 | On the Come Up by Angie Thomas {Reviewed by STELLA} Angie Thomas won critical acclaim for her debut novel, The Hate U Give(T.H.U.G.), a sharp-edged and heartfelt teen novel that grappled with racial prejudice and violence, and with stopping the circle of violence. It was raw and beautiful both as a novel and as a film. Her second book, On the Come Up, looks at some of the same issues and at growing up in some of the poorest communities in America. Bri has a dream, just like many sixteen-year-olds, but the chance of her capturing this dream is proving elusive. Growing up poor, even when you are bussing to the school in the next neighbourhood (your local is too dangerous) where you might have an opportunity to gain a scholarship for college, means an empty fridge, the power’s often cut, and your brother, who should be in college continuing his study, is working at the local pizza shop. Add that Bri’s dream is to be a rap star (something her mother is okay with as long as her grades come first) and she can’t make enough to cut a track, her mom just lost her job, she's got a crush on her best friend, her favourite aunt who has promised to help her make connections in the music world is too tied up in the drug world, and everyone is comparing her to her ‘famous’ dad who was the victim of a drive-by shooting, things aren’t looking so good. When Bri wins a rap competition (a bit like a sing-off), suddenly an opportunity arises that looks too good to be true — she’s got a new manager who is going to introduce her all the right people and they like her style — because she’s got it — the ability to make it big. Her rap goes viral, but it’s not what she expected. And this is where the story gets interesting — Bri is challenged to work out what she wants, what is important and how to be true to herself. Angie Thomas in On The Come Up confronts violence in black communities, the circular problems of drugs and gangs, and the stereotypes of colour — what white people think about you and what black people expect of you. As Bri gets increasingly frustrated by the situation she finds herself she is pushed to a place where she needs to make a decision about who she is and to confront what her culture means to her, not what it means to the music industry, the money makers and the gangs. Making it big will mean sacrifices and taking on a mantle she doesn’t feel comfortable with — her decision will change her place in the world — will it be a way out of the projects or swallow her whole? This is also a story about a young woman coming of age looking behind the masks of posturing and preening, finding out about love and realising how necessary friendship and family are. Tough issues, sassy characters and plenty of truth. |
 | How I Get Ready by Ashleigh Young {Reviewed by THOMAS} Every time, when reading or when writing, that we come to the end of a sentence or, in poetry, a line, we come to a point at which our continuation, the continuation of the text, our continued inhabitation of the text or vice-versa, is suddenly less certain, less than certain, perhaps quite uncertain, there is a break, a space, a moment of hesitation or panic — or relief — before we continue, before the text continues, before we jolt back onto the rails of the text and hurtle on, or feel our way along, towards the next uncertainty. All text is, under all else that it is, an essay in the movement through time, an essay in the prolongment of the self, so to call it, an essay in continuation, a triumph of audacity over doubt. The poems in Ashleigh Young’s new collection can be read as hesitations arrayed upon racks of words. They often have unpunctuated breaks — spaces — within a line, in addition to line breaks, stanza breaks, full stops, commas and all the rest, creating almost a stammer, a poetry of hesitation, of feeling for the right word or phrase or sense or image to continue. “But he had / this way of talking, like his voice doesn’t quite know // how to come out of his face. Why does he have to stare / at the ground, when he is among friends? You can have patience / with someone’s struggles for a length of time / but not for much longer than one minute.” But it is, as well, despite and because of this, a poetry of continuation, of the overcoming of impediments and doubts. It is not for nothing that the image of Young riding — wriding — her bicycle appears in so many of these poems: the momentum of the riding/writing carries her and us on through the gaps under which yawn uncertainty and anxiety. We hesitate, take notice, and are carried on. As with Young’s memorable and subtle essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (>>read my review of this here), How I Get Ready touches, when passing, subjects that would just cause pain if approached head-on, and Young's humour is at once playful (has poeticism ever been more subtly satirised than with the words “the leaf-blowered path”?) and sensitively descriptive of the masses with which it avoids collision. The momentum of the poems also holds together — and sometimes only just holds together — the closely noticed image-fragments that comprise them, an experience like riding a bicycle over a scattering of acorns and noticing the tiny explosions as each one is crushed by the bicycle’s tyres (the ‘I’ of the poems is too close to see other than what she sees), and the poems, like the experiences they embody (whether they record them or induce them), are often precarious, just pulling together, or almost pulling apart. “Which one of you is going to / stand up / in full sentences / and which one is going to / do the helpless dance”. This precarity is sometimes perhaps due to the tendency of an internal state to overwhelm and external circumstance, even though this is often paradoxically experienced as an external circumstance threatening to overwhelm an internal state. This disjuncture between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ provides much of the vigorous tension in many of the poems — some of which intensify towards a panic which is left unresolved, unresolvable, but left behind — and it is Young’s frankness about the chaotic tendencies of images, of noticing, together with her awareness of the performative approaches that make life liveable, that point a hesitant way towards a poetry and a life that is both possible and authentic. The last and title poem of the book, ‘How I Get Ready’, deals with the “pure, bitter difficulty” of getting ready to go out into the world, of Young’s going-out clothes “ironed smooth, laid out like a disappearance.” Her continued existence in that world is uncertain: “I can see I am not getting ready at all; if anything / I am getting unready.” |
>>Writers include: Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Daniel Handler, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Dani Shapiro, Tim Ferriss, Ann Patchett, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy’s first woman in space, and many more immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.
>> Illustrators include: Sophie Blackall, Oliver Jeffers, Isabelle Arsenault, Jon Klassen, Shaun Tan, Olivier Tallec, Christian Robinson, Marianne Dubuc, Lisa Brown, Carson Ellis, Mo Willems, Peter Brown, and Maira Kalman.
>>See some sample pages.
>>Maria Popova curates the book-positive Brain Pickings blog.
>> Numerous contributors speak about the book.
>>Some art from the book.
NEW RELEASES
Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland's glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet's past and future.
"Extraordinary and thrilling." —Guardian
>>'Silt'.
>>On creating the cover.
A remarkable novel exploring mother-daughter relationships and identity in relation to place, social class and the body.
"This book is sublime. It dares to be different, to look in a different way. Andrews is not filling anyone's shoes, she is destroying the shoes and building them from scratch." —Daisy Johnson
>>Read an extract.
>>"I didn't feel I deserved to speak."
>>Glimpsed in reflection.
Setting of to search for the bells that were used for timekeeping before the arrival of the Jesuits, Sherman follows a fascinating path through Tokyo's history and contemporary variety.
