| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Burn by Patrick Ness {Reviewed by STELLA} In this thrilling novel, the unexpected occurs in 1950s America. Sarah Dewhurst is a teen living in the small rural community of Frome. Since her mother’s death, life has been tough — her father, caring but distant, is struggling to keep the farm working and the debts at bay. The fields need to be cleared ready for ploughing and planting, but they just don’t have the manpower. Hiring a dragon is their only choice. Yes, in this America there are dragons. A fragile co-existence between dragons and humans has existed for hundreds of years but something is brewing. Add to this, Sarah’s own problems of encountering racial prejudice in a small town (she’s the product of a bi-racial marriage) and her ‘secret’ relationship with American Japanese Jacob draws more unwanted attention, is drawing the heat, especially from the local Sheriff, the despicable Kerby. When her father hires the Russian Blue to fire the fields clear, Sarah’s life gets even more complicated. Kazimir is not just working on the farm, he seems to be taking an interest in Sarah’s affairs. The relationship between the young woman and dragon (who’s young at 200 years) develops as the story progresses and a prophecy plays out. An ordinary young woman will save the world. She will be in the right place, at the right time. Kazimir has been sent to Frome as the prophecy predicted. And he is not the only being descending on this rural town. A boy assassin, Malcolm, trained from a young age, is making the lonely journey from the wastes of Canada. He is a Believer, highly trained and fanatically focused in his mission which will see Sarah Dewhurst dead and the cult’s leader exalted, the true mother of them all, Mitera Thea. Also hot on the trail of Malcolm are FBI agents Paul Dernovitch and Veronica Woolf. All these journeys will not be as expected. Malcolm will meet Nelson and he will learn something new about himself, Sarah will discover that death and life can be points in time with different consequences, Kazimir finds friendship with a human and Agent Woolf’s study of dragons will surprise even her. As the Russians launch a satellite the action comes to its devastating conclusion on an unassuming country road - the violent apex of the journey is reached. But no, not yet. Part three of the book will take you even further. Into the multidimensional where the prophecy will come true and where Sarah, Kazimir and Malcolm will need, and find, the conviction and hope to face a great challenger. A challenger who has no qualms about absolute destruction to gain absolute power. A deftly layered plot and excellent writing from the ever-fascinating mind of Patrick Ness, Burn is glorious in its fiery action and touching at its honest heart. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The White Dress by Nathalie Léger (translated by Natasha Lehrer) {Reviewed by THOMAS} Léger set out to write this book as an attempt to understand something of the fate of the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who set out to hitch-hike from Milan to Jerusalem wearing a wedding dress and recording her journey and encounters on a video camera, “To prove,” as Pippa Bacca said, “that when you show trust you receive nothing but goodness.” She was raped and murdered, and her body was found in a shallow grave in Turkey. Léger recognises that there is something inauthentic, something lacking, in Bacca’s artistic gesture, but wants to believe that “even when artists are heavy-handed, when their ideas are confused, when their questions fail in some way, their performances nonetheless stubbornly articulate something true.” But the more thought she gives her project, the further she gets from understanding, if there was even anything to understand. Léger bemoans her “heartbreaking inability to understand this girl’s story, [her] inability to grasp what was simultaneously significant and trivial in her gesture, and probably beyond comprehension.” Is it beyond naive to believe that art can ameliorate violence? “This foolishness, this over-the-top, sentimental gesture was without doubt a grand gesture, and a grand gesture might also be a failed gesture. Just because something has failed doesn’t mean that it was a good idea in the first place.” Léger travels to Milan intending to interview Pippa Bacca’s mother but has a crisis of purpose, and kind of breakdown, and instead returns to France to lie on her own mother’s sofa. As she lies there in a melancholy stupor, her mother brings her a dossier of papers and pleads for Léger to give her the ‘justice’ she has always been denied. At first this triggers a flood of unhappy childhood memories in Leger, of her father’s lovelessness and