 | Patience by Toby Litt {Reviewed by THOMAS} “The moon was proof to me I was in the world because I had never heard the Priest or the Sisters mention a moon in Hell,” states Elliott, confined to his wheelchair and to the first-floor hospital ward of an orphanage, his life a narrowly repetitive round of pains and incapacities, parked either facing the window or facing the calming white wall, incapable of much resembling speech. Trapped within the spastic body is a mind rich in unutterable language, a mind through overcoming boredom intensely observant through its senses of detail and nuance, acutely aware of the inner lives of others, bursting with an almost inconceivably large amount of knowledge which he uses to draw insights from his world in idiosyncratic and poetic ways. What sort of life is there for a mind without a body to carry it about and to enable it to communicate with others? “The nights at that time I most wanted to pass quickly were of course the slowest and the nights I most wanted to forget afterwards are those I can now remember in such absolute detail.” When Jim, mute and blind, arrives on the ward and demonstrates with his strong body a resistance, a resistance that Elliott is incapable of practising, to the strictures of the nuns, Elliott sees the possibility not only of a friendship of complementary capacities (or complementary incapacities (a sort of Beckettian ideal)) but also the opportunity to escape the ward by harnessing Elliott’s mind to Jim’s body, a stitching achieved with great patience. “Here is where a hero would become a hero by refusing to be anywhere but Here,” says Elliott in resistance to the despair and resignation that his disability would seem to demand. “It may have been my maddest decision to return to sanity when that sanity was frustration and boredom and the constant possibility of going mad in a far less pleasant way.” Litt does an excellent job of projecting himself into the mind of a narrator who is prodigiously capable of taking in but tragically incapable of giving out (“I had never assisted anyone whatsoever. I felt the atrocious selfishness of my mode of existence.”), a narrator whose relationship to time differs from that of a person capable of initiating action, and whose relationship to language differs from that of a person capable of contributing to a conversation (if occasionally Elliott’s vocabulary and knowledge seem wider than could have been achieved from a life of minimal stimulation, this somehow only serves to make Litt’s achievement more excellent). Elliott’s brief escape from the ward, his first ever self-determined act, ends with him lying injured beneath thorny bushes on the urine-smelling edge of a layby, watching horses in the nearby field running for the sake of running, is a memorable moment of beauty, a moment in which Elliott is at last part of and not separate from the world: “Nothing here or anywhere could be where it should not be. Even me.” |
>>Lose yourself/find yourself.
>>On the radio (with pictures).
>>The NZ song map (interactive version).
>>Chris McDowell on data visualisation and on what at atlas can do.
>>We Are Here has been long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. See what else has been listed.
>>Click and collect.
NEW RELEASES
Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti $36
Amid a political climate of right-wing, nationalist leadership, three very different women in the city of Calcutta find themselves gifted with magical powers that match their wildest dreams. There is one catch — the gifts come with a Faustian price. The Man Who Would Not See was long-listed for the Acorn Prize in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Chakraborti has embarked on one of the most interesting career trajectories seen in recent times." —The Sunday Guardian
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Raj reads from the book and discusses its context.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts $38
A fascinating history of Siberia as told through the pianos that have made their ways into houses there over the centuries.
"An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book." —Paul Theroux
>>A journey to the end of everything.
Actress by Anne Enright $35
Looking back on her mother's life and career as an actor, both in Ireland and in Hollywood, a woman finds herself reassessing her own life and her relationship with her parents.
"This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd." —Guardian
Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and me by Deirdre Bair $33
Becket and Beauvoir lived on essentially the same street, and, apparently, despised each other. Bair wrote incisive biographies of each. How did she juggle these personalities, and the different approaches she needed to take with each of them?
>>Bair talks about the book.
Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg $48
A beautifully drawn and thoughtful graphic novel about the imaginary world invented by the four Brontë siblings when they were children — and what happened to that world when its creators grew up and abandoned it. From the author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and The One Hundred Nights of Hero.
Humiliation by Paulina Flores $33
Short stories revealing new dimensions of often marginal life in Chile.
"In this impressive debut, nimbly translated by Megan McDowell, Flores explores the indignities of poverty, widespread in her native Chile. Like Alice Munro, Flores sparks empathy with a careful attention to details. Humanity, she makes clear, is bound together by a shared vulnerability." —Guardian
"If reading can feel like a hand reaching out and taking yours (as Alan Bennett memorably put it), it’s still rare to encounter a debut with a grip this sure. A number of stories are written from the perspective of children, and are so saturated with misunderstandings and swollen emotions that they really do transport you backwards. Flores perfectly captures how silly things and life-changingly serious ones can acquire the same weight for a child trying to make sense of a grown-up world. There’s a masterly steadiness to her writing: no flash or dash, but neat psychological insight and understated, sometimes drily funny storytelling. There are also some killer twists. For all that she eschews high drama, I still physically winced a couple of times." —Observer
Translation (Documents of contemporary art) edited by Sophie Wilkinson $55
The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture. Economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles, and the plight of refugees are now superimposed upon the intricacies of ancient and modern diasporas, generations of colonisation, and the transportation of slaves. This timely anthology considers translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation, empathy, and understanding disparate experiences. It explores the approaches of artists, poets, and theorists in negotiating increasingly protean identities—from the intrinsic intimacy of language, to translation's embedded structures of knowledge production and interaction, to its limitations of expression, and, ultimately, its importance in a world of multiple perspectives. Artists surveyed include: Meric Algun Ringborg, Geta Bratescu, Tanya Bruguera, Jesse Darling, Chto Delat, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Susan Hiller, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Shirin Neshat, Helio Oiticica, Pratchaya Phinthong, Kurt Schwitters, Yinka Shonibare, Mladen Stilinovic, Erika Tan, Kara Walker, Wu Tsang. Writers include: Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Sarat Maharaj, Martha Rosler, Bertrand Russell, Simon Sheikh, Gayatri Spivak, Hito Steyerl, Lawrence Venuti
Forever by Beatrice Alemagna $30
Beautiful illustrations with clever overlays show that we are surrounded by change, but the most important thing will last for ever.
We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and their forgotten battle for post-war Britain by Daniel Sonabend $43
Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain's homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organisations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. Fascinating (and appropriately priced).
>>Sabotage and street scuffles.
Grow Fruit and Vegetables in Pots: Planting advice and recipes from Great Dixter by Aaron Bertelsen $70
Container gardening, and cooking (also using containers (of another sort)). 50 delicious recipes; excellent photographs; New Zealand author.
Democracy May Not Exist, But we'll miss it when it's gone by Astra Taylor $33
Is democracy a means or an end? A process or a set of desired outcomes? What if the those outcomes, whatever they may be - peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry - can be achieved by non-democratic means? Or if an election leads to a terrible outcome? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Incisive. Urgent.
Comrade: An essay on political belonging by Jodi dean $35
In the twentieth century, people across the globe addressed each other as 'comrade'. Now, among the left, it's more common to hear talk of 'allies'. Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterised by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm.
Lives and Deaths by Leo Tolstoy $33
Short stories, newly translated by Boris Dralyuk. Includes the novella, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', together with shorter works 'Three Deaths', 'Pace-setter' and the fable-like 'Alyosha the Pot'.
Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt $25
"Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt. Her sentences dance with the elation of a brilliant intellect romping through a playground of ideas, and her prose is just as lively when engaged in the development of characters and story. Her wonderful new novel, “Memories of the Future,” is, among other things, a meditation on memory, selfhood and aging, but the plot is driven by the encounters of a present-day narrator with the young woman she was when she moved to New York City in August 1978. The drama that arises from these encounters is a reckoning between male privilege and female rage as timeless as “Medea” and as contemporary as #MeToo." —Washington Post
New paperback edition.
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom $35
Broom's remarkable book tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area in New Orleans. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina.
