 | Resistance by Julián Fuks (translated by Daniel Hahn) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Sometimes all that fits inside a pain is silence. Not a silence made from the absence of words: a silence that it absence itself,” writes Sebastián, the narrator of Julián Fuks’s subtle and quietly disconcerting seemingly autofictional novel, in the memoir he is writing as an attempt to gain understanding of, or some connection with, his adoptive older brother. Fuks’s prose is precise, crystalline, superbly translated by Daniel Hahn. Fuks is rigorous in his examination of the relationships within Sebastián’s family, and, more particularly, of the consequences of any attempt to put anything actual into words. “My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute: my brother is something, and this something is the set of marks we insist on looking for, despite ourselves, in his features, in his gestures, in his acts.” Fuks is aware that words, terms, labels subjugate the people and the actualities to which they are applied, pulling them towards consequences and interpretations that may not be inherent but are forced upon them by extrinsic narratives. The ways in which stories and histories are told inevitably affect the patterns and outcomes of those stories. Language is dictatorial over its objects, and Fuks/Sebastián is very aware that, in his “desire to forge the meanings life refuses to give us … I know that I am writing my failure,” unable to avoid “a constant oscillation between silence and error.” The brother’s unknown origins are irresolvable. He cannot be assimilated into the family. He resists nourishment and nurturing. But what is the source of this alienation? The brother was adopted just before the parents fled Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s for Brazil, where Sebastián and his sister were born. During the period of state terrorism that lasted from 1974 to 1983, Argentina’s so-called ‘Dirty War’, over 30,000 people were murdered by military and security forces in collaboration with right-wing death squads. Hundreds of babies were stolen at birth from political prisoners and given to supporters of the regime for adoption. For Sebastián, his brother somehow represents these children, even though he can hardly be one of them, given their parents’ dissident status. Why does the Sebastián cling so tightly to this possibility? Why does he feel the need to include himself, via his brother, in this national trauma? To resolve his brother’s lack of identity by overwriting it with a trauma that makes that lack of identity a necessity further depersonalises the brother, as Sebastián recognises. “This wouldn’t give his life meaning. It’s me, not him, who wants to find a meaning, it’s me who wants to redeem my own immobility, it’s me who wants to go back to belonging to the place where I’ve never actually belonged.” Sebastián wants to undo the brother’s exile within the family by writing the book but intuits that this cannot be achieved. The irresolvable persistence of the unknown, the lacunae, the gap, the missing information that is replaced by narrative prevents this, and prevents the supposed healing that this might provide. But does Sebastián really want to undo his brother’s exile, or is he, along with his parents, responsible for it? The brother becomes the expression of the political and personal traumas visited on the whole exiled family, and his alienation is integral to their identities. The brother, who remains unnamed, cannot bear the narrative weight of an entire family (or an entire nation), but his inability to bear this weight is necessary to this narrative. The brother’s voice is suppressed by Sebastián: “How can I let him speak, attribute even the smallest phrase to him in this fiction?” But the brother is also a sort of catalyst for everything Sebastián does or writes, unreached and unchanged, but enabling some reach or change. Although Sebastián necessarily fails in his memoir to rescue his brother from his status as a cypher, his ostensible objective, or to say anything definitive about the family’s history, Fuks succeeds in this novel, via his character’s failure, in providing insight into the brother’s functional role as the dysfunctional cypher in a ‘happy’ family’s dynamic, and into the way that collective trauma creates a narrative, a single story, that obliterates the individual stories of those affected by that trauma.Resistance is remarkable for its textual reticence, for Julián Fuks’s reluctance to fill in gaps, to create ‘fictional’ replacements for what is lost, for his uncertainty about the absent’s place in the process of resistance, a process which necessarily continues even in memory (or lack thereof), for his portrayal of the quiet, ‘undramatic’ persistence of trauma and its ongoing centrality to the dynamic of survival of that trauma, as well as for the wonderful clarity of the prose. |
 | Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen {Reviewed by STELLA} Greenland is a small country, and the town of Nuuk, where Crimson is set, even smaller. Especially so for the characters in Niviaq Korneluissen’s novel about being a Greenlander and being young and queer. There are five distinct voices in the novel: Fia, who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend; Inuk, Fia’s reporter brother who has just landed himself in a sticky situation; the wild and unreliable Arnaq, Inuk’s best friend who Fia is staying with while she finds her feet; Sara, a young woman who Fia is extremely attracted to; and Ivik, Sara’s girlfriend. As these characters dance a complex and messy polka around each other, the reader is hooked into the world of the young and confused. Korneluissen lays open prejudice, boredom and anger with humour (albeit black) and sympathy towards her fellow Greenlanders. The novel moves along at a clip as the young people go to parties, suffer hangovers, wheedle money and alcohol out of others, have personal crises, and find love. Crimson is enjoyable and believable and doesn’t shy away from painting a realistic picture. Fia’s despair and revulsion at her predictable relationship wakes her up - her complete annoyance finally drives her out of the mundane towards at first a crazy few weeks with party-girl Arnaq and then something more curious (a discovery about herself and her desires), to something ultimately more satisfying. Arnaq, for all her bluster, is a vulnerable young woman with a complex past - trauma rooted in alcohol and neglect. Inuk escapes to Denmark after finding himself in a tricky situation, yet this flight just pulls him back tighter to his homeland despite the homophobic attitudes that are ironically ingrained in him as well as in society. Crimsonisn’t all doom and gloom - in fact, the lively writing gives it a lightness that keeps you engaged. The different viewpoints are the exceptional part of this slice-of-life novel - each voice is distinct even while their problems and joys are shared. Each story adds to and builds on the former, with the change in perspective creating those full circle moments. Korneluissen became a sensation in Greenland, especially among the young and LGBT communities, when she published her book in Greenlandic (rare for contemporary works) in 2014. She translated it into Danish, and in 2018 the English translation was produced. Like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, this is a book that will appeal for its candid approach to relationships, for its portrayal of imperfect yet endearing human behaviour, and for its reflections on claustrophobic situations. And you might find yourself humming along to Joan Jett's 'Crimson and Clover' as you read. |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella also reviewed the book on the radio.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read another extract.
>> Drive Your Plow was made into a film, Spoor.
>> The book's title comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' section of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are references to Blake throughout the book.
>> Yes, Blake did prefer 'plow' to 'plough'.
>> On Poland.
>> Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights.
>> Read Thomas's review of Flights.
 | Walking by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is thought that makes life intolerable, suggests Bernhard in this 1971 novella that both anticipates and provides a key to reading his subsequent novels of ineluctable self-erasure (notably 1975’s Correction). Bernhard is constantly in mind of the widespread complicity of his fellow Austrians in Nazism, both a symptom and a cause of many of the societal ills he is most perplexed and disgusted by. “I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune.” But there is no real difference, suggests Bernhard, between objective and subjective suffering. “When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in.” We are unavoidably perplexed by our existence and cannot help thinking about it, but thought will not do us any good, as we are always carried towards the conclusion we strive most to avoid, drawn to it by this striving. “If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous.” In Bernhard’s works, thought is a kind of a chute leading towards madness and suicide, a chute down which all characters slide, faster or slower, obsessed, losing perspective. “Circumstances are everything, we are nothing.” How, then, are we to carry on existing? “There is little doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible time.” “The art of thinking about things consists in the art, says Oehler, of stopping thinking before the fatal moment.” In common with many of Bernhard’s novels, the unnamed narrator of Walking is effectively passive, effectively annihilated by his role of *merely* reporting what his friend Oehler tells him during their walk or walks together. Oehler’s observations chiefly concern another one-time walking companion, Karrer, who has recently gone “irrevocably mad” and been confined to the Steinhof lunatic asylum. Karrer’s madness followed the suicide of his friend, the chemist Hollensteiner, and you can feel the pull of this annihilation reaching through the layers of narration as far as the narrator himself, each character being effaced by their narration. “I am struck by how often Oehler quotes Karrer without expressly drawing attention to the fact that he is quoting Karrer. Oehler frequently makes several statements that stem from Karrer and frequently thinks a thought that Karrer thought, I think, without expressly saying, what I am now saying comes from Karrer.” The second of the three paragraphs that constitute the novella describes Karrer’s breakdown in Rustenschacher’s clothing shop, irrevocably losing perspective, ranting about what he perceives as the inferior cloth from which the trousers are sewn, repeatedly banging his walking stick upon the counter. At times the layers of narration are wonderfully deep, such as when the narrator tells us what Oehler tells the narrator that Oehler told the psychiatric doctor Scherrer about what Karrer said and did in Rustenschacher’s shop, and the novella becomes as much about the migration of narrative burden as it is about what the narrative is about. Habit, character, tendency, circumstance comprise a trap, a trap we find ourselves in when we begin to think but into which thinking can only drive us deeper. “When we walk, we walk from one helplessness to another. It is suddenly clear you can do what you like but you cannot walk away. No longer being able to alter this problem of no longer being able to walk away occupies your whole life. From then on it is all that occupies your life. You then grow more and more helpless and weaker and weaker.” All Bernhard’s subsequent novelsaddress this problem of the obliterative nature of thought. “We may not think about why we are walking, says Oehler, for then it would soon be impossible to walk.” |
The last new releases bulletin of 2018.
l'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (workshop for potential literature) was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 as a sort of laboratory in which members can perform experiments - chiefly experiments of constraint - in order to use the mechanisms inherent language to express new literary forms. This wonderful anthology presents the results of experiments various members through the decades, and provides a primer for you to run the experiments yourself.