aggression, and of a mother whose “entire life was made up of the ordeal of her abandonment, and we were dragged along in the wake of her sadness.” Léger’s account slips from first to third person where her early trauma is still raw. But, she realises, her mother “was too kind, incapable of shielding herself from the most banal cruelty, incapable of getting over it, incapable of anything but crying, I never helped her, I never stood up for her.” What is it her mother is asking of her? “All you need to be is my seismograph,” her mother says, “you wouldn’t have to do much, just listen and describe, simply describe, capture the wave of a far-off disturbance before it gets lost in the dust, it would be so little to you and so much to me.” Gradually her mother’s trauma emerges from under the trauma of an unhappy childhood. We learn of her father’s infidelity and abandonment of her mother, and the dossier contains the proceedings of the divorce court that allowed the unjust denigration of her mother but disallowed her the opportunity to speak in her own defence. “Vengeance is not a straight line,” says Léger’s mother, “it is a forest. It’s easy to lose the way, to get lost, to forget why one is there at all.” But the mother’s vengeance now comes as words composed by her daughter, words that give the voice back to the mother, the voice denied her in court in 1974, the vengeance is Léger’s narrative, the many permutations of narrative, this book, the fugues of narrative arrayed on commas describing the fatal breakdown of her parents’ marriage. By failing, Léger succeeds. Trauma can only be overcome by failing to overcome it and being aware of that failure. Art only succeeds to the extent that it fails. Leger looks at photographs of Pippa Bacca’s murderer taken a few days after her murder, at his niece’s wedding, and is distressed to see no trace on his face of his violence. He is bland and ordinary. Pippa Bacca’s attacker used her video camera to film the wedding. “He raped her, he killed her … and finally he stole her gaze.” Léger watches the footage as he turns the camera on himself: “He’s laughing. He’s happy. Behind his smug face the sky is empty. All narrative is annihilated.” |
>>Anthony Byrt talks with Lynn Freeman.
>>Anthony Byrt talks with Paula Morris.
>>Being Billy Apple.
>>The centre of the extended continental shelf of New Zealand.
>>Billy Apple with music.
>>Billy Apple: Life/work is forthcoming from AUP in October. Place your order now.
>>The official David Hockney website.
>>Hockney for children.
>>The world is beautiful.
>>A peculiar fish without fins.
>>Ann Quinn and Deborah Levy.
>>Narcissist or voyeur?
>>Her body or the sea.
>>Some books by Ann Quin.
>>Some books by or about David Hockney.
>>This Model World.
>>Your copy.
In the early sixties at the Royal College of Art in London, three extraordinary personalities collided to reshape contemporary art and literature. Barrie Bates (who would become Billy Apple in November 1962) was an ambitious young graphic designer from New Zealand, who transformed himself into one of pop art's pioneers. At the same time, his friend and fellow student David Hockney - young, Northern and openly gay - was making his own waves in the London art world. Bates and Hockney travelled together, bleached their hair together, and, despite being two of London's rising art stars, almost failed art school together. And in the middle of it all was the secretary of the Royal College's Painting School - a young novelist called Ann Quin. Quin ghost-wrote her lover Bates's dissertation and collaborated with him on a manifesto, all the while writing Berg, the experimental novel that would establish her as one of the British literary scene's most exciting new voices. Taking us back to London's art scene in the late fifties and early sixties, Byrt illuminates a key moment in cultural history and tackles big questions: Where did Pop and conceptual art come from? How did these three young outsiders change British culture? And what was the relationship between revolutions in personal and sexual identities and these major shifts in contemporary art?
>>Byrt talks with Paula Morris.
Anonymous people in anonymous towns; mothers screaming inside their houses, unapologetic doctors, mournful dogs, hungry girls, grandmothers on the couch tethered in a blue spell, steaks in soft sacks of blue blood, rare breeds of show cats in big black sedans, baby rabbits beneath heavy boots; and lonesome men crouched among the thorny shrubs and the rough, wild grasses... With the economy of Lydia Davis and Grace Paley, and the unsettling verve of Mary Gaitskill and Claire-Louise Bennett, The Dominant Animal is a powerful short story collection.
>>Are we still the 'dominant animal' — and what even could that mean?
