Milkman by Anna Burns (published by Faber & Faber), apparently set in Belfast during the Troubles, is a sharp portrait of structures of conformity within a divided and traumatised society - and a remarkably enjoyable book to read.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> "Incredibly original."
>>Trading blows: on the populist assault on Milkman.
>> "Completely stonked."
>> [Confused.]
>> The Man Booker judges' citation: "The language of Anna Burns’ Milkman is simply marvellous; beginning with the distinctive and consistently realised voice of the funny, resilient, astute, plain-spoken, first-person protagonist. From the opening page her words pull us into the daily violence of her world — threats of murder, people killed by state hit squads — while responding to the everyday realities of her life as a young woman, negotiating a way between the demands of family, friends and lovers in an unsettled time. The novel delineates brilliantly the power of gossip and social pressure in a tight-knit community, and shows how both rumour and political loyalties can be put in the service of a relentless campaign of individual sexual harassment. Burns draws on the experience of Northern Ireland during the Troubles to portray a world that allows individuals to abuse the power granted by a community to those who resist the state on their behalf. Yet this is never a novel about just one place or time. The local is in service to an exploration of the universal experience of societies in crisis."
 | Milkman by Anna Burns {Reviewed by THOMAS} The reason this book has a sunset on the cover - a cover that postponed my considering reading it until I was challenged to pick a winner from this year’s Booker short list* (intolerant as I am of pictorial schmaltz) - becomes apparent in the third chapter, when the narrator’s French language evening class collectively denies that the sky can be any colour other than blue (or, at night, black), despite the evidence presented to them through the window by their teacher. It is the second time in a week that the narrator has been astonished at a coloured sky: her maybe-boyfriend had taken her to ‘watch the sunset’, an unheard-of and somewhat suspect activity for someone raised in a community in which every behaviour and opinion has been determined by convention, and in which, consequently, all behaviours and opinions immediately classify a person within the strict codes of those conventions. Although no particulars are given names, the book is apparently set in Belfast in the late 1970s, in the hopeless depths of the Troubles. The eighteen-year-old narrator has learned, as have all in her community except for those ‘beyond the pale’, to present only her “topmost mental level to those who were reading it,” to hide herself within the conventions of a divided society in which norms are structured, reinforced and policed by gossip, in which “not mentioning was my way to keep safe.” In her community, in which the ‘renouncers of the state’ [IRA] are both the instigators and the manifestation of the shared political and religious position, life, and to an even greater extent, death, only makes sense in terms of the conflict. From all families, active participants in the violence, innocent victims of the state’s responses and suicides (sufferers of what the narrator’s mother calls ‘the psychologicals are everywhere) all end up in ‘the usual place’ - the cemetery. Shame is a mechanism by which partisan orthodoxy is maintained. “Given that shame was such a complex, involved, very advanced feeling, most people here did all kinds of permutations in order not to have it: killing people, doing verbal damage to people and, not least, also not infrequently, doing those things to oneself.” The narrator is not as successful at hiding herself beneath convention as she would like, her habit of reading ‘great novels’ when walking, for instance, draws the attention of, and comment from, various quarters, most significantly from the character referred to as the milkman, seemingly a renouncer specialist in “shadowing and trailing and profiling” who has been responsible for numerous killings and has high standing in the community. “I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him.” He does, however, have a white van (though he is opposite in every way from the 'real milkman'). No amount of not responding by the narrator can prevent him from ‘taking an interest’ in her, oppressing her and grooming her as a future mistress. “I’m going to curtail you and isolate you so that soon you’ll do nothing,” he says, persuading her to stop visiting her maybe-boyfriend by intimating that he, as a mechanic, would be vulnerable to a car-bomb. The ‘relationship’ between the narrator and her stalker proceeds faster in the gossip of the community than in reality, gossip that pre-forms and iterates the story and gives it a sort of inevitability. The milkman could be read as a manifestation of the community’s inherent sexism and gendered power imbalance (the personally political and the collectively political can never be entirely disentangled), but also as a manifestation of the narrator’s own psyche, deformed by the society in which she lives: the milkman seems to know everything about her, “picking up on my secret desires and dreams”. The fact that the end-point of a memory is known before the memory is recounted intimates the inevitability of any account in the past tense. Everything that happens in this novel is revealed in its first sentence, and both the awful tension of the book and its considerable enjoyability and humour (it is by no means a difficult book to read) arise from the fact that, although the novel is tightly plotted, the narrative works always against the plot, resisting it, incapable of averting the inevitable crises but attempting at least to postpone them, to ‘buy time’, by inserting more and more thoughts, speculations, and recollections into moments of urgency. The more urgent the moment - the closer the milkman - the more extensive or the more complex or the more pedantic the loops of narrative the narrator inserts, as if narrative could slow or postpone the plot’s inevitable slide towards crisis. It is the control of the speed of experience that is the narrator’s (and the author’s) primary mode of contention with ‘the facts’. Burns, in her wonderfully looping riffs of ever-increasing pedantry, uses precision to cumulatively humorous effect (if precision in itself is not a humorous effect). The pursuit of logic to the point of illogic mocks a community operating on spurious rationality, and the mix of high and low registers underscores the narrator’s ambiguous conformity with that community, a community in which the ‘logic’ of resistance to oppression creates a ‘logic’ of oppression, in which personal ends are only achieved through political means, subjecting the personal to the political rather than making the political a means by which the personal may find expression. As the novel ends, though, it is intimated that it is power’s derogation of women (and its other victims) that shows power’s vulnerability, and that provides opportunities to assert the personal in its political mode.