"A completely extraordinary book, unlike anything I have read before. At once modest in tone and vast in scale and ambition, it extends in all directions, delicately wrought, precise, unfaltering, lucid and strange as a dream. I haven’t felt so excited about an investigation into place since I first read W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Like Sebald, Sherman is concerned with war, brutality, nostalgia and loss, but her search for the meaning of time is also radiant and absolutely humane." —Olivia Laing
"The Bells of Old Tokyo is part personal memoir, part cultural history, but wholly unique. The fragile, fragmentary poetry of its prose so beautifully captures the transience of Tokyo time, the constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction, and the nostalgia for that which has been lost and yet wonder at all that remains to be found. It is the best book I have read about Tokyo written this century." —David Peace
A journal of emerging arts and letters in Aotearoa New Zealand, this issue a co-production with Mouthfull. Contributors include: Eliana Gray, Sean Hartery, Alisdair Armstrong, Molly Robson, Rhys Feeney, Erik Kennedy, Tyler Barrow, Carolyn DeCarlo, George Turner, Joy Holley, fleshy.disguise, Georgie Johnson, Sara Cowdell, Ursula Le Sin, Malibu Stacy, BIGSWEAT, O & the Mo, Gangster Phanny, H4LF CĀST, Vanessa Crofskey, Madshrew, Rebecca Hawkes, Jessica Lim, Robbie Motion, Briana Jamieson, Wes Lee, Jordan Hamel, Carter Imrie-Milne, Adam Price, Liv Gallagher, Michaela Keeble, Rose Peoples, Flynn Gough, Catriona Britton, Caroline Shepherd, Curtis Mills, Jane Arthur.
>>Visit Mouthfull.
Science is revealing how our brains are wired to construct and respond to narrative. Stories are ordering, sense-making machines, helping our brains to render the frantic incoherence of chaotic existence into comprehensible narratives. They are the matrix by which we understand our lives and our selves. Storr shows how and why fiction works - and how we can apply narrative to read our lives.
"Hugely compelling." —Guardian
>>Storr telling.
Vegetable-based recipes from Slater, whose personable, thoughtful books and relaxed approach increase our appreciation of eating and cooking. The Autumn/Winter volume will appear in Spring.
>>Visit Slater's website.
In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a bestselling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.
>>'On My Mind' (1983).
>>'Missing' (1994).
Born in 1937 in a small town in the north of England, David Hockney had to fight to become an artist. After leaving his home in Bradford for the Royal College of Art in London, his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalized, and his inclination for a figurative style of art not sufficiently 'contemporary' to be valued. Trips to New York and California—where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools—introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic. A hybrid of novel and biography, Life of David Hockney offers an overview of the painter who shook the world of art with a vitality and freedom that neither heartbreak nor illness nor loss could corrode.
In this collection of short stories, blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, Armfield explores women's experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers' sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan's shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates'. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected.
Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, tells of a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. Her memoir is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire, and the exhilaration of swimming.
>>The beauty of being a misfit.
>>Read Stella's review of The Book of Joan.
Delving into humanity's deep evolutionary past to look at how complex creatures like us emerged from single-celled life, Ball offers a new perspective on how humans think about ourselves. In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to regard the 'self' as an abstract sequence of genetic information, or as a pattern of neural activity that might be 'downloaded' to a computer, he return us to the body - to flesh and blood - and anchors a conception of personhood in this unique and ephemeral mortal coil.
Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti during a time of upheaval. Her father’s unswerving commitment to replant the deforested hillsides, despite growing political unrest, threatened to splinter his family. Drawing from her parents’ journals, as well as her own, Irving retraces the story of her family, the missionaries in the north of Haiti, and the shattered history of colonisation. The Gospel of Trees grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world.
"Irving moves seamlessly between the wide-eyed perspective of the child and the critical gaze of the adult, creating a tale as beautiful as it is discomfiting. The question that haunts her also haunts her book: 'Should we have kept trying, even if we were doomed to fail?'” —The New Yorker
An astounding collection of postcards by illustrators around the world affirming solidarity with refugees. Powerful and beautifully done.
The Mongol Derby is the world's toughest horse race. A feat of endurance across the vast Mongolian plains once traversed by the people of Genghis Khan, competitors ride 25 horses across a distance of 1000km. Many riders don't make it to the finish line. In 2013 19-year-old Lara Prior-Palmer entered the race.
>>An unlikely victory.
>>From the horse's mouth.
From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry and First World War soldiers with PTSD, to the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, Threads of Life stretches from medieval France to contemporary Mexico, from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland. It is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power and politics told through the stories of the men and women, over centuries and across continents, who have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances.
A Viking girl is swept by a storm on to a desolate English beach. Cruelly orphaned there, Ylva becomes set on revenge, tracking a killer through dangerous hinterland. She wants only the favour of the Norse gods and the comfort of her stories. But when a stranger decides to protect Ylva - seeming to understand her where others cannot - Ylva must decide if her story will end in vengeance or forgiveness.
Since the demise of the USSR, the mantle of the largest planned economies in the world has been taken up by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and other multinational corporations. For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Do the corporations' successes prove that Socialism is possible?
The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Zizek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them. Instead of establishing a dialogue with these other ideas of disparity, Slavoj Zizek wants to establish a definite departure, a totally different idea of disparity based on an imaginative dialectical materialism.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919 when troops of the British Indian Army under the command of Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired rifles into a crowd of unarmed Punjabi civilians who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, Punjab. For ten minutes, the troops continued firing, stopping only when 1650 bullets had been fired. Not a single shot was fired in retaliation. According to legend, a young, low-caste orphan, Udham Singh, was injured in the attack, and remained in the Bagh, surrounded by the dead and dying, until he was able to move the next morning. Then, he supposedly picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth, smeared it across his forehead and vowed to kill the men responsible, no matter how long it took. The truth, as Anand has discovered, is more complex but no less dramatic.
Why did Heiða Guðný Ásgeirsdóttir turn her back on a modelling career and become a sheep farmer and green activist in Iceland?
>> Meet an Icelandic shepherd.
When the human creatures appeared, they ravaged the forests and hunted many birds to extinction. The flightless Striggs had only one option: They went down, down under the ground . . . And it’s there, as you may have heard it whispered, that they still remain. Far below, in a place of stone and darkness . . . Over thousands of years, they colonised a labyrinth of tunnels and caves, but even underground the Striggs are not safe: chemicals now pollute their water and a deadly sickness threatens the flock. Even worse: an inquisitive young Strigg discovers a human boy, trapped deep in a well. Humans are to be feared and saving him could mean travelling to the surface, a place of untold peril.
"I didn't write this book. I stole it." A Parisian bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript containing three stories, each as unlikely as the other. The first, 'The Education of a Monster', is a letter penned by the poet Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl. The second, 'City of Ghosts', is a noir romance set in Paris in 1940 as the Germans are invading. The third, 'Tales of the Albatross', is the strangest of the three: the autobiography of a deathless enchantress. Together, they tell the tale of two lost souls peregrinating through time. Replete with literary references and metafictional pyrotechics, Crossings is a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.
