Book of the Week. How would it be if poetry written by women in New Zealand had a house that you could visit, in which you could spend time, and from which you could emerge having made new friends? Luckily, Paula Green has made us such a house. Wild Honey:Reading New Zealand women's poetry brings literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan, Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. Book of the Week. How would it be if poetry written by women in New Zealand had a house that you could visit, in which you could spend time, and from which you could emerge having made new friends? Luckily, Paula Green has made us such a house. Wild Honey:Reading New Zealand women's poetry brings literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan, Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. NEW RELEASES
First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. Hardwick's experience of living in the twentieth century is indelibly presented in the most remarkable sentences.
"A series of fleeting images and memories united by the high intelligence and beauty of Hardwick's prose." —Sally Rooney
"Extraordinary and haunting." —Joan Didion
""Brilliant, brittle and strange, unlike any preconceived notion of what a novel could be. Few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave." —Lauren Groff
"A novel of mental weather that enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash." —Susan Sontag
Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick $25
Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage.
"Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain." —Susan Sontag
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian $35
An audacious short story collection dealing largely with power imbalances in sexual relationships and the ways in which the desirable and the undesirable can be hard to distinguish. Includes the viral sensation 'Cat Person'.
>>Read 'Cat Person'.
>>What it felt like when 'Cat Person' went viral.
>>"Dating is caught up in ego, power and control."
Inland by Téa Obreht $38
The Wild West might well be wilder than expected in this novel in which a woman waits with her youngest son and her husband's 17-year-old cousin for her husband to return from seeking water, and for her older sons to return after an argument. Is a mysterious beast stalking the land? What lies beyond the safety of the homestead? The decision is made to set off on an expedition that will change everything.
"This exquisite frontier tale from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is a timely exploration of the darkness beneath the American dream. Inland’s message is a rebuke to isolationist US policies written with a panache and heart." —Guardian
>>"I threw 1400 pages in the trash."
An audacious short story collection dealing largely with power imbalances in sexual relationships and the ways in which the desirable and the undesirable can be hard to distinguish. Includes the viral sensation 'Cat Person'.
>>Read 'Cat Person'.
>>What it felt like when 'Cat Person' went viral.
>>"Dating is caught up in ego, power and control."
The Wild West might well be wilder than expected in this novel in which a woman waits with her youngest son and her husband's 17-year-old cousin for her husband to return from seeking water, and for her older sons to return after an argument. Is a mysterious beast stalking the land? What lies beyond the safety of the homestead? The decision is made to set off on an expedition that will change everything.
"This exquisite frontier tale from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is a timely exploration of the darkness beneath the American dream. Inland’s message is a rebuke to isolationist US policies written with a panache and heart." —Guardian
>>"I threw 1400 pages in the trash."
The Government of No-One: The theory and practice of anarchism by Ruth Kinna $48
"Ruth Kinna's book will be the standard text on anarchism for the twenty-first century. Written with brio, quiet insight and clarity and taking us from the nineteenth century anarchist Proudhon to Occupy and Rojava, this offering will appeal to the novice student, the activist and the grizzled professor." —Carl Levy
Madam and Eve: Women portraying women by Liz Rideal and Kathleen Soriano $85
An excellent survey of the many different media and approaches that women have used in the last 50 years to create images of themselves and other women.
Obedience to Authority: An experimental view by Stanley Milgram $25
In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or "teachers"—were instructed to administer electric shocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences.
"Milgram's experiments on obedience have made us more aware of the dangers of uncritically accepting authority." —Peter Singer, New York Times
Mitochonrial Eve by Kirsten Warner $15
May your heart leave your body like channel surfing, up a salt river you have to go days to find. May you look up from the good dark soil running through your fingers like melting ice caps and say: “Outside the sky there is sun.”
A poetry collection from the author of The Sound of Breaking Glass.
In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Šlepikas $33
As the Russians advance into East Prussia, women and children are forced out of their homes to make way for the victorious troops. Their fight for survival is only just beginning. Facing critical food shortages and the onset of a bitterly cold winter, some of the older children, the 'wolf children' secretly cross the border into Lithuania, begging the local farmers for work or food they can take back to their starving families.
What If...? by Thierry Lenain and Olivier Tallec $40
The child sits and observes the troubles of the world. What if we made it different? The child decides to be born!
The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones by Daniel Mendelsohn $53
Moving between the Latin classics and the modern likes of Virginia Woolf, Brideshead Revisited, Battlestar Galactica, and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, these essays expose the heart of antiquity — still beating in our art and our everyday lives. In some essays, Mendelsohn shows how readily we still call on the Greeks and Romans as role models. In others, he illuminates the surprising modernity of canonical works — including Homer's interest in artificial intelligence. We see Sappho alongside Girl, Interrupted, read the mythic side of Spider-Man, and come to understand a little better our relentless fascination with the Titanic.
The Book of Imprudent Flora by Claudio Romo $55
With stunning illustrations throughout, the book is written as a travel diary by Lazaro de Sahagun, eminent naturalist and explorer and concerns his voyage to a mysterious isle and subsequent cataloguing of the astonishing life forms, each with a unique history and mode of existence. Perhaps, as Lazaro muses, if the earth is a living organism as he believes, places like this island are necessary for the planet to safeguard these marvellous species from 'future periods of global decadence.'
Made in Japan: Awe-inspiring graphics from Japan today $60
Japan's remarkable contemporary graphic and packaging design springs from cultural depths, melding history, traditional art and philosophy. A good survey.
Words and Pictures: Writers, artists, and a peculiarly British tradition by Jenny Uglow $28
Words & Pictures explores the relationship between verbal and visual storytelling through three encounters between writers and artists. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Food: The history of taste by John Freedman $30
Surveys the history of changing tastes in food and fine dining — what was available for people to eat, and how it was prepared and served — from prehistory to the present day. Since earliest times food has encompassed so much more than just what we eat — whole societies can be revealed and analysed by their cuisines. In this wide-ranging book, leading historians from Europe and America piece together from a myriad sources the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilisations, past and present, and the pleasures of dining.
Heads of the Coloured People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires $26
A short story collection revealing the hypocrisies in a supposedly post-racial society.
"Her stories feel simultaneously like the poke of a stick and a comforting balm." —Bim Adewunmi, Guardian
>>"I wanted to see more stories about nerdy black people."
King and Emperor: A new life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson $65
Reinterpreting primary sources, Nelson provides new insights into Charlemagne's motivations and into how he was seen by his contemporaries, both commoners and nobles.
My Museum by Joanne Liu $32
Art is everywhere in the art gallery, from the visitor's tattoos to the way the light falls across the floor. While other visitors are busy trying to find their way through the museum's galleries, or fighting for room to view a masterpiece, the character in this book examines the gallery upside down from a bench, plays with his shadow, and makes friends with the custodian.
Mr Gumpy's Rhino by John Burningham $30
Mr Gumpy is back! An orphaned rhinoceros needs looking after, but soon ends up helping everyone.
