions to these problems of language. Waidner, with nothing more constrained than hyperactive brilliance, somehow combines the register of Janet & John or the Teletubbies with that of specialist academic obscurantism without being anywhere between these poles, for only the extremes are worth conflating. At times there are similarities of rhythm with texts written under lipogrammatic or other artificial constraints, or with the lyric style of Mark E. Smith, or with impromptu dramatic performances using only the text of foreign-language phrasebooks (recommended). “Might sea urchin odontogenesis, fully understood, provide the biochemical tools to transform mainstream prosthodontics?” But, really, the book is quite unlike anything else, and is an exemplar of the sort of enjoyable and uncompromising queering experiment at the edge of literature and with the substance of literature itselfthat literature so desperately needs if it is to open new potentials within itself. When the novel comes to a (sort-of) end, new, more fluid entities have been achieved in a game of ‘real-life’ Exquisite Corpse, the budgerigar has returned, the momentum of the investigation has been expended. “The truth is the only thing left now. The truth ate everyone else alive.” |
The long list for the 2018 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE was announced this week. There are some excellent books included. Click through to find out more, and to read our reviews of several of them. 
Take a virtual tour of VOLUME. Click on the lenses to change your vantage point and to go outside (we are hiding behind the counter).
NEW RELEASES
Release these books and, with them, yourself.
At once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, a thrilling police procedural, a philosophical meditation on liberty, and a counter-culture bildungsroman, The Fountain in the Forest takes a traditional crime narrative and undermines its every preconception, resulting in a head-spinning multi-leveled metaphysical wonder that loses none of the pace and intrigue of the pulp form upon which it is based.
>> Chat.
Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.
"Murmur is a profound meditation on what machine consciousness might mean, the implications of AI, where it will all lead. It’s one of the big stories of our time, though no one else has treated it with such depth and originality." – Peter Blegvad
>> You can enthuse about this book in the snow.
>> Thomas reviews Will Eaves' The Absent Therapist.
A hugely enjoyable, unstoppable and unconstrained excitation both of language itself and of its referents, social mores and particularities.
"I'm besotted with this beguiling, hilarious, rollocking, language-metamorphosing novel. The future of the queer avant-garde is safe with Isabel Waidner." - Olivia Laing
Short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> The author reads an extract.
>> Read an extract yourself.
>> Interview.
"In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past, those that are lost and those, fewer, that remain: on what, in a late work, Beckett beautifully reduced to 'time and grief and self, so-called'. Retracing his steps through his own life and the lives of the family in the midst of which he grew up, Brian Dillon takes for guides some of the great connoisseurs of melancholy, from St Augustine to W. G. Sebald, by way of Sir Thomas Browne and Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. The result is a deeply moving testament, free of sentimentality and evasion, to life's intricacies and the pleasures and the inevitable pains they entail. In defiance of so much that is ephemeral, this is a book that will live." - John Banville,
Can relationships be understood in terms of set theory? How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop and skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator's attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
"Bicecci's experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political repression, and epistemological crises." - Publisher's Weekly
>> "A visual artist who also writes."
>> The author's website.
"In this memoir of a translator’s adventures, Mireille Gansel shows us what it means to enter another language through its culture, and to enter the life of another culture through its language. A sensitive and insightful book, which illuminates the difficult, and often underestimated task of translation—and the role of literature in making for a more interconnected and humane world." – Eva Hoffman
"A history not just of twentieth century poetry but of that dark century itself, from the rise of the Nazis to the American bombing of North Vietnam, and yields too a rare insight into the nature of language and the splendours and limitations of translation." – Gabriel Josipovici
"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea." Ruefle, despite this, provides an most approachable primer to her natural element.
After reading only Beckett for three years, Coffey splices together his ruminations on the writer and his works with media accounts of torture and terrorism, occurrences in his own life and speculations on the nature of literary fame to create a fractured but prismatic work in which casts light in all directions and demonstrates how Beckett's work continues to be a useful thinking tool for the ailments of modern life. The work is structured according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished 'The Long Observation of the Ray'.
"Coffey’s book speaks to how contemporary writers might stage an unmaking and remaking of form, serving as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live. By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey’s work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"All the slipshod magnificence and crazy wonder of the late, venerated American writer are present in this posthumous collection of short stories." - Observer
A lively novel exploring the complex interplay of grief, race and gender, national and individual identities, and the struggle to personhood in a society whose currency is labels.
"Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life - wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons's novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." - Paul Beatty
"Luminescent. Sometimes fierce and angry, other times quiet and tender." - Independent
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter). Herman, the other novella in this book, was written earlier in Krasznahorkai’s career, yet deals with many of the same themes. The two versions, reminiscent at times of Kafka, tell of a master trapper whose disgust at his calling is turned upon his own species as the compounding of his exterminations creates a momentum from which neither he nor others can be released. What remains but the consequential force of past actions when their rationale has proven spurious?
>> Also available: lovely hardback.
Slipping between verse and prose but maintaining perfect cadence, Jenner's poems are steeped in the ethos of the Classical Greece of which he is a scholar, but address the contemporary, the personal and the particular with a tenderness and an intimacy from which pathos and tragedy are never far distant.
"It is a labyrinthine house of language with many rooms that Jenner inhabits and what he finds there is never less than (ordinarily) surprising and provocative." - Michael Harlow
Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf: 'outsiders', 'outlaws', 'outcasts'. A woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it (to the benefit of posterity).
"Cooking plants is a uniquely different art from cooking meat or fish - it requires not only a solid grounding in traditional cooking techniques, but also a deeper understanding of new techniques specific to plant based cookery." Nicely presented.
As children in Calcutta, Ashim and Abhay made a small mistake that split their family forever. Thirty years later, Ashim has re-entered his brother's life, with blame and retribution on his mind. It seems nothing short of smashing Abhay's happy home in New Zealand will make good the damage from the past. At least, this is what Abhay and his wife Lena are certain is happening.
"In his fifth novel, Indian-born, New Zealand-based author Rajorshi Chakraborti skilfully amps up the tension, showing how easily fear can shove reason out the window, even in smart, seemingly self-aware people.It's an absorbing, gripping read that is ultimately about the importance of family and the emotional labour required to create deep, honest connections." - New Zealand Listener
"A compelling book about the dislocation of belonging, geography, culture and, ultimately, memory." - Dominion Post
>> Read an extract.
>> An interview with the author.
Psychoanalysis: The impossible profession by Janet Malcolm $25
What is psychoanalysis? Why do people become analysts? Why do people visit analysts? Can psychoanalysis help anyone? What risks does it pose to both patient and analyst?
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum-Cleaner, A family memoir by Meir Shalev $30
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
The King is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón $23
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Rāwāhi by Briar Wood $25
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a new astronomy at the South Pole by Mark Bowen $37
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
Trajectory by Richard Russo $37
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone $20
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
Flora Magnifica: The art of flowers in four seasons by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki $70
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
Peonies by Jane Eastoe $45
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
Look What You Made Me Do by Helen Walmsley-Johnson $38
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg $28
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
The End of Epidemics by Jonathan D. Quick $38
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
Tomorrow by Elisabeth Russell Taylor $23
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Song of the Dolphin Boy by Elizabeth Laird $20
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
Albert's life is very constrained and, well, boring, until his Grandmother Z whisks him off on her motorcycle on a wonderful adventure.
The short lists for the OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS have just been announced. The winners will be announced on 15 May.Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize: The New Animals by Pip Adam (VUP);Salt Picnic by Patrick Evans (VUP); Sodden Downstream by Brannavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson); Baby by Annaleese Jochems (VUP).
Poetry: Anchor Stone by Tony Beyer (Cold Hub Press); Night Horse by Elizabeth Smither (AUP); Rāwāhi by Briar Wood (Anahera Press); The Yield by Sue Wootton (Otago UP).
Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction: Dancing with the King: The rise and fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 by Michael Belgrave (AUP); Tears of Rangi: Experiments across worlds by Anne Salmond (AUP); Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir by Tom Scott (Allen & Unwin); Driving to Trebrinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press).
Illustrated Non-Fiction: Tuai: A traveller in two worlds by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Bridget Williams Books); Tōtara: A natural and cultural history by Philip Simpson (AUP); Gordon Walters: New vision by Zara Stanhope et al (Auckland Art Gallery & Dunedin Public Art Gallery); The Face of Nature: An environmental history of the Otago Peninsula by Jonathan West (Otago UP).