>> N+7
>> Lille
>> Other extracts.
A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The book unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, and to your own past.
"A brilliant achievement." - Le Monde
Essays, book reviews, short articles and obituaries handling subjects from mistresses to marketing, and seduction to psychoanalysts, from the immensely opinionated, witty and acute editor of the London Review of Books.
A remarkable novel from one of American fiction's outstanding stylists and observers, author of The Visiting Privilege and 99 Stories of God. First published in 1978, this novel blends myth with alcohol, time with desperation, motherhood with extinction, and is as fresh and urgent today as it was when first published.
"Like no book I have read, The Changeling is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable." - Karen Russell
>> 'Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.'
Frank Bidart, for several decades, has waged a collision between language and the human body which has resulted in some of the most original and surprising poetry produced in America.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2018
Bread and butter are first recorded as being eaten together in 1492. This book looks at a long association, and provides 40 outstanding and varied recipes that celebrate the marriage of bread and butter.
The island has run out of oxygen. The island is swollen. The island is rotten. The island has taken my beloved from me. The island is a Greenlander. It's the fault of the Greenlander. In Nuuk, Greenland, Fia breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and falls for Sara. Sara is in love with Ivik who holds a deep secret and is about to break promises. Ivik struggles with gender dysphoria as their friends become addicted to social media, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in downtown bars and uptown house parties. Then there is Inuk, who also has something to hide - it will take him beyond his limits to madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen, pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing a web of relationships to a shocking crescendo. Translated from Greenlandic.
"Ferocious, inventive and unlike anything I've read in a long time." - Sophie Mackintosh (author of The Water Cure)
A strange and strangely wrought novel (first published in 1914) in which, in the words of John Ashbery, "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine', a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
>> A brief biography of Roussel.
>> Interiors in the Void.
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art.
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Two novellas from the author of The Evenings. Young Elmer longs to make friends and tries to control the world around him by forming secret clubs, of which he is always the president, but when he invites Werther to become a member, a game of attraction and repulsion begins. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a boy watches as the family of one of his friends slowly loses everything and is then taken away.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan, his eyes are closed, he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context: the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist's death can be read as an extension of his work.
Useful.
What constitutes 'the people', and what constitutes 'the people's' assumed 'right' to exercise it's will, democratically or otherwise?
What does the sea mean? Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, many Greek gods, Holderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.
Can Western nations preserve the liberal world order against rising authoritarian powers without the United States, or with Washington working against them?
An idiosyncratic, devastating graphic novel. Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body, something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.
"The thing to do is just begin. The question, of course, is where?"
So opens Thom Eagle’s description of the creation of a singular early spring meal. A cookbook without recipes, this is an invitation to journey through the mind of a chef as he works. Eagle muses on the very best way to coax flavour out of an onion (slowly, and with more care than you might expect), and considers the crucial role of salt in the creation of the perfect assembly for early green shoots and leaves.
Science is really beautiful. Artist and lay scientist Iris Gottlieb explains among other things: neap tides, naked mole rats, whale falls, the human heart, the Uncertainty Principle, the ten dimensions of string theory, and how glaciers are like Snickers bars.
With knowledge passed down from centuries ago, the presence of traditional crafts such as spoon carving, leather working, and knife making is becoming more and more pronounced in contemporary culture and on platforms such as social media and ecommerce. As the pressures of a fast-paced, modern-day life weigh on people, many seek solace in more manual, artful practices that take us out of our selves and produce something beautiful and useful. Forge & Carve looks at twenty crafters and how and why they create the items they do. Includes Takaka trugmaker Tony Hitchcock.
This is a book about a man's relationship with hawks, and his self-education as a falconer, and about his discovery that despite his Asperger's Syndrome, which hampers his normal social interactions, he can forge a loving bond with the young son he thought he had lost.
What does the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies and deception do to a black body, a black family and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse?
"Unflinchingly honest." - Reni Eddo-Lodge
The opioid epidemic has been called one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine but calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of history. Driven by greed, incompetence, and indifference, it was an utterly avoidable tragedy.
The Bard of Salford's first poetry collection for over thirty years, proof he is still alive at least.
>> 'I Don't Want to Be Nice' (1978)
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters, in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.
An essay on bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.
>> An extract: 'Why Contemporary Art (and Literature) Needs More Sarcastic Critics'
The Life and Times of a Very British Man makes the case for a new conversation about race in Britain through personal stories and political analysis. Kamal recounts the extraordinary circumstances that led to his father, a Sudanese scientist, marrying his mother, a grammar-school educated woman from Yorkshire and the first white person he had ever met. It was a time when Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech cast a shadow over the childhood of a schoolboy in Ealing.
The night flower blooms at night in the desert. Who notices it?
Well, of course.
Use the selector to choose your seasonal gifts and summer reading.
Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
List #1: FICTION
List #3: SCIENCE
List #4: FOOD & DRINK
List #5: BIOGRAPHY
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
List #6: CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION
List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY
List #8: BIBLIOPHILIA!
List #9: VISUAL CULTURE
BOOKS @ VOLUME #107 (22.12.18)
Click through to read our latest NEWSLETTER, use our gift selector, and find out which novels have been our favourites for 2018.
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
The first full biography of this pivotal artist, educator and theorist, from his Bauhaus beginnings through his Black Mountain College years to Yale. Is colour more important than form?
>> Search vs research.
Explores the story behind the promotion of New Zealand's mountains through posters, advertisements, hand-coloured photographs and more.
"I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software." A project by e-flux for the Venice Biennale, identifying the naked power that is revealed when the complex of art, the internet and globalisation shed their utopian guises.
An excellent selection of works demonstrating the scope, characteristics and quirks of this printmaking process.
>> Risography explained and demonstrated.
Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College.
>> The Ruth Asawa website (recommended).
>> Of forms and growth.
>> Objects and apparitions.
The first-ever collection of Ashbery's collage work (interesting!), with a selection of related poetry.
>> All the kitsch.
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.
A good survey of photography and its relationship to abstraction since 1910.
The 350 images in this book, many of them published here for the first time, not only chronicle the introduction of photography in Japan, but are also useful in helping to understand the dramatic changes that occurred in mid-nineteenth century Japan. Taken between 1853 and 1912 by the most important local and foreign photographers working in Japan, the photographic images, whether sensational or everyday, intimate or panoramic, document a nation about to abandon its traditional ways and enter the modern age.
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.
Storms are seen quite differently from the air from on the ground. Borja has captured a range of them in these stunning images.
>> Some storms.
A stunning comprehensive survey of the revolutionary aesthetic, in all media and from a vast range of practitioners.
Specially trained Egyptian photographers were an integral part of the pioneering Harvard-MFA expedition during the first half of the twentieth century. Their photographs documented the excavations with thousands of images, as the riches of a great ancient civilization in northern Sudan were uncovered. These photographs bring to life the dramatic landscapes of the Nile Valley and the excitement of archaeological discovery.
A beautifully presented and thoughtfully selected survey of the persistence of myths in visual culture.
Photographer Frederic Chaubin reveals 90 buildings sited in fourteen former Soviet Republics which express what could be considered as the fourth age of Soviet architecture. They reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990. Contrary to the twenties and thirties, no "school" or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity announces the end of Soviet Union. Taking advantage of the collapsing monolithic structure, the holes of the widening net, architects revisited all the chronological periods and styles, going back to the roots or freely innovating.
Representation of defining events in New Zealand's history have changed in parallel with other cultural and political developments.
The first retrospective collection of this savagely interesting artist sprung from Christchurch's itching cultural underbelly.
>> The "low-brow high art world of Tony de Lautour".
>> From earthquakes to fatherhood.
>> The thought part of the act.
This survey of Soviet design from 1950 to 1989 features more than 350 items from the Moscow Design Museum's collection. From children's toys, homewares, and fashion to posters, electronics, and space-race ephemera, each object reveals something of life in a planned economy during a fascinating time in Russia's history.
>> Visit the Moscow Design Museum.
38 floral designers.
An interesting and well illustrated survey of ways in which fashion design has been influenced by the natural world.
Brings the legacy of architects, artists and designers that have influenced the creative discourse over the last fifty years into critical dialogue with a young generation of upcoming influencers in the respective fields. The publication doesn't regard the legacy of an individual architect, artist or predecessor as an end point but as a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions and inspirations that naturally extends and transforms through its successors. The creative conversations illustrated in this title reflect the inspirational vision of personalities such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Yona Friedman, Charlie Koolhaas and Rem Koolhaas, Rachel Libeskind and Daniel Libeskind, Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo and Gian Piero Frassinelli, Aric Chen and Arata Isozaki, Liz Diller and ElizabethLeCompte, Sophie Lovell, Dieter Rams and Olafur Eliasson.
A well selected survey, featuring the work of 55 photographers.
You couldn't hope for a more stimulating and surprising collection of architectural forms from around the world.
Human's fascination with animals as recorded in art from all ages. Stunning. Beautiful.
>> See some spreads.