Chopin's Piano: A journey through Romanticism by Paul Kildea $28
Traces the history of Chopin's 24 Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent.
An excellent survey of the many different media and approaches that women have used in the last 50 years to create images of themselves and other women.
In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or "teachers"—were instructed to administer electric shocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences.
"Milgram's experiments on obedience have made us more aware of the dangers of uncritically accepting authority." —Peter Singer, New York Times
May your heart leave your body like channel surfing, up a salt river you have to go days to find. May you look up from the good dark soil running through your fingers like melting ice caps and say: “Outside the sky there is sun.”
A poetry collection from the author of The Sound of Breaking Glass.
As the Russians advance into East Prussia, women and children are forced out of their homes to make way for the victorious troops. Their fight for survival is only just beginning. Facing critical food shortages and the onset of a bitterly cold winter, some of the older children, the 'wolf children' secretly cross the border into Lithuania, begging the local farmers for work or food they can take back to their starving families.
The child sits and observes the troubles of the world. What if we made it different? The child decides to be born!
Moving between the Latin classics and the modern likes of Virginia Woolf, Brideshead Revisited, Battlestar Galactica, and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, these essays expose the heart of antiquity — still beating in our art and our everyday lives. In some essays, Mendelsohn shows how readily we still call on the Greeks and Romans as role models. In others, he illuminates the surprising modernity of canonical works — including Homer's interest in artificial intelligence. We see Sappho alongside Girl, Interrupted, read the mythic side of Spider-Man, and come to understand a little better our relentless fascination with the Titanic.
With stunning illustrations throughout, the book is written as a travel diary by Lazaro de Sahagun, eminent naturalist and explorer and concerns his voyage to a mysterious isle and subsequent cataloguing of the astonishing life forms, each with a unique history and mode of existence. Perhaps, as Lazaro muses, if the earth is a living organism as he believes, places like this island are necessary for the planet to safeguard these marvellous species from 'future periods of global decadence.'
Japan's remarkable contemporary graphic and packaging design springs from cultural depths, melding history, traditional art and philosophy. A good survey.
Words & Pictures explores the relationship between verbal and visual storytelling through three encounters between writers and artists. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Surveys the history of changing tastes in food and fine dining — what was available for people to eat, and how it was prepared and served — from prehistory to the present day. Since earliest times food has encompassed so much more than just what we eat — whole societies can be revealed and analysed by their cuisines. In this wide-ranging book, leading historians from Europe and America piece together from a myriad sources the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilisations, past and present, and the pleasures of dining.
A short story collection revealing the hypocrisies in a supposedly post-racial society.
"Her stories feel simultaneously like the poke of a stick and a comforting balm." —Bim Adewunmi, Guardian
>>"I wanted to see more stories about nerdy black people."
Reinterpreting primary sources, Nelson provides new insights into Charlemagne's motivations and into how he was seen by his contemporaries, both commoners and nobles.
Art is everywhere in the art gallery, from the visitor's tattoos to the way the light falls across the floor. While other visitors are busy trying to find their way through the museum's galleries, or fighting for room to view a masterpiece, the character in this book examines the gallery upside down from a bench, plays with his shadow, and makes friends with the custodian.
Mr Gumpy is back! An orphaned rhinoceros needs looking after, but soon ends up helping everyone.
Traces the history of Chopin's 24 Preludes through the instruments on which they were played, the pianists who interpreted them, and the traditions they came to represent.
Bomb by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan is set firmly in Aotearoa. This summery, exuberant tale will resonate with any child who has ever tried to do something that scares them. The detailed, artful illustrations are as joyous and assured as the story they capture. The unwavering love and encouragement of the child’s Nan illuminates a strong and convincing message about being yourself and having the courage to do things in your own way.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>The book trailer.
>>Making the biggest splash.
>>"Layer upon layer of goodness and wonder."
>>All the winners in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
>>Read it in te Reo: Te Pohu (translated by Kawata Teepa).
>>Sacha Cotter's website.
>>The illustrator and the designer.
>>The Bomb Song.
>>And now with 400 children.
>>And there's a baby!
>>Huia Publishing also took the Young Adult Fiction Award at the NZBACYA for Legacy by Whiti Hereaka.
  | The Bomb by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan {Reviewed by STELLA} The top prize, The Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, at this year’s New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, went to The Bomb! This lively and delightful picture book by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan is a great story, wonderfully illustrated, is laced with humour, and has a message to boot. Be yourself! An important refrain in our media-saturated world that continuously sends us messages about how we ‘should’ be and how our children ‘should’ be. It’s summertime in New Zealand and this could be anyone’s local beach, favourite river waterhole, or pool. Everyone can do the bomb...except for one boy who can’t quite seem to make it happen — no matter what. His mantra doesn’t work — “Hear my song, see my lines, check my moves, they’re so fine..” Even Nan, his stalwart supporter, with her encouraging positive vibes, can’t help (until he hears her). Everyone(!) has advice: “ More weight. More height. More hair. More puku. Bigger shorts”. But nothing helps. The bomb is a ...plop. But then he discovers the secret! He’s going to do it his way. Here’s a story you can pull out and read again and again. It’s always going to spark fires with its celebration of being yourself and finding your own way to your goal and the things that delight you. The text is a joy to read, with its rhythm and energetic language. (If you really like the text, check out the song!) And there is a te Reo edition, Te Pohu. The illustrations are tremendously playful, with things to find and keep discovering on every page, and show us a story that could only be in New Zealand — the trees, the birds, the icecreams in their cones. The book has verve and bounce as well as depth, exploring the subtler relationship between a child and those who support them in their endeavours (it’s dedicated to Sacha's and Josh’s grandmothers!), alongside themes of anxiety and confidence, without being cloying. The Bomb is sure to become a New Zealand classic. It is a joy each time you read it. I wonder how many excellent tree-like diving platforms will appear this summer! |
 | Peat by Lynn Jenner {Reviewed by THOMAS}
If words are the currency both of poetry and of the interface with bureaucracy, what is the role of a poet as a ‘public intellectual’ in New Zealand? What is the relationship between the ‘creative’ and the ‘responsive’ parts of a writer’s mind? Are these parts distinct, or does one somehow inform the other, or does each inform each? Lynn Jenner’s bookPeat is the sort of book that keeps thinking inside your head after you have finished reading it. It is at once a record of the effect on community, history and land of the building (between 2013 and 2107) of the Kapiti Expressway, a so-called ‘Road of National Significance’, near Jenner’s home, and a record of Jenner’s tentative and sensitive quest to get to know Dunedin-based poet Charles Brasch (1909-1973) through his poetry, memoir and letters to the editor, through historical residua, by visiting the houses in which he had lived, and by touching his books in the Otago University Library. The first half of the book consists of essays of varying length, concerning one or the other topic, or both (when relating Brasch’s visit to Douglas Lilburn in Kapiti in 1950). The essays generally arrange their contents temporally, as narratives or micronarratives. The second half of the book consists of two alphabetical ‘glossaries’, or archives, on the two subjects, arranging their contents spatially and providing depth and