ARTISTS: Vita Cochran, Star Gossage, Robert West: AWARDS & COMPETITIONS: Results from the 2020 Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition; WRITERS: John Adams, Johanna Aitchison, John Allison, Shaun Bamber, Tony Beyer, Iain Britton, Medb Charleton, Ruth Corkill, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, David Eggleton, Johanna Emeney, Rhys Feeney, Michael Giacon, Carolyn Gillum, Patricia Grace, Eliana Gray & Jordan Hamel, Isabel Haarhaus, Bernadette Hall, Sarah Harpur, Jenna Heller, Stephanie Johnson, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Megan Kitching, Claire Lacey, Leonard Lambert, Malinna Liang, Emer Lyons, Carolyn McCurdie, Cilla McQueen, Owen Marshall, Talia Marshall, Zoë Meager, James Norcliffe, Keith Nunes, Kotuku Tithuia Nuttall, Vincent O'Sullivan, Leanne Radojkovich, essa may ranapiri, Gillian Roach, Pip Robertson, Jo-Ella Sarich, Tim Saunders, Sarah Scott, Sarah Shirley, Elizabeth Smither, Charlotte Steel, Nicola Thorstensen, Rushi Vyas, Susan Wardell.
A blend of essay and autofiction exploring the inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. By reaching into the past and finding another woman's voice, a woman frees her own.
A blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir.
"Blueberries feels like lying down on the train tracks and looking up at the sky—a reverie, shot through by a feeling of acceleration, of something vast coming at you." —Maria Tumarkin
When Alannah was twenty-three, she met a man who was older than her - a married man - and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage's landlady. It did not end well. Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her.
"This is an exquisite thing. At once forensic and yet deeply passionate, detached and yet deeply moving." —Danny Denton
Rata Gordon’s first poetry collection is both graceful and restless, sorrowful and witty. In poems about childhood, travelling, the body and the earth, Gordon describes the freedom and disorientation we find in unfamiliar places, and the way that our longings and imaginings animate our lives.
One day Lisette finds a pretty green sock. She's delighted, until some bullies begin to tease her: socks should come in pairs; what use is one sock? Lisette searches and searches, but she cannot find the sock's missing mate. Fortunately, her friend Bert helps her see the situation in a new way.
Sami Tamimi wrote the wonderful Jerusalem with Yotam Ottolenghi (who contributes a foreword to this book), and here returns to present the recipes, cuisine and stories of the Palestinians of Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, Nablus, Haifa, Akka, Nazareth, Galilee and the West Bank.
The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of The Water Cure, enquiring into the natures of free will and motherhood. Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?
"The cool intensity and strange beauty of Blue Ticket is a wonder. Be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes." —Deborah Levy
Sitwell is good, witty company at tables from Pompeii to the present, tracing influences from an ancient traveller of the Muslim world, revelling in the unintended consequences for nascent fine dining of the French Revolution, revealing in full hideous glory the post-Second World War dining scene in the UK and fathoming the birth of sensitive gastronomy in the US counterculture of the 1960s.
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down: the fish turn venomous, bodies are red and raw, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives, a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. As she begins accompanying him on his trips to discover his idea of an authentic Korea, the two of them begin an uneasy relationship filled with suspended misunderstandings and punctuated by spilled ink. They visit snowy mountaintops, take daytrips to dramatic waterfalls, cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows - the gaudy and beautiful neon lights, the fish market where her mother guts squid and puffer fish, the evening meals she prepares meticulously for the guesthouse. As she's pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.
"Dusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful. Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book." —Guardian
Based on Walser's own experiences in a training school for servants, this novel tells of a young man who turns his back on wealth and opportunity and attends the unusual Institut Benjamenta, with the goal of becoming "something very small and subordinate later in life". A new edition, with an introduction by J.M. Coetzee.
>>Thomas on Walser.
A photographic record of a wananga for three generations of women from Ngati Torehina ki Mataka to learn the customary practice of pelting North Island brown kiwi so their feathers can be used for weaving. This passing on of customary knowledge developed out of a partnership between conservationists and weavers that returned accidentally killed kiwi to the hapu of the rohe or district in which they were found.
From a young New York reporter, to a critic exploring gender and feminism, to a woman in the jubilant solitude of older age- the characters Gornick meets in literature speak to the person she is when reading, and in reopening her favourite texts she meets characters anew.