|
 | The Long Take by Robin Robertson {Reviewed by STELLA} A beautifully crafted novel, The Long Take is an epic narrative poem by renowned Scottish poet Robin Robertson. Kicking off in New York, 1946, it follows the life of Walker, a recently returned soldier. A survivor of D-Day, Walker is displaced by trauma, unable to return to his family, his life, his love in Nova Scotia. His life, like that of many others he encounters, has been turned inside out, and he carries a burden, a guilt he can not discharge. Unemployed, a friend suggests fronting up to a local newspaper,The Press, who are looking for reporters. Walker joins the city news desk, reporting on crime and street politics. Walker’s affinity with the streets, living on the edge, and contact with skid row leads to an assignment to document the lives of the poor and homeless: an investigative piece of work that takes him to LA and San Francisco. As we travel across America with Walker and along these cities’ streets over a decade, we are given an insight into the lives of the disenfranchised and into the impact of war trauma on a nation and an individual. Add to this the politics of the 40s and 50s - the era of cronyism, McCarthyism and mob rule, organised crime and state corruption - the novel is a cutting indictment of the ‘American Dream’, the rise of the automobile and the impact this had on communities (highways and parking lots that killed communities), the falsity of war as a democratic tool, and the injustice to those who fight for freedom yet become victims of power. It’s also a hymn to the film industry of this period - to film noir; the images and language of these films cleverly interweave with the tone of the streetscape and the atmosphere of the novel. Walker is a compelling man, a man who carries a history that he feels can only be understood by his comrades in arms, by those who have experienced similar trauma. He dulls his building emotional disintegration with liquor and by keeping his distance - never becoming entangled in relationships. His work colleagues find him unreadable, and those he has the most affinity live on skid row, particularly Billy Idaho - a well-read street philosopher who helps those he can survive the streets. Walker, like Idaho, is kind and has a compassion for his fellow humans: he is an anti-hero that we empathise with - an outsider who will get under your skin. Through the keenly observant Walker, we experience the city, its people and its neighbourhoods. We see desperation, violence and the strength of community. For Walker, burying his trauma is never going to be a solution. Violence simmers at his edges and guilt plays on his conscience, and as the decade progresses his past haunts him. Robertson’s writing is wonderful: evocative, enchanting, raw and affecting. From narrative verse -descriptions of the cityscape and dialogue between characters - to hard, almost unbearable, staccato-like images of war, to lyrical memories of Walker’s childhood and life in Nova Scotia, the poetry has clarity and visibility yet never removes the reader from the story. The Long Take is a novel about us now just as much as it is a filmic exposé of post-war America, exploring issues of poverty, racism, fascism and freedom. Powerful, inventive and uncompromising. |
NEW RELEASES
Written when Revueltas, a life-long political dissident, was himself a prisoner in the infamous Palacio de Lecomberri prison in Mexico City in 1969, this novella, written in a single, torrential paragraph, concerns three prison inmates who plan to have heroin smuggled in to the prison. The book, now available in English for the first time, is an indictment of the deforming impact of institutions upon individuals.
"A whirlwind: one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century writing." - Álvaro Enrigue
"It is impossible to understand contemporary Latin American literature without Revuelta's masterpiece The Hole. Its current invisibility in the English language places works like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and César Aira's political novellas in a bibliographic vacuum." - Valeria Luiselli
>> Read an extract.
Who better to explore the uneasy relationship between the Renaissance Italy and the Muslim world than Mathias Enard, who won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass, a work calibrating experience across Europe and the Middle East? Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants pivots on Michelangelo's invitation to visit Constantinople at the behest of the Sultan, who wishes to commission a bridge. It is a novel about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.
"Necessary – no one writes like Mathias Enard." — Francine Prose
"All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age." — Joshua Cohen, New York Times
>> Read an extract.
Bill Manhire interviewed by Anna Smaill, plus six poems; ‘My Ten Guitars’, a comic by Barry Linton, with a note by Tim Bollinger; Essays by Pip Adam, Geoff Cochrane, Lynn Davidson, Lynn Jenner, Dean Parker, Giovanni Tiso, Rose Lu; Fiction by Antonia Bale, Airini Beautrais, Zoë Higgins, Anthony Lapwood, Eamonn Marra, Hannah Mettner, Clare Moleta, Rachel O’Neill, Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Maria Samuela, Michelle Tayler; Poetry by Jane Arthur, Morgan Bach, Sarah Jane Barnett, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Jenny Bornholdt, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Ruth Corkill, Uther Dean, Lynley Edmeades, Rata Gordon, Rebecca Hawkes, Andrew Johnston, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Eleanor Rose King Merton, Emma Neale, Gregory O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Justin Paton, essa may ranapiri, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Frances Samuel, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Steven Toussaint, Oscar Upperton, Louise Wallace, Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Ashleigh Young; Cover by Elliot Elam.
>>This Sporting Life.
Thoughtful interviews with Patricia Grace, Tessa Duder, Owen Marshall, Philip Temple, David Hill, Joy Cowley, Vincent O'Sullivan, Albert Wendt, Marilyn Duckworth, Chris Else, Fiona Kidman and Witi Ihimaera, and excellent portraits and (even better) photographs of writing spaces by John McDermott.
Knausgaard writes "to erode his own notions of the world," but also, by exhausting his preconceptions through writing them, to allow himself stumble inadvertently upon knowledge that they had been concealing.
As a group of islands in the far south-west Pacific Ocean, New Zealand has a history that is steeped in the sea. Its people have encountered the sea in many different ways: along the coast, in port, on ships, beneath the waves, behind a camera, and in the realm of the imagination. While New Zealanders have continually altered their marine environments, the ocean, too, has influenced their lives. A multi-disciplinary work encompassing history, marine science, archaeology and visual culture, New Zealand and the Sea explores New Zealand's varied relationship with the sea, challenging the conventional view that history unfolds on land. Atholl Anderson; Damon Salesa; Ben Maddison; Angela McCarthy; Tony Ballantyne; Peter Gilderdale; Alison MacDiarmid; Michael Stevens; David Haines; Jonathan West; Grace Millar; Chris Brickell; Douglas Booth; Susann Liebich; Julie Benjamin; Jonathan Scott. Well presented.