The long list for the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Baileys Prize) has just been announced. There are some excellent books included. Click through to make your choice.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Enjoy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
>> A fuller list of contributors.
 | McSweeney's #50 edited by Dave Eggers {Reviewed by STELLA} McSweeney’s literary magazine, founded by author Dave Eggers, has been publishing a quarterly for over twenty years. What started as a magazine that only published work that had been rejected from the mainstream journals has developed into an institution of experimental and intriguing short pieces and comic art. Issue 50 is a salute to the short story, to the importance of publishing new work and giving exposure to new writers. While this issue, which was a call-out to 50 writers to submit new work, includes some well-known names (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Davis, Sheila Heti), the writing from them is fresh and unexpected. And there are plenty of new authors to discover. Steven Millhauser’s 'Thank You for Your Patience' will resonate for anyone that ever been on hold for an inordinate period of time, while Sherman Alexie’s tale of a romantic woe on a pizza delivery job pay packet serves us a slice of farcical reality. Romance also raises its head in Haris.A.Durrani’s excellent and pithy 'Forty-Two Reasons Your Girlfriend Works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, S.H.I.E.L.D., Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords'. Workplace frustrations are central to Dan Kennedy’s removable one-page tirades, 'Please Clean the Kitchen, Please Refill the Paper Tray and Please Reserve Conference Room Ahead of Time', will be at home on all office walls. Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson’s darkly funny 'Deaths of Henry King' has a nod to Edward Gorey’s alphabet book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and Jeff Parker’s 'Hero' will make you laugh and squirm. Collections are always tricky things and some works are stronger than others, yet this one will have you dipping back in to discover and enjoy. From the reversible, folded cover (it becomes a poster if desired) to the short short story by Sarah Manguso (an author that you should seek out more work of) on the front board to the delights in experiencing so many writing styles in one volume, this is a gem of current American short story writing. |
 | Jeaslousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet {Reviewed by THOMAS} The only reality is the present moment, and the only certainty about that is that it is the present moment, constantly assailed as it is by the fantasies of the past and the future, each of which presents itself as an imitation present, a simulacrum differing either more or less from the present it seeks to replace. In retrospect, the present and the futures and pasts that assailed it are not different in kind and become hopelessly entangled, whatever geometry we apply to the task of considering it, undermining certainty and leaving us only with an endlessly loopable - and inescapable - experience of a present without any of the qualities of this present being fixed or certain. The unnarrated narrator of Jealousynarrates repeatedly a limited sequence of events: the presence of their neighbour Franck in the house he shares with the character referred to as A…, the interactions of Franck and A…, about which the narrator is uncomfortable and which culminate in the arrangement for Franck to take A... with him on his trip to the port town some hours drive from the tropical banana plantation in which they live, and also the return of Franck and A… the next day, having had to stay the night in the town apparently on account of Franck’s car having broken down. As much as possible, the narrator has excied himself from the narrative. He is only a point of observation and is careful to betray no agency. He is of course implied by his narration (ironically, A… eludes the geometry of his descriptions (even her name remains an elipsis), the very descriptions that ensnare the narrator (despite his best efforts)), even, possibly, implicated by his narration. The narrative restricts itself to the present tense and to ‘objective’ detail, so to call it. As the narrator goes over and over the sequence of events (very much in the way he describes the overheard song of one of his drivers: “These repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications - though barely perceptible - eventually moving quite far from the point of departure.”), he allows, little by little, more evidence (so to call it) about what he suspects to be A…’s relationship with Franck to slip into the narrative. Detail puts a brake on the narrative, slowing its approach to trauma, but it is also the vector of that trauma. The details, the repetitions, become tighter and tighter around the trauma, like white blood cells clustering around the trauma. The narrator suspects A… and Franck of something that he cannot bear to think about but is obsessed with all the same. The precision of miniscule detail given about Franck’s pocket, from which protrudes, despite Franck’s best efforts to hide it, the corner of a piece of blue notepaper upon which A… was observed writing something earlier and which A… has presumably handed him after sending the narrator indoors for ice for their drinks, is an exemplar of the way in which detail can be used to control the pace and focus of the reader’s attention, as well as demonstrating how psychological weight can inform and distort objective description (an oxymoron). The narrator’s uncertainty about A… (her smile “can be interpreted as derision just as well as affection, or the