A rediscovered masterwork of twentieth-century fiction, telling of a young man coming of age in Budapest between the wars. Illegitimate and unwanted, Béla is packed off to the country to be looked after by a peasant woman the moment he is born. She starves and bullies him, and keeps him out of school. He does his best to hold his own, and eventually his mother brings him back to live with her in the city. In thrall to his feckless father, Mishka, and living in a crowded tenement, she works her fingers to the bone, while Béla shares a room with a hardworking prostitute. Finally, Béla secures a job in a fancy hotel. Though exhausted by endless work, he is fascinated by the upper-crust world that his new job exposes him to; soon he is embroiled with a rich, damaged, and dangerous woman. The atmosphere of Budapest is increasingly poisoned by the appeal of fascism, while Béla grows ever more aware of how power and money keep down the working classes. In the end, with all the odds still against him, he musters the resolve to set sail for a new future. A new translation by Mark Baczoni.
What was mothering like in the past? When historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten. Using the arc of her own experience, from miscarriage to the birth and early babyhood of her two children, and drawing on letters, diaries, court records and paintings, Sarah Knott explores the ever-changing experiences of maternity across the ages. From the labour pains felt by an enslaved woman to the triumphant smile of a royal mistress bearing a king's first son; from a 1950s suburban housewife to a working-class East Ender taking her baby to the factory; these lost stories of mothering create a moving depiction of an ever-changing human experience.
A charming, intimate graphic rumination on love, empathy, and confidence. Singaporean cartoonist Weng Pixin delicately explores strained relationships with a kind of hopefulness while acknowledging their inevitable collapse.
>>Look inside!
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | McSweeney's: Issue #50 {Reviewed by STELLA} Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is always inventive and a surprise package. Literally. The first McSweeney’s Quarterly I came across was a gift — a collection of small books and notelets in a hinged square head. I’ve been dipping into Issue 50 this week, and thoroughly enjoying it. 50 is a handsome hardback with a dust-wrapper that folds out into a poster and can be refolded into a number of different jacket designs. Like all McSweeney publications, it’s clever. This issue, unlike some others, doesn’t have an overall theme, but it does have a texture. Fresh writing from previously published authors — authors who have had a relationship with the literary journal over its twenty-year history. Founded by Dave Eggers, it’s a platform to introduce new American voices and enable those more established writers to experiment and play. Like many collections its a mixed bag and wonderfully so. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Details', with its letters between two people in an illicit relationship is all small detail and long pauses — the most important clues hidden in the lines of the letters. A jar of bath salts is the catalyst for change. Steven Millhauser’s excellent and immediately recognisable internal dialogue while waiting on the phone for customer service may make you both laugh and cry. “Thank you for calling customer service. All agents are currently assisting other customers. Please stay on the line and your call be answered in the order in which it was received...Your call is very important to us and we appreciate your patience...Please do not hang up and redial, as this will only further delay your call.” There’s a sly and witty cartoon strip by Jesse Jacobs entitled 'New Sport' — this is simply adorable — and Sherman Alexie’s 'Deliver Me' pizza driver slacker story will resonate on so many levels as Jeremy navigates his job, girlfriend and a degree that can’t get him out of the precariat class. There’s a fascinating essay from Kevin Young, 'Ten Commandments: How to Spot a Hoax', that has more teeth than you expect at first glance; and a humorous list of reasons your girlfriend works for the secret service by Haris.S.Durrani. Reason #12: “She tells you not to mumble. “Say your mind,” she says. “Speak like you mean it.” Is she trying to make you incriminate yourself?... Before you realise it, you’ve assumed criminality.” Reason#39: “She gives you a call from college and says she’s changed. She thinks about life differently. You’re not sure what that means. You think she’s defected.” 'Orange Juice' by Kirsten Iskandrian is an ode to parenting small children and the edge of sanity, while Rebecca Curtis’ 'Please Fund Me' sets up the absurdity of privilege in the guise of the desire for a pool boy. Literary journals and story collections are an excellent way to introduce new authors into your reading pile and to find gems from those you already admire. This collection has pieces from some of my favourites — Sheila Heti, Jonathan Letham, Sarah Manguso and Jesse Ball. If you haven’t come across the delights of McSweeney's Quarterly previously ,we currently have on our shelves Issue 50 and Issue 58 (which is dedicated to climate change). Some others can be ordered — they become collector items quickly due to their inventive and quirky design. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 |