Dripping with blood and gold, fetishised and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. Hartnell investigates the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves, and the ways in which they left evidence of this. Beautifully illustrated.
Browse the workbooks of leading contemporary typographer and hand-letterers. Plenty of inspiration here.
A beautifully presented collection of over 60 real and imagined mazes from around the world, each with a bird's eye diagrammatic view and description.
Using over 200 circus-related artworks from the French National Library's collections, Pascal Jacob tells the story of travelling entertainers and their art and trade. From nomadic animal tamers of the Dark Ages to European jugglers and acrobats of the 1800s, from the use of the circus as Soviet propaganda to the 20th-century Chinese performance art renaissance, this is a fascinating and attractive book.
>> The horrific and the entertaining are never far apart.
Kiefer wrestles with the darkness of German history, unearthing the taboos that underlie the collective past and interweaving them with Teutonic mythology, cosmology, and meditations on the nature of belief. His works have a disconcerting tactility, at once emerging from the picture plane and decaying into it.
A beautifully presented selections of Expressionist art and of the more-seldom-seen Expressionist literature, all claiming the value of a subjective response to the world.
When Norwegian photographer Peter Lukas visited Nelson, he was so impressed with the photographic collections at the Nelson Provincial Museum that he set out to photograph the same street views as they appear today. The result is this wonderful book: historical photographs paired with their modern equivalents.
Explores the homes of 18 global creatives who take an eccentric, whimsical, curated and clever approach to their living space. An interiors book both for people who love interiors books and for people who ordinarily don't love interiors books.
Forty years of superb journalistic photography. The most comprehensive volume of McCurry's work yet.
This first history of Samoan tatau explores the people, encounters, events and external forces that have defined Samoan tattooing over many centuries. The Samoan Islands are unusual in that tattooing has been continuously practised for 3000 years with indigenous techniques. Beautifully produced and illustrated.
Bookbinder Olga Hirsch (1889–1968) left her collection of 3,500 papers dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries to the British Library - one of the largest and most diverse collections of decorated papers in the world. This book contains reproductions of papers used as wrappers and endpapers for books, as the backing for playing cards, as linings for chests and cases, as pictures for display in churches and homes, as souvenirs for pilgrims, and as wrappings for foodstuffs such as gingerbread and chocolate.
A Surrealist artist himself but better known as a zoologist and ethnologist, Morris is an excellent guide to the people who, rebelling against the strictures of modern life, devised modes of access to the workings of the unconsciousness, which they allowed expression in literature and art.
The unprecedented surge in popularity of ceramics in the last five years has helped forge a new type of potter: the ceramic designer. Part-craftsman, part designer, they bridge ceramic craft, collectable design, and fine art. These ceramicists include product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, and classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, in addition to interior decorators, illustrators, and graphic designers.
An explorer's guide to the chasm between art and politics, and to the cultural forces that lurk there. Can art catalyse historical moments into philosophical truth?
>> What makes contemporary art contemporary?
The best survey of New Zealand art available, thoughtfully selected and presented, drawn from the national collection.
A stunning large-format book of stunning large-format photographs of stunning large-format landscapes devoid of even the slightest human impact. You will want this.
How can modes of visual and performance art be used effectively in protest and other political action? This is a good survey of art on the front lines of activism.
A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, according to Darwin, is "the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions". This essay by Jack Robinson, exploring the cultural and social history of the blush from the 18th century to the present, is illustrated with witty and often unsettling images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas.
>> See some of Zagórska-Thomas's work.
>> Read Thomas's review.
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Remarkably good analysis of the evolution and design considerations of fonts.
A good selection, well illustrated, from Eileen Gray, Lora Lamm and Lella Vignelli, to Kazuyo Sejima, Hella Jongerius and Neri Oxman.
Drawing from the Victoria and Albert Museum's unparalleled collections of wallpapers and fabrics, this useful book analyses colour palettes from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. The exemplars are arranged chronologically with their own double-page spreads that explain the significance of the palette. A colour grid is shown beside each pattern, in which the colors in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colors in their own work. Useful, beautiful, interesting.
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
Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic trust established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886 and 1917. This book of well-observed photographs and documentary images records the 23 libraries established in the South Pacific (18 of them in New Zealand). A few have been demolished, others have been repurposed, some are still used as libraries.
70 illustrators were given the brief to illustrated their "dream studios" - with such wonderful results. These are the centres of creative vortices, places where dreams cross between an illustrator's internal and external worlds by means of paper.
In 1585 four young Japanese men from the nascent Christian community in Japan appeared before Pope Gregory XIII. Renowned photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto traces their steps, capturing the architectural wonders of Rome, Florence, and Venice as the Eastern visitors might have seen them. His photographs are presented in context with reproductions of Japanese art of the same period. Interesting and impressive.
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.
New applications and developments in robotics are transforming architectural practice (and theory too, for that matter). This book takes us to the forefront of design.
How do architects get their ideas down on paper? A beautifully presented collection of 250 outstanding architectural drawings, sketches and concepts, spanning continents and centuries.
>>See some spreads.
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.
The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the Whanganui River. In Te Ahi Kā, photographer Martin Toft explores the deep physical and metaphysical relationships between the river and the Māori. In 1996 Toft spent six months in the middle and upper reaches of the Whanganui River in the King Country. Here he met Māori who were in the process of reversing the colonisation of their people and returning to their ancestral land, Mangapapapa, which is on the steep banks of the river inside Whanganui National Park. Returning twenty years later, Toft began to work on this book. Its narrative is situated within the context of the current Whanganui River Deed of Settlement, Ruruku Whakatupua and the projects led by local Māori to settle historical grievances with the government dating back to the 1870s. At the heart of it is the Whanganui tribes’ claim to the river, which is seen by them as both as an ancestor and as a source of both material and spiritual sustenance.
>> Look inside the book.
War has always provided the opportunity for crimes either against art or against its established ownership structures. A well illustrated survey, from Classical antiquity to the present. New Zealand author.
>> Tompkins talks with Kim Hill.
Examines the work and work processes of two dozen leading weavers from around the world. Very nicely presented.
>> Find out more.
More than thirty young and passionate ceramicists in New York, London, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Sydney and Sao Paulo introduce us to their work, their studios and their inspiration. Beautifully photographed and presented.
A striking set of index cards surveying the history of type design.
The manifestos written by Tzara between 1916 and 1921 epitomised an assault on all traditional norms-and-forms, in art and in the art of living. Primarily works of liberating destruction, the manifestos pointed the way towards Surrealism and towards the new ways of seeing, living and making that were experimented with in the following decades.
>> "I am against manifestos."
This excellent book covers every aspect of paper: its history, composition, production, application, and trade. Beginning with the anatomy of paper and its earliest forms, this book looks at paper as a symbol of political and economic importance and as a carrier of ideas, from literature to art, design, and music. It looks at the different surfaces, opacities, weights and volumes of paper and how it is used for printing, typography, graphics, and maps as well as a vehicle for origami, architecture, and fashion.
Lissaman designed, threw, decorated, fired and sold her first significant collection of pots in 1927 and potted continuously until 1990, spanning New Zealand’s studio pottery movements. Her life, work and importance is explored in this superb new book.
The absolutely new edition of Vitamin D is packed with recent examples of artists pushing at the edges of the medium.
How can art be made following a cultural trauma such as that experienced by Europe during World War 2? This important new book includes some 400 works by 150 artists, bringing together for the first time post-war art from both Western and Eastern Europe. The book studies how Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Henry Moore, Renato Guttuso, Fernand Leger, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud and many others worked through the trauma of 1940-1945 and the Cold War.
An unparalleled resource of fashion detailing from throughout the last century: elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, daring cuts, innovative approaches and solutions. Beautifully presented and containing only the very best examples.
Considers every room and detail. Includes floor plans and endless ideas.
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.
878 Buildings, 798 Architects, 102 Countries, 9 World Regions, 1 Style. A stunning oversize volume of the best examples of brutalist construction around the world.
>> See some spreads.
A huge amount of fun (and inadvertent learning) will be had from these madcap activities based around works in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #106 (15.12.18)
Find out what we've been reading this week.
Use our GIFT SELECTOR to select books as gifts (or for yourself).
We name our favourite fiction of 2018.
Enrol for our 2019 writing classes.
We have been asked to declare our FICTION FAVOURITES of 2018.