total absence of feeling whatever.”) and about her relationship with Franck leads him to obsess over detail, which, under this sort of pressure, becomes unstable. “It’s no use making up contrary possibilities, since things are the way they are: reality stays the same,” states the narrator, but his repetitions begin to contradict themselves, first positing potentials (“A… may have put her face into the opening above the seat” after getting out of Franck’s car) and then assailing what we have previously ‘known’ (Franck crushing the centipede in A…’s bedroom rather than in dining room, Franck approaching A…’s bed, Franck’s car exploding in an accident), these alternative presents evidently constructed out of the narrator’s jealousy and bringing into question the actuality of his other observations. Everything is a play of images, interchangeable with other images, precision no guarantee of actuality. The port to which Franck takes A… has no more reality than the picture of the port on the calendar on the wall, or, rather, these realities contend with each other for the attention that will fulfill them. The present is inescapable, though it may be endlessly iterated and altered when relived in memory. The distinction between experience and memory is destabilised, the narrative chopped and repeated and discontinuous like memory. We are presented simultaneous contraries. The narrator both creates and erases the mark of the catastrophe, the trace, the stain of the centipede, the letter, the bloodstain (surely not...), the memory. In this endlessly iterated and permuted remembered present, at what point might an imagined future (also experienced as a present) begin to insert itself and start to drag the narrative, disengaged now from an actuality that is uncertain, off onto a branch that is more an expression of psychology than of so-called reality? Is it possible, even, that the entire narrative, from beginning to end, in all its permutations, takes place in the narrator’s frantic mind as he waits in A…’s room for her return from the port? As the narrator observes of A…’s and Franck’s discussion of a novel that the narrator has not read, “The variations as extremely various; the variations of these, still more so.” |
NEW RELEASES
An introduction to some of the new titles that arrived this week. Click through to find out more, and to reserve your copies.
At the end of the summer, a girl spends time at her grandfather’s place in the countryside. Then an unexpected guest arrives, who the girl doesn’t like. Through images and the characters’ actions, the book tells the story of those few days and what happens - it's about the assumptions we make that aren’t always right.
"An entirely new, wholly different form of bewitching visual storytelling." - Brainpickings
>> An interview with Blexbolex.
How easy is it for a woman to blaze her own creative path? Ivory Frame escapes her aristocratic family to interwar Paris, where she becomes an artist of the Surrealist set. Many years later she is working on her last masterpiece and looking back over her life. A novel inspired by the life of Leonora Carrington.
"The Dictionary of Animal Languages is such a special book, suffused with an almost painterly intelligence. Sopinka's characters experience the world with an intensity we associate with children and visionaries. Watching them navigate the difficulties of the humdrum and the glamorous both is a distinctive, if unsettling, pleasure." — Rivka Galchen
"Not only a dictionary of animal language, but also an atlas of the human heart, Heidi Sopinka's gorgeous debut novel maps the difficult territory between history and memory, love and loss." —Johanna Skibsrud
"If we don't have the past in mind, it is merely history. If we do, it is still part of the present." A thoughtfully written novel tracing the trauma of the Holocaust and of unspoken secrets through three generations of a family, crossing between Britain and New Zealand.
The distance between territory and map, the distance between a journey and the language used to write about it, the distance between one language and another - there is no straight line to measure any of this. A sequence of poems from one of the most exciting contemporary poets writing in Portuguese.
>> Read a sample poem.
When a shy young Mexican woman moves to Paris to study literature, this begins to move the loom upon which the relationships of many people are woven.
"Nettel creates marvellous parallels between the sorrows and follies of her human characters and the creatures they live with." - New York Times
"The gaze Nettel turns on madness both temperate and destructive, on manias, on deviances, is so sharp that it has us seeing straight into our own obsessions." - Le Monde
The third of Knausgaard's seasonal quartet covers one day in that season (13 April 2016) in the life of a man and his newborn daughter, a day filled with its own particulars but also manifesting the weight of the past, especially of something that happened in Summer nearly three years before.
New Zealand artist E. Mervyn Taylor was not only an internationally influential wood engraver. During the burgeoning of New Zealand nationalist-cultural focus in the 1960s he produced a dozen murals for government and civic buildings. Some were later destroyed or covered over. This book records the search for a distinctive artistic legacy.
From Berlin to Warsaw to Moscow to Kiev, Petrowskaja's search for her family's twentieth-century history encompasses a great-uncle sentenced to death for shooting a German diplomat, a grandfather who disappeared during World War 2 and reappeared forty years later, and a great-gandmother, maybe named Esther, who, being too frail to leave Kiev when the Jews rewe being rounded up, was shot by the Nazis outside her home.