The Table by Francis Ponge {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“The table is a faithful friend, but you have to go to it,” writes Francis Ponge, pre-eminent poet of ‘things’, in this extraordinarily subtle little book, written sporadically between 1967 and 1973, on his relationship with the table that lay beneath his elbow whenever he was writing. “The table serves as a support of the body of the writer that I sometimes {try to be | am} so that I don’t collapse (which is what I am doing at this moment) (not for fun) (not for pleasure) (but as a consolation) (so as not to collapse).” A thought may come, or not, and be expressed, or not, perhaps in some relationship with text, a problematic relationship at best, when you think of it, and go, and be perhaps forgotten, more and more commonly forgotten, or the text unread, for even the most-read text lies mostly unread, but the table continues, whatever it is, object or concept, and whatever the relationship between the table and the idea of the table that presses upon, or from, the word Table. The table lies under the work of the writer (the working of the writer), whatever that work might be, the labour of writing is supported by the table, under all writing lies the table. “The table has something of the mother carrying (on four legs) the body of the writer.” Once all the unnecessities have been removed from the act of writing, once the content and the intent have been removed, Ponge finds his table. Because the table is always beneath the writing, all writing is ultimately never on anything other than the table. “As I remember the table (the notion of the table), some table comes under my elbow. As I am wanting to write the table, it comes to my elbow and the same time the notion comes to mind.” If language could mediate the space between the object pressing at his elbow and the concept of the table, if language could allow this object to exist other than merely as the index of the idea that is imposed upon it, Ponge’s patient, precise, careful, playful rigour will approach it certainly closely enough to both deepen and dissolve the concept, to begin to replace ideas with thought. “It takes many words to destroy a concept (or rather to make of this word no longer a concept but a conceptacle).” Ponge’s operations are forensic, and his “table was (and remains) the operating table, the dissecting table.” As a support for the writer, the (t)able represents that which is able to be, and remains uncertain, and not that which must be. “One could say that this Table is nothing other than the substantification of a qualifying suffix, indicating only pure possibility.” All new thought comes from objects, from objects pushing back against the concepts imposed upon them, pushing through the layers of memory and habituation that separate us from them. If the aesthetic is not the opposite of an anaesthetic it is in fact the anaesthetic. Only objects can rescue us from the idea we have of them, but they are hard for us to reach. “The greater my despair, the more intense (necessarily intense) my fixation on the object.” Objects may be reached through the patient, precise, careful, playful abrasion of the language used to describe them, a process known as poetry, an operation Ponge performs upon a table. That which is horizontal is in a state of flux but that which is vertical has been hoisted to the plane of aspiration and display. Viewing the vertical we see that walls are built from bottom to top whereas text is built from top to bottom, but viewing on the horizontal we see that the labour of laying brick by brick and the labour of laying word by word are the same labour, or at least analogous labours. On the horizontal table the relationship between objects and language is co-operative, each operating on the other, each opening and redefining the other on the delimited space of the table. “I will remember you my table, table that was my table, any table, any old table,” writes Ponge of the object whose presence has written this book, but which still remains a presence beyond the language he uses to reach towards it (and he reaches closer to an object than language ordinarily can reach). “I let you survive in the paradise of the unsaid,” he says. Language can be stretched but not escaped. “We are enclosed within our language … but what a marvellous prison,” writes Ponge.
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>>Peter Simpson talks about the book.
>>When Colin turned 100.
>>I Am.
>>Jet out to Reinga.
>>McCahon online.
>>James K. Baxter's poem to Colin McCahon.
>>What is necessary to a painting?
>>A beach walk in good company.
>>Grab your copy.
>>Volume 1: There is Only One Direction, 1919—1959.
>>Turn up the volume.
>>Stunning slip-cased limited edition, 2 volumes, signed.
NEW RELEASES
Remarkable both for its breadth and its depth of insight, Peter Simpson's work on New Zealand's most important artist is completed in this second volume. Through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand Modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years.