>>Read an extract.
A boy follows the river from its trickling source in the mountain snow all the way to the coast.
Black Americans show how they subvert and resist racism.
A woman in the totalitarian NAS [USA] of 20 years hence is suddenly thrust back into small-town Wisconsin of 1959 in this dystopian novel that asks, How damaging are our concepts of future and past?
A young girl is exiled from her family after she reveals her brothers’ involvement in a brutal crime in this tense and probing novel.
No two civilisations have spoken so many words about each other in recent years as those of Islam and the West. And no two seem to have communicated less. People Like Us confronts the themes that define this chasm head-on: women, jihad, secularism, terrorism, reformation and modernity. Its piercing examination of these subjects reveals our thoughtless and destructive tendency to assume that the world's problems could be solved if only everyone became more like us.
A showcase of the breadth and depth of the national collection.
In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy.
>>Read Stella's reviews of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and The Book of Etta.
YA novel exposing the underbelly of the fashion industry in an era of #TimesUp and #MeToo.
Abraham cries at the first same-sex marriage in Britain, loses herself in the world's biggest drag convention in LA, marches at Pride parades across Europe, visits both a transgender model agency and the Anti-Violence Project in New York to understand the extremes of trans life today, parties in the clubs of Turkey's underground LGBTQ+ scene, and meets a genderless family in progressive Stockholm.
In May 2012 Auckland businessman Matt Blomfield found himself the target of a vicious online attack, the work of far right Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater. The attack came out of the blue, destroying Blomfield’s reputation and career, stealing his identity, turning him into a social outcast. Two years after the online attack began an armed gunman came to Blomfield’s house and tried to kill him. He only survived because the intruder’s shotgun misfired. Blomfield spent seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars taking a defamation case against Slater, which he ultimately won, establishing that Slater’s vendetta was based entirely on lies. How did Slater get away with calculated on-line bullying and character assassination for so long?
>>Dirty tactics.
>>Blomfield talks with John Campbell.
>>10 shocking moments.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #129 (25.5.19)
Find out what we've been reading — and what you'll be reading next — in our latest NEWSLETTER.
 | Jobs, Robots & Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in your hands by Kinley Salmon {Reviewed by STELLA} The robots are coming, but not yet. The hype from the tech companies and the media has us all on edge. What sort of world are we heading towards? Are half our jobs going to disappear? And how will new innovations alter the ways in which we live? In Kinley Salmon’s Jobs, Robots & Us, he asks us to take a step back — away from the exclamation headlines and suave entrepreneurs in suits — and take a longer and sometimes more wary look at the next wave of technological change. And Salmon’s book is specifically looking at New Zealand, an economy that he believes has the hallmarks to be nimble, to take the opportunity to be in change of its own destiny, and to create a healthy and wealthy environment in this future workplace. In this timely book he outlines the kinds of innovation that are possible, and which is best at creating jobs. He gives perspective to the technological changes of the past and present, and uses this analysis to project what the future might be like. There is a particular emphasis on looking at the challenges that New Zealand currently has, and the necessary changes and improvements we would need to make to ensure a positive outcome. He focuses on six aspects and their associated toolboxes: tools that would need to be implemented through policy to encourage business to respond accordingly. He sketches out two different future scenarios: one, most familiar to us, which involves a greater degree of technology in our everyday lives, but also has work (better work) at its centre; and another that means we ‘work’ less or not at all in roles where automation and AI do the work better and more cheaply, but where there is a UBI (Universal Basic Income) and opportunities for added income or what we would recognise as ‘lifestyle’ projects to satisfy our desire to be productive. Both of these scenarios require improved education and new skills training to allow us to prosper in a high-tech world. Amid all this is the challenge to harness the harms of production. The environmental impact of continued and increasing production and consumption is the problem of our times — one which we have ignored for too long. While some measures have been in place to attempt to alleviate these negative impacts on the planet, these have been slow in happening, not yet enough and require more compliance. Salmon recognises the problems of work-creation and the environment, and proposes higher carbon taxes and measures to ensure that business look towards a sustainable future, enforced by regulation and planning at a governmental level. There is plenty to think about in this book, and it’s an important study of our own particular economy and circumstances. While this is one view, Salmon’s — that of an economist, academic and millennial — is an analysis that will stimulate discussion and debate. The sub-title of this work is Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands, and this is his call to us all: to think, discuss and choose what kind of future we want for ourselves and the next generations. |
 | Correction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Finding himself the literary executor of his friend Roithamer after Roithamer’s suicide, the narrator returns to Austria, to the room in the garret of the house their mutual school-friend the taxidermist Hoeller built above the Aurach Gorge, the room in which Roithamer sought refuge from the world to think and plan and perfect the cone-shaped house he built for his sister in the exact centre of the Kobernausser Forest (the house which was so ‘perfect’ and so ‘suited to her particular character’, or so Roithamer intended, that she died (or was relieved of the burden of having to keep herself alive (Austrians’ ‘national folk art’ being “to think constantly about killing themselves without actually killing themselves”)) immediately upon entering it), the room in which Roithamer wrote, rewrote and re-rewrote the manuscript ‘About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam (with special attention to the Cone’ (which the narrator considers Roithamer’s masterwork)), despite its differing and conflicting versions, along with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of passages on slips of paper and preparatory drawings for the nihilistic structure of the Cone, which the narrator prepares himself to ‘sift and sort’. In the second of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise the book, the narrator reads Roithamer’s manuscript (the ‘corrected’ and shorter second version and the ‘re-corrected’ and even shorter third version (and the slips of paper)) and is progressively and ultimately completely subsumed by Roithamer’s voice, its absolutism, its monstrous ambivalences, tectonic self-contradictions and tiresome petulance, as Roithamer obsesses over his miserable childhood and youth at his immensely wealthy family’s home at Altensam, his attempts to oppose himself to his family, in particular to his step-mother (‘that Eferding woman’), his sale of the family estate at Altensam after it was perniciously left to him by his father (who surely knew that Roithamer hated Altensam and would bring about its destruction), all building to a maniacal crescendo of invective and self-abnegation. Even within the claustrophobic subjectivity of Roithamer’s mind, each assertion, as soon as it is stated, begins to move towards its negation: “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognise at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point of time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification, and we correct the result of the correction of a correction and so forth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying…”. As with the narrator, so ultimately with Roithamer: persons and facts do not endure; the mechanisms of thought and language, when permitted to run their course, are destructive to all equally: entities, identities, personalities, actualities are all mere contingencies to an ineluctable process of devastation.
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Frances Hodgkins: European journeys edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (published by Auckland University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) is a deeply and splendidly illustrated that finds parallel expression in a touring exhibition organised by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The book focuses on Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes: teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London.