Stella:1. The Long Take by Robin Robertson
2. Census by Jesse Ball
3. Women in the Field, One and Two by Thomasin Sleigh
Thomas:1. Kudos by Rachel Cusk
2. Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz
3. Census by Jesse Ball
 | Women in the Field, One and two by Thomasin Sleigh {Reviewed by STELLA} Ruth Bishops is an independent woman in her mid-30s attempting to shape a place for herself in the art world of London in the 1950s. Always interested in drawing, and encouraged by her aunt, she has attended the Slade Art School thanks to a small inheritance. Her time there is disrupted by the war, but she finishes her in the late 40s, her talents being in writing about art and critiquing her fellows’ work. With a small amount of attention garnered from a book she has written on contemporary art, she gains a position at the Fisher Gallery as a keeper: to catalogue the collection, research, and assist with exhibitions. Here, she finds herself in a role she loves, but also in a patriarchal institution where she has to prove herself over and above her male counterparts and is often relegated to overlooked or plainly ignored when it comes to input and meetings. When a retiring director makes her the English advisor* (partly out of spite for his nemesis) to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, things take an unexpected turn in her rather planned and predictable life. At an exhibition opening she is introduced to an eccentric Russian emigre, Irina Durova, who, on hearing of her role as an advisor, starts to badger Ruth about viewing her work. Eventually, Ruth gives in and arranges to visit Irina’s studio, where she finds a vast array of work spanning several decades. Drawn to two paintings from Irina’s final days in Russia (she migrated to London in 1913), she suggests these to committee at the National Art Gallery, having little hope that they will take her advice. Yet, despite controversy, they do. Irina and Ruth’s relationship develops as they plan the process of getting the works to New Zealand, and surprisingly Irina insists they accompany the works to Wellington. Ruth, who is having difficulties at the Fisher due to petty jealousies and office politics, as well as class and gender prejudices, is happy to have a change of scene, and finds herself on the way to the southern climes. Thomasin Sleigh has written a compelling novel, cleverly blending factual details into this fictional work. The historical references are light-handed, sometimes sharply amusing and fitting, placing this story well in its period. Her prose style is apt: the tone and language feel just right for the time. The two female leads are both convincing: Irina - a hive of conflicting impulses and an off-handedness that points to a deception; and Ruth - a seemingly naive yet highly observant individual who has grit at her core. Yet this is more than a story of two women making their mark on the page, more than a story of two paintings and their meaning: Sleigh is talking about colonisation, immigration, class and gender. As an art writer, she brings insight and knowledge to this interesting period and shows how art can be a catalyst for changing attitudes. Women in the Field, One and Two (a wonderfully playful title) is a novel that is both thoughtful and provocative, a missive about the art world and creative female practice now, as much as it is about the 1950s. Issues of paternalism, prejudice and favouritism still abound. What does it take and what do you give up to be free and creative? As Irina states: “I kept going and I wouldn’t go back. I had to make it work, because...because that was all I could do. I didn’t know that there were special rules, a special game, about whose art gets seen and whose art is remembered.” The most compelling New Zealand novel I have read this year: clever, witty and engaging.
(*the gallery had English advisors until 1972.)
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Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In biology, the directional response of a plant’s growth, either towards or away from an external stimulus that either benefits or harms it, is termed tropism. Nathalie Sarraute, in this subtly astounding book, first published in 1939, applies the term to her brief studies of ways in which humans are affected by other humans beneath the level of cognitive thought. In these twenty-four pieces she is interested in describing “certain inner ‘movements’, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives. These movements, of which we are hardly cognisant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness, in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak. They constitute the secret source of our existence.” We are either attracted or repulsed by the presence of others, though attraction and repulsion are indistinguishable at least in the degree of connection they effect, we are either benefitted or harmed by others, or both at once (which is much more harmful), but we cannot act upon or even acknowledge our impulses without making intolerable the life we have striven so hard to make tolerable in order to survive. Neurosis may be a sub-optimal functional mode, but it is a functional mode all the same. We wish to destroy but we fear, rightly, being also destroyed. We sublimate that which would overwhelm us, preferring inaction to action for fear of the reaction that action would attract, but we cannot be cognisant of the extent to which this process forms the basis of our existence for such awareness would be intolerable. We must deceive ourselves if we are to make the intolerable tolerable, and we must not be aware that we so deceive ourselves. Such devices as character and plot, which we both apply to ‘real life’ and practise in the reading and writing of novels, are “nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life” to make it liveable. Sarraute’s brilliance in this book, which is the key to her other novels, and which constitute an object lesson for any writer, is to observe and convey the impulses “constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.” Subliminal both in its observations and in its effects, the book suggests the urges and responses that form the understructure of relationships, unseen beneath the effectively compulsive conventions, expectations and obligations that comprise our conscious quotidian lives. Many of the pieces suggest how children are subsumed, overwhelmed and harmed by adults: “They had always known how to possess him entirely, without leaving him an inch of breathing space, without a moment’s respite, how to devour him down to the last crumb.” Sarraute is not interested here in character or plot, but in the unacknowledged impulses and responses that underlie our habits, attitudes and actions. Each thing emerges from, or tends towards, its opposite. All that is beautiful moves towards the hideous. Against what is hideous, something inextinguishable moves to rebel, to survive. ‘Tropism’ also suggests the word ‘trop’ in French, in the sense of ‘too much’. The ideas we have of ourselves are flotsam on surging unconscious depths in which there is no individuality, only impulse and response. Sarraute’s tropisms give insight into the patterns, or clustering tendencies, of these impulses and responses, and are written in remarkable, beautiful sentences. “And he sensed, percolating from the kitchen, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we’ve taken our breath away.”
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>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read a few of the 300.
>> "Fuelled by ts own accretion."
>> "Required reading for all those experiencing crises of confidence and the otherwise deleterious effects of the human condition."
>> Writing the Self: Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson and Heidi Julavits.
>> Read articles by Sarah Manguso.
>> Sarah Manguso and Leslie Jamison.
>> Read Thomas's review of Ongoingness.
>> Manguso @ VOLUME.
NEW RELEASES
In this 'non-coming of age tale', a young woman travels from Argentina to Germany under pressure of emotional conflicts. When she arrives, she is constantly exposed to all kinds of adventures and incidents, some funny, others tragic, but never fully understands her situation and never learns from her circumstances. The book is a wonderfully resonant exploration of displacement and the effects of political repression.
>>"No matter where I go, I'm still broken."
A ground-breaking feminist classic from 1950s Uruguay, now translated into English. The Naked Woman was met with scandal and outrage due to its erotic content, cynicism, and stylistic ingenuity. The novel follows Rebeca Linke's ardent, ultimately tragic, attempt to free herself from a hostile society. Juxtaposing fantastic imagery and brutal depictions of violence, the book will resonate with readers of Clarice Lispector, Angela Carter, and Djuna Barnes.
"A timely translation of a Latin American hidden jewel. Wild and brilliant, Armonia Somers speaks to us in the here and now of our troubled present." - Cristina Rivera Garcia
"The extraordinary power of The Naked Woman lies in the mysterious sensation of a metaphor whose meaning is being suspended. Like all literary greats, Somers offers no answers, she just amplifies the questions." - Andres Barba
Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next. From the author of All That Man Is.
Eden travels from Odessa to Bessarabia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey's Black Sea region, exploring the interconnecting culinary cultures. A beautiful book, with very tempting recipes.
Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality and harshness of Iron Age life.Behind and ahead of Silvie's narrative is the story of a bog girl, a sacrifice, a woman killed by those closest to her, and as the hot summer builds to a terrifying climax, Silvie and the Bog girl are in ever more terrifying proximity.
"I love this book. Ghost Wall requires you to put your life on hold while you finish it." - Maggie O'Farrell
"Original, ambitious and challenging, submerging the reader in the strangeness of an anomalous mind, an aqueous medium where language is refracted into mazes of shifting meanings." - Guardian
"Arnold’s impressive debut is strange and dexterous. She has an ability to capture on the page a complex, obsessive mind without veering into pretention or convolution." - White Review
This powerfully silent graphic novel follows the life of a boy who grows up to be an astronaut, just like he always wanted, until a fatal space shuttle crash upends his life and he begins to find solace in beauty here on earth.
Every aspect of the mountain considered in this beautiful book for children: natural and cultural history (and climbers).
A year in the life of a young woman coming to terms with the death of her stepfather, while attempting to find love in LA. We are introduced to her friends and family, as she struggles to launch herself out into the world, to take the risks of love – the one constancy in all the change.
"Funny, tender and wholly original." - Book Soup
"A master." - Rivka Galchen
“A moving and graceful novella of overcoming sorrow.” —Kirkus Reviews
Too compendious to digest in one sitting, this vast, astounding volume contains every possible fact about everything humans eat or drink, beautifully and clearly displayed.
Sometimes having eight arms makes being brave and helpful even more effective. A new edition of this beloved book from the creator of the also-ever-wonderful The Three Robbers.
65 famous and lesser-known building projects in Germany, Vienna, Barcelona, Prague, and Budapest by architects including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Lighthouses epitomise humans' relationship with the sea. This book explores the histories of twenty towers built on the rocks surround Britain between 1811 and 1904.
Explores the most interesting facts about these marine mammals, from the enormous blue whale (which has a heart the size of a car ) to the Amazon river dolphin (which is pink). Gorgeously illustrated, this book delves into cetaceans' mysterious evolution (from land to water mammals), their place in mythology, and their ecology, habitats, and behaviors (such as singing, fluking, beaching, bubble feeding, and more).
A beautifully illustrated introduction to the piscine world and full of facts.
It is not nothing to be the king of nothing and the formidable king of nothing presides with proper pride over his kingdom of which nothing is known except that he is the king. He parades through his kingdom, and he oversees his kingdom, and he sets out to defend his kingdom--especially when, one day, out of the blue, the last thing he would ever have expected or wanted shows up within its borders: something.
Who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes, but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose? He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.
>> Some books by Gorey.
>> The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
India's and South Asia's history has been determined by seasonal water distribution through monsoons and rivers. Climate change is disrupting these patterns. What will the consequences be?