"New Zealand's foremost artist Colin McCahon is many things to many people: modernist, visionary, environmentalist, shaman, preacher, rustic provincialist, bicultural trailblazer, painter-poet, graffiti artist, teacher, maverick. Peter Simpson's account interrogates as well as accommodates all of these possibilities. Guiding us year by year through the artist's career, he offers a ground-breaking overview of the life's work of a tenacious, brilliant and endlessly fascinating figure." —Gregory O'Brien
>>Volume 1: There is Only One Direction, 1919—1959 $75
>>Stunning slip-cased limited edition, 2 volumes, signed $175
On 8 March 2008 the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set out to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem in a wedding dress, documenting her journey with a video camera. On 31 March her body was found in woods on the outskirts of Istanbul. In telling the young woman's story, which overwhelms her and inexorably draws her in, Léger recounts the different stages of her research and the writing of the book. She strikes upon something fundamental within Bacca's performance: the desire to remedy the unfathomable nature of violence and war, and the failure of art to ameliorate these harms.
>>Read an extract.
>>On the road.
>>Read Thomas's review of Exposition.
>>Read Thomas's review of Suite for Barbara Loden.
The new novel from the winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize for Fiction unsettles as it compels, undermining the reader's conceptions of the workings of reality in the age of surveillance capitalism. Adam both attracts and deflects attention to her characters, effective or abandoned doubles, shrinking from the twin monstrosities of alcohol and boredom in a novel both mathematical and disconcerting.
"Adam has advanced even further as a writer. There is an evenness to her writing that is hypnotic rather than monotonous, steady rather than flat, and the sustained melancholy recalls the sadder end of science-fiction — films like Her and Never Let Me Go. At its heart, this is a novel about shame, loneliness, about wanting to do good and hoping for second chances — or third or fourth chances. It’s about finding new ways of being. That it can cover all this, and be deeply affecting as it does so, while also pushing at the traditional limits of fiction, is a real achievement." —Philip Mathews (ANZL)
>>An extract.
>>Twins in Sims.
>>The New Animals.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.
"All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice, and as an author Shibli is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good." —Fatima Bhutto, Guardian
"An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion, and formal virtuosity." —Pankaj Mishra
A strong collection from a vital poet; radio signals crackling across the spaces between people, between cultures, between generations, and between worlds.
I am not a building I say I have no pull-out map is what I meant to say so we deal with what comes up yes right there in the passersby one horse at a time you stepping
out into traffic with your hand held up strong and me thanking every fucker for their help
A remarkable reimagining of Argentina's macho national origin myth from a female perspective; a joyful, hallucinatory journey across the pampas of 19th century.
"The Adventures of China Iron sets British industry and Argentine expansion against the sisterhood of the wagon and an indigenous society of fluid genders and magic mushrooms. Sentences bound on from one page to another, seeming almost as long as the vignette-like chapters, in a thrilling and mystical miniature epic. This story, drunk on words and visions, is an elegy to the land and its lost cultures." —Guardian
>>Short-listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
In these essays, the artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter—with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book—and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
"Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, thinker, writer, and person." —Maggie Nelson, Artforum
>>Read an extract.
>>Davey and her notebook.
In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study abroad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three. It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s.
>>"I'm an alien, a book man."
>>'Janet Frame and Me" (extracted from the book)
Sara McIntyre, the daughter of the artist Peter McIntyre, was nine years old when her family first came to Kākahi, in the King Country, in 1960. The family has been linked to Kākahi ever since. On the family car trips of her childhood, McIntyre got used to her fathers frequent stops for subject matter for painting. Fifty years on, when she moved to Kākahi to work as a district nurse, she began to do the same on her rounds, as a photographer. This book brings together her remarkable photographic exploration her observations of Kākahi and the sparsely populated surrounding King Country towns of Manunui, Ohura, Ongarue, Piriaka, Owhango and Taumarunui.
When she was nine, Golriz Ghahraman and her parents were forced to flee their home in Iran. After a terrifying and uncertain journey, they landed in Auckland where they were able to seek asylum and create a new life. Ghahraman talks about making a home in Aotearoa New Zealand, her work as a human rights lawyer, her United Nations missions, and how she became the first refugee to be elected to the New Zealand Parliament.