When Frances Hodgkins left New Zealand in 1901, location became a key factor in her determination to succeed as an artist. In Finding Frances Hodgkins (published by Massey University Press), Mary Kisler has also written an account of following Hodgkins through England, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain and Wales in search of the locations in which Hodgkins constantly pushed her exploration of modernism. This book is well illustrated, too.
>>On the trail of Frances Hodgkins.
>>Sample pages of European Journeys.
>>Radio slide-show.
>>A life in colour. >>The exhibition is currently showing at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
>>Why (briefly) Hodgkins is important.
>>On the reputation of Frances Hodgkins.
>>Slide show with Chopin.
>>What happened when Kate Sylvester discovered Frances Hodgkins.
>>The Frances Hodgkins Retirement Village(!)
>>Obituary (1947).
NEW RELEASES
In this playful and inventive reimagining of Mary Shelley's 1818 classic, Winterson explores the possibilities of love in a world of artificial intelligence, cryogenics and robotic simulacra.
>>"I did worry about looking at sexbots."
In this playful and inventive reimagining of Shakespeare's and Wilkins's Pericles, Haddon explores the possibilities of storytelling and the power of the imagination in a world distorted by abuse and tradition.
"The extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon’s prose ensure that The Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding demonstration of the transporting power of stories. The Porpoise is also about humanity stripped down to its starkest elements by forces beyond its comprehension and control; about damage and survival, and the balancing act between the two." - Guardian
After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other - even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand.
The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna-mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters-Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey-but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals.
By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Why was nothing done? What does this mean for us now?
Chariandy draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experience of growing up as a visible minority in the land of his birth to explain to his daughter the politics of race.
A narrative non-fiction account of Egypt after the 'Cairo Spring', speculating on parallels between contemporary life and Egyptian lives in ancient history.
"Nuanced and deeply intelligent—a view of Egyptian politics that sometimes seems to look at everything but and that opens onto an endlessly complex place and people." - Kirkus
>> A visit to Abydos.
A resilient Turkish writer's account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism.
"Read this - it will explain why you ever read anything, why anyone ever writes." - A.L. Kennedy
When our heroine Ophelia is promoted to Vice-storyteller by Farouk, the ancestral Spirit of Pole, she finds herself unexpectedly thrust into the public spotlight and her special gift is revealed to all. Ophelia knows how to read the secret history of objects and there could be no greater threat to the nefarious denizens of her icy adopted home than this. The second book in this intriguing YA series, following A Winter's Promise.
>>Read Stella's review of the first book.
At the end of hostilities in 1918, a radical new beginning was not only possible but unavoidable. Now in paperback.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade's group's name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah's Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence as Alliance - and as a result, the Gestapo pursued its members relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents.
Amundsen's South Polar conquest is an extraordinary tale that combines risk, intrigue and personal conflict. A man of striking intelligence and a single-minded thirst for world records, Amundsen's astute planning and shrewd strategy propelled him into first place. Such a man, with everything to lose, will stop at nothing to secure his goal. Told for children.
As an educated, married noblewoman whose husband was in captivity, Colonna was able to develop relationships within the intellectual circles of Ischia and Naples, and became a confidante of Michelangelo, Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, Isabella d'Este, and others. Her early poetry began to attract attention in the late 1510s and she ultimately became one of the most popular female poets of sixteenth-century Italy.
For decades now, Pico Iyer has been based for much of the year in Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, share a two-room apartment. But when his father-in-law dies suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer begins to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying. In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, this question has a special urgency and currency.
"An exquisite personal blend of philosophy and engagement, inner quiet and worldly life. It's Iyer's keen ear for detail and human nature that helps him populate his trademark cantabile prose." - Los Angeles Times
"My name is Hanna. I am 15. I am Latvian. I live with my mother and grandmother. My father is missing, taken by the Russians. I have a boyfriend and I'm training to be a dancer. But none of that is important any more. Because the Nazis have arrived, and I am a Jew. And as far as they are concerned, that is all that matters. This is my story."
Poulantzas's book was the first major Marxist study of German and Italian fascism to appear since the Second World War. It carefully distinguishes between fascism as a mass movement before the seizure of power and fascism as an entrenched machinery of dictatorship. It compares the distinct class components of the counter-revolutionary blocs mobilzed by fascism in Germany and Italy; analyses the changing relations between the petty bourgeoisie and big capital in the evolution of fascism; discusses the structures of the fascist state itself, as an emergency regime for the defense of capital; and provides a sustained and documented criticism of official Comintern attitudes and policies towards fascism in the fateful years after the Versailles settlement.
With recipes drawn from throughout Greece.
The world's largest archipelago of spices.
There is a continuity between humans and other species, and, in fact, the characteristics that we generally consider the most human are those most widely shared with other species.
A striking novel about secrets on occupied Guernsey in 1940 and their repercussions fifty years later, from the author of The Model Occupation - The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940-1945 and Love of Country.
Driven to his deathbed by an incurable disease, the thirty-year-old impoverished gentleman Chulkaturin decides to write a diary looking back on his short life. After describing his youthful disillusionment and his family's fall from grace and loss of status, the narrative focuses on his love for Lisa, the daughter of a senior civil servant, his rivalry with the dashing Prince N- and his ensuing humiliation. These pages helped establish the archetype of the 'superfluous man', a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
Princess Arnica is so sweet and gentle that when she smiles even wolves and bears forget their fierceness. Everyone loves her, but she loves only Poor Johnny. Luckily, he loves her too, and even more luckily she has a very sensible king for a father, who is happy for her to marry whomever her heart desires. Just one problem: the Witch with a Hundred Faces has cast a spell on Arnica and Johnny which means that one of them, at any one time, must always be a duck, and the other human Who can help them? Only the Seven-headed Fairy!
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>"The road to Brexit starts here."
>>"The location of a great malady" - from Patrick Keillor's Robinson in Ruins.
>> "England is a very powerful country."
>> J.M. Coetzee: 'He and His Man' and Foe.
>>M.J. Carter on the literary artefacts of the colonial past.
>> The book is published by the wonderful small press, CB Editions.
>>"The road to Brexit starts here."
>>"The location of a great malady" - from Patrick Keillor's Robinson in Ruins.
>> "England is a very powerful country."
>> J.M. Coetzee: 'He and His Man' and Foe.
>>M.J. Carter on the literary artefacts of the colonial past.
>> The book is published by the wonderful small press, CB Editions.
>>'Jack Robinson' is a pseudonym of CB Editions publisher Charles Boyle. Read Thomas's reviews of other books by this 'Jack Robinson':
Blush (with Natalia Zagorska-Thomas)
>>Writing under the pseudonym 'Jennie Walker', Charles Boyle won the 2008 McKitterick Prize for 24 for 3.