Granta 150: There Must Be Ways to Organise the World with Language $28
Fiction, reportage, poetry, photography. Carmen Maria Machado, Oliver Bullogh, Andrew O'Hagan, Sidik Fofana, Amy Leach, Mazen Maarouf, Jack Underwood, Che Yeun, Tommi Parrish, Michael Collins, Jay G. Ying, Iain Willms, Pwaangulongii Dauod, Noriko Hayashi.
Flesh-Coloured Dominoes by Zigmunds Skujiņš $25
When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen's officer husband's body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local Captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. What happens next? A darkly bizarre novel flitting between 18th century Baltic gentry and the narrator's life in contemporary Latvia.
The Writing Deck: 52 prompts for putting pen to paper by Emily Campbell and Harry Oulen $40
Prompts, constraints, exercises, suggestions — your writing year in a deck of cards.
Diary of a Murderer by Kim Young-Ha $23
In the titular story of this darkly funny collection, a one-time serial killer with dementia sets his sights on one last target: his daughter's boyfriend.
"Filled with the kind of sublime, galvanizing stories that strike like a lightning bolt, searing your nerves." —Nylon
"Kim delicately weaves philosophical debates on the nature of happiness and morality into his characters' inner narrations. Both jarring and atmospheric, this is a cerebrally satisfying collection." —Booklist
Meet Me in Buenos Aires by Marlene Hobsbawm $35
Recounts her hugely eventful and various life, especially with her husband, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, often under constant scrutiny by MI5.
The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson $23
Could there be a better guide to the streets, stories, histories and cultural depths of Belfast than the author of Shamrock Tea and Fishing for Amber?
Identity and Involvement: Auckland Jewry into the 21st century edited by Ann Gluckman $50
This, the third volume of Gluckman's monumental record of 180 years of Jewish life in Auckland (and wider New Zealand), gathers family and individual stories of migration and identity. Contributors include Max Cryer, Sir Peter Gluckman, Walter Hirsh, Juliet Moses, Professor Paul Moon, Dame Lesley Max, Bob Narev, David Galler, Diana Wichtel, Judge David Robinson, Deb Filler and Maria Collins.
Radicalised by Cory Doctorow $23
Four dystopian sci-fi novellas set in a near future and exploring issues of migration and toxic economic and technological stratification.
Puligny-Montrachet: Journal of a village in Burgundy by Simon Loftus $33
Loftus explores the mystery of how seven and a half acres of impoverished soil became the most precious agricultural land on earth, producing the grandest of all white wines: Puligny-Montrachet.
An Atlas of Geographical Wonders: From mountaintops to riverbeds by Gilles Palsky, Jean-Marc Besse, Philippe Grand and Jean-Christophe Bailly $100
An outstanding selection of comparative maps and tableaux, mostly drawn from nineteenth century publications. Endlessly wonderful.
On Flowers: Advice from an accidental florist by Amy Merrick $85
"I wanted the book to feel like this delightful collection of surprises, where you wouldn’t quite know what was coming next, a bit like a classic 1950s flower arranging manual but also a scrapbook of inspiration and ideas." —Amy Merrick
>>An interview with Amy Merrick.
Speak Italian: The fine art of the gesture by Bruno Munari $30
With this superbly designed and photographed "supplement to the Italian dictionary" you will learn what Italians are saying with their hands — and what this says about them.
>>How to talk without using words.
Amid a political climate of right-wing, nationalist leadership, three very different women in the city of Calcutta find themselves gifted with magical powers that match their wildest dreams. There is one catch — the gifts come with a Faustian price. The Man Who Would Not See was long-listed for the Acorn Prize in the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Chakraborti has embarked on one of the most interesting career trajectories seen in recent times." —The Sunday Guardian
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Raj reads from the book and discusses its context.
A fascinating history of Siberia as told through the pianos that have made their ways into houses there over the centuries.
"An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book." —Paul Theroux
>>A journey to the end of everything.
Looking back on her mother's life and career as an actor, both in Ireland and in Hollywood, a woman finds herself reassessing her own life and her relationship with her parents.
"This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd." —Guardian
Becket and Beauvoir lived on essentially the same street, and, apparently, despised each other. Bair wrote incisive biographies of each. How did she juggle these personalities, and the different approaches she needed to take with each of them?
>>Bair talks about the book.
A beautifully drawn and thoughtful graphic novel about the imaginary world invented by the four Brontë siblings when they were children — and what happened to that world when its creators grew up and abandoned it. From the author of The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and The One Hundred Nights of Hero.
Short stories revealing new dimensions of often marginal life in Chile.
"In this impressive debut, nimbly translated by Megan McDowell, Flores explores the indignities of poverty, widespread in her native Chile. Like Alice Munro, Flores sparks empathy with a careful attention to details. Humanity, she makes clear, is bound together by a shared vulnerability." —Guardian
"If reading can feel like a hand reaching out and taking yours (as Alan Bennett memorably put it), it’s still rare to encounter a debut with a grip this sure. A number of stories are written from the perspective of children, and are so saturated with misunderstandings and swollen emotions that they really do transport you backwards. Flores perfectly captures how silly things and life-changingly serious ones can acquire the same weight for a child trying to make sense of a grown-up world. There’s a masterly steadiness to her writing: no flash or dash, but neat psychological insight and understated, sometimes drily funny storytelling. There are also some killer twists. For all that she eschews high drama, I still physically winced a couple of times." —Observer
The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture. Economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles, and the plight of refugees are now superimposed upon the intricacies of ancient and modern diasporas, generations of colonisation, and the transportation of slaves. This timely anthology considers translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation, empathy, and understanding disparate experiences. It explores the approaches of artists, poets, and theorists in negotiating increasingly protean identities—from the intrinsic intimacy of language, to translation's embedded structures of knowledge production and interaction, to its limitations of expression, and, ultimately, its importance in a world of multiple perspectives. Artists surveyed include: Meric Algun Ringborg, Geta Bratescu, Tanya Bruguera, Jesse Darling, Chto Delat, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Susan Hiller, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Shirin Neshat, Helio Oiticica, Pratchaya Phinthong, Kurt Schwitters, Yinka Shonibare, Mladen Stilinovic, Erika Tan, Kara Walker, Wu Tsang. Writers include: Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Sarat Maharaj, Martha Rosler, Bertrand Russell, Simon Sheikh, Gayatri Spivak, Hito Steyerl, Lawrence Venuti
Beautiful illustrations with clever overlays show that we are surrounded by change, but the most important thing will last for ever.
Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain's homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organisations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. Fascinating (and appropriately priced).
>>Sabotage and street scuffles.
Container gardening, and cooking (also using containers (of another sort)). 50 delicious recipes; excellent photographs; New Zealand author.
Is democracy a means or an end? A process or a set of desired outcomes? What if the those outcomes, whatever they may be - peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry - can be achieved by non-democratic means? Or if an election leads to a terrible outcome? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Incisive. Urgent.
In the twentieth century, people across the globe addressed each other as 'comrade'. Now, among the left, it's more common to hear talk of 'allies'. Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterised by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm.
Short stories, newly translated by Boris Dralyuk. Includes the novella, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', together with shorter works 'Three Deaths', 'Pace-setter' and the fable-like 'Alyosha the Pot'.
"Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt. Her sentences dance with the elation of a brilliant intellect romping through a playground of ideas, and her prose is just as lively when engaged in the development of characters and story. Her wonderful new novel, “Memories of the Future,” is, among other things, a meditation on memory, selfhood and aging, but the plot is driven by the encounters of a present-day narrator with the young woman she was when she moved to New York City in August 1978. The drama that arises from these encounters is a reckoning between male privilege and female rage as timeless as “Medea” and as contemporary as #MeToo." —Washington Post
New paperback edition.
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom $35
Broom's remarkable book tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area in New Orleans. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina.
Fiction, reportage, poetry, photography. Carmen Maria Machado, Oliver Bullogh, Andrew O'Hagan, Sidik Fofana, Amy Leach, Mazen Maarouf, Jack Underwood, Che Yeun, Tommi Parrish, Michael Collins, Jay G. Ying, Iain Willms, Pwaangulongii Dauod, Noriko Hayashi.