What sort of government can be termed a democracy? How can the will of the people be expressed as a form of government? What are the strengths and vulnerabilities of a democratic model? Miller traces democracy from ancient Greece to is current predicaments.
Imagine a United States in which half the population has been silenced (possibly this doesn't take much imagination). When the government limits women's words to a quota of 100 per day, and then forbids education or employment for women, how can women make themselves heard?
An all-new collection of poems and essays.
Marko has come to New Zealand to escape his past in Bulgaria. Why does a Polish bookstore owner call him a traitor? Who covertly photographed him for the newspaper? A novel set in an immigrant community, connected by classical music.
Follows the compelling Dashing for the Post.
The first volume of the series that has been dubbed 'The Pacific 'Twilight''. In Samoa, ancient mythology tells of Telesa, demon women who are guardians of earth and gifted with the elemental powers of Air, Water and Fire. Telesa are vengeful and cruel. Are these tales to frighten children, or something more? Leila come from Washington D.C. in search of family and a place to belong. Instead she finds her destiny threatens to tear her apart. Can she resist the bewitching call of a telesa sisterhood, or will Daniel be the element that gentles the fire of the Telesa? Must love burn at the altar of the telesa covenant?
>> Book trailer.
An account of grassroots actions and initiatives that not only address climate change, but social issues too.
An outstanding graphic novel for young adults dealing with the causes and effects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Seventeen-year-old Riki is worried about school and the future, but mostly about his girlfriend, Gemma, who has suddenly stopped seeing or texting him. But on his way to see her, he's hit by a bus and his life radically changes. Riki wakes up one hundred years earlier in Egypt, in 1915, and finds he's living through his great-great-grandfather's experiences in the Maori Contingent. At the same time that Riki tries to make sense of what's happening and find a way home, we go back in time and read transcripts of interviews Riki's great-great-grandfather gave in 1975 about his experiences in this war and its impact on their family. Gradually we realise the fates of Riki and his great-great-grandfather are intertwined.
Very well illustrated.
She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley created Frankenstein by Lynn Fulton and Felicita Sala $32
An appealingly executed picture book.
In-depth interview with Laurie Anderson (great reader), and a consortium of monsters inspired by Frankenstein.
>> 1977
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
Full of colour and fun facts, this book is the ideal way to introduce children to the world of plants. Matches Creaturepedia.
A new way of telling the story of the famous explorer: through the eyes of his cook on the Endeavour, the one-handed John Thompson. As the ship travels the Pacific we get nuanced observations on class, power and race, as well as actual recipes from the ship's galley, all done the graphic style that won Gavin Bishop the 2018 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award for Aotearoa.
From the Aardonyx to the Zuniceratops, discover when dinosaurs lived, where they lived, what they ate and much more.
At last! An excellent clear guide for children to New Zealand fauna of land, water and air.
Set off on a journey around the world with this follow up to the bestselling Illuminature and Illumanatomy. Use your three-colour lens to explore the continents: use your green lens to see the landscape, the red lens to see plants and animals, and the blue lens to see cultural highlights and famous buildings.
Edible science! If you can follow a recipe you can learn about science. Ideal for children (and other people too).
>> Nanogirl is a good name for a superhero.
A stunning, beautiful exploration of the ocean, from the shoreline to the depths, presented in this large-format volume with die-cut pages and flaps to lift.
>> Other books by Hélène Druvert.
New Zealand's answer to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls! Inspiring stories and wonderful illustrations. Includes Whina Cooper, Janet Frame, Beatrice Tinsley, Frances Hodgkins, Georgina Beyer, Huria Matenga, Jane Campion, Joan Wiffen, Karen Walker, Kate Edger, Katherine Mansfield, Mai Chen, Merata Mita, Mojo Mathers, Patricia Grace, Suzie Moncrieff, Farah Palmer, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Lucy Lawless, Kate Sheppard, Nancy Wake, Sophie Pascoe, Margaret Mahy, Lydia Ko, Merata Mita, Lorde, Rita Angus and Te Puea Herangi. Illustrations by Sarah Laing, Sarah Wilkins, Fifi Coulston, Ali Teo, Helen Taylor, Phoebe Morris, Sophie Watkins, Rebecca ter Borg and Vasanti Unka.
A beautifully illustrated book for children, showing how East and West have been tied together by people, trade, disease, war, religion, adventure, science and technology, along the trade routes of the Silk Roads. Frankopan's The Silk Roads (the adult history) is a remarkable book, showing that much often overlooked history should be central to our view of the past. This book does the same, for children.
Meet 15 boats and ships and learn what keeps them so busy. Also learn what those flags mean. An appealing board book.
Follow rivers around the world (including the Waikato!) and learn about the people and history that belong along their banks. This large-format picture book is packed with information that will suggest further exploration.
>> Goes at work.
>> Other wonderful books by Peter Goes.
Mix and match halves of fantastical beasts from around the world to make new fantastical beasts. Fun.
>> Sample pages.
Wonderful graphic novel presentation of one of the staunchest and smartest of the Greek gods and goddesses.
Hockney and Gayford turn the conversational approach so successful in A History of Pictures to this thoughtful and companionable book introducing children to interesting art.
A fun pictorial introduction to Chinese characters.
>> The method is superb.
>> The Chineasy website.
Most of the building blocks of the universe can be found around the house.
Essays, interviews, illustrations, songs and consciousness raising for young people, from a wide range of contributors.
Finding the details in these iconic paintings will enable young children to approach artwork fully open to its rewards.
There are many kinds of hero! Oh Boy! is a collection of true stories about New Zealand men who overturned stereotypes and broke through obstacles to follow their passion.
A wonderful colourful graphic for children, covering the whole of history, from the Big Bang to an imagined future, showing how human progress is achieved through a combination of observation, imagination and communication.
Everyone in a family is related to everyone else, but in different ways. This quirky picture book is a fun introduction to genealogy.
Learn the alphabet with this radical board book.
"N is for No.
No! No! No!
Yes to what we want.
No to what must go!
No! No! No!"
Explores the most interesting facts about these marine mammals, from the enormous blue whale (which has a heart the size of a car ) to the Amazon river dolphin (which is pink). Gorgeously illustrated, this book delves into cetaceans' mysterious evolution (from land to water mammals), their place in mythology, and their ecology, habitats, and behaviors (such as singing, fluking, beaching, bubble feeding, and more).
Each fascinating illustrated letter of the alphabet contains another alphabet: An alphabet of Alphabets, an alphabet of Birds, an alphabet of Creepy-crawlies, an alphabet of Dinosaurs, &c, &c. Fun.
When Brick was just a baby, tall buildings amazed her. Her mother said, "Great things begin with small bricks. Look around and you'll see." Brick sets off to visit famous brick buildings around the world. Where will she find her place?
What are feathers made of? Why do birds have so many of them? How do they help birds fly? And what other purpose do they serve? All these questions and many more are answered in this book bursting with the most beautiful illustrations.
A companion for The Egg.
Follow the emperor penguin through snow, ice and bitter temperatures; watch as the great white shark swims 10,000 km in search of seals; track huge herds of elephants, on their yearly hunt for water and be amazed at the millions of red crabs, migrating across Christmas Island. Lovely illustrated hardback.
Fossilisation, rocks, the water cycle, volcanoes, glaciers, thunderstorms, geology, ecology - a beautifully illustrated introduction to earth science.
A wonderful large-format, beautifully illustrated book introducing children (and the rest of us) to the wonders of space. From the 'Welcome to the Museum' series.
A huge amount of fun (and inadvertent learning) will be had from these madcap activities based around works in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
Have a look through this selection of a dozen New Zealand poetry books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
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.
"Love, death, Bruce Willis, public urination, being a woman, love, The Nanny, love. This pamphlet of poetry by Hera Lindsay Bird is a startling departure from her bestselling debut Hera Lindsay Bird by defying convention and remaining exactly the same, only worse. This collection, which focuses on love, childish behaviours, 90’s celebrity references and 'being a woman', is sure to confirm all your worst suspicions and prejudices."
Selected by Carol Ann Duffy: "Without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet - on page and in performance - to arrive."
"I've begun to think of short poems as being the literary equivalent of the small house movement. Small houses contain the same essential spaces as large houses do. Both have places in which to eat, sleep, bathe and sit; they're the same, except small houses are, well, smaller." -Jenny Bornholdt
A beautifully presented and thoughtful selection of short verse from well-known poets, new voices and rediscovered poets.
An excellent selection of poems that have appeared weekly in The Spinoff, including established names and new voices.
Eggleton's new collection "possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poets recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode. Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars while simultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and repurposes high visual culture and demotic aural culture."
Poems assailed by blankness, by ice, by erasure, by exhaustion, by the dissolution of form.
"The work takes full advantage of the white pages on which the words appear. In particular it plays with ideas of erasure, as if all our words, like any evidence of human presence, can be extinguished by a fresh fall of snow." - Bill Manhire
Recipient of the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
The first part of Helen Heath's new collection is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, fences and buildings, a meditation on Theo Jansen's animal sculptures, and the lives of birds in cities. A series of speculative poems further explores questions of how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In these poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost. How might our experiences of grieving and remembering be altered?
>> Helen Heath - Standing room only.
>> Ask Gary Numan.