>> The Manet Girl by Charles Boyle writing as 'Charles Boyle'.
>>Boyle's blog, Sonofabook.
>> Murmur by Will Eaves, also published by CB Editions, has just been awarded the 2019 Wellcome Prize. >>Read Thomas's review.
>>Click and collect a copy of our Book of the Week.
>>Click and collect a copy of our Book of the Week.
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When Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name discovers the footprint of a stranger on the margins of the island he considers his domain, he builds defences and prepares violence. He wants to keep for himself his table, made with his own hands, his rude bowl, likewise the project of a man who has brought to DIY the gravitas of a spiritual exercise, and his parasol, but even more he wants to keep for himself the puritanical practices of useful labour, useful thought, austerity and self-restraint - he made a very small amount of rum last for ten years! - that are both the expression and the perpetuation of his isolation. He remains resistant to all that is not him. When given the opportunity, upon a suitably disadvantaged other, he shows himself prepared to teach but not to learn. The propagation of Defoe’s novel as an English classic over the centuries has both epitomised and contributed to a particularly noxious strand of Anglo-Saxon masculinity compounded of an arrogance and a superiority complex on the one hand and a concomitant deep insecurity and fear on the other, resulting in an instinct to devise rules, build defences and prepare violence. Jack Robinson, in this quick and subtle little book, not only sketches the deleterious effect upon English society of this thread of Englishness, leading to the Brexit crisis resulting from the projection of threat onto difference, but also traces the literary offspring of Ur-Crusoe, so to call him: Robinsons in books by Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Spark and others, and in the films of Patrick Keillor, each either or both perpetuating or degrading the character with whom they are inescapably associated. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains a central topos for reactionary British nativism. It is no coincidence that, in the space of populist disaffection resulting from Conservative austerity policies, a prominent contemporary British fascist has adopted the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’ in his xenophobic campaign for “respect for British heritage, values and tradition.” Robinson Crusoe, despite circumstances that make his attitudes increasingly ridiculous, cannot help but insist, with increasing violence, that he is master of ‘his’ island. Jack Robinson’s quarrel “is less with Defoe than with Crusoe and the uses which the book has been put to.” He observes that “Crusoe has amassed such gravitas - or rather, his emblematic status in British culture became so far reaching - that the natural development of his descendants was inescapably stunted.” Can this be healed? In Crusoe’s unthinking adherence to ‘heritage, values and tradition’, he is incapable of change or growth or understanding, incapable of opening himself to new experience, of accepting as an equal anyone different from himself. When Crusoe leaves the island he remains the slaver and misogynist he was when he arrived. All he has done is survived. “Defoe denies Crusoe self-doubt, which is another way of infantilising him. His blind trust in God shuts off all radical introspection.” Without that introspection there is no hope.
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 | Lanny by Max Porter {Reviewed by STELLA} Lanny is an exquisite novel. You are immersed from the beginning (and I read this in a single sitting), the voice of Dead Papa Toothwort opening the past and present to the reader’s eyes. An ancient being, a force, a mythical creature, Dead Papa Toothwort is threatening and ambiguous, is present in the surroundings (in the earth and air) and, later we realise, in each of the villagers. This story is set in a village - a commuter trip from London. It is the story of a young boy, Lanny, and his disappearance. Lanny lives with his mother Jolie, a writer of grisly revenge crime novels, and his father Robert, a financial advisor working in corporate London. Lanny is unusual, creative and playful - a child of about eight who is fascinated by nature, loves ideas, and has an active imagination. Also living in the village is an artist, Pete, rather famous but now at the end of his career, nicknamed by his neighbours as ‘Mad Pete”. Art lessons with Pete are a wondrous thing for Lanny, and the two find solace in each other’s way of seeing the world and of being misfits. The book is split into three parts. In the first, we are introduced to our cast of players, their voices distinct and their desires articulated. Dead Papa Toothwort’s desire to take something living. His fascination with being within others and objects as he flits from one to the other is lyrical and sprightly while at the same time surrounding us with decay and darkness. Lanny’s Mum’s suffocation at the hand of village life and her cynicism will strike chords with trapped parents anywhere, while her description of her latest plots might make your skin crawl. Robert, pretty much the lousy father and unhappy husband, uncomfortable about his son’s oddness and more concerned with social status, is a familiar trope. And the other major voice in this novel is Pete, curious and generous but no hero. We only know Lanny through the eyes and ears of these characters, what they feel and describe, and their conversations and interactions with this child. In the second part, the style and pace change. The lines are fraught with urgency: Lanny has disappeared and he must be found. Here, the world of the village is laid bare in all its hypocrisy, prejudice and pettiness. The police arrest Pete and the villagers jump to conclusions supported by their small-mindedness. Old Peggy (our sage) directs her conversation directly to Dead Papa Toothwort, calling him out, but is disinclined to help the frantic Jolie - why does she dislike her so much? Both Robert and Jolie are understandably distraught, yet they both start imagining life without Lanny. Porter reveals the cruelty and tenderness of people with directness and spareness. The language is lean and taut but also encapsulates a lyricism that is melodic in parts but staccato and punchy when necessary. The final and third part of the novel is a dream-like sequence starring Pete, Robert and Jolie, an attempt to reveal Lanny’s whereabouts or to mystify us further. This is a novel to be immersed in, to re-read and think about, to appreciate the beauty of the language and the assuredness of the prose. A must for your reading pile this winter. |
NEW RELEASES
Published to mark the 300th anniversary of first publication of Robinson Crusoe, Good Morning, Mr Crusoe argues that the legacy of Defoe's novel is racism and misogyny embedded in the fabric of British society.
"The novelty here is the way Jack Robinson uses Crusoe to analyse the mad act of self-maiming we call Brexit. As he demonstrates, all the blinkered mental preconditions for the Leave campaign exist in the novel." - Observer
"A clever take-down of the classic novel." - Guardian
“Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” A bizarre series of medical experiments in Buenos Aires in 1907, involving decapitation as a means of contacting the so-called afterlife, is mirrored strangely in the life of a contemporary artist.