When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen's officer husband's body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local Captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. What happens next? A darkly bizarre novel flitting between 18th century Baltic gentry and the narrator's life in contemporary Latvia.
Prompts, constraints, exercises, suggestions — your writing year in a deck of cards.
In the titular story of this darkly funny collection, a one-time serial killer with dementia sets his sights on one last target: his daughter's boyfriend.
"Filled with the kind of sublime, galvanizing stories that strike like a lightning bolt, searing your nerves." —Nylon
"Kim delicately weaves philosophical debates on the nature of happiness and morality into his characters' inner narrations. Both jarring and atmospheric, this is a cerebrally satisfying collection." —Booklist
Recounts her hugely eventful and various life, especially with her husband, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, often under constant scrutiny by MI5.
Could there be a better guide to the streets, stories, histories and cultural depths of Belfast than the author of Shamrock Tea and Fishing for Amber?
This, the third volume of Gluckman's monumental record of 180 years of Jewish life in Auckland (and wider New Zealand), gathers family and individual stories of migration and identity. Contributors include Max Cryer, Sir Peter Gluckman, Walter Hirsh, Juliet Moses, Professor Paul Moon, Dame Lesley Max, Bob Narev, David Galler, Diana Wichtel, Judge David Robinson, Deb Filler and Maria Collins.
Four dystopian sci-fi novellas set in a near future and exploring issues of migration and toxic economic and technological stratification.
Loftus explores the mystery of how seven and a half acres of impoverished soil became the most precious agricultural land on earth, producing the grandest of all white wines: Puligny-Montrachet.
An outstanding selection of comparative maps and tableaux, mostly drawn from nineteenth century publications. Endlessly wonderful.
"I wanted the book to feel like this delightful collection of surprises, where you wouldn’t quite know what was coming next, a bit like a classic 1950s flower arranging manual but also a scrapbook of inspiration and ideas." —Amy Merrick
>>An interview with Amy Merrick.
With this superbly designed and photographed "supplement to the Italian dictionary" you will learn what Italians are saying with their hands — and what this says about them.
>>How to talk without using words.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #165 (15.2.20)
Read our newsletter. Find out what we've been reading, about upcoming events, about our Book of the Week, and about some of the books that have just arrived on our shelves.
 | Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica by Rebecca Priestley {Reviewed by STELLA} What is it about Antarctica that both repels and fascinates us? It’s the place of, for most of us, the unknown: a dangerous, fragile and expansive place; a place of exploration and on-going discovery, one where you can now more easily ‘tourist’ to. In Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, science writer Rebecca Priestley takes us with her on her journeys into the great white terrain. Built around her three trips to the ice, the first in 2011 and the final one in 2018, we are not only taken on three very different trips but also travel alongside Priestley with her increasing knowledge of the science that is being carried out there, and her fears and concerns, personal and professional. This is not just a science book, although it will satisfy the rational and fact-acquiring reader; this is an appreciation, a very human and often humorous one, of those who work on the ice, and an admiration of their painstaking work: data collection, analysis and projections. It is a nod to early explorers and their fortitude, as well as an awareness of the cultural significance of Antarctica — its role in our imagination, and through the work (text and art) that has emerged from the Artists to Antarctica programme which has been running since 1957. Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica draws us in due to Priestley’s deft observations of the landscape and the people. We, with her, feel despairing and hopeful, concerned and elated. And while the descriptions of the ‘cold’ and how to pee on the ice will become repetitive, this is all part of our immersion in this landscape. Anxiety runs like a constant companion throughout the book — Rebecca Priestley’s anxiety, I think, is a hound bounding beside her — sometimes distracted by prey in the distance but always returning to haunt. She is scared of flying, something that several successful journeys to the ice does not diminish. She is anxious about getting cold and disorientated, a real and constant concern for an extreme climate; and she is anxious in the greater sense about our future and the climate changes occurring — a real and constant threat. Yet, still this fascination with this extreme place, with the wonder that is the earth and the way in which we live on it. Priestley writes with a direct style that will appeal to a wide readership — to anyone who wonders what it would be like visit the ice and to anyone concerned about our future — and she asks questions of herself and her reader about our human role in fragile ecologies. |
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The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” The Writing of the Disaster concerns the effect upon language, upon literature, of what Blanchot (thinking of the Holocaust and Hiroshima (though this book can also be 'about' climate emergency or any unassimilable personal or collective trauma)) calls the disaster: something beyond the reach of language yet sucking language towards it to the ultimate nullification of the meaning that language is usually thought to bear. The disaster does not concern itself with content, the disaster possesses the writing and is not and cannot be the subject of the writing. The writing of the disaster is not so much writing about the disaster as writing in the force-field of the disaster: The Writing of the Disaster concerns itself with the ways in which trauma takes ownership of writing. The ‘of’ in the title signals possession in the same way, perhaps, that all objects possess their subjects and by this relationship contend with them for agency. The disaster is a grammatical phenomenon, a loss of agency through grammar, a relation between elements rather than an element itself. Blanchot is remarkable for identifying the shifts of agency that result from grammatical alteration. It is in grammar, perhaps, that our problems lie, and it is in grammar, perhaps, that we must agitate for their solution. But it is in the nature of the disaster to protect itself with our passivity. “We are passive with respect to the disaster, but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” The disaster robs the writer of agency, cauterises meaning, averts all gazes and renders the usual useless. As Blanchot demonstrates, writing in the ambit of the disaster can only proceed in fragments. Failure and incompletion are both results of and assaults upon the impossible. “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” When writing of the reading of the writing of the disaster, the semantic degeneration of the disaster exercises itself even through the intervening writer, rendering them transparent. To re-read a passage of Blanchot is to read without recognition, to entertain thoughts quite different from, and rightly quite different from, those entertained on the first reading, or prior readings, of that passage. Thinking about reading about Blanchot writing about how the disaster affects everything but cannot be perceived, I write, “The disaster is that no distinction can be made between disaster and the absence of disaster,” but I cannot determine where this sentence comes from. I cannot find it in the text. Whose thoughts are those thoughts thought when reading? If the thoughts cannot be located in the text, are they then the thoughts of the reader? If the thoughts would not have been thought by the reader without the text, to what extent are they the writer’s thoughts? (Do not ask if these thoughts are in fact thoughts. Let us call thought that which does the work of thought, regardless.) Blanchot proceeds in a fragmentary style, aphoristic but without the sense of completion aphorisms provide, he writes koans — or antikoans — that do not prepare the mind for enlightenment so much as relieve the mind of the possibility of, and even the concept of, enlightenment. Taken in small doses Blanchot is full of meaning but as the dose increases the meaning becomes less, until at the point of his complete oeuvre, I extrapolate, Blanchot means nothing at all. This liberation from semantic burden is entirely in accord with Blanchot’s project.
|
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
>>Read Stella's review.
>>The curse of memory.
>>Power and metaphor.
>>How The Memory Police makes you see.
>>Click and collect.
>>Other books by Yoko Ogawa.
NEW RELEASES
Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah $37
For two years, 28-year-old Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But Ayami has just been made redundant, and thinking about the future feels like staring into the unknown. Her life moves forward, but in multiple parallel strands. The characters are propelled forward by their actions, yet also this throws them into a chaotic state which is like a fever with its twin traits of clarity and disorientation.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>"I was practising my typing and wrote my first story by accident."
2000ft Above Worry Level by Eamonn Marra $30
"Eamonn Marra writes about trying to grow into a complete human being in a world that wants only selected parts of you. He does it better than anyone I can think of. His stories are thoughtful and introspective, but each contains a wallop of insight that comes from forgetting that anyone but you exists, and looking up to suddenly see someone close to you in a flash of complex vulnerability." —Annaleese Jochems
>>"When I was nineteen I started a blog about my depression. It was the founding of my brand."
>>At the Cavern Club.
Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride $33
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. A hotel room is a no-place that could be any place. When there, the occupant has only the forces of their past to provide momentum. Destabilised by loss, the protagonist becomes increasingly uncertain of her identity.
