 | Rufus Marigold by Ross Murray {Reviewed by THOMAS} He had read the book so there was no reason why he should not by now have also written the review. He had, however, not written the review and he was, for some reason, feeling disinclined to start writing the review, even though the review had to be finished soon, in fact the sooner the better, to go out in the newsletter, preferably before dinner, and he could feel this urgency sitting like a physical pressure, even though he could not quite locate where upon his body this seemingly physical pressure was applied, or was applying itself. Presumably if he was affected by a seemingly physical pressure it would be experienced physically, or seem to be, which is the same thing, his body was all he had, so maybe this physical pressure was applying itself, or being applied to, his head, or his back, or his stomach, he could certainly feel what could be the cumulative effects of such pressure in each of those locations, or in all of those locations, he could not decide which, though he also could not decide whether what he felt in those physical locations was the effect of the seemingly physical pressure to write the review of Rufus Marigold, a pressure that was not actually physical but only seemingly physical in that it was experienced physically and his body was all he had, or of some other seemingly physical but not actually physical pressure, and here he had to stop himself from considering the various candidates for causing this seemingly physical but not actually physical pressure, and he thought there might be quite a few, better not to go there, or, indeed, of some actually physical pressure applying itself or being applied to those locations in his body, and here again there were various candidates for the cause of this, gravity not least among them. This always happened to him. Some minor detail or aspect of the so-called exterior world, or some comment or nuance by someone in the so-called exterior world, or some observation made by him, usually involuntarily, of the so-called exterior world, or of a person therein, would trigger a plausibly endless chain of monologue, either endlessly discursive or endlessly reiterative, in the so-called interior world, achieving nothing but underlining the apparent separation, or separateness, if there is a distinction to be made, of the so-called exterior world and the so-called interior world, causing the two to, if he could indulge the metaphor, rotate in opposite directions and lose touch. Once a thought has been thought it cannot be unthought, but does it need to be rethought and rethought? Rufus Marigold, the eponymous protagonist, if protagonist is not too generous a word, of the graphic novelRufus Marigold, has a somewhat similar problem, he thought. Anything that Rufus Marigold cares about immediately triggers (can a trigger be anything other than immediate? he wondered. Can there be such a thing as a slow trigger? A delayed trigger?) in him a monologue to the effect that he is repellent, useless and a failure, or perhaps, sometimes, not so much that he is repellent, useless and a failure as that others will inevitably regard him as repellent, useless and a failure whether he is repellent, useless and a failure or not. Once this thought has been thought it cannot be unthought and Rufus will make the worst of any available situation that could make him seem, at least to himself and, if possible, to others, repellent, useless and a failure. Rufus sees himself as a chimpanzee, but nobody around him seems to see him as a chimpanzee. The separation of Rufus’s internal and external worlds, so to call them, is unbridgeable in either direction. Anxiety casts forward and overwrites desires with fears, but anxiety at least indicates the presence of desires, and therefore of hopes. Desires cannot be disappointed nor hopes dashed if desires and hopes do not exist, after all, and anxiety is, for all else that it is that we would rather it was not, an indication of something that its sufferer values. Anxiety identifies what is valuable and attempts to sully it or to put it beyond the sufferer’s grasp, but anxiety at least finds value. Anxiety is a capable ailment, though it feels incapable; it is active, though it seems to devastate action. He was a little nostalgic for anxiety, he thought, for its alternative is despair. Nothing written confidently was ever worth reading, he conjectured, not that there was any danger of that in his case, so, if only he could make himself anxious, he thought, he could at least write the review of Rufus Marigold that he needed to write, even though anyone who read it would immediately either recognise it to be vapid and ill-written or, failing that, fail to perceive anything in it that was not vapid and ill-written, or at least not entirely so, or, at best, he would continue to believe that anyone who read it had immediately recognised it as vapid and ill-written whether they had in fact found it vapid and ill-written or not. Same difference. At least the job would be done. At least Rufus Marigold had had the intensely funny and tragic graphic novel he had drawn about his anxiety published, by New Zealand’s Earth’s End Publishing, no less, even if he had agreed to someone called Ross Murray having his name put on it. Or perhaps, he thought, this ‘Ross Murray’ is just a persona invented by Rufus Marigold to deflect attention away from the nubs of his anxiety, to represent him in the so-called exterior world, to help him, at a safe remove, to function. That could be a useful tool, he thought, staring at the blank screen where his review of the book would have appeared if it had been going to appear. If I could access my anxiety I would use that. |
Rufus Marigold is a primate with a problem. He suffers acutely from anxiety and every social encounter is a harrowing ordeal. A budding artist, Rufus spends his days working in an office. As life become increasingly more of a struggle, Rufus yearns to be defined as something other than a complete nervous wreck. An intensely funny and tragic New Zealand graphic novel. Highly recommended.
"Ruefully, familiar, hilarious. Rufus Marigold delights and horrifies in equal measures in equal measure. A must-read for anyone who's ever felt award in social situations, and anyone who's had a dream." - Sarah Laing
Reimagining the criminal and jail-breaker Jack Sheppard (the model for Macheath in The Beggars' Opera and then in The Threepenny Opera) as a transgender rebel exposing the double standards of eighteenth-century London, whose 'true' life story is revealed in a manuscript unearthed by an equally fluid modern academic Professor R. Voth, Confessions of the Fox is a crazed, erudite adventure with postmodern inflections and stunning audacity.
"Quite simply extraordinary. Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier and Daniel Defoe collaborated." - Sarah Perry
"Extraordinary and brilliant. At once a queer love story, a history of horrors, and a thrilling page-turner, Confessions of the Fox is a vitally important work of our time." - China Mieville
"A hat tip to Moby-Dick, a running footnote hall of mirrors to rival Borges, one of the most trenchant calls for progressive action that I have read in a very long time.” —The New York Times
The modern era is remarkable for the degree to which the personal is available to the public. What are the refuges of the personal? Can we escape having our every thought and action known by friends, companies, governments and who knows who else? What are the beauties of inscrutability?
"What a stunning, intelligent book! And timely in these times of endless exposure. Akiko Busch leaves no pebble unturned in her contemplation of invisibility in all of its myriad guises, many of which will surprise you, and in the course of things her contemplation becomes a search for one’s place in nothing less than the flow of life itself." - Mary Ruefle
>> The beauty of invisibility.
Eileen Mayo (11 September 1906 – 4 January 1994) was an English-born artist and designer who worked in England, Australia and New Zealand in almost every available medium — drawings, woodcuts, lithographs on stone and tempera, tapestry and silk screening. In addition to being a printmaker, illustrator, calligrapher and muralist, she designed coins, stamps, tapestry and posters, and wrote and illustrated eight books on natural science. She lived in New Zealand from 1962 until her death. The book is beautifully illustrated and produced.
>> Works at Te Papa.