Len Howard, the daughter of a poet, and a successful concert violinist, was forty years old when she decided to devote the rest of her life to her true love: birds. She bought a small cottage in Sussex, where she wrote two international bestsellers, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived in and around her house, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed. This novel is based on her life.
What work is referred to in a work of art? How can art explore the meaning of work, both economically and in a wider social context?
We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories. Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way.
"A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving. Stories weave and unweave over the book's course, patterning thought into a complex built environment, at once disorientating and illuminating." - Robert Macfarlane
An insightful account of the life and importance of the émigré artist who, from his arrival in New Zealand in 1939, became an aperture through which international and indigenous heritages entered art discourse and practice.
A boy finds that with some help from his nana and a costume that gives him the confidence to be himself, he is at last able to make the perfect bomb into the water.
The same in te Reo.
The state of New Zealand's fresh water has become a pressing public issue in recent years. From across the political spectrum, concern is growing about the pollution of New Zealand's rivers and streams.
Mr Kinfolk introduces us to the unseen shapers of visual culture: Dries van Noten, Kris Van Assche, Spike Jonze, Melina Matsoukas, Grace Coddington, Linda Rodin and many more. Excellent photography and production inside.
>>Look inside.
Lees began this book with the intention of swimming in natural outdoor water in New Zealand every day for a year. Around her account of this she has written what amounts to a history of wild swimming in New Zealand and the social history surrounding it.
>>Immersive reading.
A new edition with new women, in a pleasing smaller format. 200 women from around the world, famous or unknown, answer the same five questions, such as “What really matters to you?” and “What would you change in the world if you could?” New Zealand interviewees include, Jacinda Ardern, Louise Nicholas, Marilyn Waring, Damaris Coulter, Kimbra Johnson, Lydia Ko, Marama Fox, Eva McGauley and Karen Walker.
Chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, the myth of recovery. Is this everyone's story?
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.” — Cheryl Strayed
Can the upwelling of dissenting energy be shaped into a collective political force or party? Can politics come to be seen as an expression of the people rather than a disempowering force?
Seminal works of psycho-geography, first published at the turn of the twentieth century (but only now in English), from a pioneer of urban sociology and precursor the the Frankfurt School.
When an American pilot crashes in the desert he must seek refuge in the very camp it had been his mission to bomb.
"Red Birds is an incisive, unsparing critique of war and of America’s role in the destruction of the Middle East. It combines modern and ancient farcical traditions in thrilling ways." - Guardian
A rejection of received norms and practices and the creation of new forms of connection and creation reach a quantum intensity in New York during the 1960s and early 1970s.
A sharply satirical and fantastical collection of stories revealing the depth and breadth of racism in contemporary US.
"An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny." -George Saunders
Koirala has that knack of creating depth with a simple few lines — she creates images that seem to arise without effort, ideas that quietly lift off the page to settle in the mind of the reader. A new collection from the poet of Tear Water Tea.
In 1621, fifty-six English women crossed the Atlantic in response to the Virginia Company of London's call for maids 'young and uncorrupt' to make wives for the planters of its new colony in Virginia. The English had settled there just fourteen years previously and the company hoped to root its unruly menfolk to the land with ties of family and children. While the women travelled of their own accord, the company was in effect selling them at a profit for a bride price of 150 lbs of tobacco for each woman sold. The rewards would flow to investors in the near-bankrupt company. But what did the women want from the enterprise? Why did they agree to make the dangerous crossing to a wild and dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within their first few years - from dysentery, typhoid, salt water poisoning and periodic skirmishes with the native population? What happened to them in the end?
When the Rift opens, death follows. For generations, the Rangers of Black Water Island have guarded the Old Herd against horrors released by the Rift. Cal West, an apprentice Ranger with a rare scar and even rarer gifts, fights daily to prove he belongs within their ranks. After nine years away, Meg Archer returns to her childhood home only to find the Island is facing a new threat that not even the Rangers are prepared for. Meg and Cal can't ignore their attraction, but can they face their darkest fears to save the Island from disaster?
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Come to the launch of The Rift on Tuesday 6 November at 6:30 at the Elma Turner Library in Halifax Street. There will be a Q&A, book signing and refreshments.
>> 5 reasons to read The Rift.
>> The rift between writing and making ends meet (Rachael talks to The Sapling)
>>What's Actaeon got to do with it?
>> (Gosh)
>>The Rift is published by Walker Books.
>> Rachael's 'Spark' trilogy is also superb.
>>Order a copy of The Rift (we can send it to you anywhere).