"Strange Hotel evokes a precariousness that flits between the physical, the mental and the linguistic — specifically, the narrator’s identity as a woman. Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying." —The Guardian
>>Read Thomas's review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
Patience by Toby Litt $35
Elliott is something of a genius. More than that, Elliott is an ideal friend, and to know him is to adore him. But few people do know Elliott, because he is also stuck. He lives in a wheelchair in an orphanage. It's 1979. Elliott is forced to spend his days in an empty corridor, either gazing out of the window at the birds in a tree or staring into a white wall wherever the Catholic Sisters who run the ward have decided to park him. So when Jim, blind and mute but also headstrong, arrives on the ward and begins to defy the Sisters' restrictive rules, Elliott finally sees a chance for escape.
"Fresh, unusual and completely charming." —The Irish Times
“A genuine revelation.” —The TLS
>>Read an extract.
Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer $36
A devastatingly well-written set of short stories focussing on the experiences of persons living on the margins of contemporary German society. Meyer's spare and clean prose is unsentimental, yet each story packs an emotional wallop.
>>Read an extract.
An Apartment on Uranus by Paul B. Preciado $36
Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named after a Greek deity. It is also the inspiration for Uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 to define the 'third sex' and the rights of those who 'love differently'. Following in Ulrichs's footsteps, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he can live, free of the modern power taxonomies of race, gender, class or disability. In this bold and transgressive book, Preciado recounts his transformation from Beatriz into Paul B, and examines other processes of political, cultural and sexual transition, reflecting on socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the criminalisation of migrants, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role artists and museums might play in the writing of a new social contract.
"Paul B. Preciado has the magic ability to fire off imperatives that don’t feel bossy, but rather incite us to join him in whatever crackling energy, urgent curiosity, and dynamic nomadism is flowing through him. Reading these chronological missives offers the real pleasure of Preciado’s company in time, and inspires us not just to stay with our trouble, but to greet it with unstoppable speech, complex solidarity, glitter, and defiance." —Maggie Nelson
>>Read an extract.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai $45
"With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book—Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book." —László Krasznahorkai
"Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is not a conclusion to Krasznahorkai’s quartet, but it is a completion. It is his longest book by some measure, his funniest, and probably his darkest. It draws together and illuminates its predecessors. The vision is complete, even as its constituent pieces fall apart." —David Auerbach
>>The spider web and the abyss.
>>Obsessive fictions.
>>"I thought that real life, true life was elsewhere."
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado $37
Machado's devastating (and devastatingly well-written) memoir of a relationship gone wrong covers wide ground, exploring societal mechanisms of psychological abuse while remaining both playful and grounded in the personal and particular. Along with Her Body and Other Parties, Machado is claiming her own corner in the field of contemporary queer literature.
Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove $25
"The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." —Hera Lindsay Bird
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth $23
When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different. The novel has caused immense controversy in Norway when the author's siblings 'revealed' that the book is autobiographical. "Unsettling and beautifully constructed." —Guardian
>>"I won't talk about my family. I'm in enough trouble."
Escape Routes by Naomi Ishiguro $40
A space-obsessed child conjures up a vortex in his mother's airing cupboard. A musician finds her friendship with a flock of birds opens up unexpected possibilities. A rat catcher, summoned to a decaying royal palace, is plunged into a battle for the throne of a ruined kingdom. Two newlyweds find themselves inhibited by the arrival in their lives of an outsized and watchful stuffed bear.
"Stories that start like delicate webs and finish like unbreakable wire traps." —Neil Gaiman
"A writer whose voice I hope to be following for many years to come." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
The Living Days by Ananda Devi $34
A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, an elderly white woman, and Cub, a British-Jamaican boy, and drives her crumbling world into heightened delusion. The two struggle to keep their footing as white supremacy, desperation and class conflict collide on the streets of London.
"Devi is alert to the ways in which social forces, such as racism and ageism, are reshaping London's already complex post-colonial landscape, and her fluid, poetic language memorably conjures a union of two outcasts." —The New Yorker
"A demanding and important book by a true artist and a great writer'." —Lara Pawson (author of This Is the Place To Be)
>>Read an extract.
>>Read another extract.
>>"If there is a characteristic that unites all my protagonists, it is their ambiguity."
>>How does a place become a home?
>>Read Thomas's review of Eve Out of Her Ruins.
The Music of Time: Poetry in the twentieth century by John Burnside $60
A wonderfully idiosyncratic, wide-ranging, acute and vital consideration of the sweep of a century as snagged upon poets whose calling made them incapable of 'going with the flow'.
"Burnside's thoroughly human prose makes him a great companion and guide. As this inspiring, persuasive book argues the case for poetry it comes close to being poetry itself." —Fiona Sampson
"A rich and pugnacious plea for the necessity of poetry which takes in autobiography, medieval Swiss irrigation channels, the viewpoint in Romantic landscape, Rilke's itineraries, cruising with Hart Crane, attacks by zoo animals." —Jonathan Meades
New Transgender Blockbusters by Oscar Upperton $25
This first collection introduces a poet reconstituting the ordinary as strange and activating hitherto passive portions of our daily lives.
Don't Look at Me Like That by Diana Athill $23
A new edition of Athill's only novel, about love, betrayal, and a young woman finding herself in 1950s London.
How to Read a Suit: A guide to changing men's fashion, from the 17th to the 20th century by Lydia Edwards $55
Improve your sartorial literacy. Well illustrated and full of good information.
This is Your Real Name by Elizabeth Morton $28
Underneath the surface of the contemporary world of Pokémon, The Cosby Show and hospital cubicles, the reader of these poems is drawn into a dreamscape of creeks and bogs, a fiery meadow and the guts of the sea. A blindman circles a Minotaur; a black horse rides through the pages.
>>Also available: Wolf.
How to Argue With a Racist: History, science, race and reality by Adam Rutherford $35
Examines the social constructs behind the perceived idea of 'race' and shows the factual and systemic flaws in the thinking behind so-called 'race science'.
>>Read also Superior by Angela Saini.
>>A scientific toolkit to separate fact from myth.
A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order by Judith Flanders $40
Our most widespread system of ordering is also — seemingly — the most arbitrary.
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey $38
"Are you a coward or a librarian?" Gailey's novel reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer librarian identity. Fun.
"A good old-fashioned horse opera for the 22nd century. Gunslinger librarians of the apocalypse are on a mission to spread public health, decency, and the revolution." —Charles Stross
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann $38
Kehlmann's resetting of the adventures of the folkloric prankster Tyll Ulenspiegel during the Thirty Years' War delivers a book that is funny, frightening, dirty, informative, both alien and familiar, and completely engrossing.
"This energetic historical fiction, featuring a folkloric jester in a violent, superstitious Europe, is the work of an immense talent. It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times." —Guardian
>>Hmm.
>>Hmm #2.
For two years, 28-year-old Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But Ayami has just been made redundant, and thinking about the future feels like staring into the unknown. Her life moves forward, but in multiple parallel strands. The characters are propelled forward by their actions, yet also this throws them into a chaotic state which is like a fever with its twin traits of clarity and disorientation.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>"I was practising my typing and wrote my first story by accident."
"Eamonn Marra writes about trying to grow into a complete human being in a world that wants only selected parts of you. He does it better than anyone I can think of. His stories are thoughtful and introspective, but each contains a wallop of insight that comes from forgetting that anyone but you exists, and looking up to suddenly see someone close to you in a flash of complex vulnerability." —Annaleese Jochems
>>"When I was nineteen I started a blog about my depression. It was the founding of my brand."
>>At the Cavern Club.
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. A hotel room is a no-place that could be any place. When there, the occupant has only the forces of their past to provide momentum. Destabilised by loss, the protagonist becomes increasingly uncertain of her identity.