"Comemadre is a story about the limits of science and discovery, about the purpose and process of art, about the dangers of the unchecked male ego, and much more. Beneath each of these distinct intentions, though, the book is not fundamentally theoretical, but relational. Larraquy imagines a complicated world of webbed human bonds that span generations. Each of these bonds is pulling on another, creating unique tension, unique threats, and unique possibilities. Larraquy’s scientists and artists attempt to uncover their true natures on both personal and existential fronts. In the process, their desire to be validated and accepted by others becomes all-encompassing. As these relationships carry the narrative and take center stage, it becomes apparent that guilt and desire can easily transform into violence once acted upon. The profound tragedy suggested by Comemadre is that in the absence of extended validation, that validation is too often stolen by force. At the book’s fundamentally relational foundation, Larraquy demonstrates that the tenderness which results from shared vulnerability is often undergirded by a violence springing from the same source." - Full Stop
40th birthday special. It’s 1979. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, China introduces its one-child policy, Margaret Thatcher is elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and an old Cambridge student magazine is relaunched. This special edition marks Granta’s 40th birthday by bringing together some of its best writing from the past forty years. Featuring: Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Todd Mcewen, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Primo Levi, Amitav Ghosh, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, John Gregory Dunne, Ryszard Kapuściński, Joy Williams, Don Delillo, John Berger, Gabriel García Márquez, Bill Buford, Lindsey Hilsum, Lorrie Moore, Hilary Mantel, Ian Jack, Edward W. Said, Diana Athill, Edmund White, Ved Mehta, Alexandra Fuller, Binyavanga Wainaina, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, Jeanette Winterson, Herta Müller. What more could you want?
After her mother’s death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.
“Ayşegül Savaş is an enormous new talent who writes with the rigour of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald. Walking on the Ceiling holds the immediacy of youth and the depth of long-earned wisdom at once. Its elegant voice is sure to summon old memories and longings from each reader, relighting them anew.”—Catherine Lacey
Could millions of jobs soon be eliminated by artificial intelligence and robots? From driverless cars to digital assistants, the world of work is on the cusp of a technological revolution that is generating hopes and fears alike. But are the robots really knocking at the door? What does all this mean for New Zealanders? Kinley Salmons new book is a call to start debating - and choosing the future we want. Kinley Salmon grew up in Nelson and now works as an economist in Washington DC.
>>Come and hear Kinley Salmon talk on Thursday 23rd May at KUSH, 5 Church Street. Door open and coffee available from 5 PM. See you there.
Beautifully presented. Includes extracts from Sculpting in Time, and pieces by Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Satre and other on Tarkovsky's particular approach to film-making.
>>Watch Tarkovsky's films on your device.
From her entry into parliament in 1975 at age 23 until the epoch-changing 1984 general election that was triggered by her telling Robert Muldoon that she intended to cross the floor to vote against the National government on nuclear- free legislation.
>>Muldoon calls the snap election after consulting the Governor General and the bottle.
"The Shakespeare scholar’s fun, insightful and profoundly approachable study of 20 of his plays is perhaps the finest critique of his work to date." - Guardian
A remarkable New Zealand lawyer (1916-2007) whose lifelong commitment to social justice, legal reform, gender equality and community service left a profound legacy. She was married to Bill Sutch, who died in 1975 after being acquitted of charges of spying.
"AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealisations aspirations circumnavigations realisations radicalisations and liberations, Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him." Ferlinghetti conveys his 100 years on the planet as a torrent of words bearing him on through time.
Roland Wakelin (painter), Dulcie Deamer (writer and libertine), Jean Devanny (novelist and feminist), Douglas Stewart (editor and writer) and Eric Baume (journalist and media personality) had little in common in personality, proclivities and politics. Yet they all experienced fame and/or notoriety in the 'West Island' while being largely forgotten in their country of origin.
What if you were a novelist in a world where the only media people consumed was spectacular pornography about war with titles like Wonder Woman and Captain America? What if your country had elected as its leader a shameless millionaire who was stealing your money, your democracy and your dignity? What if the media were owned by filthy rich men who didn't give two shits about any of it as long as it continued to make them filthy rich?Wouldn't it be enough to send you certifiably insane? To make you write a novel about an immortal lesbian fairy that mimicked the conventions of movies like Wonder Woman but became an accidental allegory for #MeToo? To write a savage death wail of a satire about how the rich stole everything from us?Enough to make you, reader, consider laying off the spectacular pornography about war for long enough to read it?
"Ayelet Gundar-Goshen has justifiably won plaudits for her two previous novels, Waking Lions and One Night, Markovitch. In Liar, Nofar, a socially awkward, unhappy teenage girl, inadvertently accuses a faded talent show star of sexually assaulting her. The police procedures and press furore create a momentum of their own and Nofar finds herself trapped in an ever greater web of deceit. Gundar-Goshen skilfully explores various dynamics of power – sexual, coercive, authoritative, familial – and portrays with great compassion and insight the humiliation, loneliness and rage of society’s outsiders. A perceptive and exquisitely observed novel, Liar should win Gundar-Goshen a wide international readership." - Guardian
A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the author of Postcapitalism. How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway? The notion of humanity has become eroded as never before. In this book Paul Mason argues that we are still capable - through language, innovation and co-operation - of shaping our future. He offers a vision of humans as more than puppets, customers or cogs in a machine.
>>"The world order is being ripped to shreds by an alliance of ethnic nationalists, women-haters and authoritarian leaders who are harnessing the power of machines and algorithms to do it."
Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilisation's last chance by Srećko Horvat $40
Capitalism and historical revisionism have constructed a new world of normalized apocalyptic politics in which our passivity is guaranteed if we believe there is no future. This is a radical manifesto for hope in democracy, union and internationalism. Horvat is an associate of Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis and is standing for the EU elections as part of DiEM25.
>>"The current system is more violent than any revolution."
1945. They have survived the Blitz, but when Simon, Patricia, Evelyn and Larry step through a mysterious library door, it is the beginning of their most dangerous adventure yet. They discover the magical world of Folio, where an enchanted kingdom of fairy knights, bears and tree gods is under threat from a sinister robot army. The many stories of the Library are locked in eternal war, and the children's only hope is to find their creator - a magician who has been lost for centuries.
A very accessible and well illustrated history of the series of conflicts between the Crown and various groups of Maori between 1845 and 1872, conflicts that form the often unacknowledged background to much else in New Zealand history.
From the author of the monumental The Great War for New Zealand.
In 1902, the young German writer Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.
Since Britain's 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasising that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek, 'the George Orwell of our times', goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation's alienation from itself. Perceptive.
What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains - and our choices over what we eat, who we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all? Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of our unconscious minds.
Monday Charles is missing, and only Claudia seems to notice. Claudia and Monday have always been inseparable - more sisters than friends. So when Monday doesn't turn up for the first day of school, Claudia's worried. When she doesn't show for the second day, or second week, Claudia knows that something is wrong. Monday wouldn't just leave her to endure tests and bullies alone. Not after last year's rumors and not with her grades on the line. Now Claudia needs her best--and only--friend more than ever. But Monday's mother refuses to give Claudia a straight answer, and Monday's sister April is even less help.
As Claudia digs deeper into her friend's disappearance, she discovers that no one seems to remember the last time they saw Monday. How can a teenage girl just vanish without anyone noticing that she's gone?
Four novellas: 'The Wife', 'The Steppe', 'Ward No. 6' and 'My Life', demonstrating the subtlety of Chekhov's perceptions and the effective economy of his prose. Selected and introduced by Janet Malcolm.