A celebration of seasonal vegetables and fruit, packed with 120 simple and surprisingly quick vegetarian recipes. With roots, we think of the crunch of carrots, celeriac, beetroot. From springtime stems like our beloved asparagus and rhubarb, through leaves of every hue (kale, radicchio, chard), when the blossoms become the fruits of autumn - apples, pears, plums - the food year is marked by growth, ripening and harvest. Beautifully presented, with photographs by Andrew Montgomery.
“On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron Gas Station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm.” This dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye. Sarah can't help but be curious about him, an animal who supposedly doesn't have a soul but is seemingly intent on keeping her safe from the brutal attentions of Deputy Sheriff Emmett Kelby. Kazimir knows something she doesn't. He has arrived at the farm because of a prophecy. A prophecy that involves a deadly assassin, a cult of dragon worshippers, two FBI agents – and somehow, Sarah Dewhurst herself.
"A gold mine of revelations. If there is a pantheon of cruciverbalist scholars, Adrienne Raphel has established herself squarely within it." —Mary Norris
Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonise' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? From the stolen Wakandan art in Black Panther, to Emmanuel Macron's recent commitment to art restitution, the question of decolonising our relationship with the art around us is quickly gaining traction. People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.
>>Uncomfortable Art Tours.
Quickly builds children's familiarity with, and knowledge of, animal droppings and dung. Fun.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Inland by Téa Obreht {Reviewed by STELLA} Meet Nora, a tough raw-edged frontierswoman awaiting the return of her husband, Emmett, three days late with the water. It’s Arizona 1893 and the drought has left the land dry and Nora’s mouth even drier. Over the course of this novel, we will spend 24 hours at the homestead with Nora as she contemplates her future. Emmett has not returned with the much-needed water; her adult sons have taken off in search of their father or revenge, her youngest is dreaming up visions of a beast wandering the property, and Josie, their live-in helper is also insistent that something or someone is haunting them. Add to this Nora’s internal monologue with her own long-dead daughter and it is hardly surprising that this is a woman under pressure and at a crossroads. She’s also surprisingly naive and sentimental despite her hardness. Our other protagonist is Lurie, a man on the run — an outlaw hounded across the frontier by Berger, a lawman who won’t give up. Lurie arrives in America with his father — but fortune does not smile on them. His father dies and the child finds himself a slave in a doss house until the Mattie brothers take him under their wing. As the brothers become more infamous they make a mistake and then the law is on their tail. As they go their separate ways in a bid to outrun the law, Lurie reinvents himself, travelling deeper into the desert, and on the fringes of society he is always on the move. And it is on his wanderings that he makes his greatest discovery and friendship with Burke, a camel. Camels in the wild west were not exactly what I was expecting in this novel — but this is based on fact. An army officer called Beale had commissioned a herd of camels along with their cameleers from Turkey and Syria to accompany him and his troops as they lay the ground for the settlers across the unforgiving deserts. Lurie is nicknamed Misafar and he finds a ‘home’ with his fellow Mediterraneans, especially Hi Jolly (Hadji Ali). Yet, it’s not to last with Berger on his tail and getting ever closer. As the stakes rise, he takes Burke and goes his separate way — a way that can only lead to running further. Tea Obreht weaves these stories expertly — at times you are unsure as to what is going on and where you are being led to but this is the wonder in the story. Where is Emmett? Why is Nora so set on upending what fragile equilibrium she and her family have? How are Lurie and Nora connected? And what do some see in the darkness? Obreht unwinds her novel like a spool of barbed wire, letting us feel our way along with sharp tugs to keep us alert. As with her previous novel, The Tiger’s Wife, there are elements of the surreal and the supernatural — Josie can sense spirits and Lutir ‘sees’ the dead — the wandering, lost souls that litter the frontier — souls that call out to him and try to bind their desires to him. And it is unrequited desires that drive Nora — a woman who hardly knows or dares to know herself, for to do so would make it impossible to live a practical life. This is the American West as only Tea Obreht could write it: breaking stereotypes, confounding us with striking histories that seems so bizarre it can only be true and making the land reel off the page to haunt and embrace us. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
  | The Years by Annie Ernaux {Reviewed by THOMAS}
|
NEW RELEASES
Bina by Anakana Schofield $38
Schofield's 74-year-old narrator has finally, she thinks, seen the last of the lodger who has dominated her life for a decade, but can she fathom the secret operations of 'the Group'?