We're living through hysterical times. Rage, resentment, shame, guilt and paranoia are everywhere surfacing, as is the intemperate adoration or hatred of popular but divisive public figures. Political discourse suffers when people seem to trust only what they feel and can no longer be swayed by reason or facts. If extreme feelings are a contagion within the political cultures of today, so too is the spread of a kind of affectlessness, as if we're starting to resemble the very technologies that threaten to replace us.
Definitive, delicious, beautifully presented. 550 recipes covering a vast range of regional cuisines, street and family food.
In order to recover a painting he believes was stolen from his family by the Nazis, the novel's protagonist ends up learning a lot more about his Hungarian roots and Jewish heritage than he ever could have imagined.
"The single word that sums up this beautifully written debut novel is 'fluidity'. It’s set in a world of waterways; nobody’s character remains fixed from start to finish; gender and memory are as fluid as the waters themselves; the flow of myth and folklore runs through it; and even words themselves slither away from attempts to pin down their meaning. Gretel, the young woman at the heart of the book, is a lexicographer. But the true definition she seeks is the restoration of her relationship with her mother, who abandoned her to foster care so she could make a fresh start with a new lover. When they are finally reunited, that desire is complicated and confounded by her mother’s dementia. The past encroaches on the present as we gradually unravel their personal mythologies. It’s a modern variation on Sophocles’s Oedipus, and the twists and turns of the book’s stories braid this together with European folk tales to create a strong narrative river that carries us to a conclusion laced with tantalising possibilities. The natural world is evoked with sinister sensitivity and through it all runs the shadow of our imagined monsters." - Judges' commendation, 2018 Man Booker Prize short list. Now in paperback.
"Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction." -Lauren Groff
Homeostasis brings stability to organisms and provides a way of tracing our physiological and sociological characteristics back as far, even, as the needs of our single-cell ancestors.
A beautifully presented celebration of the history and design possibilities of the physical book, with special consideration of LU Jingren, Stefan Sagmeister and Hubert & Fischer.
>> See some sample pages.
Great flavours, easy recipes, good nutrition.
Part memoir, part travelogue, part biography, part philosophical reflection, Book of Cohen is as stimulating, eclectic and surprising as its subject, full of sharp-eyed observation and hard-won wisdom. You will enjoy this book, even its gaps and silences. After all, as the man himself might say, that’s how the light gets in. — Jonathan Freedland
From the Hutt to Tel Aviv, music writing to memoir, David Cohen takes an intimate, erudite voyage around that other Cohen, the immortal Leonard. Questions of identity — Jewishness, lost fathers — are at the heart, the gravelly undertow of well-earned weltschmerz always backlit by both Cohens’ dry-as-desert-dust humour. — Diana Wichtel
>> Two Cohens, one of them obscure.
>>Farewell to a beautiful loser.
>> Cohen's favourite Cohen.
An in-depth illustrated historical overview of art that has contested received notions of sexuality and sexual identity.
In a contemporary twist of Homer's Odyssey in the mythic style of the Igbo tradition, Obioma follows his Booker-shortlisted The Fishermen with an epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
Clearly presented, achievable and authentic Mexican food.
On the island of Lampedusa, the southernmost part of Italy, between Africa and Europe, Enia looks in the faces of those who arrive and those who wait, and tells the story of an individual and collective shipwreck. On one side, a multitude in motion, crossing entire nations and then the Mediterranean Sea under conditions beyond any imagination. On the other, a handful of men and women on the border of an era and a continent, trying to welcome the newcomers.
Rehabilitates happiness from the dead ends of consumerism and the self-help industry, distinguishes it from satisfaction, and liberates it as a perilous, adventurous, radical personal and political force.
A look at the projects, inspiration and presence of the New York architectural firm. Architecture must "empower people to engage with others, to produce memorable experiences, and to live with a sense of wonder."
>> Some projects.
Moves from children's natural curiosity to develop philosophical enquiry.
Why do we spend so much time and ebergy doing jobs that just aren't necessary? Whose interests do these jobs serve? Incisive. Now in paperback.
"Spectacular and terrifyingly true." - Owen Jones
Tells of urgent doctoring through chapters dedicated to the seven emotions that Abbey regards as the seven signs of life: distraction, fear, grief, joy, hope, anger and disgust.
>> "I take a lot of baths."
A novel recreating the period when the Band, fresh from touring with Bob Dylan, created their debut album Music from Big Pink in 1968. With its distinctive blend of country, rock, folk, classical, R&B, and soul, the album has gone on to influence generations of songwriters and musicians.
"Smoky, ravishing magic." - Caitlin Moran
>> The Band's Music from Big Pink (1968, full album).
Through the early works of Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi, this book traces the development of their deep fascination with the machine. Looking at the way that both artists began in the late 1940s and the years following, the book illustrates their fascination with popular culture and the methods that they used in creating their art. Common to all their methods of making works was their hand-made quality. Only in the 1960s did the artists make the step to mechanical means to create their own artworks, resulting in the iconic images that are integral to our culture. As Warhol said of himself, there is only surface, with nothing underneath.
"One of contemporary literature's most gifted prose stylists." - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
From subterranean department store food halls to luxurious top-floor hotel restaurants, and all the noodle shops, sushi bars, and yakitori shacks in between. Exciting.
Magrit lives in an abandoned cemetery. She is as forgotten as the tiny graveyard that surrounds her. One night a passing stork drops a strange bundle into the graveyard. Master Puppet, her friend and advisor, tells her it is an awful, ugly, terrible thing and that she should get rid of it. But Magrit has other ideas.
"A triumph of originality." - The Times
A re-evaluation of the Spanish seizure and settlement of Mexico in the light of a new examination of Aztec and Spanish primary sources.
A global survey of more than 100 artists, chosen by art-world professionals for their work with threads, stitching, and textiles.
Makes the case for the emergence of a pan-continental economic power bloc driven by Moscow and Beijing.
What if you remembered things that never happened? Or you forgot everything every few seconds? Or one side of your body stopped working?
"Extraordinary." - Nature
Thirteen-year-old Théo and his friend Mathis have a secret.Their teacher, Hélène, suspects something is not right with Théo and becomes obsessed with rescuing him, casting aside her professionalism to the point of no return. She uncovers (and stirs up) unforeseeable depths of familial and personal harm and sadness, barely held in check by facades of respectability.
"Bleak and poignant." - The Guardian
When Circle, Square and Triangle play hide-and-seek, Triangle hides against the rules - in the dark. Who else is hiding there?
How does the world at night reveal itself to us? Beautifully illustrated.
"To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender, religion, race? And, if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?" Four decades of essays.
In the blasted ruins of what was once a picture-perfect suburb, nothing stirs - except the postman. Clad in a hazmat suit and mounted on a bicycle, he is still delivering the mail, nuclear apocalypse or no nuclear apocalypse. One family has taken refuge in an underground fallout shelter, and to them he brings - or, rather, shouts through the air vent - a series of odd, anonymous letters.