 | The Rift by Rachael Craw {Reviewed by STELLA} If you're going to read one new young adults' novel this year, make it this one! You will be saying “aha” and “yes... hmm…. sure...” - i.e. not really listening or taking notice of the world around you at all as you fall into the setting of Black Water Island, the Rift, and the lives of Cal and Meg. Rachael Craw, the author of the award-winning 'Spark' series, brings us a new intriguing and captivating novel, The Rift. Like her earlier series, The Rift has elements of science and fantasy, richly spiced with action, mystery and romance. Add to this a mythological element and you have unputdownable teen read. Black Water Island, remote and isolated, is a mysterious place - affected by ley lines and electromagnetic interference. Digital and mechanical devices are things for the mainland. It is the homeland of an ancient deer herd that holds a precious and wanted commodity - a medicinal property, Actaeon's Bane, marketed as a cure for all ills. The company who owns the rights and access to the deer’s special property is Nutris Pharmaceuticals - a corporation who don’t always 'play nice'. The Old Herd is protected by the Rangers, a group of talented trackers - one could say eco-warriors - who preserve the herd and keep it safe. Rangers are special - their talents handed down through hereditary lines. They have close relationships with birds, and each ranger usually has their own bird scout. Cal, an apprentice Ranger, is different - a fisherman’s son, he received his position via experience rather than inheritance. Meg, the daughter of the Head Ranger Sargent, left the island when she was nine after a horrific accident. Living on the mainland with her mother Dora, they decide it is time to return so that Meg can claim her inheritance. Planning to stay for only a few days, things go awry when the unexpected happens. It’s the time for the cull and the full moon is due - fortune hunters are beginning to descend on the island, and crossing the water with Meg and Dora is the sinister Jack Spear - an employee of Nutris. The island and the herd have been unsettled for days, and Cal senses that something is amiss. The Rift feels uneasy. And this is where the story really starts to hum. The whole concept of the Rift and the Rift Hounds is fascinating, darkly strange and edgy. Meg and Cal are now almost eighteen and hold a key to something they cannot begin to understand - and will remain mysterious to the reader also (I sense a sequel is on the horizon!) - but, drawn together and attracted to each other, they create a strong and important bond - a bond that helps them to face their fears and pushes them to act courageously when danger and death threaten. There are many layers to this novel: a romance - it will satisfy your desire to champion a love match for these two young people; a fantasy - it will intrigue you with the endlessly complex world of Black Water Island and its mysterious Rift; an action-packed adventure - there’s enough hand-to-hand combat, kick-ass athletics and human prowess for anyone; it is a fantasy which draws on myth and ancient tales will pique your curiosity; and a social commentary on ecological systems, medicine and power - it will kick off ideas and discussion that will give it depth and meaning. Add to that Craw’s adept language, brilliant story arc and great descriptive talent and you’ll be hooked. I’m looking forward to interviewing Rachael on Tuesday at the launch of The Rift. She is a YA superstar and a local author! |
 | House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson {Reviewed by THOMAS} Eight residents and then their 'house mother' each deliver a 21-page interior monologue (with snippets of direct speech) revealing their thoughts during the same evening of activities at their rest home. Johnson has cleverly structured the novel so that the narratives can be compared page-to-page and a sequence of events can be constructed by cross-reference. Each character is introduced with a table rating the degree of incapacity of their various faculties, which is then reflected in the monologues (these become less coherent as the book progresses through decreasingly compos mentis residents). By providing internal access to each person present, Johnson provides a multidimensional concurrent narrative, a sort of compound claustrophobia, in which he explores the relationship between memory and identity, the gradual reduction of mental life to the desperate subjective affirmation of banality that underlies all utterances (he is democratic enough, though, to grant all meaning equivalent status), the persistence or otherwise of personhood through increasing incapacity, and the shaky concept of ‘the normal’ (at one point the house mother says, “I disgust them in order that they may not be disgusted with themselves”). House Mother Normal is a remarkably approachable experiment, in turns excoriating, compassionate and uncomfortably funny. |
NEW RELEASES
New books for a new month.
"A father is a necessary evil." - Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. William Butler Yeats's father was an impoverished artist, an inveterate letter writer, and a man crippled by his inability to ever finish a painting. Oscar Wilde's father was a doctor, a statistician and amateur archaeologist who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange foreshadowing of events that would later befall his son. The father of James Joyce was a garrulous, hard-drinking man with a violent temper, unable or unwilling to provide for his large family, who eventually drove his son from Ireland. What do these men tell us about Ireland, about literary creation, even about fatherhood?
Lucia Berlin burst, posthumously, out of obscurity in 2015 with the publication of a selection of her stories entitled A Manual for Cleaning Women. Here was an authentic voice, a cleanness of style, a depiction of disadvantage, vulnerability and strength without sentimentality of condescension, a mordant but sympathetic humour, and an ability to pivot the largest observations on the smallest of details. Evening in Paradise is a further selection from Berlin's work.
>> Click through to find out more about our Books of the Week.
When Berlin died in 2004 she was working on a set of autobiographical sketches. These are now published for the first time.
>> Click through to find out more about our Books of the Week.
The worlds in Marcus's stories are bizarre but at the same time instantly recognisable. Every new ill or illness, however, is met with an equally new virtue or cure. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.
>>"Writer's block happens when I'm boring."
>>A connoisseur of anxiety.
>>'Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A correction.'
>> Visit the Ben Marcus website.
A novel exploring the complicated ways in which a translator can complicate the already complicated relationship between an author and a reader. What happens when a translator starts to take control of the text they are supposedly translating? The novel concerns a translator translating a novel from French into English, but, in translating this actual novel from French into English, the actual translator Emma Ramadan begins to insert herself into the text and make commentary, very much as does the translator in the novel (albeit in an opposite way).
>>Uncommon translations.
New New Zealand writing. This issue features work by: John Adams, Nick Ascroft, Iain Britton, Nicholas Butler, Brent Cantwell, Jill Chan, Stephanie Christie, Makyla Curtis, John Downie, Doc Drumheller, Norman Franke, Jasmine Gallagher, Michael Giacon, Joy Holley, Mark Houlahan, Erik Kennedy, Rhiannon Leddra, Bronwyn Lloyd, Caoimhe McKeogh, Piet Nieuwland, Keith Nunes, Sarah Penwarden, Chris Pigott, Sugu Pillay, essa may ranapiri, Vaughan Rapatahana, Sahanika Ratnayake, Jack Ross, Lisa Samuels, Erena Shingade, Carin Smeaton, Fiona Stevens, Chris Stewart, David Taylor, Richard Taylor, Loren Thomas, Richard von Sturmer, and Mark Young.
The exciting new book from the Nelson author of the 'Spark' trilogy.