colour to terms and entities referred to in the essays. It is as if these archives are the strata, the histories, the settled ‘facts’ from which the essays — the hesitant and uncertain trials in what Jenner calls “the unshapely present” — arise and into which they feel for meaning. “Stories of the present resist endings,” writes Jenner, and the unifying element of the book is Jenner’s attempt to see whether the enigmatic Brasch can provide some way of aligning or usefully arranging the outward-facing and inward-facing lives of a poet. As soon as the Kapiti Expressway was proposed it began to change the relationship between the local community and the land, and between the various people in that community. Jenner seeks to understand some of this change. “From the moment the project had received consent, the Expressway began to speak with its own voice, and for more than three years, it had not stopped. ... In 2017 I still believed that the Expressway had a character and that I could discern that character from its behaviour, as you might a person.” Once completed, it is the noise of the road that impacts most heavily on the community (“Noise is a short word. Say it slowly and it sounds a little like a dentist’s drill”). Because this noise (eventually) falls within regulatory standards, and because it affects the community unevenly, it becomes a divisive rather than a cohesive element. “The fact that the community at large ‘moves on’ so quickly, and the unpleasant situation still happening to a few becomes invisible, bothers me.” In Charles Brasch’s letters to the editor and other writings about his community, he expresses strong concern about developments that deplete rather than enhance the aesthetic life of Dunedin’s citizens, and shows a keen and almost pained interest in the quality of change. “Brasch was first and always concerned with beauty,” writes Jenner, and he believed that the experience of beauty, be it in art, nature or civic life, was a vital way in which people of all sorts could improve themselves and their lives. Although Brasch was white, male, and wealthy, he was also very much an outsider in the New Zealand of his time: Jewish, sensitive, socially and sexually enigmatic. “Brasch doesn’t fit into any single category,” Jenner observes, and this reflects Brasch’s thoughts about himself, when he speculates that the writing of the ‘outer’ concerns of his life (so to call them) may provide some sort of pivot around which he might swing such ‘inner’ concerns as the writing of poetry: “These sketches, I see now, have a purpose, a use for me: they will remake me, create an image of myself & so give me in my own eyes a reality & a stability that I scarcely possess even yet, & a continuity which I have never achieved. They may offer me a centre to write poetry from, possibly a hint of direction too.” Peat may well be reaching for the same mechanism, a calibration of inner and outer concerns, of the individual with society, of the physical world with time.
|
NEW RELEASES
Green explores New Zealand poetry as if it were a house, moving from room to room and through time, releasing historical female poets from definition or exclusion by traditional male gatekeepers, bringing literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. Includes biographies of 195 poets. Illustrated by Sarah Laing.
>>Have a look inside.
The future’s a disaster. Everyone knows it’s time to get proofing. But you, you’re out of energy to bolt down the bookshelf. You can’t afford a carbon-neutral kitchen. Balance the math & trash the books: you won’t ever have a house. You little worm. Do you really think you deserve your own bedroom? Fear not! If you can’t afford to be part of the problem, you can still buy into the compromise. La Belle Dame avec les mains vertes offers a solution for your every civic grievance. Set down in writing, made in New Zealand, one last blast of arts & crafts. La Belle Dame sees your plaint, & raises it. Would you like to register a charge, or a lamentation?
A green and grumpy, very funny ode to life in contemporary Tāmaki-makau-rau, in the form of a double sestina.
>>Read Thomas's review of Evangeline Riddiford Graham's Ginesthoi. Evangeline read at VOLUME in 2017.
A beautiful picture book, with recipes from all the various people that live in the apartment building.
>>Visit Sala's website!
Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form. The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ — Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.
"The paired allegorical poetry tales in BACK Before You Know take on history and the perky fatalised body—as ‘The Fancier Pigeon’ sprightly-deathly observes, “The world is fixed / in ice and fire” and symmetry and entropy “go together / like two girls in a bar.” Edmond writes with a wry deliciousness in a pace from which one can’t turn away – we stop in the heart and we can’t stop anything in these forward cantering loops through fabled destiny." —Lisa Samuels
"Murray Edmond joins the rich tradition of late modernist folk poetry, which also includes Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and Tom Pickard’s The Ballad of Jamie Allan. Wistful and riotous by turns, these two startling fables radiate with human warmth. They ring beautifully true." —Steven Toussaint
Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonised peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
>>The author changes the mind-set.
A sampler of interesting emerging poets.
Duggan wrote two collections of short stories but never presented them for publication. These appear here for the first time, with a substantial introduction by John Weir.
>> Duggan's Selected Poems has/have just been reprinted.
It unexpectedly arrived. It brushed past someone in the street. It weaves its way in and out of people on the street. It catches people completely unaware. But what is this It? A beautiful, quirky large-format book.
[Answer: happiness!]
Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, was recorded and released in 1979. Edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky, and fun — with Brian Eno's production, it's a record that bursts out of the downtown scene that birthed the band, and hints at the directions (positive and negative) they'd take in the near future. Here, Jonathan Lethem takes us back to the late 1970s in New York City and situates Talking Heads as one of the most remarkable and enigmatic American bands.
>>'Heaven'.
For Maresi, like so many other girls, the Red Abbey was a haven of safety in a world ruled by brutal men. But now she is a young woman and it is time for her to leave. She must take all that she has learned from her sisters and return to her childhood home to share the knowledge she has gained. But when Maresi returns to her village, she realises all is not well - the people are struggling under the rule of the oppressive Earl, and people are too busy trying to survive to see the value of her teachings. Maresi finds she must use all the terrible force of the Crone's magic to protect her people, but can she find the strength to do so when her heart is weakening with love for the first time?
>>This is an excellent YA series.
Having fled to Paris in January 1933, on the day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth wrote a series of articles in that 'hour before the end of the world', that he foresaw was coming and which would see the full horror of Nazism, the Second World War, and, most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness.
When fox kits Mia and Uly are separated from their litters, they quickly learn that the world is a dangerous place filled with monsters. As the young foxes travel across field and forest in search of a home, they'll face a zombie who hungers for their tender flesh, a witch who wants to wear their skins, a ghost who haunts and hunts them, and so much more.
Welcome to the coalface of poetry: a unique combination of poems & polemics by David Merritt, the "people's laureate" (often seen hawking his words on the streets of Nelson and elsewhere), fused together for the first time. Concerning influence both literary & otherwise, the history of the desktop publishing revolution, best practices for making rich compost out of brute materialist society. Two lyrical essays paint a world where there's no good reason to see DIY printing & gardening as significantly separate skill sets.
The Way Through the Woods: Of mushrooms and mourning by Long Litt Woon $40
A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing - hunting for mushrooms. Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after arriving in Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student. They fell in love, married, and settled into domestic bliss. Then Eiolf's unexpected death at fifty-four left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been her partner and anchor for thirty-two years. Adrift in grief, she signed up for a beginner's course on mushrooming—a course the two of them had planned to take together—and found, to her surprise, that the pursuit of mushrooms rekindled her zest for life.