>> Sample frames.
What have we been reading this week?
Find out in our latest NEWSLETTER.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #116 (23.2.19)
" Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's." - Neil Gaiman
>> The book is the first in the 'Dark Star' trilogy.
>> A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize.
 | Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James {Reviewed by STELLA} What to make of Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf? With comparisons to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, George R.R.Martin’s Game of Thrones (even James has jokingly dubbed the trilogy the 'African Game of Thrones') and accolades from Neil Gaiman it’s daunting before you even open the cover. Marlon James’ Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings blew your mind with its slang, its violence, its trippy dialogue and complex political machinations. It was an incredible piece of work that confronted readers, leaving some bewildered and others startled. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is far from this Jamaican world: it is the African epic fantasy that has not previously been written. Marlon James gives us a complex tempest of a story. At its centre is Tracker (a hunter), hired for his brilliant nose, able to track - one would say compelled to track - by his incredible sense of smell. Tracker is a loner, devoid of family (he has forsaken family, in fact even killed some of his kin - those who have wronged him), suspicious of people’s motives, yet drawn to danger and curious about others, especially those who dwell on the fringes of society. Tracker is also our narrator. We meet him imprisoned, confessing his crimes or beguiling his Inquisitor with stories. For this is a novel of stories and intrigue - stories that beget tales that in turn tell us more stories. At the heart of this tempest is a quest to find a child, and this quest pushes Tracker into the company of a group of mercenaries who are employed for this task. Twisting and turning through the world of Tracker - a world with his love/hate relationship to Leopard (a being who moves from leopard to beast with a barely a breath) - this is the story his jealousy of Leopard’s young bow man, of witches and anti-witches, of mingi children cast out, hunted and protected, of creatures that are both male and female, both human and mythic, of magical forests and bewitched lands, of ancient lands and power-hungry overlords and slavers, of cruelty and deceit, loyalty and betrayal. In a small part of this epic, the hyena women capture Tracker. They heckle him, desire him and piss on him with their long cocks, wish to devour him, kill him and free him. Torture and taunting is their real pleasure even as they argue among themselves - yet are they even real? (his missing eye is all that reveals to him that they probably are). And the tales keep coming at the reader. Complex, convoluted and endlessly fascinating, this work is oddly compelling and will have you turning the pages despite its violence, revulsion and cruelty. For alongside these elements are the strange machinations of the human heart, the desire to right wrongs, to absolve guilt with sacrifice or endangerment, to desire others, to be sensual, to overturn corruption and to be free from power structures enforced by others. Add to this some smart-arse characters, spiky female characters (mostly witches or other agents of spells and magic) and sparking dialogue that hums with tension and humour, and you will admire the first book in this trilogy - a trilogy that is laced with African mythology, ancient tales and a hallucinatory natural world which will have you spinning as well as intrigued. |
 | River by Esther Kinsky (translated by Iain Galbraith) {Reviewed by THOMAS} The prose of Esther Kinsky’s River, flowing as it does both over the surface of and, perhaps more slowly and tentatively but just as surely, in the unseen depths of various kinds of personal, cultural and fluvial sediment, provides the most precisely detailed record of the vague impressions that form the majority of our experience of place that you could hope to read. All sediment being primarily a temporal phenomenon, or, rather, both the primal and ultimate intermixing of physical and temporal phenomena, the effect of Kinsky’s book, comprised as it is of an immense amount of highly specific detail borne in exquisite prose (exquisitely translated by Iain Galbraith), is to immerse us in a sort of generalised past from which specific pasts arise and return, always subservient to the erosive force of the general. The novel is intensely personal but we learn few biographical details about the narrator, intent as she as at looking outward, at observing her surroundings, at recording, with words and camera or collected objects, the specifics of the world she finds herself in. It seems that some loss has caused her to move, excising herself from her old London life “just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo,” to a small temporary flat in the northeast of London, near the banks of the River Lea before it empties into the Thames, and it seems that her looking outward draws both her and our attention away from her unspecified loss, circling around it, both addressing and avoiding it. She is detached but not yet ready to leave. “Again and again during those wind-buffeted weeks, I picked up my battered suitcase with the intention of setting off on a journey. On each occasion, however, I turned back. Barely had I set foot outside the front door when the journey seemed too burdensome. … Few things are sadder than an eagerly anticipated coastline that turns out to be dismal: blurred outlines, the inconclusive discontinuance of the flat land, charmless villages where the only thing happening is washing flapping in the wind, and the silt-bound, sea-filled boats. After a while I learned to roam without thoughts of travel or a suitcase in my hand: I made a home for myself by walking, and casting my eyes with ever increasing dedication upon the unremarkable things that lay unheeded by the wayside, things lost and not found, things left behind, unclaimed, thrown aside, going to rack and ruin, beyond retrieval or recognition.” A river is antagonistic to order, is bordered by “interstitial wildernesses”, places that are contested by the solid and the fluid, the populated and the wild, the permanent and the impermanent, zones of “dislocation, confusion and unpredictability in a world that craves order.” The narrator walks the banks of the River Lea, through places not quite in the city but not quite free of it either, wastelands both rural and industrial, intensely interested in the minutiae of the physical and the human environments but withholding herself from both. The interstitial nature of the river is temporal as much as physical and the narrator is feels the ongoing attrition ensuing from past traumas, her own and others’. “Here in London the reasons for erasing traces of the past may have been different from those in the country of my childhood, but the unhappiness that inhabited the drab chasms between the houses looked remarkably similar in both.” The equivalence of intense attention given to what the narrator observes and to what she remembers, to the Lea and to other rivers, to her own inclinations and to the actions of others, corrodes the objectivity of observation and demonstrates that observation and memory are, perhaps surprisingly, mutually antagonistic. Her observations are very precise, their subjects entirely particular and not representative and thus cumulatively more and more interesting, the details becoming more and more specific until the reader finds they have lost their footing and have been carried somewhere beyond truth (the disconcerting detail of the aged circus performer, the dystopian radio station or the man borne aloft by the wind are examples of this). A clever novelist and a watchful reader both know the effect of detail on the experience of reading: detail both supplies a simulacrum of authenticity and controls the pace of experience; in other words, detail has both a physical and a temporal effect. Kinsky’s book is very much *about* detail-as-river: how we approach and follow text, how we surrender to being carried along by it, or alongside it, how the onward flow of text affects us both consciously and subconsciously, both willingly and against our will, both above and beneath our notice. Details can make the truth slippery, but often a truth that has slipped away can only be grasped through residual details. Must it always be the case that the closer we attend, the less we recognise? The people the narrator observes in her neighbourhood are all outsiders in their own ways (as she is in hers): Hasidic Jews, Croatians, immigrants from Eastern Europe or Africa, Gypsies, people caught somehow out of their own time or place. For all of them, memory is a form of erasure. “Every river is a border. It informs our view of what is other, forcing us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side. [But] does the water carry something away with it? Isn’t it saying that what we really belong to is the gaze toward the other side?” Kinsky’s obsession with the outward gaze that is necessary to observation (and to one’s own invisibility), extends to the qualities of light upon which gaze is dependent in both its objective and subjective aspects. The narrator photographs not so much scenes on the banks of the River Lea as the shadows and hazes and vaguenesses that make those scenes uncertain. Objectivity, taken to its extreme, reveals itself to be hardly objective at all. Light is corrosive to sight and is, in the end, a cause of blindness. |
Fascinating and well-written investigations of the fraught interface between the personal and the collective, springing from an interrogation of five axioms: 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of 7 and I'll Give You the (Wo)Man', 'History Repeats Itself...', 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It', 'You Can't Enter The Same River Twice', and 'Time Heals All Wounds' - finding all to be both true and untrue, helpful and unhelpful, liberating and restricting.