When the Rift opens, death follows. For generations, the Rangers of Black Water Island have guarded the Old Herd against horrors released by the Rift. Cal West, an apprentice Ranger with a rare scar and even rarer gifts, fights daily to prove he belongs within their ranks. After nine years away, Meg Archer returns to her childhood home only to find the Island is facing a new threat that not even the Rangers are prepared for. Meg and Cal can't ignore their attraction, but can they face their darkest fears to save the Island from disaster?
>> Five reasons to read The Rift.
>> Come and meet Rachael at the launch of The Rift on Tuesday 6 November at 6:30 at the Elma Turner Library!
"I am not a man, I am dynamite," said Nietzsche. Over a century after his death, his assaults upon philosophy and society are still unassimilated and subject to often contradictory interpretations, though we live subject to concepts and anticoncepts heralded by him: the death of God, the Übermensch, slave morality, the will to power. Prideaux's book gets closer to the man behind both the words and the silence.
>>"What does not kill me makes me stronger."
Why do we have such a fascination for imitations of things that are much much smaller than the originals? What does this tell us about ourselves, and about our relationship with the full-sized world?
For thousands of years, humans have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Great Walls have appeared on nearly every continent, the handiwork of people from Persia, Rome, China, Central America, and beyond. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. How does history look like when represented by its walls?
The Maloufs' books are always beautiful and a pleasure to cook from. Fruit; Dairy; Frozen; Cakes; Cookies; Pastries; Doughnuts, Fritters & Pancakes; Halvas & Confectionery; Preserves; and Drinks.
What we call sanity is easily upended by emotions and experiences experienced by all of us.
An exhaustive and superbly documented catalogue of and guide to all of the architectural works.
An American academic specialising in prison architecture visits Buenos Aries at the request of a colleague and sometime lover. When he fails to locate her he becomes increasingly disoriented and his conception of reality is increasingly dominated by dogs. With absurdist tendencies, this novel is also a critique of authoritarian nationalism.
How the World Thinks: A global history of philosophy by Julian Baggini $37
"An engaging, urbane and humane global survey." - Guardian
A history of contrary positioning through history told in 180 objects, from papyrus to pussy hats.
When an open-water distance swimmer returns to New Zealand after a call from his sick, estranged mother, he finds the provincial town claustrophobic and becomes compelled to swim towards an island off the coast.
Winner of the 2018 Viva la Novella Prize.
"The true writer has nothing to say." - Robbe-Grillet. A 'special agent' begins to investigate a crime, finds he cannot disentangle himself from the 'evidence' and ends up committing the crime (the murder of his father). Robbe-Grillet's first published book (Les Gommes) was first published in 1953.
Stories about creepy doubles, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks to a girl, a house of sugar that is the site of an eerie possession, children who lock their perverse mothers in a room and burn it, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman.
"I don't know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." - Italo Calvino
Say what you really think with this feminist card game featuring 20 'nasty' women.
Not so much a story of kings and conquests as the story of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydesdale who fought for their rights, and the contemporary struggle for independence.
An unflinching account of life in Suffolk between the wars, this novel blends fine nature writing with an examination of the dangers of nostalgia in a changing world.
"A masterpiece." - Jon McGregor (author of Reservoir 13)
“A deeply unusual, psychologically astute novel about technology and survival, sex and love. If the late Philip K. Dick and Ann Patchett had managed to team up and write a collaborative novel, it might look something like this. Beguiling, irreverent, and full of heart.” - Kirkus
A sumptuous survey of a career dating back to 1964.
Are Morrigan's dreams of escaping her curses existence over as soon as they have begun? Why does the Wundrous Society seem so intent on suppressing her mysterious ability? How has Nevermoor turned from a place of safety into a place of danger? Can the ominous Ezra Squall be resisted? Find out in this riveting sequel to Nevermoor.
He is __ appreciated. From the band's formation in 1976 (with Martin Bramah on "the world's cheapest guitar") until Smith's death this year, The Fall carved a jagged swathe through the pampered flesh of musical taste. Smith's verbal inventiveness and acidic irony earned him a special place in a generation of independent minds.
>> 'Hip Priest' (live, 1981).
"The problem is not police training, police diversity of police methods. The problem is the unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift of the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself."
A fascinating anecdotal history of a way of life now almost forgotten.
"I paint with my back to the world." Martin's increasing withdrawal from the world, her obsessively geometric approaches, her overwhelming serenity made her an exemplar of Minimalism for five decades.
Between 1967 and 1972 Colin and Phyllis Wheeler visited 60 isolated sheep stations throughout the country, drawing, painting and writing. This beautifully produced book is the ultimate record of high country life.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #99 (27.10.18)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we're reading and doing at VOLUME.
>>Visit the Lucia Berlin website.
>>Lydia Davis likes Lucia Berlin.
>>"I was always on the outside."
>> Lucia Berlin writes home.
>>An 'Unmanageable' alcoholic.
>> A litany of failed homes.
>>Home movies.