"Rarely is research into family history this exciting, this moving. If this were a novel it would seem exaggerated and unbelievable. This is great literature." - Der Spiegel
"There's a literary miracle on every page here. There's poetry and politics in this family memoir, but most of all there's the pleasure of being in the company of Petrowskaja's talent. A Proust for the Google age." - Peter Pomerantsev
Beyer's poetry has a clarity and space that allows meaning and association to orbit the lines and create patterns of resonance indicative of hitherto inaccessible levels of experience, both of society and the natural world.
Short-listed for the poetry award in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Poetry and relationships pull against each other, or buoy each other, in this collection of poems set against a failing marriage and an assertion of artistic vitality.
An acerbic, acid-bright, yet unapologetically sentimental and personal reflection on what it means to perform and dissect identity, as a poet and a person.
>> Sample!
Well's discovery of a cache of letters among his elderly mother's effects led him to unravel the many strands of his family's history, and to find very personal experiences of the war against Te Kooti, the Boer War, the Napier earthquake, the Depression, class fluidity, personal and collective crises and AIDS.
Pastoral yet gritty, intellectual and witty, sweet but with stings in their tails, the poems and sequences collected in Pasture and Flock are essential reading for both long-term and new admirers of Jackson’s slanted approach to lyric poetry.
>> Read a sample.
The world is clearly not the world as manifest to humans, says Harman: "'To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects - whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human - are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems.
As a boy growing up on the south coast of England, Howard Cunnell's sense of self was dominated by his father's absence. Starting with his own childhood in the Sussex beachlands, Cunnell tells the story of the years of self-destruction that defined his young adulthood and the escape he found in reading and the natural world. Still he felt compelled to destroy the relationships that mattered to him. Cunnell charts his journey from anger to compassion as his daughter Jay realizes he is a boy, and a son.
"There is so much aching love in this book, such pain and beauty." - Tim Winton
"Dazzlingly beautiful. This is truly heart-stopping writing." - The Financial Times
It's 1969 and a remote coastal town in Western Australia is poised to play a pivotal part in the moon landing. Perched on the red dunes of its outskirts looms the great Dish: a relay for messages between Apollo 11 and Houston, Texas. Crouched around a single grainy set, radar technician Evan Johnson and his colleagues stare at the screen, transfixed. Watching all this, and narrating this novel, is a caged bird, a galah named Lucky.
"Warm and smart." - The Australian
How does the internet, personalised technology and shifts in ideas of empowerment, individuality and transpersonal identity alter the way we think and act about sex? Does this make it any easier or any harder to integrate or separate sex and love?
Work from featured poet Alistair Paterson and a raft of established and emerging poets, as well as essays on poetics and reviews of collections published in the last year.
A good overview of the resources and potentials of oral literature.
Katharina's husband isn't coming home for the weekend - again - so she's on her own. When their chaotic daughter Helli has a nosebleed, Kat has to dash off to school to pick her up. Then their son, Alex, announces he's bringing his new girlfriend home for the first time. Kat's best friend from college is coming around tonight too, and she's wondering if she should try to seduce him - but first she needs to do the shopping, the vacuuming and the laundry, deal with an exploding clothes-dryer, find their neighbour's severed thumb in the front yard and catch a couple of escaped rodents. When she's got all that sorted, perhaps she'll have time to think about the thing she's been trying not to think about - the lump she's just found in her breast. Because you can't just die and leave a huge mess for someone else to clean up can you? And wasn't there supposed to be more to life than this?
It's Dunedin 1892, and the women's suffrage movement is gaining momentum. Left to fend for herself when her husband's committed to the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 23-year-old Eva meets Grace, an outspoken suffragist with an exotic and mysterious past. As the friendship between the two women grows through a shared love of music, Eva begins questioning the meaning of her marriage and her role as a woman. But Grace has a bullying husband and secrets she's been keeping from Eva, which could threaten the freedom both women find themselves fighting for.
In an age when mass communication links us across the globe, why are we increasingly reinforcing the barriers, both literal and figurative, between us.
A white butterfly lands on many different coloured flowers. What happens when it lands on a cat?
The great-grandson of New Zealand publishing pioneer George Whitcombe, Maclean has been responsible for a number of outstanding books about place, history and the outdoors in New Zealand, including Tararua: The story of a mountain range (1994), John Pascoe (2003), Stag Spooner: Wild Man from the Bush (2012), Tramping: A New Zealand History (2014), Kapiti (2000), Wellington: Telling Tales (2005) and Waikanae (2010). This book gives good insight into the New Zealand publishing industry.