How can other people like the books we don't like? What benefit can we get from rereading a work? Can we read better? If so, how? These and many other questions, ranging from the field of writing to that of reading and translation, are addressed by the always incisive Tim Parks.
Printer, typographer, publisher, boxer, sailor, drinker, scholar, satirist, wit — and poet. New edition.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle.
Wiffen's discovery of therapod bones in Hawke's Bay in 1975 proved that dinosaurs featured in New Zealand prehistory — overturning what was thought at that time.
Excellent analysis of the blights of the autocracy, neoliberalism and international interference that led to economic collapse, famine and civil war.
The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Bastani claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Gosh.
"They demolish our houses while we build theirs." This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian 'stone men', using some of the best-quality limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, have built almost every state in the Middle East except one of their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabricating, and dressing is the Occupied Territories' largest private employer and generator of revenue, and supplies the construction industry in Israel, along with other countries in the region and overseas.
Thirteen stories set in Rio's largest favela, gravitating around the lives of boys and men who struggle with the violence involved in growing up on the less favoured side of the 'Broken City'.
Everyone knows that rockets are just toys, the stuff of cranks and pulp magazines. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, an engineering student named Frank Malina set out to prove the doubters wrong. With the help of his friend Jack Parsons, a grandiose and occult-obsessed explosives enthusiast, Malina embarked on a journey that took him from junk yards and desert lots to the heights of the military-industrial complex. Malina designed the first American rocket to reach space and established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But trouble soon found him: the FBI suspected Malina of being a communist.
John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. Thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, the novel was freed for publication.
Duncan Blake is a New Zealand filmmaker whose move to LA has not gone to plan. After a series of setbacks, he's working at a chain restaurant, his marriage is on shaky ground after a porn-related faux pas and his son won't stop watching Aladdin. When Duncan gets the chance to scout locations for a fated director's biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino, it's the lifeline he's been searching for. But in Italy, in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century levitator, he must confront miracles, madness and the realities of modern movie making.
>>"It's bad for your health" (recommended viewing!)
The winners in the 2019 NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS have just been announced.
Click through to reserve your copies.
MARGARET MAHY BOOK OF THE YEAR + PICTURE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Set firmly in Aotearoa, this summery, exuberant tale will resonate with any child who has ever tried to do something that scares them. The detailed, artful illustrations are as joyous and assured as the story they capture. The unwavering love and encouragement of the child’s Nan illuminates a strong and convincing message about being yourself and having the courage to do things in your own way.
WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION ESTHER GLEN AWARD FOR JUNIOR FICTION
Be transported to a convincingly rendered dystopian future in which all grasses have been destroyed. The only real chance of survival for Ella and her half-brother Ellery is to leave the city and travel with their magnificent doggos by dogcart, across the wilderness to Ellery’s family farm — and hope. Danger is everywhere, food and water scarce. Resilience and resourcefulness are essential in this enthralling, fast-paced ecological drama.
YOUNG ADULT FICTION AWARD
Riki wakes after an accident to find he’s gone back a century. He is mistaken for his great-grandfather, who happens to be a soldier in the middle of Egypt during WW1 — a long way from present-day Wellington and his girlfriend. The convincing characterisation and scene setting help readers understand the moral complexities and challenges of life as a Māori soldier during the WW1 campaigns.
ELSIE LOCKE AWARD FOR NON-FICTION + BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
The meanings and methods behind iconic works in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection are uncovered, using dazzling design features that are instantly engaging. This book shows how art can touch us at every level, from cultural to emotional, and it’s all done with a madly ‘art-rageous’ sense of humour. A highly interactive book which connects young people with art and encourages readers to try out the art techniques.
RUSSELL CLARKE AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATION
An architect takes on the toughest clients yet in this clever story, full of warmth and gentle surprise. Luminous and detailed illustrations reveal cross-sections of each animal’s house, and encourage exploration. The rhythm and rhyme are impeccable, with a refrain listing the essential requirements for the perfect home — readers are left in no doubt that friends and family are the most important ingredients.
WRIGHT FAMILY FOUNDATION TE KURA POUNAMU AWARD FOR TE REO MAORI
Legend says Tamanuiterā (sun) and Hine Raumati (summer maiden) had a son named Tānerore. On scorching hot days, the mother and son haka to the sun from the parched earth. As they do this, their hands shake vigorously, reflecting the heatwaves that shimmer between Papatūānuku and Ranginui. ‘Ko te reo te mauri o te mana Māori’ shines through in this ancient pūrākau and is creatively intensified by stunning original artwork.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #138 (3.8.19)
Our newsletter contains our reviews and recommendations, information about our events and courses, news and competitions.
In the wholly remarkable Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Bachmann draws the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men, who may or may not exist outside her head.
>>"Malina continues to reveal new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living." —read Thomas's review.
>>Read an extract.
>>Detonating the container of consciousness.
>>A singular woman adrift.
>>"We could call her happiness self-deception."
>>"I don't understand how one can live."
>>Reading Ingeborg Bachmann.
>>Is Malina "the truest portrait of female consciousness since Sappho"?
>>"The outrageous has become the everyday."
>>Malina was made into a film by Werner Schroeter in 1991.
>>As a piece of physical theatre.
>>A brief biography of Bachmann.
>>Books by Bachmann.
>> Fun fact: Bachmann appears as Maria in Thomas Bernhard's last novel, Extinction.