>>A Lucia Berlin mug, anyone?
 | In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne Girls, football and music are the distractions and saving graces in three young men’s lives in the gritty, violent and tension-filled shadows of the towers of Stones Estate in North London. Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf just want to get together to play football and find a way out. Selvon trains -runs, boxes, presses the bench in a bid to make a university on the sports team. Arden has a secret dream to make his beats a musical career, and Yusuf wants to be invisible to the eyes of his Muslim community. In Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, long-listed for the Man Booker, short-listed for the Goldsmith’s Prize, three voices meld, declaring their friendship against the growing tensions of race riots, poverty, extremism and raw edges. “Our friendships we called our bloods and our homes our Ends….Our combs cut lines in our hair and we scarred our eyebrows with blades….Close without touch…. In our caustic speech we threw out platitudes, in our guts our feisty wit. It was like we lived upon jagged teeth in the dark, in this bone-cold London city.” The language, with its slang and dialect which draws on grime (music) and sassy vibes, hums along, spits and hollers with the voices of the three young men, giving the text authenticity as well as an edgy structure, building to a crescendo over the two days of the book. Alongside the voices of these three compelling young men are two from the generation of their parents: Nelson, father to Selvon, from Montserrat, and Caroline, single alcoholic mother of Ardan, from Belfast. Each has their own story of oppression and resistance - of violence and pain - creating layers of history that parallel contemporary issues as well as digging deep into constructs of prejudice that have never resolved. In this post-9/11 world where the economy bites and prejudice is rife, the melting pot of London is under pressure. When white supremacists fuel race hatred, and the radicalisation of the local Mosque forces out moderate voices, tensions mount and the three friends find themselves in the middle of a dangerous world - a world that was a safe haven, that was their home. This is a provocative novel that doesn’t shy away from the attitudes of young men, their desperate desires and self-absorption, and shows their world as it is - tough and vicious. Yet there is hope in this seemingly dangerous situation: each of the friends care, and care deeply, about each other and about their families. They are determined to survive and be true to themselves, to remain untouched by rhetoric even in the face of extreme pressure and confusion. Gunaratne explores these complex themes with agility and sensitivity. The strength of the novel lies not so much in its telling but in the way in which this author writes - his words riff off the page, with the rhythm of the dialogue and the lively, and at times beautiful, descriptions of a place that represents oppression, fear and desperation, to let us open a window into a world which may be foreign to us - to enable us to understand the choices people make and the repercussions that follow them. |
 | The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I dedicated my time to writing about the cases I had worked on, but I wrote them differently. My new method was to recount a series of events without disregarding insanity or doubt. This form of writing wasn’t about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.” An ‘ex-detective’ takes a commission from a man she meets at a party to follow and bring back the man’s second wife, who danced with a man she met at a party and fled with him deep into the Taiga, leaving a trail of telegrams and other “forms of writing no longer in use” which have given the man the impression that she wants to be found. The ex-detective looks out through a window and sets off. What she embarks on is a literary undertaking rather than an actual one, but one with exactly similar detective work. The journey into the Taiga is a journey into the forest of possible ways a story could be told. “Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.” It is not difficult to find the traces of the woman who left, but the detective’s quest is not so much a search for her as a search for the mechanisms of passion that motivated her to leave and to enter the Taiga: the quest is one of becoming aware of the experiences of the woman, or, rather, of becoming aware of the words that might be used to express or access the experiences of the woman. The detective is seeking not so much to capture what happened or to capture the story that might be written about what happened, as to capture the mechanism by which what happened might give rise to the story about that happened. What is the relationship between the mechanisms of passion that caused a woman to leave her husband and follow another into the Taiga, and the mechanisms of passion that caused another woman to follow and to write about it? The detective seeks to understand “the desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.” She asks, “What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest? What brings together the writing of a forest with the lived experience of a forest?” The Taiga is emotional rather than physical terrain. The detective travels with a translator, a man who is able to provide her with parallel representations of the stories told by the people who live in the Taiga, a man who both both provides access to experience and keeps this experience at a remove and uncertain. The narrative is full of parallels, removes, repetitions, circularities, and circularities-within-circularities. Is the person the detective is tracking in fact herself? Does she seek to know why she herself left and ran off into 'the Taiga', or desired to leave and run off into 'the Taiga'? Is the constant emphasis on fleeing and on one who flees evidence of an unstated situation in which it is impossible or not yet possible to flee? To see through a window is to project oneself through that window into what the window frames: the distance, the Taiga, the place where one is absent from the situation in which one currently exists. In fairy tales one enters a forest both to escape and to confront the cannibalistic desires to which one is exposed in one’s ‘ordinary’ life and situation. In the Taiga the detective discerns terror, especially the terror experienced by the so-called lost woman, but the terror is primarily a terror of consequence, any consequence, a terror of a development towards which we are propelled through the impulse to escape. Where does the trail lead? “To seek something out is to expose it,” but “it is difficult to describe what can’t be imagined.” The quest is a literary rather than a physical endeavour, a struggle for what we might call narrative to overcome what we might call description. The story is frequently overwhelmed and lost by noticing, by the ‘evidence’ of the senses. Noticing is static. “Seeing is just confirmation of a fact.” It is the natural tendency of details to disperse the impulse and obscure meaning, although impulse and meaning have no way in which to come to our attention without details. “When nothing else seemed to make sense, sense was hidden in irrefutable words.” Will the detective ‘find’ the woman (even if that woman is herself)? Will she ask, “Is this the end of falling out of love?” Will she bring the woman back (whatever that means)? “Failures weigh people down,” the detective states, but she also provides a quote from Einstein that likens gravity to fiction: “Said force is an illusion, an effect of the geometry of space-time. The Earth deforms space-time in such a way that space itself pushes us toward the ground.” |
NEW RELEASES
Oh no, Francis Plug is back! In the devastatingly funny How To Be A Public Author, Plug (a.k.a. New Zealander Paul Ewen) gave an account of visiting book festivals and events and getting Booker winners to inscribe books to him (>>read Thomas's review of that book here). Now Plug has landed a position as a writer-in-residence. What could be worse (or funnier)?
"Outstandingly funny, this book is pure delight. Plug’s observations on authors, academics and architects are hilarious and absurd but always compassionate." - The Guardian
Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and tinged with gallows humour, Thacker's writing hovers between the thought of futility and the futility of thought. The final section of the book contains pessimistic biographies of the so-called 'patron saints of pessimism' (>>meet some of these here).
Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In this outstanding graphic novel, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, charting her way deep into a country still tainted by war.