In a series of backroom negotiations in 1956, the National Government and Labour Opposition agreed to put aside adversarial politics temporarily and entrench certain significant electoral rules. For any of these rules to be amended or repealed, Section 189 of the Electoral Act (now Section 268 of the 1993 Act) requires the approval of either three-quarters of all MPs or a majority of electors voting in a referendum. The MPs believed this entrenchment put in place a 'moral' constraint to guide future parliaments, but its status has changed over time. In Search of Consensus tells the story of why and how such a remarkable political settlement happened. It traces and analyses the Act's protected provisions, subsequent fortunes and enduring legacy.
A quirky collection of graphic or illustrated short stories charting many different types of love, with many different outcomes.
"The book has much to say about the beauty and devastation of seeking companionship in any given human life. The collaboration is winningly strange.” — Publishers Weekly
What sort of story can be told of a city based on the detritus found in the mud on the banks of the river that runs through it? Very well illustrated.
Why is it that some citizens of once-Communist countries exhibit such nostalgia for how they used to live? Perhaps for the same reason that dancing bears liberated into the wild will still raise themselves up on their hind legs when they see humans.
>> It's not easy running a retirement home for old dancing bears.
The Yark loves children. More precisely, this hairy monster loves to eat children: ham of boy, orphan gratin, schoolchild puree, breaded babies, girl rillettes. But he has a problem: his delicate stomach can only tolerate the flesh of nice children; liars give him indigestion. There are not nearly enough good, edible children around to keep him from starvation. Then the Yark finds delicious, sweet Madeleine. Will he gobble her up? Or will she learn how to survive?
A selection of
FICTION BY WOMEN
compiled for International Women's Day (8.3.18).
Discover a new author.
“Carrington’s stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and grotesque, tender and cruel. She never contented herself with something simple or trite.” - Sheila Heti
“Her stories are vivid, funny and surprisingly fresh, combining satire with surrealist situations to deftly mock the pomposity of organized religion, sexual repression or the endless forms of bureaucratic hypocrisy and ineptitude.” - The New York Times
>> Leonora Carrington at VOLUME.
A collection of raw but unflinching stories, all examining the complexities of women's relationships with and through their bodies.
"Bomer offers her characters no outs only the creeping sense that they're doomed to swing forever between futile attempts at self-determination." - The New York Times
"Reading Paula Bomer is like being attacked by a rabid dog - and feeling grateful for it. This is some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering." - Jonathan Franzen
A collection of short stories exploring connections between extremes of heat and cold. Sometimes this is spatial or geographical; sometimes it is metaphorical. Sometimes it involves juxtapositions of time; sometimes heat appears where only ice is expected. In the stories, a woman is caught between traditional Fijian ways and the brutality of the military dictatorship; a glaciology researcher falls into a crevasse and confronts the unexpected; two women lose children in freak shooting accidents; a young child in a Barbie Doll sweatshop dreams of a different life; secondary school girls struggle with secrets about an addicted janitor; and two women take a deathly trip through a glacier melt stream. These are some of the unpredictable stories in this collection that follow themes of ice and glaciers in the heat of the South Pacific and take us into unusual lives and explorations.
"Aotearoa New Zealand has yet to hear a voice as striking as this one from its Pasifika diaspora: Fijian-infused, queer-inflected, and crafted with legal precision." - Selina Tusitala Marsh
When her mother, a former slave, is killed by the panther that also leaves herself disfigured, Samantha crosses the Texan frontier with her brother Benjamin, and, with an unlikely posse, seeks revenge on this implacable and unknowable force of nature.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a poet, philosopher, essayist and playwright in the 17th century. Eccentric, erratically shy but desiring of fame, she was both shunned and celebrated by the aristocracy and the thinkers of the time. Dutton’s fictional account of this fascinating character is lively and absorbing.
"A small miracle of imaginative sympathy." - Guardian
>> A Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish
>> An introduction to her philosophical work.
An intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, lover and desire, written under strict OuLiPian constraints: a tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing.
Winner of the Prix Médicis.
"For Garréta, it may just be possible that the body occupies the space of language so powerfully as its capacity to produce it." - BOMB
When Roxy's husband and his lover are killed in a car accident, Roxy will not be denied her revenge. Who will she direct this at, though?Written in a concise, lucid style, this book is a clear exploration of the emotional weight grief and anger lever upon ordinary details.