>>The drowned and the saved.
A man is washed ashore on the Australian coast and ends up in the Darwin detention centre. He doesn't speak, but paints a dream city on the wall of his cell. When finished, he utters the single word: 'Isinglass'. Who is he? What is his story? Edmond's beautifully written and widely resonant novel is an indictment of Australia's desert gulag.
The life of a girl progressing through womanhood is contrasted with the lives of animals domesticated or affected by humans. Both humans and animals are imprisoned, raised, educated and protected, both formed and deformed by society. What would be the price of freedom?
2018 PEN Translates Award winner.
The fifteen-year-old protagonist and her distant, financially ruined, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together to Greece on the SS Proleterka. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she suddenly decides she would like to receive her father’s ashes, our heroine recounts her youth. Her remarried mother, cold and far away, allowed the father only rare visits with the child who was stashed away with relatives or at a school for girls. On board the SS Proleterka, she has a violent, carnal schooling with the sailors. Mesmerized by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father.
"'Incorruptible crystal' is an apt description of Jaeggy's style. Her sentences are hard and compact, more gem than flesh. Images appear as flashes, discontinuous, arresting, then gone. This feels appropriate for a writer who is a 'stranger' and an 'enemy' to the familial." - Sheila Heti, The New Yorker
Ada, a girl who hasn’t gone quite to plan, and Father live a quiet life together, in a clearing in the woods outside of town. They spend their years tending to local Cures – the human folk who come to them, cautiously, with various ailments, and for whom they care little.
Ada embarks on a disquieting relationship with a local Cure named Samson, much to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister. When Ada is forced to choose between her old and new lives, what she does will change the town – and The Ground itself – forever.
"Rainsford writes beautifully with a lyrical, earthy prose which is evocative and eviscerating yet mesmerising. She gives Ada a unique voice which fills and haunts the narrative. One of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time, it is utterly compelling and will linger, uninvited, in your consciousness long after you’ve turned the last page." – Irish Independent
"Reminiscent of the work of Alexandra Kleeman, Carmen Maria Machado, and Han Kang, it’s a sinister, sensual, haunted book." – Lithub
Can failure be a mode of resistance in an increasingly intolerable world? To what extent can failure be seen as a productive, or at least dynamic, mode? Can any new space be claimed for art without doubt, error, and the refusal of (or recognition of the insufficiency of) existing dogma? Can failure be a strategy of cultural production as well as a world view? A stimulating anthology of art writing and cultural theory.
Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is assigned to a checkpoint. The commander doesn't know where they are, what border they're protecting, or why. Their map is useless and the radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance--but the enemy is unknown. Refugees arrive seeking safe passage to the other side of the checkpoint, however the biggest threat might be the soldiers themselves.
The Twisted Tree by Rachel Burge $19
Martha can tell things about a person just by touching their clothes, as if their emotions and memories have been absorbed into the material. It started the day she fell from the tree at her grandma's cabin and became blind in one eye. Determined to understand her strange ability, Martha sets off to visit her grandmother, Mormor - only to discover Mormor is dead, a peculiar boy is in her cabin and a terrifying creature is on the loose.
"A stunning intermingling of Norse mythology, horror, and an unusual coming of age. Hauntingly beautiful descriptions, juxtaposed against a ramping relentless sense of peril." - Bookbag
A young bear meets a young wolf. Their worlds may be different, but they are in some way aligned. A beautifully illustrated book.
>> Take a peek.
Everything we do is the manifestation of a vast web of cause and effect reaching right back to the most primal forces of the planet. Dartnell traces our behaviours back through our genetic and cultural evolution to the engine houses of the Earth.
A town is struck by a strange epidemic of perpetual sleeping. The sleeping women's brains are very active - what are they dreaming?
"Frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, The Dreamers is a love story and also a horror story. A symphonic achievement, alternating intimate moments with a panoramic capture of a crisis in progress." - Karen Russell
An interesting and in depth look into the Schiele's work, through the collection at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.
Davies argues that life as we know it should be considered as a means of information storage. Does the way in which information is structured tell us more than the content?
View the treaty as a foundational document, the significance of which has changed through history.
>> Wright speaks.
Essays chosen and introduced by Geoff Dyer. Subjects include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves.
The highly anticipated new YA novel from the author of The Hate U Give. Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill. But it’s hard to get your come up when you’re labeled a hoodlum at school, and your fridge at home is empty.
>> Angie Thomas answers a few questions.
The gears the German 'elevator society' have ground to a halt. In the absence of the social mobility of yesterday, widespread social exhaustion and anxiety have emerged across mainstream society. Nachtwey analyses the reasons for this social rupture in post-war German society and investigates the conflict potential emerging as a result.
Previously uncompiled pieces from 'the queen of not-nice', many from the interface between politics and the arts, mostly from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
"Janet Malcolm is a ruthless, dazzling journalist." - Guardian
>> "Why have a library and not use it?"
A wonderful photographic record of these bizarre brutalist Yugoslavian monuments, built from the 1960s in often remote locations and now often abandoned to nature.
>> Spomenik Monument Database.
Society is held together by various forms of care, which are hard to quantify and hence often omitted from historical and political analyses. This book seeks to redress that omission.
Ella and her brother Emery are alone in a city that's starving to death. If they are going to survive, they must get away, upcountry, to find Emery's mum. But how can two kids travel such big distances across a dry, barren, and dangerous landscape? Well, they've got five big dogs and a dry-land dogsled... From the author of How to Bee, winner of the 2018 Esther Glen award for NZ children's fiction.
AC v. DC - who will win?
The British far right supported Hitler, even after the outbreak of the second world war. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, Tate offers a reappraisal of their sympathies, revealing the widespread existence of a fifth column in Britain.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," Richard Feynman wrote in 1965 - the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information- about what can be known and how. The quantum world isn't a different world- it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called 'weird', it's us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means - and what it doesn't mean.
January is a dying planet--divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk. But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside. Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal. But fate has other plans...