>> A German in New York.
>> Watch Krug drawing the book.
>> What is left to say about Germany's Nazi past?
>> Krug's website.
Compendious, authoritative, clear, well illustrated, desirable.
Galleries of Maoriland introduces the many ways in which Pakeha discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the 'Maori world' at the turn of the century: in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie, among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Maori past. The culture of Maoriland was a Pakeha creation. The book shows also that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation.
>> Blackley on the radio (and an image gallery to look at while you're listening!).
The absolutely definitive guide to every possible sort of pastry, biscuit, cake and bread originating in Scandinavia (with regional variations). Highly recommended.
A beautifully presented and illustrated cultural history of the importance, use, study, depiction and description of New Zealand's unique avifauna to Maori and Pakeha through history.
Parallel stories in 1871, when the discoveries of Darwin and others challenged established world views, and 2016, when Trump's election indicated a world-changing challenge of a different sort, Kingsolver's eagerly anticipated new novel is alert to the personal nuances of social change.
Profiles, photographs and recipes from the eateries on Wellington's favourite street.
When Michael and Hilary Gustafson and his wife opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page?
>> Literati, the story of a community bookshop (recommended viewing).
>> The typing!
When Gopnik and his wife moved to New York in the early 1980s, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder.
"Anyone who worries that artificial intelligence might some day outpace the faulty circuitry inside human heads should be cheered by the existence of Adam Gopnik. His brain has nothing to fear from electronic competition. It is an organ housed in a body, kindled by the appetites and affections of the flesh; it operates friskily, risking vast generalities that it clinches with neat, nimble aphorisms. Gopnik can write brilliantly about almost anything." - Guardian
An honest and riveting account of literary agent Clegg's descent to rock bottom through crack addiction, and of his attempt to ascend to normal life.
Books (and much else) either succeed or fail at the level of the sentence. Moran shows us how to appreciate - and how to produce - sentences in which the words combine with effectiveness and elegance.
Dante's Inferno newly translated by a self-described "fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian", author of the unparalleled Lanark.
>> The Gray Matter.
The television chefs who were at the forefront of changing public attitudes towards homosexuality in 1970s and 1980s New Zealand.
>> Cheese grating.
Hilllary and New Zealand were supposed to be a support act to the 1958 British Commonwealth Antarctic crossing party. By heading on to the South Pole and reaching it before the crossing party, Hillary exceeded the brief. His actions created tensions, unleashed a media storm, and denied the British a historic first overland to the South Pole since Scott. This book also details the establishment the restoration of Scott Base, and of New Zealand's presence in the Antarctic generally.
At last! An excellent clear guide for children to New Zealand fauna of land, water and air.
Abducted by slave traders from her home in Ruthenia - modern-day Ukraine - around 1515, Roxelana was brought to Istanbul and trained in the palace harem as a concubine for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Suleyman became besotted with Roxelana and foreswore all other concubines, freeing and marrying her. Roxelana became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, transforming the hearem into an instrument of imperial rule and helping Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women - Isabella of Hungary, Catherine de Medici - were increasingly close to power.
The Female Eunuch and beyond.
>>1971.
Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's a Fractional Persian - half, his mother's side - and his first ever trip to Iran is about to change his life. Darius has never really fitted in at home, and he's sure things are going to be the same in Iran. His depression doesn't exactly help matters, and trying to explain his medication to his grandparents only makes things harder. Then Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door, and everything changes. Soon, they're spending their days together, playing soccer, eating faludeh, and talking for hours on a secret rooftop overlooking the city's skyline. Sohrab calls him Darioush - the original Persian version of his name - and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he's Darioush to Sohrab.
Across the West, there is a rising tide of people who feel excluded, alienated from mainstream politics, and increasingly hostile towards minorities, immigrants and neo-liberal economics. What does this mean for the functioning of our societies?
Lenny Spink is the sister of a giant. Her little brother, Davey, suffers from a rare form of gigantism and is taunted by other kids and turned away from school because of his size. To escape their cruel reality, Lenny and Davey obsess over the entries in their monthly installment of Burrell's Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. Lenny vows to become a beetle expert, while Davey decides he will run away to Canada and build a log cabin. But as Davey's disease progresses, the siblings' richly imagined world becomes harder to cling to.
During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor.
Margaret Atwood posits it's time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of colour walking in public space. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story assumes control of her family's finances to buy a house. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not on offer when she worked as a life-drawing model. Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect.
From his retelling of the Greek myths in Mythos, Fry now turns his attention to the Greek legends, bringing alive the mortal human and demigod heroes as they confront quests and monsters on behalf of the rest of us.
>> Just for one day.
Personal introductions to forty life-preserving texts.
A love letter to all things bookish, quirkily illustrated with hand-drawn stacks of books, bopokshops (including Unity Auckland!), bookshop cats, &c.
Also available:
Bibliophile diary 2019 $40
Bibliophile notecards $30
>> Have a look through our BIBLIOPHILIA! list.
What things do women usually not tell other people about their bodies? This silly, gross but somehow empowering book outlines a few.
>>Tallulah Pomeroy's website.