Gerritsen's skillful writing creates tension with its forward-propelling relentless plot, a compelling awkward narrator and uncertain outcomes. The clever ironic conversations between the characters and zany happenings hit you like a slap, while what is unsaid, what is hinted at and implied between the words and lines on the page, jolts you awake. Like Craving, Roxy is a candid portrayal of damage and trauma, sometimes shocking, often blackly funny.
This book is at once an excoriating self-examination, a pitiless self-satire (although it may in fact not be as satirical as it seems to be) and an unforgivably self-indulgent exercise in self-exposure (and is these things all at once and not by turns). You will be irritated by Sheila, but she is irritating in pretty much the same way that you are irritating to yourself, and you will grow tired of Sheila, but in the same way that you grow tired of yourself. You will put the book aside, but, without really knowing why, you will keep coming back to it in pretty much the same way you keep coming back to vaguely important but imprecise and somewhat irritating aspects of your own life. Sheila nobly asks herself “How should a person be?”, and gets the same unsatisfactory, earnest and ridiculous answers as you would get if you asked yourself the same impossible question. The book contains passages of painful honesty and vapid bullshit (both at the same time, mostly), and beautiful, sad and hilarious passages, too (again, beautiful, sad and hilarious all at once and not by turns). By asking big questions in a life that contains only small answers, Sheila holds herself up to show us that we don’t know how to be, or how to make our lives the way we want them, or even to know what we want with any sureness or consistency.
"Sultry, sinister, hilarious and demented, Baby blazes with intelligence and murderous black humour. Heavenly Creatures for a new generation." – Eleanor Catton
"Patricia Highsmith meets reality TV in this compelling debut. Jochems nudges up the tension until we can’t bear to look – and can’t bear to look away: thrilling, dangerous and deliciously funny." – Catherine Chidgey
"This funny, sexy, unnerving novel challenges received ideas and delivers jolts of pleasure and disquiet throughout. Jochems, like her extraordinary creation Cynthia, is a force to be reckoned with." –Emily Perkins
>> "The best novel of 2017." - Spinoff
Short-listed for the 2018 Acorn Prize in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, a woman finds a green spot on her pubis. She scrapes at it half-heartedly but fails to remove it and it rapidly spreads over her lower body, a sort of mould or fungus about which she seems strangely not distressed but even seems to become rather fond of. As she wanders about her house, she wanders also through her memories, particularly concerning her niece, with whom she shares a name (and all the literary doubling that that implies), and the switching of her husband’s affections from the older to the younger Constanza. The further the mildew spreads, the less grip the narrator has on the habitual patterns of her life, or, rather, the less she is gripped by them, and the more her memories are shown to be arbitrary, partial, unreliable, self-seeking (or self-harming). As the mildew spreads, the reader, too, finds their grip on facts loosened and the psychological forces which underlie the narrative send filaments up through the pores in the surface of reality and softly overwhelm both its momentum and its meaning. Despite the great psychological weight carried in this book it is written very lightly and directly, with a sharp pen and not a wasted word, and the damp claustrophobia of the narrator’s mind is perfectly expressed, as is the release she (sort of) experiences as the mould or fungus becomes a symptom and externalises whatever it is that it is a symptom of.
Seduced by politics, poetry and an enduring dream of building a better world together, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor. Moving with him to a rain-washed coastal town, she swiftly learns that what for her is a bond of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of an obedient wife, bullying her and devouring her ambition of being a writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. At once the chronicle of an abusive marriage and a celebration of the power of art, this is a smart, fierce and courageous take on traditional wedlock in modern India.
"It would take Carol Ann Duffy, Caroline Criado-Perez, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie to match Kandasamy's infinite variety." - Independent
First published in 1997, long before Knausgaard and Heti, this novel was a well-placed detonation beneath the wall dividing memoir and fiction. Ostensibly an account of Kraus’s all-consuming middle-aged crush on a man she has met only briefly and who has seemingly done nothing to encourage her obsession, the first half of the book consists of a hilarious compilation of letters addressed to ‘Dick’ by Kraus and her husband, with whom she plays a hugely ironic game of cultural and psycho-social toe-to-toe positioning. Following the delivery of the great mass of letters to ‘Dick’, Kraus and her husband separate and Kraus continues to pursue the passive ‘Dick’, who remains a tabula rasa for her projections, until he becomes little more than a ‘dear diary’ figure, recipient of essay-letters concerning art and cultural theory. Kraus pursues her ‘crush’ through a maze of received social constructs and gender-role expectations with a snide irony that both deepens and ridicules the pathos of her rather abject attempts to ‘possess’ ‘Dick’. A letter from the ‘real’ Dick at the end implies that the liaisons recounted in the second half of the book are entirely fictional, and that Kraus has used her projected ‘Dick’ as a sort of catalyst to examine and make changes in her personal and artistic life. In any quest for authenticity, each manifestation of the personal is a struggle with the demands of form. Here, Kraus forces the bourgeois genre of the epistolary novel to burst from interior pressure to allow the first person to penetrate from the letters into the more empowering narratorial frame.