A book conveying what it’s like to live in a world where shaking a stranger’s and, catching a taxi or touching a door handle are fraught with fear and dread. This memoir charts the author’s breakdown after migrating from New Zealand to England: what begins as homesickness and career burn-out develops into depression, contamination phobia and OCD. Increasingly alienated from all the things that previously gave her life meaning and purpose – family, work, nature, literature – the author is forced to confront a question once posed by the young Virginia Woolf: ‘How is one to live in such a world?’
On 26 April 1986 at 1.23 am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area were abandoned to their fate. The blast put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, contaminating over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. Masterful. Jaw-droppingly readable.
>>Chernobyl vs. The Zone.
A novel exploring the tension between notions of what it means to be an American and what it means to be Other, an immigrant for instance.
"Rich and polyphonic. Unflashy almost to the point of comedy, happy to include humdrum dialogue about, say, weather or food seasoning, the novel’s round-robin mode nonetheless accumulates a kind of revelatory power, setting aside top-down commentary in favour of side-by-side juxtaposition – a narrative style that ultimately functions as a plea for more listening, as well as highlighting the quiet irony of the title, which ends up being hard to read as anything more than just 'Americans'." - Guardian
It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two countries: Pakistan and India. The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders. Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home.
"MacCarthy refutes the often ill-researched reductionist characterisations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist. Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential reading for anyone studying architecture and design." - Irish Times
The heady optimism that accompanied the advent of the Internet is gone replaced by a deep unease. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have exacerbated social inequalities and stoked explosive political climates across the world. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. In this world of surveillance capitalism, profit depends not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?
"Groundbreaking, magisterial, unmissable." - Financial Times
>>Interview with Zuboff.
A Thousand Small Sanities: The moral adventure of liberalism by Adam Gopnik $40
A defence of liberal values and world-view, and of democracy itself, against new dogmatisms.
"Supremely intelligent." - Guardian
An artist makes some mistakes when making a picture book, but these mistakes become the book and drive the story onward.
2019 CATEGORY WINNERS
{ Click on the covers to secure your copies }
ACORN FOUNDATION FICTION PRIZE
This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman (Vintage, Penguin Random House) $38
Judges' citation: In This Mortal Boy Fiona Kidman has written an intensely human and empathetic story, recreating the events leading to the real life hanging of “jukebox killer” Paddy Black at Mount Eden prison in 1955. With seeming effortlessness, she pulls the reader into mid-century New Zealand – the restlessness of a new urban youth culture, the moral panic that led to the Mazengarb report, the damning assumptions of the legal profession and the unchallenged omissions that eased the pathway to a young man’s death. Kidman draws her characters deftly, alternating between the bravado and vulnerability of Auckland’s young bodgie culture and the desperation of a poor and disempowered family in Ireland. The result is moving, memorable, authentic and urgently relevant to our times.
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press) $25
Judges' citation: Helen Heath’s collection impresses with its broad thematic reach, its willingness to tackle complex issues, and its poetic risk-taking. By turns thoughtful and moving, Are Friends Electric? asks how the material world might mediate—or replace—human relationships. The experimental first half uses found poems to engage how artifacts—sex dolls, buildings—become objects of human passion. Technology is situated in relation to the natural world, and to issues of gender, sexuality and power. The elegiac second half offers a touching speculative narrative: A woman embeds her deceased partner’s personality into software to avoid letting go. Heath asks if friends can—or should—be electric, and probes deeper questions about what it means to be human.
ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION AWARD
Tatau: A cultural history of Samoan tattooing by Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot (Te Papa Press) $75
Judges' citation: Excellence in an illustrated work of non-fiction is to be found in the flawless integration of text, illustration and design. Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing is the exemplar of those goals. Creating a cohesive whole that incorporates multiple writers and a wide range of illustrations and artworks is a difficult task, and this publication achieves this with authority, style and integrity. It is a visual feast, and at the same time celebrates the tactile pleasure of a book in the hand, and should be acknowledged as a milestone in contemporary publishing. And, most importantly, quality design is met with innovative writing that both records and opens up new territory, creating a book that will expand and enrich the knowledge of readers throughout Aotearoa, the Moana Pacific and beyond.
ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
Hudson & Halls: The food of love by Joanna Drayton (Otago University Press) $50
Judges' citation: Set against the backdrop of the double act many of us will remember, Hudson & Halls reveals the humour and drama of this couple’s onscreen chemistry, and is a deeply moving and often surprising account of their private life. Set within the context of significant social and political moments over four decades and three countries, Joanne Drayton’s fresh approach to storytelling makes this a must-read. In its design, the kitsch flamboyance of the pair and the period is celebrated in a way that is quirky, engaging and in keeping with the tone and vibrancy of the couple. Hudson & Halls is not simply the story of celebrity chefs: it is a generous, multi-layered, and touching account of companionship and enduring love.
TE MŪRAU O TE TUHI - MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD
He Kupu Tuku Iho: Ko te Reo Maori te Tatau ki te Ao by Tīmoti Kāretu and Wharehuia Milroy (Auckland University Press) $50
Judges' citation: He tai mutunga kore te ranga whai reo e āki kau ana ki te aroaro o te tokorua kātuarehe, ngā ruānuku o te reo o nehe, ki nāianei rangi. He whāiti taua urunga, engari i konei ka wherawhera mai. He maioha tēnei nā Tīmoti Kāretu rāua ko Te Wharehuia Milroy, kia hou mai te tāura ki waenga pū i ā rāua kōrerorero, he kōrero paki, he hokinga mahara o te ohinga, ā, pakeke noa. He puanga rautangi ki te hauangi. Kapohia e te tini. He tatau e puare ana i tō rāua ao. Staunch advocates of our spoken reo have relentlessly sought to sit down with these two most influential exponents of reo Māori, from the past and for today. Few have had the opportunity, He Kupu Tuku Iho now opens that door. Tīmoti Kāretu and the late Wharehuia Milroy invite the reader into their conversations, their yarns and musings from decades of cultural experience. This book’s value is undeniable. Its language, accessible. This is a doorway to their world.
MitoQ Best First Book Awards:
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION
The Sound of Breaking Glass by Kirsten Warner (Mākaro Press) $35
Judges' citation: In The Sound of Breaking Glass first time novelist Kirsten Warner presents a surreal, satirical and deeply moving story of multi-generational trauma. Through her central character Christel, we are confronted by the unresolved legacy of the Holocaust and the unaddressed corruption of adolescence. In revealing the impact of this history through an illusory censorious shape-shifter – Big Critic – and the Golem-like Milk Bottle Man, Warner takes her readers on a frenetic and ambitious narrative that tests the boundaries of storytelling. That she achieves this without compromising character or credibility is testament to her skills as a writer. The Sound of Breaking Glass is vivid, intelligent, funny and as compelling as it is inventive.