Read our newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending this week, about some of the week's new releases, and about a great swathe of upcoming events.
 | Call Them By Their True Names: American crises (and essays) by Rebecca Solnit {Reviewed by STELLA} In a time of political, social and environmental crises, it’s easy to dismiss the issues and be subsumed by your own ideology - and be enraged by another’s viewpoint. We all will find ourselves both challenged and heartened by journalist, critic and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest series of essays, Call Them by Their True Names. These essays are focused on the country she lives in, its politics and history, and the stories that paint a portrait of a country in crisis and the response to these crises, yet her language and her arguments are universal: her themes are issues that should concern us all - injustice, inequality, violence and hope. The introductory essay lays the groundwork for the reader’s approach to the subject matter. As the title suggests, she is urging us to consider the ways in which society (politicians, media, lobbyists, spin doctors) and we, as individuals, describe situations and issues, often hiding the true meaning behind false language. What we call things, and how we call it out, matters - language is crucial to understanding and hence to communication. Solnit argues that it is only when we call things by their true names that we can counter them or converse in meaningful (and change-provoking) dialogue. From the 2016 American elections, where she pinpoints the disenfranchisement of millions of voters ( in 'Twenty Million Missing Storytellers') as a pivotal tool to a conservative victory, to the ‘loneliness’ of Donald Trump - an individual isolated from the real mechanisms of the political system and ultimately, you get the impression from Solnit's analysis, doomed to failure of his own making - to the reasons why Hilary Clinton was demonised even by the left-leaning media and critics, Solnit calls out the lazy thinking and the ease with which certain catch-phrases and language are used to explain away the results. She then goes on to think and articulate the emotional structures that underpin some of this thinking. In the essay 'Preaching to the Choir' she considers the wisdom of talking with or to those who hold the same or similar political beliefs. She draws on psychological research - it is easier to move people closer to your viewpoint than to change someone’s mind from an opposing position - and with this in mind, wonders why the focus of political elections has been on the ‘swing voter’ or the undecided. In 'Naive Cynicism', Solnit critiques those who fall back on rhetoric on all sides of the political spectrum, and is particularly damning of those on the left who have found it easier to be cynical and use language as a tool to undermine the actions or small achievements of their colleagues. 'Facing the Furies' deals with anger and violence as political tools and whether they are useful or even advisable. The third part of the collection looks at specific and pivotal happenings that illustrate Solnit’s ideas. There are thought-provoking and important essays about climate change and resistance: 'Climate Change is Violence', 'The Light from Standing Rock'; the annexation of California and what borders mean: 'Blood on the Foundation'; and inequality and its repercussions: 'Death by Gentrification'. The final three essays lay out a way of thinking about the future by engaging in the present: the importance of community, communication and the indirect consequences of action, and why utilising language that embraces facts and history rather than spin or empty phrases is vitally important. Solnit is biting and savage in her analysis, yet also hopeful and admiring of the power of activism. |
 | An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans {Reviewed by THOMAS} [Warning: This review contains spoilers (in fact, it is one big spoiler)] “If people stopped feeling altogether, the world would be greatly improved. They could lose an arm or a leg without noticing; it wouldn’t feel any different from cutting your nails. They could bleed to death without noticing. People should be numb. Then they would never have reached such numbers. This many would have never survived.” Traumatised and exhausted by years of fighting the Nazis as one of a multinational group of partisans now attached to the Red Army, the narrator of this nihilistic novella (first published in Dutch in 1950) leaves his unit on the orders of a commander whose language he cannot understand and enters the streets of spa town (possibly in Hungary?) that has been abandoned by its population. He walks straight up to a large intact house, and, finding its door ajar, he wipes his feet and enters. There is nobody in the house, but, as when a hero enters a fairy tale castle, he finds that the house contains every comfort and provision, with even soup still warm on the stove. "For the first time in a very long time I had entered a real house, a genuine home,” he states, and it is not long before it becomes clear to him that he will not be returning to his unit but remaining in this house for the duration of the war. “Stay here forever, I thought, where nothing can happen. If the whole world disappeared, I wouldn’t even notice, as long as this house, this grass, and all the things I can see around me stay the same.” The person that the narrator may once have been is a casualty of the war; he is now nothing more than a symptom of his circumstances. “Those who only think are only half in touch with themselves,” he says. “I only did things that didn’t require any thought.” Rationality is no virtue in war. The head is, in fact, he points out, the source of the war: “This bowl of bone covered with its lid and moveable hole, this was where it all came from: the other people, the world, the war, the dreams, the words, the deeds that seemed to happen automatically.” The narrator is about to force the door of the one room that the house keys will not unlock (another fairy tale trope), when there is a knock on the street door: the Nazis have retaken the town and are requisitioning the house to billet officers. The narrator finds it expedient to pretend to be the owner of the house - even though the trousers he has requisitioned are ludicrously short - and to remain in the upper rooms of the house. All identities are dissolved by war and become fluid. “The owner of the house had never existed, that was the truth! He had been the intruder, not me.” For a time, uneasily but not particularly uneasily, the narrator shares the house with the Nazi officers. One day, when the officers are away, he climbs a ladder in an attempt to enter the locked room through one of the blacked-out windows, but he is surprised by the return of the house’s actual owner, and, as the novella gains momentum towards it awful end, the narrator shoots him from the window and strangles his wife. As he passes the door of the locked room on his way to hiding the bodies, he notices it is ajar, and, in a passage that would make your jaw drop if I hadn’t here told you about it, he finds that the room is filled with aquariums containing rare fish attended by an immensely old man, the owner’s father, who, existing in quite some other narrative, states that his son and daughter-in-law have been hit and killed by a shell. Circumstances allow no space for initiative, merely for reaction. The, as the town is recaptured by the Red Army, the Germans flee. When the commandant advises the narrator to escape, the narrator locks him in the cellar and returns to the house with his partisan unit who enact a shocking carnival of destruction, finally relieving the house of the qualities that had attracted the narrator. “It was like the house had been putting on an act the whole time and was only now showing itself as it, in reality, had always been.” Hermans’s stark, condensed style is very effective in showing how fragile our so-called virtues are in the face of crisis, and how violence ultimately relieves us of whatever qualities we thought had defined us. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Patrick Ness introduces us to the book.
>> Ness reads to us from the book.
>> The illustrations are wonderful. Visit Rovina Cai's website.
>> Books by Patrick Ness at VOLUME.
>> Hmmm.