A Haitian family is burdened by a curse lasting generations. This novel gives insight into the lives of disenfranchised women in the Caribbean.
"Lahens describes her country with a forceful beauty - the destruction that befell it, political opportunism, families torn apart, and the spellbinding words of Haitian farmers who solely rely on subterranean powers." -Donyapress
Winner (in French) of the Prix Femina, 2014.
Very occasionally you come across a book that impresses itself upon you so heavily that the next several books you read seem contrived and inconsequential by comparison. Eimear McBride’s story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, the on-going impact of his childhood brain tumour, their mother’s hysterical Catholicism and the narrator’s increasingly chaotic and self-annihilating sexuality is tremendously affecting because of the highly original (and note-perfect) way in which the author has broken and remade language to match the thought-patterns of the narrator. Short sentences like grit in the mind, snatches of unassimilable experience, syntax fractured by trauma, the uncertain, desperately repeated and painfully abandoned attempts to wring a gram of meaning or even beauty out of compound tragedy, to carry on, both living and telling, despite the impossibility of carrying on, situate the reader right inside the narrator’s head. This book is upsetting, intense, compassionate, revelatory, unflinching, and sometimes excoriatingly funny. It gives access to what you would have thought inaccessible.
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest.
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
A playful, modernised parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery. First published in 1974.
"A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious, Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout." —Kirkus
When 95 percent of the earth's population disappears for no apparent reason, Mira does what she can to create some semblance of a life: she cobbles together a haphazard community named Zion, scavenges the Piles for supplies they might need, and avoids loving anyone she can't afford to lose. Four years after the Rending, Mira's best friend, Lana, announces her pregnancy, the first since everything changed and a new source of hope for Mira. But when Lana gives birth to an inanimate object - and other women of Zion follow suit- the thin veil of normalcy Mira has thrown over her new life begins to fray.
Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she struggles to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.
"I worship at the altar of this book. A keen portrait of a subculture, an instant classic in life-writing, a go-for-broke exemplar of queer feminist imagination, a contribution to crucial, ongoing conversations about whose lives matter, Black Wave is a rollicking triumph." - Maggie Nelson
Through her use of her fictional character Madame Realism, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision.
In an increasingly plausible dystopian future America, women's reproductive rights have been overturned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers.
"Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Red Clocks is funny, mordant, baroque, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring -not to mention a way forward for fiction now." - Maggie Nelson
"A lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women's lives." — Naomi Alderman, The New York Times
>> Read an extract.
>> Keri Hulme is an object of her gratitude.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #64 (3.3.18).
Read our NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading, what new books have arrived this week, about next week's Book of the Week, and about our forthcoming poetry course.
If apples had teeth, they would bite back. If trees were pink, they would be nevergreens. This silly, inventive picture book illustrated by the outstanding graphic designer of the protopsychedelic era will make your brain turn somersaults. Each page presents a counterfactual situation, encouraging children to speculate about their world in a playful way. Art, poetry and meaning are all profitably generated from nonsense, and a creative life can be achieved by learning to look at the familiar in fresh ways. A facsimile of the original 1960 edition, the book is exquisitely produced and printed (on just the right paper stock!), and is the perfect addition to the shelf of either an imaginative child or anyone interested in period design. Sometimes the counterfactual is counter-counterfactual (how liberating!): If a zebra wore striped pajamas, you would never know. {T}
>> Also in stock (and new): Posters by Milton Glaser. From the early psychedelic work to recent production, with Glaser's own commentary, this book marks half a century at the forefront of graphic design.
>> Visit Glaser's studio.
>> To inform and delight.
>> Milton Glaser's website.
>> "Great design makes ideas new."