Is nowhere a place we can get closer to? How does history prevent us from seeing the present? These excellent poems are a fertile and dangerous confluence of cultural streams.
"Alice Miller looks hard at history's terrifying straight lines, yet time and again turns to the obsessive, sometimes redemptive circlings of art. She knows that in a universe ruled by time and death, words can both rescue and destroy us, sometimes in a single utterance." - Bill Manhire
A selection of poems from his ninth decade: sharp, learned, playful, poignant, looking back on a long life and forward to the mortality that has claimed so many of his literary fellows and now waits for him. If anything, Stead continues to improve as a poet, his lines scattering resonance across the page from a central point of intensely intelligent watchfulness.
Steven's gifts as a poet include the ability to isolate ordinary details as connective routes between times, places and modes of experience. His poems bristle with the particulars of life in the shabby backstreets of Dunedin, but pull with them an allegorical load of illuminating subtlety.
"This collection speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality. It dives through noir, whakamā and kitsch and emerges dripping with colour and liquor. There’s whakapapa, funk (in all its connotations) and fetishisation. The poems map colonisation of many kinds through intergenerational, indigenous domesticity, sex, image and disjunction. They time-travel through the powdery mint-green 1960s and the polaroid sunshine 1970s to the present day. Their language and forms are liquid—sometimes as lush as what they describe, other times deliberately biblical or oblique. It all says: here is a writer who is experiencing herself as powerful, restrained but unafraid, already confident enough to make a phat splash on the page." —Hinemoana Baker
>> "I always assumed Denis Glover was talking about some other Johnsonville."
>> 'For a Cigarette and a Blanket.'
>> Read Stella's review.
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!
Each poem in this excellent collection pits its voice both against silence and against the deluge of other voices suspended above it, waiting for an opportunity to smother it. Every word is effective and surprising, the whole geared so that the humour and the blades rotate in opposite directions. A form-bursting collection from a poet recently moved to Nelson from the UK.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Find out about the 5-session POETRY LABORATORY course Cat will be teaching at VOLUME in February (hint: this would make a good present).
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
A book is different things to different people. This is a lovely and whimsical set of thoughts of what books can be and do, with entirely appealing illustrations. You will love this book.
In attempting to define what constitutes a 'book' in an age when technology is helping us to re-examine the definitions of many cultural entities, Borsuk covers much interesting ground, both historical and speculative, approaching books as physical objects, as content, as ideas and as interface.
>> 'The Hand and the Page in the Digital Age.'
Franklin loves books and he loves reading to children, but people tend to be scared of him because he is a dragon. Fortunately, Luna knows all about dragons from reading many books about them, and the two spend many hours together discussing the books they have read. To share their love of books with others, they decide to open a flying bookshop (good idea).
What is a book? This book lavishly illustrates the developing relationship between people and their books as recorded in paintings from the last 500 years.
Personally, we're for them. An extended consideration of the importance of a bookshops as cultural and intellectual spaces.
A good selection of influential Anglophone and translated books, well illustrated with covers, portraits, &c.
A new way of thinking of familiar literary worlds is shown in the quirkily drawn maps of this enjoyable book.
“Dear Reader is an enjoyable novel on several levels, from straightforward publishing-industry story, to a more personal story of time going by and loss, to the sheer technical virtuosity on display — both Fournel’s and translator Bellos'. Dear Reader is a good example of why the Oulipian method isn’t merely a game, but rather a surprisingly fertile approach to writing.” – The Complete Review
14-year-old Dita is confined in the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The several thousand residents of camp BIIb are inexplicably allowed to keep their own clothing, their hair, and, most importantly, their children. Fredy Hirsch maintains a school in BIIb. In the classroom, Dita discovers something wonderful: a dangerous collection of eight smuggled books. She becomes the books' librarian. Based on a true story.
How did the period of Soviet cultural outreach affect the production of children's books in other countries? Apart from the interesting text, which shifts the focus of international children's book production, the book is packed with delightful examples of illustration and book design.
Visit 45 towns around the world (including Featherston in New Zealand) that celebrate the printed word.
Kells runs his finger along the shelves and wanders the aisles of libraries around the world and through time, both real and imagined, with books and without, and ponders the importance of the library as a representation of the human mind.
Knowing what Shakespeare read would provide new levels of insight into his works, but which books did he read and where are they now?
What role does a book jacket play in the relationship between a writer and a reader? What is the contribution of a designer to a work of literature? Elegantly written.
A beautifully presented celebration of literary maps, with contributions from Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, DAvid Mitchell, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Philip Pullman. Irresistible.
When Manguel 'downsized' his home, he had to pack his library of 30000 volumes, knowing that he might never see many of them again. As he did so, his mind was filled with thoughts about literature and about our attachment to books. Fortunately, he has written this book of these thoughts.
Peter Mendelsund has designed some of the best book covers of recent years, and one of the reasons that they are so successful is that they arise from his careful reading of the texts. In this book, which reminds me of Ways of Seeing and The Medium is the Massage in its interplay of image and text giving an appealingly light touch to a heavy subject, he is particularly interested in the visual effects of reading. These visual effects are non-optical and comprise mental images fished into awareness by the ‘unseen’ black hooks of text; they are the fictional correlative of the visual effects fished into awareness by ‘actual’ optical stimulation. I suppose a difference between reading text and reading actuality is that when reading text the scope of our awareness has been set for us by the authority of the author (our surrogate self), whereas actuality is undifferentiated and incomprehensibly overstimulative and the necessary repression of stimuli in the reading of it is dependent on personality, conditioning, socialisation and practicality. Emphasising that he is interested in the experience of reading rather than the memory of reading (if such a distinction can be sensibly made), Mendelsund treats in depth an aspect of what I would call ‘the problem of detail’: what is the role of the reader in ‘completing’ the text? Whereas the reader’s ‘actual’ experiences of course inform and colour their reading of detail, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mendelsund’s opinion that when reading we ‘flesh out’ characters in our imagining of them or place them in ‘familiar’ contexts – while we are reading we may well also indulge in such extra-textual self-massage, but I don’t think that this is the reading itself.
500 images, 32 varied and outstanding contemporary artists whose practice includes making books. Impressive, and full of interesting ideas.
>> Sample pages on our website!
Influential art writers consider the work of influential art writers, including Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Alfred Barr's monograph on Matisse, E.H. Gombrich'sArt and Illusion, Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture, and Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Required reading.
Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic trust established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886 and 1917. This book of well-observed photographs and documentary images records the 23 libraries established in the South Pacific (18 of them in New Zealand). A few have been demolished, others have been repurposed, some are still used as libraries.
The destruction of the 'I'.
Read this with a pencil at the ready: not only will you be making yourself a reading list, you'll be wanting to start writing love letters and break-up notes to the books that you love or that have disappointed you.
Just because these books have been lost from history for one reason or another hasn't prevented them from being culturally important and the foci of intense speculation. What are we to make of the memoirs of Lord Byron, the magnum opus of Bruno Schulz, the Hemingway novel mislaid at the Gare de Lyon, the second part of Gogol's Dead Souls or the contents of Walter Benjamin's suitcase?
Over 250 works of art from all periods depicting people reading books.
Offers concise introductions - each of them accompanied by generous quotation (in English) from the book in question - to sixty-six works in the canon of Chinese literature. The books chosen reflect the chronological and thematic breadth of Chinese literary tradition, ranging from such classics as The Book of Songs and the Confucian Analects, through popular dramas and novels (The Romance of the Western Chamber; The Water Margin), twentieth-century political and biographical works (Quotations from Chairman Mao, the autobiography of the last emperor) and modern novels that are little known in the West (Memories of South Peking, Six Chapters from a Cadre School Life).
100 recipes for dishes mentioned in favourite books. Includes Marmalade (A Bear Called Paddington), Tunna Pannkakor (Pippi Longstocking), Crab & Avocado Salad (The Bell Jar), Stuffed Eggplant (Love in the Time of Cholera), Coconut Shortbread (The Essex Serpent), Madeleines (In Search of Lost Time), Figs & Custard (Dubliners), Chocolatl (Northern Lights) and Smoking Bishop (A Christmas Carol).
"A work of rare joy, and one as wholly irresistible as the food it so delightfully describes. It is a glorious work that nourishes the mind and spirit as much as the body, and I could not love it more." - Sarah Perry (author of The Essex Serpent)
>> Crytallised ginger to please Agatha Christie
What can finding out more about the places in which books are set help us to appreciate those books more deeply? Well illustrated and documented.
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 this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
Indo-Persian food conveying the flavours and culinary approaches of the Mughal Empire.
Three-course meals from some of the world's leading chefs, all using overlooked, undervalued or waste ingredients. Beautifully presented. "These dishes could change the way we feed the world, because they can be cooked by anyone, anywhere, on any budget. To feed the planet, first you have to fight the waste." - MB
>> See some spreads.
>> See some chefs reducing waste.
Profiles, photographs and recipes from the eateries on Wellington's favourite street.
"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.
The Michelin star chef shares his gastronomic vision, springing from the area at meeting of France and Italy on the shores of the Mediterranean. Meet the local suppliers of Mauro's ingredients, try the recipes, drool over the photography.