"This generation's Ursula Le Guin." - Andrew Sean Greer
Subtlety and wit drawn with a scalpel by this master of the short story.
"Russo the nonfiction writer is a lot like Russo the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. He is affably disagreeable, wry, idiosyncratic, vulnerably bighearted, a craftsman of lubricated sentences." - The New York Times
The Limits to Capital provides a broad theoretical guide to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this new edition, Harvey updates his classic text with a substantial discussion of the turmoil in world markets today. In his analyses of 'fictitious capital' and 'uneven geographical development' Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx's controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with an analysis of geopolitical and geographical considerations.
Learn about fonts, and about your friends, with this enjoyable card game featuring 50 fonts to date, ditch or friend.
>> Type tasting.
Useful.
Dirt by Gemma Walsh, Katie Kerr, et al
Our Book of the Week is an experimental cookbook that digs into the relationship between food and words. Twelve earthy recipes from chef Gemma Walsh are accompanied by a collection of stories, poems and conversations from some of New Zealand’s contemporary writers, including Courtney Sina Meredith, Lana Lopesi, Rosabel Tan, Dominic Huey, Vanessa Crofskey, Natasha Matila-Smith, Owen Connors, Liam Jacobson, Amy Weng, Reem Musa, Gabi Lardies and Sam Walsh.
>>Preview here.
>> Gemma Walsh and Katie Kerr converse.
>> Recipes by Gemma Walsh.
>> Find out more about Gloria Books.
>> An interview with Katie Kerr, the designer of Gloria Books.
>> Studio Katie Kerr.
>> Dwelling in the margins.
>> "Due to algorithms, our ability to access unexpected content has become narrower. The bookstore becomes one of the few places where this is disrupted – where you can find content that wasn’t chosen for you by a computer."
 | The Wolves of Currumpaw by William Grill {Reviewed by STELLA} William Grill, the author and illustrator of Shacklelton's Journey, brings us another delight, The Wolves of Currumpaw. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of a wolf, Old Lobo, the wolf that no one could capture. This is a famous and fabled wolf-hunting story of The Old West, and Lobo was revered by the peoples of the Currumpaw Valley, where he was known as The King. As settlers moved across North America developing farming, wolves roamed too, attacking their cattle. Lobo and his pack of wolves were known far and wide, a pack that moved through the night, uncapturable and wreaking havoc for the ranchers. Many tried and failed, great hunters were shamed by the clever Lobo who avoided the traps, wasn’t fooled by the disguised poisons and evaded the wolf-hounds and guns, time and time again. In 1893, a respected naturalist and hunter, Ernest Thompson Seton, left New York in a bid to rid the ranchers of Old Lobo and his pack. This wasn’t as easy as Seton thought it would be and after many failed attempts he noticed another wolf, the beautiful she-wolf Blanca, and this ultimately leads to the capturing of Old Lobo. This is a beautifully told story with stunning illustrations, which also reflects on the impact of Seton’s hunt for Lobo, his regret at his success and his growing awareness of the wilderness - the importance of wild places and the animals that belong in them. |
 | The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In an unnamed country [Hungary] during an unnamed war [WWII], twin brothers from the Big Town are deposited with their unknown grandmother in the Little Town [near the German border]. Their belongings are immediately taken and sold by their grandmother, apart from their father’s big dictionary, which they use to write their story in the big notebook they demand from the local bookseller on the basis of ‘absolute need’. They set rules for their writing: “The composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do. For example, it is forbidden to write, ‘Grandmother is like a witch,’ but we are allowed to write ‘People call Grandmother a witch’. We would write, ‘We eat a lot of walnuts’, and not, ‘We love walnuts,’ because the word ‘love’ is not a reliable word. Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.” The twins describe how they perform ‘exercises to toughen the body’ – hurting themselves and each other until they no longer cry when they are hit, and ‘exercises to toughen the mind’ – subjecting each other to verbal abuse until they no longer blush and tremble when people insult them, and also repeating the words of affection their mother used to use to them until their eyes no longer fill with tears: “By force of repetition, these words gradually lose their meaning, and the pain they carry in them is assuaged.” Unable to be separated, controlled or opposed, the twins practise the only virtue left in a world rendered amoral by war: survival. ‘Absolute need’ is the basis of their interactions with others: they demand boots from the cobbler so they can go about in the winter, they blackmail the priest on behalf of the unfortunate Harelip, they comply with the masochistic requests of the Foreign Officer because of his ‘absolute need’ (which is no less absolute for being psychological), they wreak disfiguring revenge on the priest’s housekeeper because of her mocking of the passing [Jewish] Human Herd’s absolute need for bread. The narrators’ dual identity, the pared-back matter-of-fact prose without metaphor or superfluity, the rigour with which small and horrendous matters are treated with flat equivalence make this book powerful, moving (while remaining unsentimental) and memorable.
|
NEW RELEASES
Keenan's madcap and brutal novel hinges on the comradery between the members of a Provisional IRA cell in Belfast in the 1970s, whose madcap and brutal activities include kidnap, violence, arguing about the relative merits of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, and running a comics shop. Interesting to read in comparison with Anna Burns's Milkman, also set in Catholic Belfast in the 1970s.
>> Probably an interview with Keenan.
"These stories are extremely good. I could reference masters of the particular as far-flung as Thomas Bernhard or Lucia Berlin, but the resonance of Maryse Meijer's ultraprecise prose is unique." - Dennis Cooper
A handsome edition collecting poems from 1960 to the present.
"Fleur Adcock has written some of the best poems in world literature." - The Spinoff
Frank feels so left out that he goes home and cries into a saucepan. If he makes jam of his tears will everyone come to tea? From the author/illustrator of the also-wonderful My Dog Mouse.
"The completion of the poem has not led me to any sense of resolution. It has led to something less measurable, perhaps more valuable-greater clarity, particularly of the depth of injustice Maori have endured in Taranaki. At the same time it has strengthened my attachment and my gratitude to my great and great-great grandparents, whom I know as essentially good people. And it has led me back to Parihaka: to profound respect for Te Whiti and Tohu, the art of leadership, the art of passive resistance, and their refusal of human war." - Dinah Hawken
Ten new stories, one inspired by each of the songs on Joy Division's most intense and affecting album. Sophie Mackintosh, David Gaffney, Jessie Greengrass, Toby Litt, Eley Williams, Nicholas Royle, Jen Ashworth, Zoe McLean, Zoe Lambert, Louise Marr and Anne Billson.
"United by some unleashed kinetic force from long ago, these collected stories are achingly modern and fully embrace contemporary anxieties and preoccupations. They confront us with intense feelings and show us places we may not always wish to be, but – just like Joy Division themselves – they have the collective power to stay firmly rooted in our minds." - The Guardian
>> 'I Remember Nothing.'
>> Sophie Mackintosh on writing her story for the book.
Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. To research her books, such as the remarkable The Soul of an Octopus, Montgomery has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets. Beautifully, quirkily illustrated.