 | All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos {Reviewed by STELLA} “It’s the same thing time and time again, shamelessly, tirelessly. It doesn’t matter whether it’s morning or afternoon, winter or summer. Whether the house feels like home, whether somebody comes to the door to let me in. I arrive, and I want to stay, and then I leave.” All My Goodbyes is a novel for the restlessness in us all. Mariana Dimopulos’s protagonist is a young woman on the move. Leaving Argentina at 23 in an attempt to thwart her father’s ambitions and to escape the confines of what she sees as her predictable life, she heads to Madrid with the idea of being an ‘artist’, smoking hashish and hanging out, discussing ‘ideas’ with other travellers. After only a month, she is bored and on the move again, reinventing herself — being Lola or Luisa — whichever identity fits, being a tourist or a traveller, making new backstories, but never quite the truth. She is ambiguous to those she meets and, at times, to the reader also. We follow, or aptly, interact with her life over a decade as she swings between several European places — Madrid, Malaga, Berlin and Heidelberg to mention a few — and South America, washing up in rural Patagonia. The narrative is fractured as she relays her memories, skidding across one experience to the next and back again in a looping circuit, tossing us backwards and forwards in time. We are taken into conversations and thrown out again; we interact with those she has formed relationships with and ultimately said goodbye to. We see her as a traveller, tourist, voyeur, baker, shelf stacker, factory worker, farmhand. Upon this fractured narrative, a web is woven as we piece together the relationships that make her and break her — and always there is an impending sense of something or someone that will change her, a sense of threat with the axe taking centre stage. Dimopulos’s writing is subtle and agile. We do not mind being tossed on our protagonist's sea. In fact, we are curious. We love her late-night conversations with Julia in her kitchen, leaning up against the bench with the sleepy Kolya bunched up in his mother’s arms; we wonder when she will give in to the gentle charms of the scholar Alexander; and question why she is fascinated by the uber entrepreneur Stefan. We know, before it happens, that she will abandon them all, that her desire to leave is greater than her desire to stay. She travels full circle: we encounter her back in her homeland — still restless, still moving — living in the southernmost part of Patagonia. Working for Marco and his mother she finally finds a place to stop. Yet deceit and disaster settle here and take her onward and away, against her will and desire. Is she the architect of her own disaster, creating impossible situations? Her abandonment of people in her life is at times mutually beneficial, at other times cruel. Why does she not speak up, or face up to herself, when she could make a difference? Her riposte is always to leave — to turn her back. While the themes in this novel are restlessness, abandonment and departure, the writing, in contrast, is assured, subtly ironic, agile and so compelling that you will want to reread this — you will want to keep arriving. |
 | Selfies by Sylvie Weil {Reviewed by THOMAS} The hands holding the book in the painting by Markus Schinwald, and the black curtains between which they protrude, are painted in such a way as to make the viewer suspect that they are looking at a painting, or a part of a painting, by some Old Master, and the viewer, upon researching further, feels a little cheated to find that the artist is still alive. Had we perhaps confused even the name Markus Schinwald with that of some minor Germanic Old Master — perhaps a painter of agonising crucifixions, memento mori and surgically accurate Sts. Sebastians — which would have given this painting, in which the person holding the book into the light is effectively bodiless, concealed behind curtains, a disconcertingly suppressed reference to physical suffering? Maybe we should not feel cheated. Maybe it is the reference to the reference, by way of our confusion, that gives the painting, for us, its meaning. In the picture I didn't end up taking of myself I am sitting in an elderly armchair, the pile of its plush worn to the ghost of its original pattern on the arms and upper back. Beside me is a rather spindly green table upon which sits a vase of stocks, wilted at their tops, and a small empty coffee cup, a lip-mark of coffee at its rim. The sideboard behind me is stacked with books, and the fading light falls from my right onto the book I hold at an odd angle as if trying to postpone the moment in which I will have to get up and switch on a light. I am wearing a heavy mustard jersey, no longer worth darning, under which another jersey can be seen, and my head is thrust awkwardly forward over the oddly angled book, which I seem to be on the verge of finishing. Its title can be read despite the shadow: Selfies by Sylvie Weil.
*
The thirteen exquisite pieces of memoir that comprise Selfies each begin with a description of an actual artwork, a self-portrait by a woman ranging from the thirteen century to today. This ekphrasis is followed by a description of a (possibly hypothetical) self-portrait by Weil which echoes or resonates with the historical work and provides a means of access to the third section of each piece, a more (but variously) lengthy examination of one of the more significant or uncomfortable aspects of Weil’s life. This tripartite structure demonstrates how viewing art can unlock new levels of understanding of our own lives, and how the communication of a stranger’s moment by means of a surface invariably stimulates the viewer’s memory to read that moment in terms of moments from the viewer’s own life, moments pressing at the surface of consciousness from the other side, so to speak. Viewing is remembering. The rigour and delicacy Weil demonstrates in viewing the artists’ works allows her to apply a similar set of criteria to her own memory-images, resulting in a remarkably nuanced set of realisations to be accessed and conveyed, potentially provoking a similar deepening of access in a reader to her or his own memories. Weil’s prose, pellucidly translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, gauges subtle shifts of tone, frequently shifting our understanding of situations or persons before any knowledge about them is attained. The awful American mathematician with whom Weil had a love affair, her son’s mother-in-law, the close friend of her mother’s, the unsympathetic owners of a “Jewish” dog, are all revealed as having complex and often ambiguous relationships with the surfaces they present. Weil’s sentences, at once so straight-forward and so subtle, can move both outwards and inwards at once, operating at various depths simultaneously, as when Weil describes responses to her adult son’s mental breakdown: “I reply politely to friends who say: ‘I wouldn’t be able to cope if something like that happened to my son.’ I didn’t tell them that it could happen to anyone. And that they would cope, as people do. They’d have no choice. I don’t reply that they deserve to have it happen to them. Deep down, I agree that it is unlikely to happen to them. Not to them.” Precision often leads us to the verge of humour, as when Weil describes “the remains of a smile abruptly cut short, as if by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a dangerous animal.” The ‘Self-portrait as an author,’ springing from a description of a 1632 self-portrait of Judith Leyster seen as an advertisement for her portrait commissions (a commercial imperative), is a devastatingly perfect Cuskian account of the people who visited Weil’s signing table at a literary festival. The book is full of images, or moments, details, that implant themselves in the mind of the reader and continue to resonate there in a way similar to the reader’s own memories. What is the purpose of self-depiction? “Everyone takes selfies,” Weil observes. “It’s a way of going unnoticed,” but at the same time each selfie is a form of searching, an attempt to locate oneself, somehow, in the circumstances that comprise one’s life. Memory is the only way we have to attempt to make sense of these moments.
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NEW RELEASES
"A beguiling series of vignettes, by turns wry, amusing and disturbing, inspired by self-portraits by women artists and reflecting on the images they provoke. An illuminating survey of the author's various identities, in a fractured world, as mother, lover and writer." —Michèle Roberts
"A new genre is born: the short selfie collection! Lively, inventive, compassionate, aching, morally complex and troubling, I loved these self-portraits more than anything I’ve read lately." — Lauren Elkin
“What knocks me out about The Wind That Lays Waste—a novel that starts in the great pause before a storm—is how it delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. The story centres around a reverend who is evangelising across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God, or fate, leads them to an ageing, atheist mechanic and his young helper. As a long, strangely intimate day passes, curious tensions ebb and flow, until finally the storm breaks over the plains. Perfectly translated by Chris Andrews, this is a book for readers who like that metallic taste and the feeling of the hairs on the back of their necks rising.”—Barbara Epler
Ten stories set in Belfast, laying bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A reclusive cult-rock icon ends his days in the street where he was born; a lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a husband and wife become enmeshed in the lives of the young couple they pay to do their cleaning and gardening.
"With skill and style, Erskine unpicks the underlying complexity of ordinary lives, the unexpected intricacy of ordinary situations. These are stories about ramification as opposed to redemption; dark, bittersweet and perfectly formed." —Sara Baume
>>Erskine reads from the book.
An exquisite graphic novel about the architect and designer's life and work in the 1920s on her exemplary Modernist Villa E-1027.
>>Visit Villa E-1027
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.
"Astonishing, thrilling, morally grave, electrifying." —Independent
In 2014 I moved back to the United States after living abroad for fourteen years, my whole adult life, because my father was dying from cancer. Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died. Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too. When Jean Hannah Edelstein's world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realise we're not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future?
"A most magnificent, beautifully written memoir." —NIna Stibbe
A collection that gathers together Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiance on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas.
"Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction." —Robert Penn
"Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary fiction." —Edmund Wilson
Surreal short stories set in the swamps of Florida, often with ecological issues underpinning their plots.
"Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places; we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world." —Guardian
An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them. As these groups converge upon the town, the inhabitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.
"Nobber is hallucinatory and sly, conjuring a densely strange and savagely captivating world. There are lots of novels, and there are lots of novels that are all much alike, but there is nothing like Nobber." —Colin Barrett
Are we spending more time at work than we would have 50 years ago? Are we sleeping less? How has the Internet affected the way we use our spare time? Everything we do takes time, and it feels like our lives are busier than ever before. Yet a detailed look at our daily activities reveals some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in.
>>Research!
A wonderful illustrated book of evolution, the concertina pages of which fold out to a frieze as long as a triceratops.
>>Other work by Dupont.
"Accessible, irreverent and entertaining, Bhaskar Sunkara has delivered a razor-sharp guide to socialism's history, transformative promise, and path to power. This book also serves as an irresistible invitation to join in building that power, and in shaping the radically democratic future that is our best hope in these make-or-break times." —Naomi Klein
"From one of the brightest stars of the American left, essential reading for anyone who wants to build a new society based on people's needs, not profit for the elite." —Owen Jones
A remarkably hopeful look at the coming of beneficent AI and their partnership with humans as part of an organic planetary consciousness, 'Gaia'.
"To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own." Arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, in this book Wilde seeks to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. For Wilde, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without first engaging his or her critical faculties.
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique - which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon - until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room—and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face—to match her own.
Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize and the Akutagawa Prize.
Stories of the uncanny, death, sex, longing, murder, &c, exploring the tense dynamic between lust and revulsion.
Max is asked to mail a letter for his mother. As he walks through his neighborhood in search of a mailbox, he encounters all sorts of interesting things like falling leaves dancing in the wind, skyscrapers towering in the distance, and junk being piled into a rubbish truck. All around him adults hurry on their various errands, too busy to appreciate these wondrous details. His walk through the city leads Max to discover that the mailbox is actually right next door to his own house.
A woman fights to retain her sense of self amidst the chaos of work, motherhood and alternative universes.
Beautifully written evocations of the rural Kentucky of Berry's childhood.
'The Lark Ascending', Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'pastoral romance for orchestra' was premiered in 1921. Over the course of the twentieth century this piece of music, perhaps more than any other, worked its way into the collective consciousness to seemingly define a mythical concept of the English countryside: babbling brooks, skylarks, hayricks. But the birth and legacy of the composition are much more complex than this simplified pastoral vision suggests. The landscape celebrated as unsullied and ripe with mystique is a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment—not an unaffected idyll. On a chronological journey that takes him from postwar poets and artists to the late twentieth century and the free party scene which emerged from acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity has been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #137 (27.7.19)
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Find out what we've been reading and find out what you'll be reading next.
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Dig by A.S. King and Wilder Girls by Rory Power {Reviewed by STELLA}
Some things grow down and other out and up. In Dig, the potato tuber takes centre stage while in Wilder Girls a plant-like toxin is trying to take everything over, including the inhabitants of an island. These two teen novels are both excellent. Dig by A.S. King deals with some big issues in the world of a group of teens in a Southern town in America while Wilder Girls by Rory Power lands us in Raxter, a girls' boarding school on an island. Each explores the ferocity and grit of teens to overcome challenging situations. Wilder Girls has been described as The Power meets Lord of the Flies. Hetty, Reese and Byatt are firm friends and become even more dependent on each other as the situation on Raxter escalates. And what a situation it is! The Tox, a robust and vigorous plant-form is suffocating and mutating the environment, as well as the children and teachers that live on the island. Some merely succumb to the plague and die, while others are damaged or find themselves with a variety of growths — extra spinal structures, silvered arms. The island is in quarantine awaiting, the girls think, rescue. Each girl has her role to play, and when Hetty is chosen to be one of a small team to go to the jetty to collect food and other supplies, she realises that the teachers (who are still alive — just two of them) are not being up-front about the school’s predicament. It’s dangerous outside the gates of the school, and at night the mutated forest creatures are hungry beasts who need to be warded off from entering the school grounds. With this mix of illness and fear, the girls, while living chaotically and dividing themselves off into groups pitted against each other, are kept at arm's length from the truth. No one is coming to rescue them. When Byatt has a relapse and disappears from the school infirmary, Hetty and Reese go in search of her, in search of the cause of the Tox and a way off the island. This gripping, imaginative tale where many can not be trusted, where a fierce friendship will help overcome devastation, where you will keep reading despite a sense of unease (it’s a little creepy — the intruding vines and branches) and you will hold your breath until the surprising end. Dig is quieter in its telling but no less powerful. Bringing together of the lives a group of teens whose stories ultimately will intertwine, A.S. King’s young adult's novel is a brilliant piece of work. Set in the South, we are introduced to the characters through their eccentricities: The Freak — a girl who is off the rails and bullied, The Shoveler — a boy who has arrived in a new town (for the umpteenth time) always the outsider, CanIHelpYou? — a girl who works in a drive-thru handing out junk food and hustling hash on the side, Loretta and her flea circus who live in a trailer home with an abusive father and down-trodden mother, and Malcolm — who doesn’t eat lamb. The teens live normal lives, go to school, make some pocket money, regret or despise their parents, try to make their own decisions and go their own way when they can, but reality throws them curve-balls. And then you also meet the young thugs of the town. Bill and Jake, along with the respectable elderly couple, Marla and Gottfried. and as the story progresses you realise that they are tarred with the same brush. Dig down a little and the past, its injustices and prejudices make a quick route to the surface. King does not shy away from the racism, abuse and double standards that permeate middle America and the small-town attitudes that act as a fertiliser. Why are Marla and Gottfried in a position of superior wealth? Why has The Shoveler’s mother moved them to this small town? Why can’t HowCanIHelpYou? remain friends with Ian (her closest friend since primary school)? And why do they all see The Freak unexpectedly flickering in and out of their lives what is she trying to tell them? Dig down and it’s all there underground. Rot, as well as hope. |
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Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“‘Today’ is a word that only suicides ought to be allowed to use, it has no meaning for other people.”