"Strange Hotel evokes a precariousness that flits between the physical, the mental and the linguistic — specifically, the narrator’s identity as a woman. Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying." —The Guardian
>>Read Thomas's review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
Elliott is something of a genius. More than that, Elliott is an ideal friend, and to know him is to adore him. But few people do know Elliott, because he is also stuck. He lives in a wheelchair in an orphanage. It's 1979. Elliott is forced to spend his days in an empty corridor, either gazing out of the window at the birds in a tree or staring into a white wall wherever the Catholic Sisters who run the ward have decided to park him. So when Jim, blind and mute but also headstrong, arrives on the ward and begins to defy the Sisters' restrictive rules, Elliott finally sees a chance for escape.
"Fresh, unusual and completely charming." —The Irish Times
“A genuine revelation.” —The TLS
>>Read an extract.
A devastatingly well-written set of short stories focussing on the experiences of persons living on the margins of contemporary German society. Meyer's spare and clean prose is unsentimental, yet each story packs an emotional wallop.
>>Read an extract.
Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named after a Greek deity. It is also the inspiration for Uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 to define the 'third sex' and the rights of those who 'love differently'. Following in Ulrichs's footsteps, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he can live, free of the modern power taxonomies of race, gender, class or disability. In this bold and transgressive book, Preciado recounts his transformation from Beatriz into Paul B, and examines other processes of political, cultural and sexual transition, reflecting on socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the criminalisation of migrants, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role artists and museums might play in the writing of a new social contract.
"Paul B. Preciado has the magic ability to fire off imperatives that don’t feel bossy, but rather incite us to join him in whatever crackling energy, urgent curiosity, and dynamic nomadism is flowing through him. Reading these chronological missives offers the real pleasure of Preciado’s company in time, and inspires us not just to stay with our trouble, but to greet it with unstoppable speech, complex solidarity, glitter, and defiance." —Maggie Nelson
>>Read an extract.
"With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book—Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book." —László Krasznahorkai
"Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is not a conclusion to Krasznahorkai’s quartet, but it is a completion. It is his longest book by some measure, his funniest, and probably his darkest. It draws together and illuminates its predecessors. The vision is complete, even as its constituent pieces fall apart." —David Auerbach
>>The spider web and the abyss.
>>Obsessive fictions.
>>"I thought that real life, true life was elsewhere."
Machado's devastating (and devastatingly well-written) memoir of a relationship gone wrong covers wide ground, exploring societal mechanisms of psychological abuse while remaining both playful and grounded in the personal and particular. Along with Her Body and Other Parties, Machado is claiming her own corner in the field of contemporary queer literature.
"The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." —Hera Lindsay Bird
When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different. The novel has caused immense controversy in Norway when the author's siblings 'revealed' that the book is autobiographical. "Unsettling and beautifully constructed." —Guardian
>>"I won't talk about my family. I'm in enough trouble."
A space-obsessed child conjures up a vortex in his mother's airing cupboard. A musician finds her friendship with a flock of birds opens up unexpected possibilities. A rat catcher, summoned to a decaying royal palace, is plunged into a battle for the throne of a ruined kingdom. Two newlyweds find themselves inhibited by the arrival in their lives of an outsized and watchful stuffed bear.
"Stories that start like delicate webs and finish like unbreakable wire traps." —Neil Gaiman
"A writer whose voice I hope to be following for many years to come." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, an elderly white woman, and Cub, a British-Jamaican boy, and drives her crumbling world into heightened delusion. The two struggle to keep their footing as white supremacy, desperation and class conflict collide on the streets of London.
"Devi is alert to the ways in which social forces, such as racism and ageism, are reshaping London's already complex post-colonial landscape, and her fluid, poetic language memorably conjures a union of two outcasts." —The New Yorker
"A demanding and important book by a true artist and a great writer'." —Lara Pawson (author of This Is the Place To Be)
>>Read an extract.
>>Read another extract.
>>"If there is a characteristic that unites all my protagonists, it is their ambiguity."
>>How does a place become a home?
>>Read Thomas's review of Eve Out of Her Ruins.
A wonderfully idiosyncratic, wide-ranging, acute and vital consideration of the sweep of a century as snagged upon poets whose calling made them incapable of 'going with the flow'.
"Burnside's thoroughly human prose makes him a great companion and guide. As this inspiring, persuasive book argues the case for poetry it comes close to being poetry itself." —Fiona Sampson
"A rich and pugnacious plea for the necessity of poetry which takes in autobiography, medieval Swiss irrigation channels, the viewpoint in Romantic landscape, Rilke's itineraries, cruising with Hart Crane, attacks by zoo animals." —Jonathan Meades
This first collection introduces a poet reconstituting the ordinary as strange and activating hitherto passive portions of our daily lives.
A new edition of Athill's only novel, about love, betrayal, and a young woman finding herself in 1950s London.
Improve your sartorial literacy. Well illustrated and full of good information.
This is Your Real Name by Elizabeth Morton $28
Underneath the surface of the contemporary world of Pokémon, The Cosby Show and hospital cubicles, the reader of these poems is drawn into a dreamscape of creeks and bogs, a fiery meadow and the guts of the sea. A blindman circles a Minotaur; a black horse rides through the pages.
>>Also available: Wolf.
Examines the social constructs behind the perceived idea of 'race' and shows the factual and systemic flaws in the thinking behind so-called 'race science'.
>>Read also Superior by Angela Saini.
>>A scientific toolkit to separate fact from myth.
Our most widespread system of ordering is also — seemingly — the most arbitrary.
"Are you a coward or a librarian?" Gailey's novel reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer librarian identity. Fun.
"A good old-fashioned horse opera for the 22nd century. Gunslinger librarians of the apocalypse are on a mission to spread public health, decency, and the revolution." —Charles Stross
Kehlmann's resetting of the adventures of the folkloric prankster Tyll Ulenspiegel during the Thirty Years' War delivers a book that is funny, frightening, dirty, informative, both alien and familiar, and completely engrossing.
"This energetic historical fiction, featuring a folkloric jester in a violent, superstitious Europe, is the work of an immense talent. It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times." —Guardian
>>Hmm.
>>Hmm #2.
 | Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah {Reviewed by STELLA} Untold Night and Day is a surreal two-day looped tale. We meet Ayami on her final day of work at the small, only and virtually unknown audio theatre in Seoul. It’s mid-summer and there is a heat-wave. The last visitors to the theatre are a group of high school students who are studying the play, a man who Ayami presumes is their teacher, and a visually impaired girl. The play is The Blind Owl by Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat, a book Ayami is currently reading and discussing with her friend and German teacher, Yeoni. From the first page, Suah creates an unease. Ayami tells the director about the audio that turns itself on sometimes — what she believes is a radio, and the voices remind her of the shipping news in their tone and texture. Ayami has been an actor but, unable to find work, she has been in the menial role at the theatre for two years. Now, she is about to be made redundant and this uncertainty is played out in the heat of a day and a night. As she goes to leave the theatre for the last time she is confronted by a strange occurrence. A man is on the other side of the glass door, seemingly mad, desperately trying to communicate with her. Despite the glass, she feels as though she can hear him. She can lip-read and what she deduces it that he wants revenge, but what for and why is unknown to her. This stranger seems to know her, but she does not recognise him. The man, Buha, has his own story that runs parallel to Ayami’s, and he is tenuously linked to her by a connection with Yeoni. In his mind, Ayami is a the poet-woman and his obsession with this woman disrupts his perspective. There are further references to poets later — Ayami must meet a foreign poet at the airport, the director goes to a poetry reading, and there is a poet's exhibition held in the now ex-audio theatre. After Buha is taken away by security guards, Ayami goes to meet the director at a ‘blackout’ restaurant where you eat in the dark — your senses of touch and taste enhanced and the waiters are all blind. It is as if the writer wants us to turn off our expectations of what a conventional novel is and tune in other antennae to navigate our way through Untold Night and Day. Here you have the groundwork for the novel — a place where dream and reality are superimposed, where there is a stretching of time, as well as a concentration of repeated actions. This makes the text both clever and confusing, so much so that I felt at times the puzzle was still to be solved if solving it was the aim. Suah uses a repetitive motif — repeated descriptions of characters, multiple roles, repeated lines, repeated but slightly adjusted actions, objects and images that reoccur (a white bus, a statue with a raised arm (sometimes a man), the book called The Blind Owl, barking dogs) — to superimpose the linked dimensions: all happenings are valid and real, yet surreal and dream-like. The characters are propelled forward by their actions, yet also this throws them into chaos: a chaotic state which is like a fever with its twin traits of clarity and disorientation. Suah’s writing is intriguing and mind-bending — be ready to be taken somewhere else. |
 |
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Does anything that happens extinguish by the fact of happening all the things that could have happened in its place (extinguishing thereby also all the things that could have been going to happen as a result of any of those things)? Whether everything that can happen does happen (each possibility in its own universe) may be a matter of serious discussion among quantum physicists and multiversalists but it is self-evident to writers and readers of fiction and forms the basis of their shared practice. In Forest Dark, a novelist named Nicole, who evidently shares the memories, circumstances and history of the author (at least up until the moment the book is written), despairs both about her relationship with the father of her children and about her seeming inability to write another novel. “I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and in my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give things shape at all.” She despairs of the novelistic conventions that bind both writer and reader, obscuring greater with lesser truths. “Chaos is the truth the narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its deliberate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.” One day Nicole has the sensation that she is already in her house, that she is a double of herself, and leaves New York to stay in the brutalist Hilton hotel in Tel Aviv, a place she had stayed many times in her childhood, ostensibly to start writing her novel. She meets an enigmatic retired academic (or Mossad agent), who convinces her of the possibility that Franz Kafka did not die in Austria in 1924 but emigrated to Palestine and lived out his life quietly and pseudonymously as a gardener. Nicole recognises that this alternative history is fraught with implausibilities, but “between the two stories of Kafka’s life and death, the one Friedman had drawn struck me as having the most beautiful shape — more complex but also more subtle, and so closer to the truth. In the light of it, the familiar story now seemed clumsy, overblown, and steeped in cliché.” Soon she resigns herself to being driven by Friedman into the desert, with a suitcase seemingly containing the unpublished Kafka papers (that at the time of the novel were in the possession of Kafka’s friend and de facto literary executor Max Brod’s secretary’s daughters and the subject of a complex court case concerning ownership (of Kafka as much as of the papers)). The chapters of Nicole’s first person account are alternated with those concerning Jules Epstein, a prominent and wealthy New York lawyer, who, following the deaths of his parents, leaves his wife and his practice, sells off his art collection and travels to the Tel Aviv Hilton, ostensibly to fund a fitting memorial to his parents if he can find something worth funding (trying to overcompensate, perhaps, for the hatred he feels for his parents but cannot admit even to himself). Like Nicole, he has been accustomed to living in an active mode: “All his life he had turned what wasn’t into what was, hadn’t he? He had pressed what did not and could not exist into bright existence.” And, also like Nicole, his progress through the novel is characterised and enabled by his relinquishment of this active mode, relinquishment leading to the desert and dissolution. There are many resonances between the two strands of the novel, and the reader wonders whether perhaps the characters might meet (though it is likely that they inhabit parallel universes rather than a shared universe), or whether the third-person Epstein thread has been written by the Nicole character in the other thread (though it is likely that both the Nicole thread and the Epstein thread were written by the Nicole from whom the Nicole of the Nicole thread split at the time the novel was begun (well, obviously, we know this to be the case)). All this makes for a wonderfully supple and inventive (and often funny) exploration of the possibilities of fiction. Krauss is ambivalent about fiction in the same way that she feels the ambivalences of her Jewishness: tradition, expectation and understanding are forms of binding, losses of freedom, traps, but the struggle to be free of tradition, of expectation, of understanding, to break the binding, to invert the trap, to unmake and remake, are also inherent in being a writer and a Jew.
|
>>A unique world view exists in the structure of a language.
>>Te reo's different take on place and time (one of David's series of columns in the Nelson Mail).
>>Click and collect.
>>Other Māori resources at VOLUME.
>>Where to learn te reo.
>>Some of David Kārena-Holmes's poetry books.
>>An extract from From the Antipodes.
NEW RELEASES
Te Reo Māori: The basics explained by David Kārena-Holmes $35
The use of te reo Māori in daily New Zealand life is snowballing, as is demand for resources to make learning the language efficient and enjoyable. This book helps answer that demand. Here in simple terms is a thorough guide to the building blocks of grammar in te reo, showing how to create phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The book employs real-life examples to illustrate how Māori grammar works day to day, and draws on David Kārena-Holmes's decades of experience teaching and writing about Māori language.
>>Hear David talk at 2 PM this Saturday (8 February) at the Nelson Public Library Te Whare Mātauranga o Whakatū in Halifax Street.
Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman $35
Triggered by her reading of Woolf's Orlando, Aline, an academic and Proust specialist, finds herself suddenly transferred into the body of a young man sitting opposite her at a cafe. From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men, the novel is a subtle, insightful and funny exploration of androgyny, projection, and psychological and literary doubles.
"Jacqueline Harpman displays incredible confidence in juggling identities and meshing together yearnings and phobias, fantasies and frustrations." —l'Express
>>Read Stella's review of I Who Have Never Known Men.
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell $35
A compelling novel exploring the emotional life of an American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria.
"An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel — Garth Greenwell writes like no one else." —Eimear McBride
"Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth." —Lisa Taddeo
"Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex-locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradations, our sweetness, confusion, and rage." —Sheila Heti
Greenwood by Michael Christie $37
A multigenerational family story in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
Flèche by Mary Jean Chan $28
Much like the fencer who must constantly read and respond to her opponent's tactics during a fencing bout, this debut collection by Mary Jean Chan deftly examines relationships at once conflictual and tender. Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in epee, a competitive sport of the poet's teenage and young adult years. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') in public and private spaces.
Winner of the 2019 Costa Award for Poetry.
>>Parry riposte.
>>Fleche attack!
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau $28
If you could go back in time and see any band play, what would you choose? This novel provides it characters with the opportunity to do just that, but when the time machine delivers one of its clients a thousand years too early, things begin to get complicated.
Here in the Real World by Sara Pennypacker $17
An introverted boy and a tough, secretive girl fight to save an abandoned section from being sold in this children's novel from the author of Pax.
Big Mamma's Cucina Popolare: Contemporary Italian recipes $60
Fresh and exciting Italian cuisine.
The Plays of Bruce Mason by John Smythe $40
The first comprehensive survey of the work of this outstanding playwright, whose plays are packed with socio-political insight.
The Gorse Blooms Pale: Southland stories and The General and the Nightingale: War stories by Dan Davin $45 each
The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting Davin's experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in Southland.
Davin was also the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin's 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as a wartime scholar-soldier and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies. They yield insight into the experiences of the ANZAC soldier at war during the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns of World War II.
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld $37
A rock off the coast of Scotland stands witness to the lives of three women over the centuries in this suitably angry novel.
"A modern gothic triumph. Spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel." —Max Porter
>>The terror of men's violence against women.
A Delayed Life: The powerful memoir of the Librarian of Auschwitz by Dita Kraus $28
Kraus's experiences as the custodian of books smuggled in by the concentration camp's inmates is retold by Antonio Iturbe as The Librarian of Auschwitz.
Agency by William Gibson $37
San Francisco, 2017. In an alternate time track, Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump's political ambitions were thwarted.
London, 22nd century. Decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 per cent of humanity. A shadowy start-up hires a young woman named Verity to test a new product: a 'cross-platform personal avatar' that was developed by the military as a form of artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, characters in the distant future are using technological time travel to interfere with the election unfolding in 2017. Will they succeed?
The Hidden Girl, And other stories by Ken Liu $35
16 new science fiction and fantasy stories.
"Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and Western readers." — New York Times
Dreamers: When the writers took power, Germany, 1919 by Volker Weidermann $28
At the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed. But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved.