In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of imaginative freedom and creativity. Cohen explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity, and considers four faces of inertia - the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer and the slacker. Could apathy help us to live more fulfilling lives?
A subtle and perceptive graphic memoir of a young artist struggling against what is expected of her - as an artist, as a woman, and as a human generally.
"Passing for Human is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I've ever read. It's a story about becoming a person, about creativity, about love, all told with originality and grace. An amazing, amazing book." - Roz Chast
>> Finck in Vogue.
It's the 1950s, and Lorrie is unimpressed when her family moves to the remote Scottish island where her grandad runs a whisky distillery. She befriends Sylvie, the shy girl next door. Yet fun-loving Lorrie isn't sure Sylvie's is the friendship she wants to win. As the adults around them struggle to keep their lives on an even keel, the two young women are drawn into a series of events that leave the small town wondering who exactly Sylvie is and what strange gift she is hiding.
"A breath of fresh air." - The Irish Times
>> Read an excerpt.
>> "I ate a Kit Kat the wrong way once."
>> Read Thomas's review of Don't Try This At Home.
A Korean-American boy tries to deal with the legacy of abuse in Chee's stunning 2001 debut novel, which begins in Maine when young Aphias Zee joins a boys choir.
"Every word makes me ache. Written with exquisite empathy and grace." - Roxane Gay
"Singularly beautiful and psychologically harrowing. One of the best American novels of this century." - Boston Globe
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. New edition.
"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
"Wonderful." - Rebecca Solnit
"An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray’s exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock. 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy, as explored via the lonely sexual fantasies of Jock McLeish, failed husband, lover and business man." - Will Self (in the introduction to this new edition)
"This is one of the most underrated, most stupidly unread novels in the world." - LitReactor
>> "My best novel."
In July 1975, George Szirtes' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance on her way to hospital after attempting to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. This memoir is an attempt to make sense of what came before, to re-construct who Magda Szirtes really was. The book moves from her death, spooling backwards through her years as a mother, through sickness and exile in England, the family's flight from Hungary in 1956, her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer, and her vanished family in Transylvania.
Goliath of Gath isn't much of a fighter. He would pick admin work over patrolling in a heartbeat, to say nothing of his distaste for engaging in combat. Nonetheless, at the behest of the king, he finds himself issuing a twice-daily challenge to the Israelites: Choose a man. Let him come to me that we may fight. Astounding graphic novel.
Mitteleuropa in this period of change still retained the deep impressions of the periods of change that had gone before.
I Am So Clever by Mario Ramos $20
Who is cleverer, the Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood?
A short story published to mark Murakami's 70th birthday.
Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through fifty crucial artworks, from Francisco de Goya's 'The Disasters of War' (1810-1820) to David Hammons's 'In the Hood' (1993), Social Forms asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.
Text Me When You Get Home: The evolution and triumph of modern female friendship by Kayleen Schaeffer $30
Since its inception in 1660, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific discovery and exploration. Includes contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey.
What relevance are the journalistic ideals of truth and objectivity in a world increasingly unhinged by changes in the way that people access information (or "information")? Abramson takes us behind the scenes at four media titans during the most volatile years in news history. Two are maverick upstarts: BuzzFeed, the brain-child of virtuoso clickbait scientist Jonah Perretti, and VICE, led by the booze-fuelled anarcho-hipster Shane Smith. The two others are among the world's most venerable news institutions: The New York Times, owned and run for generations by the Sulzberger dynasty, and The Washington Post, also family-owned but soon to be bought by the world's richest merchant of all, Jeff Bezos.
Robotics and virtual work practices will mean a drastic shift in employment structures and wealth distribution. Who will control the changes, and to who will benefit from these changes?
A carnivalesque travelogue that features the passengers of the Lynceus, a vessel shipwrecked by a hurricane in the fictional land of Ponukele on a journey from Marseilles to Buenos Aires. To entertain themselves while waiting for a release ransom to be paid to the local drag-clad Emperor Talou, the crew of serendipitously skilled performers (including a historian, a ballerina, a fencing champion, a pyrotechnic, and an ichthyologist, among others), known collectively as the 'Incomparables', stage a gala. Readers should be prepared for an Africa unlike any they would likely visit in reality. First published in 1910. Unusual.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #114 (9.2.19)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading, about our Book of the Week, about new titles that have just arrived, and about a whole swathe of events this week (well, mostly on Thursday).
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in, the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive?
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman
>> Read the first chapter.
>> Hear an extract.
>> And another.
>> Lanchester talks about the book.
>> "A dystopian fable for our time."
>> Talking about The Wall.
>> "Walls were coming down... now they are springing up."
>> "Some of this feels familiar already."
>> 20 questions.
>> Is this where our climate crisis is headed?
>> We will be giving copies of The Wall away (courtesy of Allen & Unwin NZ) to a few randomly selected customers on Thursday 14th (International Book Giving Day).