Even five decades after it was written, this wholly remarkable book continues to reveal new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living. In the first part of the book, ‘Happy With Ivan’, the unnamed narrator records her obsessive love affair with a man she first sees outside a florist’s shop near her home in Vienna. On account of Ivan, “the rest of the world, where I lived up to now — always in a panic, my mouth full of cotton, the throttle marks on my neck — is reduced to its petty insignificance.” She snatches evenings with Ivan, plays chess with him (resulting in stalemate), writes him letters (which she tears to shreds and throws away, unsent), and talks (or 'talks') with him on the telephone, but, mainly, she waits and thinks and narrates. “Ever since I’ve been able to dial this number, my life has finally stopped taking turns for the worse, I’m no longer coming apart at the seams. I hold my breath, stopping time, and call and smoke and wait.” But hers is a desperate happiness, not a convincing happiness, not really happiness at all but a straining towards the impossibility of happiness, agitation trying to pass as happiness. Just as the difference between pleasure and irritation is generally merely a matter of degree, there is, for the narrator, no substantial difference between ostensibly contradictory states and the case for her happiness is made so strenuously that it is clearly made from a position of great unhappiness. Ivan lives along the street, but the narrator shares an apartment with Malina, a civil servant who works at the Austrian Military Museum but who is so compartmentalised in the narrator’s mind that he never makes contact with Ivan, or, rather, never inhabits the Ivan compartment in the narrator’s mind. Although the narrator interacts with Malina, and we are told of her visiting elsewhere with him, it is very unclear that Malina exists outside the narrator’s mind, or, rather, that he is not an aspect of the narrator. “Ivan hasn’t been warned about me. He doesn’t know with whom he’s running around, that he’s dealing with a phenomenon, an appearance that can also be deceiving, I don’t want to lead Ivan astray but he has never realised that I am double. I am also Malina’s creation.” I increasingly began to suspect that Ivan also exists, at least mostly, in the narrator’s mind, and that, although probably affixed to someone she saw outside the florist’s shop, the Ivan with whom this 'love affair' persists is a never-quite-reachable eidolon of her longing and desperation. “My living body gives Ivan a reference point, maybe it’s the only one, but this same bodily self disturbs me. Extreme self-control lets me accept Ivan’s sitting opposite me.” Is there no exteriority? All these words, these truncated staccato telephone conversations, these endlessly commaed descriptions, these letters and interviews and documents in many versions, these moments and encounters, these details, these memories and revised memories, these stupendous rants, are they all the desperate invention of the narrator (in the same way that the novel is the desperate invention of the author)? “Whatever falls on my ground thrives, I propagate myself with words and also propagate Ivan.” The second part of the book, ‘The Third Man’, intimates, perhaps, the degree of trauma that underlies the narrator’s agitation and the fracturing of her psyche. Passages, seemingly dreams or memories, describe violence, torment and sexual abuse, largely at the hands of the narrator’s 'father' (and of, by extension, Austria and Nazism), enacted either upon the narrator or upon her naive and complicit alter ego Melanie. “Here there is always violence. Here there is always struggle.” Bachmann’s sentences offer no respite for the reader nor for the narrator. “I don’t want to be any more, because I don’t want war, then put me to sleep, make it end.” The dream sequences are interspersed with conversations, written as script, between the narrator and the rational, interrogating Malina, bringing into her awareness the nature of her trauma, and moving towards the possibility of understanding. “Although it disgusts me to look at him [father], I must, I have to know what danger is still written in his face, I have to know where evil originates.” But, Malina warns, “Once one has survived something the survival itself interferes with understanding.” The third part, ‘Last Things’, charts the shrinking of the narrator’s world, her gradual inevitable loss of Ivan, either as reality or eidolon, her loss of confidence in herself or hope in her world — and it is much funnier than this list would suggest, though no less tragic. Experience, once replaced with knowledge of — or description of — experience, loses the power of experience. Language at once conjures and replaces — annihilates — what is lived. But, says the narrator, “I must have reached a point where thought is so necessary that it is no longer possible.” Her conversations with Malina drain the reality from Ivan and reveal her isolation and self-suffocation. “I am not one person,” she says, “but two people standing in extreme opposition to one another, which must mean I am always on the verge of being torn in two. If they were separated it would be livable, but scarcely the way it is.” The slow, cumulative, fatal intrusion of rationality is here like a pin being pushed against the surface of a balloon with great, horrible, slow, thrilling patience. “The story of Ivan and me will never be told, since we don’t have any story.” Literature is lack. All that is written is written against the facts. Happiness, or imagined happiness, becomes harder and harder and at last impossible to sustain. All that is imgined is destroyed. The narrator’s ‘I’, her subjective self, “an unknown woman”, catches a last whiff of Ivan in the crack in the wall, enters the crack and disappears, leaving the rational alter ego, Malina, the cataloguer, the explainer, the understanding and inhibiting mind, to answer the telephone when Ivan rings (their first encounter) and to deny her very existence. The book ends with the bare sentence, “It was murder,” but, if the characters are all fractured parts of a single mind (if there can be such a thing), what is the nature of this ‘murder’? “What is life?” asks Malina. “Whatever can’t be lived,” the narrator replies. |
>> Book your ticket to hear Lynn Jenner in conversation with with environmental planner and social scientist Charlotte Šunde at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL in September.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>> Radio NZ review.
NEW RELEASES
In the wholly remarkable Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Bachmann draws the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men, who may or may not exist outside her head. Viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety — and genius.
"If I was permitted to keep only one book it would be Malina. Malina has everything." —Claire-Louise Bennett
"Malina continually reveals new possibilities in literature and new impossibilities in living." —Thomas
>>Read an extract.
>>Detonating the container of consciousness.
>>"A singular woman adrift."
>>"We could call her happiness self-deception."
>>"I don’t understand how one can live."
In this hypersharp, subtle and humane novel, Ginzburg portrays a family drawn to the brink of an abyss by one of its member's absence.
>>Read an extract.
>>"The novel’s new English title is evocative. That comma is like the pre–big bang universe shrunk to a pinhead."
>>Read other books by Ginzburg.
"I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.'' Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl — the fortieth prisoner — sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. A compelling feminist science fiction novel, first published in Belgium in 1997.
"A small miracle." —The New York Times
Lynn Jenner’s deeply thoughtful book enlists the help of deceased cultural eminence Charles Brasch to explore the tensions between words and land, and between society and ecology, as a response to the recent development of the Kāpiti Expressway, a so-called ‘Road of National Significance’.
>>RNZ review.
>>Book your ticket to hear Lynn Jenner in conversation with with environmental planner and social scientist Charlotte Šunde at the VOLUME MAPUA LITERARY FESTIVAL in September.
Grandpa’s in the hospital and hating it. He swears at the nurses and makes trouble for everyone. Dad finds it too stressful to visit, but Gottfried Junior visits Grandpa as often as he’s allowed, and when he’s not allowed, he goes anyway. Grandpa thinks only of the place he was happiest—the island where he lived with Grandma. He wants to go back one last time, but they won’t let him out of the hospital. Gottfried Junior and Grandpa take things into their own hands. If running away is the only way to the island, then they’ll be runaways.
A remarkable collection of accounts, collected by Alexievich since the 1970s, in which the subjects recall life as Soviet children during the upheavals and horrors of World War 2.
Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen created a profound impact on the cultural landscape when it was originally published in 1972. A sardonic portrayal of one white, middle-class, US Midwestern girl's coming-of-age, the novel takes a wry and prescient look at a range of experiences treated at the time as taboo but which were ultimately accepted as matters of major political significance: sexual harassment, job discrimination, the sexual double standard, rape, abortion restrictions, the double binds of marriage and motherhood, and the frantic quest for beauty. The book is one of the first and exemplary pieces of fiction born of the women's liberation movement.
"An extraordinary novel. Women will like it and men should read it for the good of their immortal souls." —The New York Times (1972)
Following his Booker Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Whitehead unearths another shocking strand of US history, setting his novel in a hellish reform school in Jim-Crow-era Florida.