19 Love Songs by David Levithan $24
Levithan has written a short story for his friends each Valentine's Day; this book presents them all.
Universal Love by Alexander Weinstein $26
A boy and his father find music in a drowned city. A lonely twenty-something gets addicted to comfort porn. A man is given a choice to have his trauma surgically removed. A mourning daughter brings her dead mother back to life as a hologram—but the source material isn't quite right. Inventive stories about the human thirst for connection amid rapid technological advancement.
>>Read Stella's review of Children of the New World.
Le Corbusier Paper Models $40
10 kirigami buildings to cut and fold. Fun.
The use of te reo Māori in daily New Zealand life is snowballing, as is demand for resources to make learning the language efficient and enjoyable. This book helps answer that demand. Here in simple terms is a thorough guide to the building blocks of grammar in te reo, showing how to create phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The book employs real-life examples to illustrate how Māori grammar works day to day, and draws on David Kārena-Holmes's decades of experience teaching and writing about Māori language.
>>Hear David talk at 2 PM this Saturday (8 February) at the Nelson Public Library Te Whare Mātauranga o Whakatū in Halifax Street.
Triggered by her reading of Woolf's Orlando, Aline, an academic and Proust specialist, finds herself suddenly transferred into the body of a young man sitting opposite her at a cafe. From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men, the novel is a subtle, insightful and funny exploration of androgyny, projection, and psychological and literary doubles.
"Jacqueline Harpman displays incredible confidence in juggling identities and meshing together yearnings and phobias, fantasies and frustrations." —l'Express
>>Read Stella's review of I Who Have Never Known Men.
A compelling novel exploring the emotional life of an American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria.
"An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel — Garth Greenwell writes like no one else." —Eimear McBride
"Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth." —Lisa Taddeo
"Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex-locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradations, our sweetness, confusion, and rage." —Sheila Heti
A multigenerational family story in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
Much like the fencer who must constantly read and respond to her opponent's tactics during a fencing bout, this debut collection by Mary Jean Chan deftly examines relationships at once conflictual and tender. Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in epee, a competitive sport of the poet's teenage and young adult years. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') in public and private spaces.
Winner of the 2019 Costa Award for Poetry.
>>Parry riposte.
>>Fleche attack!
If you could go back in time and see any band play, what would you choose? This novel provides it characters with the opportunity to do just that, but when the time machine delivers one of its clients a thousand years too early, things begin to get complicated.
An introverted boy and a tough, secretive girl fight to save an abandoned section from being sold in this children's novel from the author of Pax.
Fresh and exciting Italian cuisine.
The first comprehensive survey of the work of this outstanding playwright, whose plays are packed with socio-political insight.
The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting Davin's experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in Southland.
Davin was also the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin's 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as a wartime scholar-soldier and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies. They yield insight into the experiences of the ANZAC soldier at war during the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns of World War II.
A rock off the coast of Scotland stands witness to the lives of three women over the centuries in this suitably angry novel.
"A modern gothic triumph. Spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel." —Max Porter
>>The terror of men's violence against women.
Kraus's experiences as the custodian of books smuggled in by the concentration camp's inmates is retold by Antonio Iturbe as The Librarian of Auschwitz.
San Francisco, 2017. In an alternate time track, Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump's political ambitions were thwarted.
London, 22nd century. Decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 per cent of humanity. A shadowy start-up hires a young woman named Verity to test a new product: a 'cross-platform personal avatar' that was developed by the military as a form of artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, characters in the distant future are using technological time travel to interfere with the election unfolding in 2017. Will they succeed?
16 new science fiction and fantasy stories.
"Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and Western readers." — New York Times
At the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed. But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved.
Levithan has written a short story for his friends each Valentine's Day; this book presents them all.
A boy and his father find music in a drowned city. A lonely twenty-something gets addicted to comfort porn. A man is given a choice to have his trauma surgically removed. A mourning daughter brings her dead mother back to life as a hologram—but the source material isn't quite right. Inventive stories about the human thirst for connection amid rapid technological advancement.
>>Read Stella's review of Children of the New World.
10 kirigami buildings to cut and fold. Fun.
 | The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa {Reviewed by STELLA} Who are the Memory Police? With their purposeful stride, their polished boots, guns at the hip, expressionless faces, and their dark green trucks with canvas covers, they are reminiscent of Bradbury’s Firemen and Orwell’s Big Brother troops. Living on the island controlled by the Memory Police (we never know who they work for or what exactly their mission is aside from oppressing memory) are the Novelist and her editor, ‘R’. The Novelist’s parents are long dead and her world is a small community — her neighbours, the editor and an old family friend, simply known to us as The Old Man. As more objects disappear, the Novelist becomes increasingly unsettled. Like most of the inhabitants, she easily accepts the loss of objects. One day the rose bushes are no longer ,and for several days the rivers are filled with petals gently being washed out to sea. “None of the petals were withered or brown. On the contrary, perhaps because the water was so cold, they seemed fresher and fuller than ever, and their fragrance, mixed with the morning mist from the river, was overpoweringly strong. Petals covered the surface as far as the eye could see.” A few days later the rose and the idea of the rose simply cease to exist. The inhabitants’ memories are wiped. The forgetting is like a mist: evasive. Yet some don’t forget and when they can no longer hide this they literally go into hiding. The first person the Novelist knew who was like this was her mother, a sculptor. She would keep objects (keepsakes) in a cabinet in her studio and share these with her daughter, then a young girl, hoping to trigger a sense of understanding — a connection to the past through the items she placed in her hands telling stories, hoping to trigger memories. But her mother’s purpose was greater — to preserve what the Memory Police tried to blackout. When ‘R’ is in danger of being discovered (he remembers) the Novelist and the Old Man construct a secret room in her house and hide him from the authorities. They are lucky. Life carries on despite the increasingly fast pace of disappearances. Calendars go, dates and days, months are no longer. And in turn, the inhabitants wonder whether winter will ever cease — as if by thinking just this, spring fails to arrive. Novels are no longer and you can imagine the book burnings. And a novelist no longer knows what or why she writes. R encourages her to continue in secret, demanding that her manuscript remains hidden with him. While the words do not come at all at first, eventually a word does emerge, along with what she feels are nonsensical phrases, and through perseverance she does write again — but now it is with a great personal cost. When a body cannot function, can that person still be in existence? Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is haunting and fascinating, an allegory for totalitarianism, as well as an exploration of memory and forgetting. What is memory, and are objects necessary to understand our past? In what part of ourselves do we truly exist: the physical or the consciousness — and what happens to one without the other? Ogawa’s novel is fascinating on many levels and her prose is a joy to read with its simple style and depth of meaning. |
 | Jeaslousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet {Reviewed by THOMAS} The only reality is the present moment, and the only certainty about that is that it is the present moment, constantly assailed as it is by the fantasies of the past and the future, each of which presents itself as an imitation present, a simulacrum differing either more or less from the present it seeks to replace. In retrospect, the present and the futures and pasts that assailed it are not different in kind and become hopelessly entangled, whatever geometry we apply to the task of considering it, undermining certainty and leaving us only with an endlessly loopable - and inescapable - experience of a present without any of the qualities of this present being fixed or certain. The unnarrated narrator of Jealousy narrates repeatedly a limited sequence of events: the presence of their neighbour Franck in the house he shares with the character referred to as A…, the interactions of Franck and A…, about which the narrator is uncomfortable and which culminate in the arrangement for Franck to take A... with him on his trip to the port town some hours drive from the tropical banana plantation in which they live, and also the return of Franck and A… the next day, having had to stay the night in the town apparently on account of Franck’s car having broken down. As much as possible, the narrator has excised himself from the narrative. He is only a point of observation and is careful to betray no agency. He is of course implied by his narration (ironically, A… eludes the geometry of his descriptions (even her name remains an ellipsis), the