 | The Witches of Benevento, #1: Mischief Season by John Bemelmans Marciano {Reviewed by STELLA} Mischief Season introduces a charming band of children living in 19th century Italy. Twins Rosa and Emilio awake to the mischief of the Janara (witches by night, villagers by day). Rosa, who is always hungry, has a stomach ache - she’s eaten a whole wheel of cheese during the night - and she has an itchy nose - that her brother claims is caused by Janara sticking straw up her nostrils continuously tickling her while she sleeps. To cover up for her theft of cheese, Rosa naturally blames the Janara. But on this morning her father slams his fist on the table saying, "No more! No more Janara did it!" Rosa has cried wolf once too often and now she is in trouble with Father. As the weeks continue, there are not enough eggs for market, the Janara mess up the barn, spill the wine and throw the tiles from the roof. Emilio and Rosa are determined to stop the Janara and their mischief. Their friend Primo suggests a salt trap but this just makes the Janara angry. So they visit the fortune-teller, Zia Pia, crossing her hand with a silver coin, to get some advice. And the advice? A spell which includes very specific amounts of garlic and chillies along with a blade of grass rubbed on a frog’s back and a goose feather to make a paste, and instructions on how and where to bury this paste while chanting the spell. The result isn’t good for Rosa, who once again finds herself blamed for the mischief that ensues. A night excursion by the village children to the special tree that the Janara flock to doesn’t bring the right result either, only a petty quarrel between Primo and Rosa who both always think they are right! Emilio, always the thinker, is sure there is an answer to the Janara problem, but where will he find it? The first book hints at more stories to come, so you can join Emilio, Rosa, Primo, Sergio and Maria Beppina to solve more mysteries and have adventures in their village of Benevento. Add to this a Witchonary, a map, historical notes about Benevento and about how children lived in 1820s Italy, and a child reader couldn’t wish for anything more. This is a charming and delightfully illustrated chapter book series for younger children, combining folklore, history and enjoyable mischief-making. ...And in case you are curious about the reality of the Witches of Benevento, click here. |
 | A Hypocritical Reader by Rosie Šnajdr {Reviewed by THOMAS} Every work of LITERATURE these days comes caparisoned in a ‘Critical Reader’, a volume which elaborates, for the advancement of students and other such intellectual aspirants, upon the text and quietly harnesses the meaning of the work to the culture that currently drives it. How we long for a ‘Hypercritical Reader’ to cut the text loose and let it run. Instead, Šnajdr provides us with its opposite, a ‘Hypocritical Reader’ (who, me?), suggesting that our standards, in literature as in every other sphere, are less lofty that we pretend, that we would rather pick among the ornaments that fall from literature than follow it over the hill. Too right (if you can be too right). Šnajdr shows us how cultural detritus can be reassembled, seriously, into new forms which we enter on a ‘purely fun’ basis, captivated by the surfaces until we find ourselves nauseated by the depths. Vertigo! (And we don’t even know if vertigo is a symptom of depths, or merely of disjunction.) Although the reader spins one way and the text spins the other, we know what a choose-your-own-adventure is, don’t we? “If you want to tell everyone that delusions of exceptionality are unavoidable, go to p.60.” Ha. “Something is occurring,” Šnajdr tells us, helpfully. “Something is taking its course,” wrote Beckett, but the Šnajdr project is restlessly effervescent, Beckett on acid. Objects snatch metaphor and use it to assume agency, language engages the quotidian in a process of defamiliarisation that allows intrusion, inversion and diversion the plausibility they (we!) require to overthrow the given, high register swaps its underclothes with low. “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Any way out, please. The mechanisms of language supplant the sense to which they are usually subservient, and create, perhaps, new meaning. What are the risks? “Thomas is a gingerbread man crossing the Lethe on fox-back. The stream of consciousness deepens and Thomas inches closer to the savage-toothed snout. A crafty style threatens to gobble him up.” For its characters, fiction ceases to resemble real life (so to call it) at the moment that the characters become aware of the reader, or, at least, of their fictionality, which implies a reader and also a writer (beware this realisation, those who take the reality of life for granted). When writing about themselves, how can a writer create an insulating barrier between them and their character to avoid the continual “nauseating déjà vu” that would otherwise result? Will doubling do it? Tripling? The writer is everything they write about, but at what point does a doppelgänger morph into a dreifachgänger? (“He stutters on it, mispronouncing the latter in the mouthshapes of the former.”) What is the relation between the written world and the not-ostensibly-written world? If the surface of a balloon is an expression of the size of the vacuity within it, when it bursts, and the two vacuities - the world and the work (so to call them) - become one, all that is left are shreds of surface. What will we make of these? Was there ever any more meaning than could be found there? |
NEW RELEASES
"Splicing the Choose Your Own Adventure format, sci-fi, metafiction, absurdism and social critique, Rosie Snajdr's A Hypocritical Reader is experimental fiction at its most animated and innovative. This is the future literature we need but haven't seen. You read it here first." - Isabel Waidner
"A warping, wending, distending, distressing, flaming lightening strike of a book. Snajdr summons forces to be reckoned with." - Eley Williams
>>Read an excerpt.
>> Why has the short story evaded the influence of modernist experiment?
A selection of remarkable, lyrical essays selected from the long oeuvre of this Danish poet, essayist and novelist, dealing with memory, politics, poetry, randomness, and other expressions of the individual's startling place in the universe.
"Like all Christensen’s writing, The Condition of Secrecy aims to be a history of no less than everything: the origins of the stars and our souls, the beauty of fractals and of third-century Chinese poetry. It is a book about eating strawberries, witch-burning and the challenge that the soft, scumbled sides of clouds pose to geometry. It’s about standing in the garden and watching yellow slugs ‘moving like slow flames’ in sunlight. It’s a hectic kind of erudition that could easily seem showy, but in these essays we experience it as a kind of abundance, an outpouring of love for the world. Susanna Nied’s clean, musical translation helps. There is nothing knotty, nothing strained. The arguments radiate outward with the measured rhythm of ripples in water." —Parul Seghal, The New York Times
"She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and reread again and again." - Siri Hustvedt
Pat`Pearly' Gates has achieved a lot in his life and evinces considerable satisfaction in his achievements. He has a reputation as a former Otago rugby player and believes he would have been an All Black but for sporting injuries. He runs a successful real-estate agency in a provincial South Island town, of which he is the second-term mayor. Popular, happily married, well established, he cuts an impressive figure, especially in his own eyes. But will his pride and complacency come before a fall? And if so, how will that come about? Who better than Owen Marshall to skewer South Island small town life?
In a not-too-distant (and, metaphorically, not-too-different) future, Britain is surrounded by a vast wall that keeps out not only the higher seas that are the result of climate change, but also the refugees and other 'Others' who want to get in. In atrocious conditions, the walls are guarded by the young, but if any Others get in , the same number of Defenders are put adrift in the sea. Will Kavanagh and Hifa survive?
"The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself. I was hugely impressed by it." - Philip Pullman
>> Talking about The Wall.
When the artist Vincent van Gogh cuts off his ear, the ear is suddenly left alone and headless. What will become of her? Where should she go? What should she do? Acutely aware of how small and insignificant she is in the big, wide world, the ear experiences something of an identity crisis. Silly.
For the first time, all four sections of Murnane's second novel have been published together as the author intended. When A Lifetime on Clouds was published in 1976 it was met with acclaim, but the full extent of Murnane's novel, which instigates his fascination with the relationship between the landscape and what he calls 'the image world', has not been read before.
>> Read Thomas's review of several of Murnane's novels here.
An illustrated collection of 15 macabre stories (many now otherwise out of print): "The Unstrung Harp", "The Listing Attic", "The Doubtful Guest", "The Object Lesson", "The Bug Book", "The Fatal Lozenge", "The Hapless Child", "The Curious Sofa", "The Willowdale Handcar", "The Gashlycrumb Tinies", "The Insect God", "The West Wing", "The Wuggly Ump", "The Sinking Spell", "The Remembered Visit".
>> Also available: Born to Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery
Marlon James follows his remarkable 2015 Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings with this remarkable fusion of African mythology, history and fantasy.
"Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's." - Neil Gaiman
Theodore de'Ath is fixated on the Underworld. He reads Dante, Milton, and Goethe's Faust. He struggles to express his feelings for Elizabeth Paterson. When he is obliged to leave New Zealand for the trenches in France during World War One, he finds a Hell that is real and without the literary machinery he is used to.
Longlisted for the 2019 Acorn Prize for Fiction in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>> Whisper of a Crow's Wing.
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world - or sacrifice themselves to it. A precursor to The Savage Detectives.
Jefferies's memoir gives insight into the New Zealand independent music scene from the 1980s on, through his experiences with Nocturnal Projections, This Kind of Punishment and The Cakekitchen.
>> This Kind of Punishment.