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY
Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press) $20
Judges' citation: In a year of strong first collections, Tayi Tibble’s remarkable book stood out. Poūkahangatus drew us in again and again with the strength of its voice, its narrative power, its formal experimentation, and the depth of the feelings it manifests and invokes. With an unsettling self-assurance, Tibble takes us on a tour of senses, scenes and a range of uncomfortable tropes that an Aotearoa audience may recognise as our own. Awkward and unequal power dynamics are battled out brutally on the page with a self-conscious attention to the ways the past plays out in the present. Her lyrical kaupapa draws us in to gaze at a two-way mirror through gestures that are by turns playful, angry, seductive and disquieting.
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O'Shea, 1948-2000 by John Reid (Victoria University Press) $60
Judges' citation: Approaching an extensive archive for a first-time author is a daunting prospect, and one on which many an established biographical writer has come to grief. Whatever It Takes is an impressive debut, covering a complex story that highlights a unique part of our visual culture and social history. It is clearly written and carefully structured, with an approach to illustrations that is sympathetic to the original nature of the film-based imagery being reproduced. The design and illustrations create a richly contextual, evocative sense of the original time and place. The final result is a book that records a remarkable story and reflects an emerging non-fiction writer of great potential.
E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
We Can Make a Life by Chessie Henry (Victoria University Press) $35
Judges' citation: Beautifully written and highly engaging, Chessie Henry’s We Can Make a Life is a powerful and gripping story of a family coping with personal trauma in the midst of national tragedy. Told with warmth and curiosity, this is both a candid account of the impact of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes on her family and a touching tribute to her adventurous parents. The beautiful writing is complemented by a considered approach to the design and production. An assured and compelling first book by an exciting new voice, this book is honest, compassionate, and in its coverage of personal responses to traumatic events is emotionally revealing without being sentimental.
>>Find out the category winners chosen by respondents to the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer).
>>Find out the category winners chosen by respondents to the VOLUME OCKHAMETER (and Acornometer).
BOOKS @ VOLUME #127 (11.5.19)
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 | Ursa by Tina Shaw {Reviewed by STELLA} Fast-paced, exciting and moving, Tina Shaw’s Ursa opens with Leho watching the Black Marks burning books. In the city of Ursa, there are two peoples - the Cerals and the Travesters. One works for the other; one has the resources while the other has the left-overs; one has choices while the other has none. Leho is a Ceral and a canny one at that - able to keep in the shadows, to wander the city unnoticed if he is constantly alert. What happened to make Ursa this way? And why is it getting worse for the Cerals? Is the idea of a promised new land too good to be true? In Tina Shaw’s teen novel we are introduced to a great cast of characters: Leho and his family - his grandmother who holds them all together through iron will, his mother who has been blinded by a sadistic officer of the Black Marks, his older sister who is secretly defiant, and his older brother working in the dangerous factory and plotting even more dangerous endeavours of a revolutionary nature. No one seems to take much notice of Leho, but he’s determined to prove his worth. Not only is he setting out to play his part in overthrowing the system, but he also has a greater secret - a new-found friendship with an unusual Travestor girl, Emee, who he is curiously drawn to. Will there be a time when a Ceral boy and Travestor girl can be friends? Shaw writes with great pace and lively descriptions of the disparate halves of the city, hooking the reader in. Through Leho’s eyes, we discover more about the world he lives in as he begins to understand more about the history of Ursa and the people's desires and needs. He begins to understand his older siblings and the difficulties they endure, and he begins to see the Travesters not as one oppressor but as people with diverse viewpoints. But he also sees increasing hardship and brutality as he is more engaged with an adult world through his work at the Director’s garden, a job he creates to get closer to the heart of control - dangerously close. And he is not the only one courting danger: revolution is coming. Can he save his family and his friends? What can one unnoticed boy achieve against the Black Marks, against the Director, against a system that is unfair? This is a coming-of-age story that has heart and hope. An increasingly important reminder of regimes that denigrate groups of people through control of resources, with borders and power for the benefit of a chosen few, in a time where nationalism and populist movements are on the rise. Excellent teen reading with its great story-telling and character development, and with an underlying message to rise up against oppression. |
 | The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg {Reviewed by THOMAS} In this beautifully abject and uncomfortable biographical novel, Sara Stridsberg suspends her subject, Valerie Solanas, indefinitely at the point of death in San Francisco’s disreputable Bristol Hotel in 1988 and subjects her to a long sequence of interrogations by a self-styled ‘narrator’, superimposing upon the distended moment of death two additional narratives stands: of her life from childhood until the moment Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and from the trial via the mental hospital to society's margins and the Bristol hotel. Stridsberg has strung a multitude of short dialogues in these strands, typically preceded by the narrator setting the scene, so to call it, in the second person, and then scripting conversations between Solanas and the narrator, or with Solanas’s mother, Dorothy, or with her friend/lover Cosmogirl, or with Warhol or ‘the state’ or a psychiatrist or a nurse, or with the opportunistic Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published Solanas’s remarkable SCUM Manifesto, a radical feminist tirade against the patriarchy at once scathingly acute and deliciously ironic. Stridsberg (aided by her translator into English, Deborah Bragan-Turner) conjures Solanas’s voice perfectly, animating the documentary material in a way that is both sensitive and brutal. This is, of course, both against and absolutely in line with Solanas’s wishes, making herself available to “no sentimental young woman or sham author playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material.” The Solanas of the dialogues is often largely the deathbed Solanas, suspended in a liminal state between times and on the edge of consciousness, whereas her interlocutors are more affixed to their relevant times, for instance her mother Dorothy forever caught in Solanas’s childhood - in which Valerie was abused by her father and, later, by her mother’s boyfriends - yet hard to get free of, due to “that life-threatening bond between children and mothers.” The scene/dialogue mechanism that comprises most of the novel appears to remove authorial intrusion from the representation of Solanas’s life more effectively than a strictly ‘factual’ biography would have done, while all the time flagging the fictive nature of the project. “I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I chose to believe in the one who embroiders.” Stridsberg does a remarkable job at being at once both clinical and passionate, at undermining our facile distinctions between tenderness and abjection, between beauty and transgression, between radical critique and mental illness, between verbal delicacy and the outpouring of “all these sewers disguised as mouths.” Solanas shines out from the abjection of America, unassimilable, a person with no place, no possible life. “It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to.” At the end of the book the three strands of narrative draw together and terminate together: Solanas shoots Warhol at the moment of her own death two decades later, and the personae are released. All except Warhol, who lived in fear of Solanas thereafter: “People say Andy Warhol never really came back from the dead, they say that throughout his life he remained unconscious, one of the living dead.” |