very descriptions that ensnare the narrator (despite his best efforts)), even, possibly, implicated by his narration. The narrative restricts itself to the present tense and to ‘objective’ detail, so to call it. As the narrator goes over and over the sequence of events (very much in the way he describes the overheard song of one of his drivers: “These repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications - though barely perceptible - eventually moving quite far from the point of departure.”), he allows, little by little, more evidence (so to call it) about what he suspects to be A…’s relationship with Franck to slip into the narrative. Detail puts a brake on the narrative, slowing its approach to trauma, but it is also the vector of that trauma. The details, the repetitions, become tighter and tighter around the trauma, like white blood cells clustering around the trauma. The narrator suspects A… and Franck of something that he cannot bear to think about but is obsessed with all the same. The precision of minuscule detail given about Franck’s pocket, from which protrudes, despite Franck’s best efforts to hide it, the corner of a piece of blue notepaper upon which A… was observed writing something earlier and which A… has presumably handed him after sending the narrator indoors for ice for their drinks, is an exemplar of the way in which detail can be used to control the pace and focus of the reader’s attention, as well as demonstrating how psychological weight can inform and distort objective description (an oxymoron). The narrator’s uncertainty about A… (her smile “can be interpreted as derision just as well as affection, or the total absence of feeling whatever.”) and about her relationship with Franck leads him to obsess over detail, which, under this sort of pressure, becomes unstable. “It’s no use making up contrary possibilities, since things are the way they are: reality stays the same,” states the narrator, but his repetitions begin to contradict themselves, first positing potentials (“A… may have put her face into the opening above the seat” after getting out of Franck’s car) and then assailing what we have previously ‘known’ (Franck crushing the centipede in A…’s bedroom rather than in dining room, Franck approaching A…’s bed, Franck’s car exploding in an accident), these alternative presents evidently constructed out of the narrator’s jealousy and bringing into question the actuality of his other observations. Everything is a play of images, interchangeable with other images, precision no guarantee of actuality. The port to which Franck takes A… has no more reality than the picture of the port on the calendar on the wall, or, rather, these realities contend with each other for the attention that will fulfill them. The present is inescapable, though it may be endlessly iterated and altered when relived in memory. The distinction between experience and memory is destabilised, the narrative chopped and repeated and discontinuous like memory. We are presented simultaneous contraries. The narrator both creates and erases the mark of the catastrophe, the trace, the stain of the centipede, the letter, the bloodstain (surely not...), the memory. In this endlessly iterated and permuted remembered present, at what point might an imagined future (also experienced as a present) begin to insert itself and start to drag the narrative, disengaged now from an actuality that is uncertain, off onto a branch that is more an expression of psychology than of so-called reality? Is it possible, even, that the entire narrative, from beginning to end, in all its permutations, takes place in the narrator’s frantic mind as he waits in A…’s room for her return from the port? As the narrator observes of A…’s and Franck’s discussion of a novel that the narrator has not read, “The variations as extremely various; the variations of these, still more so.” |
>>Signs, songs, stumps and symbols.
>>Have a look inside the book.
>>The art of protest.
>>Voices on the radio.
>>A significant portion of the book is devoted to the long tradition of Māori activism.
>>How to tell a story through objects.
>>The book has just been long-listed for the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Click and collect.
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>>Read Thomas's review of Spurious.
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>>Usually confined to David Copperfield.
>>Good grief.
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>>Like this!
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An insightful, devastating and well-written account of growing up in a housing estate on the west coast of Scotland.
"A non-fiction book for the ages. Motherwell is a searching, truthful, shocking (and timely) observance of the blight that monetarist policies can bring about in a community of workers, indeed on a whole culture of fairness and improvement, while also showing — in sentences as clean as bone — the tireless misunderstandings that can starve a family of love." —Andrew O'Hagan, Guardian
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When a new student transfers in from a posh private school, he falls in with a group of like-minded suburban stoners, artists, and outcasts too smart and creative for their own good. His classmates nickname their new friend Nietzsche (for his braininess and bleak outlook on life), and decide he must be the front man of their metal band. As always, Iyer blends philosophical rigour and quotidian misery to humorous effect.
>>Read Thomas's review of Spurious.
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Unfold pages, lift flaps, gaze into mirrors, and interact with art like never before. Inspired by the many ways that art can be viewed and experienced, this book encourages children to spend time with a curated selection of fine art from the Whitney collection — and to dig deeper and consider all angles. Each artwork is showcased with a novelty mechanism and caption, for curious hands and wondering eyes. Delightful.
An unprecedented and ambitious examination of how the modern Middle East unravelled and why it started with the pivotal year of 1979.
"An essential account of the ideologies that have shaped the region." —Guardian
Beginning in Cyprus, the goddess's mythical birthplace, Hughes decodes Venus's relationship to the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and, in turn, Aphrodite's mixed origins, both as a Cypriot spirit of fertility and procreation, and as a descendant of the prehistoric war goddesses of the Near and Middle East. Hughes also moves forward to show how the figure of Venus became the repository of socially destabilising and hence often proscribed forces of desire.
>>Shocking Blue.
>>Venus in Furs.
The five former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all became independent when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. In the Kyrgyzstani villages Erika Fatland meets victims of the widely known tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets Chinese shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea and she witnesses the fall of a dictator. She travels incognito through Turkmenistan, a country that is closed to journalists. She meets exhausted human rights activists in Kazakhstan, survivors from the massacre in Osh in 2010, and German Menonites who found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago.
Literary characters refuse to be confined to their books and start causing havoc in Wellington and in the otherwise normal lives of Charley Sutherland's family.
>>Usually confined to David Copperfield.
>>Good grief.
Finding solace among the trees of Epping Forest, Turner comes to terms with his religious upbringing, sexual abuse, and identity as a bisexual man.
"Electrifying." —Olivia Laing
"Refreshing, frank, edifying, courageous." —Amy Liptrot
A beautiful and gentle story in which a young boy receives reassurance from his father about loss being part of the cycles of nature.
Urgent. Useful. Our shared values — equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity — can both provide the basis for a critique of capitalism, and help to guide us towards a truly democratic society.
When Tammy disappears, only her twin brother Ethan knows she's safe — but he can't tell anyone or he won't see her again. Ethan teams up with his friend Iggy and the mysterious (and very hairy) Hellyann, a spaceship called Philip, and Suzy the trained chicken, in a nail-biting attempt to get his sister back. From the author of Time Travelling with a Hamster, The 1000-Year-Old Boy and other wonders.
An enthralling history of a signifier of masculinity in costume, art, literature and popular culture, from the middle ages to today.
Unless we stop seeing ourselves as individuals and start recognising that we are but parts of the larger organism our our environment, we will not be able to find a way to address problems that have arisen primarily from our separation from this larger self.
"Timely and challenging." —Guardian
While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife—who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings—ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?
Interesting. Demonstrates the social upheavals that accompany climate change.
A selection of the outstanding literary critic's essays, from 1919 to 2019.
In 1536, Henry VIII was almost toppled when Northern England rose to oppose the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A classic of historical fiction, first published in 1952.
"By widespread assent, one of the finest historical novels ever written. It may even be the finest." —Times Literary Supplement
Boarding a train in Propad, Slovakia, the women believed they had been offered work in a factory, but they had been sold to the Nazis as slave labour by their government. Almost all were killed.
A meditation on beauty and body image from the author of Eggshell Skull.
Sara Fanelli's activity book asks young readers to help the onion break free by answering thought-provoking questions and completing the activities within, finally pressing a three-dimensional character right out of the pages. The book encourages young children to be imaginative and think about complex issues in unexpected ways.
>>Like this!
>>Sara Finelli.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #162 (25.1.20)
Events, courses, book groups, new books, our reviews — all can be found in our NEWSLETTER.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>On growing up as a Chinese New Zealander in Aotearoa.
>>Rose Lu on Radio NZ.
>>Red Packet.
>>The Tiger Club.
>>Cleaver.
>>The migrant experience and the tangata whenua experience.
>>Three myths about hiring for diversity.
>>The cover is by Sharon Lam, author of Lonely Asian Woman.
>>Click and collect.