In the desolate wasteland between the sierra and the jungle, under an all-seeing, unforgiving sun, a single day unfolds unfolds in which people are trafficked and brutalised, illegal migrants are cheated of their money, their dreams, their names, as countless others scrabble towards the border, trying to reach a land they call Paraíso.
"This is a book of unbearable affliction. It is written with the lucidity of someone who has opened his eyes and refused to shut them again. The book's power is not only in what it says. but in the silences that it leaves the reader's conscience to grapple with." - Yuri Herrera
"Among the Lost is masterly. Its rhythm and syntax form an unforgettable, multilayered requiem for our battered region." - Valeria Luiselli
It is twenty-five years into the future, and a glitch in the global communications network is ripping a previously united world apart at the seams. The millennials find themselves hardest hit – among them childhood friends Evan, an addict theatre director; Kras, a family patriarch and ex-war-minister; and Zoja, an anarchist poet. As they prepare to celebrate their fiftieth birthdays, the three find themselves hurtling through a disconnected world filled with the debris of past histories, as they desperately try and recapture the magic of their former lives and hold on to some sort of sense of belonging.
Winner of the debut EU Prize for Literature.
>> Interview and excerpt.
When Anton goes missing and the only clue is a postcard sent from Istanbul, his twin sister Alissa leaves her life in Berlin to find him. Without her twin, the sharer of her memories and the mirror of her own self, Ali is lost. In a city steeped in political and social changes, where you can buy gender-changing drugs on the street, Ali's search - for her missing brother, for her identity - will take her on a journey for connection and belonging.
"Salzmann thoughtfully and cleverly addresses the themes of memory, identity, and migration, asking if language, nationality, or gender are important for our self-definition." - World of Literature Today
Shows how architects use thew physical sketch as a way of developing their ideas.
Makes the case that the development and spread of civilisation was dependent upon, and demonstrative of, exploitation of the ocean's resources.
Greta sets out to prove that her grandfather was right when he told stories of the Brabegazi, gnome-like creatures who live in the mountains. When she finds Barbegazi and uncovers a plot to capture them, she learns that some secrets are best kept secrets forever.
Beautifully illustrated. Includes ropes, gulls and mermaids.
A year in the life of the fictional Elsie Winslow is recorded as poems, photographs, e-mails and notes, detailing her return from Europe to Wanaka to care for her dying brother. As the seasons turn and Elsie observes the minutiae of nature, Elsie begins to think about life and love in new ways.
Longlisted for the poetry prize in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
What is happening in our atoms and our cosmos?
How do some organisms control other organisms? An intriguing look at parasites, viruses, and zombification, a process that occurs with surprising regularity in the natural world, such as when a jewel wasp “brainwashes” a cockroach into hosting its young, or when a lancet fluke manifests different life cycles in sheep, snails, and ants.
Who is the prisoner? When a woman is arrested and disappears for asking this question, her lover begins a search for her that takes him deep into the mechanisms of oppression in a post-truth world.
Chosen for the honour of bonding with a frostsliver - a fragment of the sentient glacier that crests her icy home - Sabira embarks on the dangerous pilgrimage to the top of the mountain. When a huge avalanche traps her on the glacier and destroys the pass, Sabira is determined to find another way home. In order to survive, she must face up to the merciless mountain, but there are dark and fiery secrets hiding in its depths...
An honest and insightful account of the year following Wells's cancer diagnosis, and the reassessment of his identity and priorities that ensued.
Chaya Lindner is a teenager living in Nazi-occupied Poland who becomes a courier between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people. Soon Chaya joins a resistance cell that runs raids on the Nazis' supplies. But after a mission goes terribly wrong, Chaya's network shatters, and she finds herself on a journey toward an even larger uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
How are we tricked into aspiring to prepackaged satisfaction? By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, could we each find a life worth living?
>> Avoiding wellbeing.
"Matter of fact, full of bravado yet always wryly observational. One of the pleasures of reading Moshfegh is her relentless savagery." - The Guardian
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Another excerpt (with photos!).
>> "She believes that sleep will cleanse her."
>> "Easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible."
>> "Am I sick of talking about it?">> Where did the idea come from?
>> "I say too much."
>> "I wish I could have been a singer."
>> What's in Moshfegh's fridge?
>> Moshfegh's Eileen was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
>> By the book.
>> Buy the book.
>> The provenance of the painting on the cover.
>> Moshfegh at VOLUME.
 | Milkman by Anna Burns {Reviewed by STELLA} Milkman took out the Man Booker prize in 2018 and has raised eyebrows, created debate about literary fiction (- is it too hard to read?) and divided readers into the 'likes' and the 'nots'. A typical Man Booker winner then? Yet, no: Anna Burns’s novel is refreshingly uncompromising, inventive and compelling. I was drawn in within a few pages - the style of writing is beguiling and the voice of the narrator, Middle Sister, is ever present in the reader’s mind, even when you rest between chapters if you dare to. Our eighteen-year-old has no conception of how her actions, or, more correctly, her inaction, impact the community, family and friends. Preferring to walk and read, an action that sees her attracting harsh criticism from friend and foe alike, to be distracted by the nineteenth century and perhaps even eighteenth-century classics, Middle Sister would like to distance herself from her social environment and, in particular, the politics of that place. There are no named characters and no place names yet we know that this is a place of threat and violence, that she lives in a close-knit community riven by religion, history and paranoia. Petty jealousies, posturing and gossip reinforce these divisions and add fuel to the flames. When the Milkman takes an interest in her - much to her confusion and, at first, annoyance and then, later, fear - she is drawn against her will into a web of threat and violence that she would rather ignore. Though, of course, we can easily see that there is a no way to ignore this politically violent and corrupt world, no matter if you go to French classes, avoid political discussion, or keep your head in the literature of the past. Burns brings us First brother-in-law (and third), Somebody McSomebody, the Wee Sisters, and - my favourite - Maybe-Boyfriend, with effortless conviction. The narrative and descriptions of place mark this as Ireland during the height of the Troubles - more specifically, Belfast of the 1970s. From the beginning, despite some forewarning, there is tension - a tension that has sharp teeth. Threat invades from all sides. Especially frightening are the scenes with the Milkman. Despite this, the novel brims with humour, quirky anecdotes and snappy observations of relationships, both familial and romantic. The politics are expressed in all their seriousness (violence and its real consequences), as well as their ridiculousness (bravado, rules and one-up-manship that borders on the idiotic). The conversations between the characters are laced with irony, hostility and double-speak - Middle Sister is often startled by the actions that take place around her and by the behaviour of others towards her, as though she is at an epicentre of a maelstrom, unable to act, only wishing to remain unnoticed. She is unable to react in any coherent manner, unable to protect herself or others close to her. Anna Burns’ Milkman is unforgettable. With its incredibly powerful narrative style, it will make you laugh out loud, shiver with fear, and strike you with its profundity. |