>>From unmarked graves to a novel.
From June 1797 to the autumn of 1798, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth lived on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset and began to explore a new way of looking at the world — and their place in it — as devotees of nature and of the unfettered mind, effectively inventing the Romantic movement.
"The perfect marriage of poetry and place." —Robert McCrum, Guardian
A novel dramatising Liberia's early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.
"Compelling." —Guardian
The sequel to the immensely exciting The Traitor and the Thief is, as you would guess, also immensely exciting. Sin is dying, poisoned by his blue blood. His troubles deepen when the traitor who poisoned him escapes from the custody of the Covert Operations Group and sets out for revenge. COG tasks Sin, his friend Zonda Chubb and their frenemy Velvet Von Darque with recapturing the traitor, whatever the cost. Taking to the air in pursuit, they must battle skypirates and the terrifying Clockill to complete their mission. But with his condition worsening, can Sin survive long enough to save his friends, himself and the day?
>>Here they come!
Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theatre performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and inside out. This book is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared in English.
From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop, a new novel about an elusive ladies' man and the women who have loved him.
Much of artist Roni Horn’s work revolves around language. In a series of watercolours produced in 2013 and 2014, she remembered words and pairs them with dots, adding the words to the dots like footnotes or captions, creating a kind of personal, even autobiographical dictionary. The combination of the dots with the words creates unexpected relations and meanings, endless strings of associations, absurd and beautiful at the same time. This book provides a key to the artworks (not included), and to Horn's mind and working methods.
Mina is found by police staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge. When her husband takes her to London, she seeks to overcome her despair first in the women on Classical mythology, and then in the arms of the living.
"Buchanan has achieved that rare feat of writing a convincing novel about depression which manages, miraculously, not to be in itself depressing." —The Spectator
Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America.
What does it mean to give our attention to something? What does it mean to seek attention?
"Adam Phillips is that rarest of phenomena, a trained clinician who is also a sublime writer. Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored." —Observer
"This is one of the most riveting, assured and scorchingly original debuts I've ever read. Taddeo's beautifully written and unflinching portraits of desire allow her protagonists to be wholly human and wholly, blessedly complex. I can't imagine a scenario where this isn't one of the more important — and breathlessly debated — books of the year." —Dave Eggers
Zanzibar cooks a fine mushroom omelette,and he is a crow who wears his feathers well. At least he thought so, until a spectacled lizard knocks at his door, wanting to write an article about a remarkable person. Is Zanzibar remarkable? The lizard seems to doubt it. Zanzibar thinks: To be remarkable, I must achieve something incredible, an extraordinary feat. What will he do? An enjoyable early chapter book.
Imagination is the faculty that distinguishes homo sapiens most from other species, but just how do we form images of things that are not, and then how do we convert these into things that are?
A thoughtful, understated graphic novel. After a dangerous encounter riding the rails, Natasha chooses to show up on the doorstep of the family she abandoned years ago and finds an upset husband and a little girl yearning for a mother. Can someone who covets independence settle down?
"This is a remarkable graphic novel. Forsman and Radiguès seem to understand instinctively that while one person’s search for happiness may be the cause of another’s deep pain, accepting daily sadness as a kind of life tax won’t, in the end, make things better for anyone." —Guardian
Wheeler travelled across eight time zones, guided by the writers of the Golden Age: Pushkin to Tolstoy via Gogol and Turgenev.
Sixteen-year-old scholarship student Hetty was one of the first to show signs of the Tox. Over the last 18 months, she’s watched it ravage her classmates and teachers as they wait, quarantined within school grounds, for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and deliver a cure. The Tox affects everyone differently: Hetty’s right eye sealed itself shut; her best friend, Byatt, grew a second, exterior spine; Reese has a sharp, silver-scaled left hand and glowing hair. Why is this happening? What does this mean?
This is the story of Mattis, a mentally handicapped man who lives with and is cared for by his older sister, Hege. Within their isolated, lakeside existence, Mattis cannot make sense of his tangled thoughts, frightening apparitions, surges of emotion and clever insights. When a travelling lumberjack attracts Hege's affections, the disruption is too much for Mattis to bear. This spare Norwegian novel by the author of The Ice Palace sensitively captures the presence of the natural world, the prison of unfulfilled time and the fragility of the human mind.
Portraits are often painted to represent the power of the powerful. What does it mean when such portraits are destroyed, either by their subjects or by those who wish to undo their power?
A novel of the life of early 20th-century Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, acclaimed both before and after the Revolution.
Far up in the north is a blueberry-blue house with a grass roof, where Lisa and Nils live. One day a tourist arrives: Otto has cycled for months, maybe years, to visit his friends. Otto wants to do a spectacular painting of the Northern Lights to remember his visit, but he is from a hot country and it is very cold here, but he can’t paint for shivering so hard. His friends decide to knit him a jersey.
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Postcard Stories by Richard von Sturmer {Reviewed by STELLA}
Postcard Stories does all those things that books should. From the moment you spy the cover — a group of Filipino dancers in brightly checked frocks arranged in front of a smoking volcano — your curiosity will be piqued. It will also confound you a little and ultimately hook you in, not once, but several times over, as you investigate what it is. Richard von Sturmer has chosen 100 postcards from his collection, arranged them into thematic groups and added text (prose and verse), creating narrative dimensions that resonate on multiple levels. Postcard Stories is a gem of a book — charming, curious, and just a little strange. In his introduction, von Sturmer talks about his collecting habits, and his attraction to the unusual or odd. “My own interest in postcards lies elsewhere, in a more eccentric and even subversive realm where the postcard is appreciated for itself, for its own oddness, which transcends whatever scene or image it may represent.” He sees postcards as a portal to places and times, thinking of them as “cells in a giant, universal brain” and as “postcard dreamscapes”.Postcard Stories gives us an opportunity to share in these dreamscapes. The book is divided into three parts. The first part consists of postcard sequences (16 in total) with a corresponding verse. Each sequence is a group of four distinct postcards that von Sturmer feels resonate with each other — they are linked by a common element or theme. For example, in sequence 5, four postcards all containing monuments — statues — tell a story of escape and discovery. There are landscape images of deserts and roads to seemingly nowhere resonating together even as they are pulled from different places on the globe. There are strange groups of people participating in what might be tourist activities, and ancient wonders sitting alongside industrial haunts. The verse that accompanies these postcard sequences is sparse and cleverly composed, the narrative building between image and text constantly drawing us in, altering our perspective, our way of seeing. In the second part, von Sturmer has selected some individual postcards that stand alone in their oddness. Here he adds short prose pieces that let us look again at the images and notice so much more. In the final section, there is a short homage to postcard publisher John Hinde who would tell his photographers, “You can’t have enough sunsets.” Postcard Stories is initially delightful and witty, but it is ultimately this and more. It is an endlessly curious book that takes you into a realm of imagination and narrative playfulness. In these dreamscapes, you will find much to occupy your mind (and eye). |