A celebration of modern German home cooking from Anja Dunk’s young family kitchen. Strudel, Noodles and Dumplings is a long-awaited revival of this national cuisine, proving that there is more to German food than Bratwurst and Black Forest gateau. Anja Dunk’s German food is gently spiced, smoky and deeply savoury. From recipes such as whole-wheat buttermilk waffles to caraway roast pork and red cabbage, quince and apple slaw, her way of cooking is vibrant, quick and deeply intertwined with the seasons and the weather. Featuring over 200 recipes for the everyday family table, as well as for snacks and special occasions, Anja’s cook book is an essential guide to all the basics of German cuisine, providing inspiration for appetising and comforting meals throughout the year.
>> To live the good life.
A beautifully presented large-format book, with stunning diagrams and very clear step-by-step photographs.
Eden travels from Odessa to Bessarabia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey's Black Sea region, exploring the interconnecting culinary
cultures. A beautiful book, with very tempting recipes.
A beautifully presented and very appealing book of delectable and authentic dishes from western India, all absolutely at home in New Zealand.
As well as building the "hideous monstrosity" that has become France's foremost visual icon, Gustav Eiffel also build the Thuir Distillery in 1873, which was the origin of many of France's iconic aperitifs, including Pernod Absinthe, Byrrh, Lillet, Ricard and Suze. The first half of this book features photographs of the restored distillery, the second contains illustrated recipes from some of the world's foremost bartenders for cocktails based on these aperitifs. All in all a very pleasing book.
A definitive collection of over 400 regional and traditional recipes, organised by course and accompanied by insightful notes. Soups, noodles, rices, pickles, one-pots, sweets, and vegetables - all authentic and achievable at home.
A neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood guide to the best of the Danish capital's food and eating places. Nicely illustrated, and with 70 mouthwatering recipes.
A selection of the best food writing from 'The Poet Laureate of Appetite', and author of the hugely enjoyable The Raw and the Cooked.
"A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life." - Kirkus
Profiles and portraits of over 100 chili varieties.
Definitive, wide ranging.
"For a long time, vegan cooking has lived in the shadow of the health food movement of the Sixties and Seventies, but here's a cookbook that blasts away the past and jumps boldly into a multi-culinary future where veganism isn't just about saying no to animal products but is instead about saying yes to hundreds of mind-blowing dishes from Iraq to Ireland, and from the Philippines to Peru."—Amanda Cohen
Yasmin Khan harvests black olives from the groves of Burquin in the West Bank, hand-rolls maftool - the plump Palestinian couscous - in home kitchens in Jenin and finds time to enjoy a pint with workers at the Taybeh brewery, which is producing the first Palestinian craft beer. As she feasts and cooks with Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds, she learns about the realities of their everyday lives. Zaitoun includes herb-filled salads, quick pickles, fragrant soups, tender roasted meats and rich desserts, and has a special focus on vegetarian versions of Palestinian classics.
"A moving, hugely knowledgeable and utterly delicious book." -Anthony Bourdain
Well illustrated, attractively presented and full of clear and useful information on how to make a variety of delicious breads.
>> It is not as difficult or as time-consuming as you might think.
Too compendious to digest in one sitting, this vast, astounding volume contains every possible fact about everything humans eat or drink, beautifully and clearly displayed.
Build a repertoire of enjoyable vegetarian food loved by families of varying backgrounds. The family stories and then-and-now photographs are delightful, too.
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.
The skills that we learn bind our lives together. Do you want to know how to grow your own food? Or how to keep bees? How to forage for edible seaweed along the shoreline, or wild greens down by the stream? Maybe you're curious about growing mushrooms or how to grow the perfect tomato. You're invited to make these skills your own. Uses permaculture as a basis for a practical, sustainable and ethical antipodean lifestyle.
>> Visit Milkwood.
>> Living like it matters.
Visit Catalonia's buzzing metropolis through its local dishes. An exciting addition to the excellent 'Cult Recipes' series.
The absolutely definitive guide to every possible sort of pastry, biscuit, cake and bread originating in Scandinavia (with regional variations). Highly recommended.
An intimate glimpse into life in a traditional Venetian neighbourhood (beautifully photographed!), with 130 delicious and achievable recipes of authentic everyday family dishes. Another excellent book from the author of Polpo.
A special Slow Food investigation into authentic regional cuisine.
Ottolenghi’s cookbooks take us to new levels of appreciation of food. His recipes, mostly with a Mediterranean inflection, are always both reliable and exciting, the food is always a pleasure to make - and even more of a pleasure to eat. This new book, Simple, has everything you love about Ottolenghi - made simple, or quick, or both simple and quick. The letters of the title are a key to the recipes within: S = short on time: less than 30 minutes; I = 10 ingredients or less; M = make ahead; P = pantry; L = lazy [suits me]; E = easier than you think. So, whenever you have the inclination for Squid and Red Pepper Stew, or Roasted Aubergine with Anchovies and Oregano, or Pasta with Pecorino and Pistachios (if you’re feeling alliterative), or No-Churn Raspberry Ice Cream, you’ll be able to whip it up in no time and still have the benefit of Ottolenghi’s subtle mastery of flavours.
"We are no longer like our ancestors. We no longer depend on our skills as foragers, gatherers, scavengers, hunters and fishers for food. We are only part-time food raisers at best. Our biology, on the other hand, has changed far less. Now there is a mismatch between who we are and what we eat. And it is in the gap created by this mismatch that chronic diseases can take root."
Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights: A journey deeper into dining hell with Jay Rayner $15
You aren't really interested in glorious prose poems celebrating the finest dining experiences known to humanity, are you? You want a food reviewer to suffer abysmal cooking, preferably at eye-watering prices, so you can gorge on the details and luxuriate in vicarious displeasure. You're in luck.
Four times named the world's best restaurant, Noma has its own fermentation laboratory (headed by Zilber). Here world fermentation traditions are tested, understood and enhanced. This is an astounding book.
The deliciously cosmopolitan story of the restaurant, from eighteenth-century Paris to El Bulli. What does eating out tell us about who we are?
A 'method' companion to the hugely useful and enjoyable Flavour Thesaurus, this book promises to be just as useful and enjoyable. The book is divided into 12 chapters, each covering a basic culinary category, such as 'Bread', 'Sauces' or 'Custard'. The recipes in each chapter are then arranged on a continuum, the transition from one recipe to another generally amounting to a tweak or two in the method or ingredients. Which is to say, one dish leads to another: once you've got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, then its neighbouring dishes on the continuum (crackers, soda bread, scones) will involve the easiest and most intuitive adjustment. The result is greater creativity in the kitchen: Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. Entertaining, opinionated and inspirational, Lateral Cooking will have you torn between donning your apron and settling back in a comfortable chair.
In answering a lot of silly questions about what can and cannot be done in the kitchen, rather a lot of useful information about cooking is conveyed. A funny and attractively illustrated introduction to kitchen culture for young cooks.
>> Some spreads here.
A good introduction to authentic French cooking techniques.
>> Here they are.
>> And here.
Cuban cuisine is notable not only for the appreciation of 'ordinary' ingredients but for the inventiveness in their treatment. This book is meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated.
As it says.
Have a look through this selection of books we are recommending for summer reading and as seasonal gifts. Click through to read our reviews. Use the 'click and collect' function on our website to reserve your copies.
If you don't find what you're looking for here, come and talk to us: we have many other interesting books on our shelves.
The first full biography of this pivotal artist, educator and theorist, from his Bauhaus beginnings through his Black Mountain College years to Yale. Is colour more important than form?
>> Search vs research.
A nuanced and perceptive graphic novel biography of the nuanced and perceptive thinker.
"Incredible." - Deborah Levy
“Ken Krimstein's deeply moving graphic memoir about the life and thoughts of philosopher Hannah Arendt is not only about Hannah Arendt. It's also, through her words, about how to live in the world, the meaning of freedom, the perils of totalitarianism, and our power as human beings to think about things and not just act blindly. Krimstein explains Arendt's ideas with clarity, wit, and enormous erudition, and they still resonate.” – Roz Chast
>> Who was Hannah Arendt?
>> On drawing the graphic novel.
What is the topography of anxiety in Godzone? This excellent collection of essays, personal accounts and stories, from Ashleigh Young, Sarah Lin Wilson, Kirsten McDougall, Anthony Birt, Hinemoana Baker, Bonny Etherington, Kate Kennedy, Holly Walker, Kerry Sunderland, Eamonn Marra, Tusiata Avia, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Rebecca Priestly, Donna McLeod and others, reveals both the breadth and the depth of New Zealand's anxiety epidemic - and suggests that there are veins of light to be found in that darkness.
>>Naomi talks on Radio NZ.
Fascinating graphic biographies of thirty remarkable women, most of whom have been largely 'forgotten' by history. Includes Tove Jansson, Josephine Baker, Temple Grandin, Wu Zetian and Peggy Guggenheim.
"A modern classic." - Guardian
>> See some spreads.
Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. "Far from dragging politics into art," he wrote in 1953, "art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017. Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger's development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s to Berger's reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left.
>> Ali Smith on John Berger.
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.
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 remarkable 'fictional autobiography' of Louise Bourgeois, in the form of a self-addressing interior monologue.
"A truly wonderful book. Jean Frémon knew Louise Bourgeois, and in his words that are also her words I discovered her adain in all her bitter, tender, heroic, violent creativity. There is something uncanmny at play in this small book, something I don't fully grasp. but I suspect that elusive, haunted excess may be exactly why I love it. " - Siri Hustvedt
>> Read Thomas's review.
>>"Louise Bourgeois as I knew her."
>>Something like a portrait of Louise Bourgeois.
Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: Conrad's portrayal of these forces the dawn of the twentieth century make him, in this new interpretation, a prophet of globalisation.
"An extraordinary and profoundly ambitious book, little short of a masterpiece." - Guardian
Drawn to fashion despite his family's opposition, Cunningham moved to New York and made a name for himself as a photographer, personality and designer. He remained, however, a secretive man, and this memoir was not available for publication until after his death.
>>Have you seen the film about Cunningham?
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time.
"A Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism." - New York Times
"The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live." — John Banville
"One of the best books you’ll ever read." — Deborah Levy
"Ravishing and almost oracular with insight, Ernaux’s prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, 'big' history and private experience. The Years is a philosophical meditation paced as a rollercoaster ride through the decades. How we spend ourselves too quickly, how we reach for meaning but evade it, how to live, how to remember – these are Ernaux’s themes. I am desperate for more." — Kapka Kassabova
"A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original." — Philippe Sands
>> Read Thomas's review.
The essayist, according to Franzen, is like "a firefighter, whose job, when everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them." These essays address Franzen's great loves, literature and birds, and much else beyond and thereby. Where the new media tend to confirm one's prejudices, he writes, literature "invites you to ask whether you might be wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you." The cumulative effect of the essays is strangely hopeful, however. Includes a meditation on New Zealand seabirds.
A fascinating account of the social, political and cultural changes in Britain since World War 2, especially for women, as focused on the life of a particularly keen and involved observer.
"Refreshingly unconcerned with self-excavation, the beauty of it is in its flow from the particular to the general. The vast consolation and pleasure of this generous book is its conviction that we are all more than one life allows." - Times Literary Supplement
A memoir in three parts. `Double Unit' tells the story of Maurice Gee's parents - Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man's man. `Blind Road' is Gee's story up to the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship as a writer began. `Running on the Stairs' tells the story of Margaretha Garden, beginning in 1940, the year of her birth, when she travelled with her mother Greta from Nazi-sympathising Sweden to New Zealand, through to her meeting Maurice Gee when they were working together in the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1967.
who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes, but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose? He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.
>> Some books by Gorey.
>> The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
When Edward M. Hallowell was eleven, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. Hmm.
Hours after the 2011 Christchuch Earthquake, Kaikoura-based doctor Chris Henry crawled through the burning CTV building to rescue those who were trapped. Six years later, his daughter Chessie interviews him in an attempt to understand the trauma that led her father to burnout, in the process unravelling stories and memories from her own remarkable family history. A remarkable interrogation of the personal fractures wrought by trauma.
>> The other side of bravery.
This book gives great insight into the mind of this outstanding journalist, and, through that, further insights into the people and stories he brought to the world's attention, including the Mai Lai massacre and the atrocities at Abu Graib.
"Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. This book is essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over." - John le Carré
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.
The television chefs who were at the forefront of changing public attitudes towards homosexuality in 1970s and 1980s New Zealand.
>> Cheese grating.
In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. A new edition, with an introduction by Olivia Laing.
>> Visit the gardens at Prospect Cottage.
>> Meet Derek Jarman.
>> Some of Jarman's remarkable films.
>> Olivia Laing, Philip Hoare and Sarah Wood discuss Derek Jarman.
Born to a Jewish family in Estonia in 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia; by the time of his death in 1974, he was widely recognised as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces built during the last fifteen years of his life.
>> Fisher House.
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.
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.
This collection of Timothy Leary's selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality. Includes much on Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Carl Sagan.
>> A message to young people (1966).
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.
Re-reading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, shortly after Doris Lessing's death, Lara Feigel discovered that Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, a writer, and a mother in a way that no other novelist had done. At a time when she was dissatisfied with the conventions of her own life, Feigel was enticed by Lessing's vision of freedom. Studying Lessing further helped her to change her own life and to write this dazzling book of forensic intensity.
"The most intriguing and certainly the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read." - Deborah Levy
Following Things I Don't Want to Know, this second installment of Levy's 'living autobiography' reveals a writer in radical flux, grappling with life and letters and re-establishing the positions of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in a contemporary context.
>> Read Thomas's review.
“To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.” A collection of essays titled after a line by Mansfield and addressing topics such as time, authenticity, intention, attachment, character, ambivalence and melodrama as they are mapped in literature, both for readers and for writers, and as demonstrable parts of mechanisms of the two years of intense depression that Li emerged from in writing this book.
>> Read Thomas's review.
In turns funny, angry and insightful, Lockwood's memoir of growing up with a father several times larger than life in a world several sizes too small for them both is not quite like anything else. Lockwood's Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals positioned her as an American approximation of Hera Lindsay Bird.
"Lockwood's prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris." - The New York Times
>> "Anything that happens from here is not my fault." (Lockwood in Wellington.)
Unprecedented insight into the creative life of one of the most consistently unsettling living film directors. Lynch's free-form memoir sections are interspersed with long-time close collaborator McKenna's more traditionally biographical (but no less fascinating) sections.
>> "I like to tell stories."
>> A trailer for Eraserhead (1977).
Meeting an urban musician with a passion for birds, Maclear became fascinated by the relationship between creativity and nature. In the year that they spent together, Maclear began to apply the principles and approaches of birdwatching to other areas of life, and made some gently profound discoveries. What is the gift that the small and the particular can give us that we are usually too busy and too 'big picture' focused to see? A lovely book.
"Original, charming, a little eccentric even. The book is a delight." - Nigel Slater
"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."
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
Startling essays on addiction, infertility, feminism, depression, rape and other 'unmentionable' subjects from a remarkable new Irish writer.
"I’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question, each dilemma, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone, especially young women and men, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously." - Irish Times
"Do not read this book in public: it will make you cry." - Anne Enright
>> Emilie Pine on her father's alcoholism.
A lightly fictionalised graphic memoir describing a young artist's experiences working in a diner frequented by drunks, junkies, thieves and creeps.
"The woman artist had no place in New Zealand at the turn of the century." Living in Hokitika before leaving first for Sydney and then California, Ridge became both a modernist poet and a painter, and a tireless advocate for the working class. Comparisons are made with Mansfield, Bethell and Mander: "Short story writer Katherine Mansfield was the only contemporary New Zealander with international ambition equal to Ridge's," and, "Ridge's main competitor for 'New Zealand's best woman poet of the early 20th century' is another modernist, Ursula Bethell."
>> American anarchist with a New Zealand West Coast connection.
>> Some poems and a bio.
Grove Press, and its house journal The Evergreen Review, revolutionized the publishing industry and radicalized the reading habits of the "paperback generation." Barney Rossett founded the company on a shoestring in 1951 and it became an important conduit through which avant-garde and European literature, and the works of Beckett, Burroughs, Brecht and Malcolm X became available in the US.
>> Rossett obituary (2012).
>> Much discussion in this institution.
Replete with documents, memories, and images from the life of Miroslav Sasek, this book is richly illustrated with material from Sasek's books as well as such archival material as previously unpublished illustrations, photographs, and vintage fan letters from children inspired by his books.
>> Sasek at VOLUME.
>> New York!
Seabrook's accounts of his wanderings around the Kentish coast forces English culture to roll over and reveal its dark underbelly.
"I guess you'd call it psychogeography, though this doesn't begin to capture its intense interest, its uncanny spookiness, the way it ensnares you, turning your stomach, messing with your head. A fugitive sort of book, twitchy and mournful, All the Devils Are Here demands to be reread, picked over, endlessly discussed - and yet to know it is somehow not to know anything at all." - Observer "An alternate English history." - Iain Sinclair
An often hilarious pointillist time-travel trip to the Greenwich Village of Shopsin's bohemian 1970s childhood, a funky, tight-knit small town in the big city. Shopsin's father, Kenny, operated a dining cafe, with a notorious range of eccentric dishes, including 'Slutty Cakes' (pancakes with peanut butter in the middle), and Tamara's charming memoir is packed with her idiosyncratic drawings and anecdotal vignettes.
>> Visit Shopsin's.
>> "A huge event of incompetence." (a clip from the 2004 documentary on Shopsin's, I Like Killing Flies)
>> Tamara Shopsin in The New Yorker.
Applying avant-garde approaches to popular musical forms, from 1968 onward, Can opened a sort of crack to the creative unconscious through which flowed enormous amounts of musically liberating energy. This book is in two parts: a biography of the band by Young, and a symposium on musical experimentation by founding member Schmidt, and a consideration of the tentacular reach of the band's influence.
>> 'Halleluhwah' (1971).
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.
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.
Smith's revered account of living in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe as the 1960s pushed itself into the 1970s is here presented in a beautiful hardback edition, full of fascinating photographs and illustrations.
"I couldn't explain how I'd become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people, without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us, and the Rapture they told us was coming. But then I couldn't really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father..."
"Beautiful, dizzying, terrifying, Stott's memoir maps the unnerving hinterland where faith becomes cruelty and devotion turns into disaster. A brave, frightening and strangely hopeful book." - Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
"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?