“Insightful. Inventive. Hilarious. Genius.” —Eimear McBride
"Anakana Schofield’s Bina is a fiction of the rarest and darkest kind, a work whose pleasures must be taken measure for measure with its pains. Few writers operate the scales of justice with more precision, and Schofield is no less exacting in what she chooses to weigh. The novel’s themes — male violence, the nature of moral courage, the contemporary problems of truth and individuality, the status of the female voice — could hardly be more timely or germane. Schofield’s sense of injustice is unblinking and without illusion, yet her writing is so vivacious, so full of interest and lust for life: she is the most compassionate of storytellers, wearing the guise of the blackest comedian." —Rachel Cusk
>>"No-one should die unwitnessed."
The Reed Warbler by Ian Wedde $35
Drawing from his own family history, and the experiences of others, Wedde's new novel tells of a young woman from northern Germany who straddled two worlds and ended up in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and asks, how reliable are memories? and what is the nature of stories?
"Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories." —Catherine Chidgey
>>"Billed as a masterpiece."
>>Ian Wedde talks with Paula Morris.
One Day I'll Tell You Everything by Emmanuelle Pagano $37
Adèle and her younger brother Axel grew up in a hamlet in the spectacular mountains of the Ardèche region in south-east France. Ten years later, they have returned to their childhood home and Adèle now drives the school bus. Adèle is desperate to keep the secret of her past--of when she was a boy. No one recognises her here now, but when a terrifying snowstorm strands the bus on the mountain, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and that's when the stories come out.
"Pagano writes about siblings, about love and lies, about life slipping away, and about adolescents who are full of life. She speaks about bodies transforming, seasons changing, and memories that never fade. This extraordinarily beautiful novel, both sensitive and thoughtful, has an astute and deeply affecting ending." —Livre et Lire
Pagano's Faces on the Tip of My Tongue was listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
Te Wheke: Pathways across Oceania edited by Ken Hall $40
A selection of art looking at Aotearoa New Zealand's connections with the Pacific, with texts investigating the journeys and tensions that shape this world. Te wheke means octopus in te Reo. Te Wheke features work by more than 70 artists from Aotearoa and the Pacific, including Shane Cotton, Fatu Feu’u, Charles Goldie, Bill Hammond, Lonnie Hutchinson, Yuki Kihara, Colin McCahon, Ani O’Neill, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Lisa Reihana, Bill Sutton, and Robin White.
Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet by Tom Hunt $50
"This book is like a hybrid of Michael Pollan and Anna Jones. It combines serious food politics with flavour-packed modern recipes. This is a call-to-arms for a different way of eating which seeks to lead us there not through lectures but through a love of food, in all its vibrancy and variety.'" —Bee Wilson
Free Day by Inès Cagnati $30
Gagnati's novel, based on her own experiences as a child, refuses to mitigate the pain and isolation of growing up in the French countryside with a brutal father and incompetent mother. As 14-year-old Galla cycles home from her boarding school, we learn of her predicaments and her hopes.
>>"The countryside is a place where tough, alienated people scratch out a thankless existence."
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston $28
Zora Neale Hurston's candid, exuberant account (first published in 1942) of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. 's candid, exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. New introduction by Jesmyn Ward.
Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic visions from the USSR edited by Detlef Mertens $58
Presenting more than 250 illustrations depicting discoveries, scientific innovations, futuristic visions, and extraterrestrial encounters.
18 Tiny Deaths: The untold story of Frances Glessner Lee and the invention of modern forensics by Bruce Goldfarb $38
Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) became the 'mother of modern forensics' and was instrumental in elevating homicide investigation to a scientific discipline. She learned forensic science under the tutelage of pioneering medical examiner Magrath, who told her about his cases, gave her access to the autopsy room to observe post-mortems and taught her about poisons and patterns of injury. Lee acquired and read books on criminology and forensic science — eventually establishing the largest library of legal medicine. She went on to create The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas depicting the facts of actual cases in exquisitely detailed miniature.
>>Visit the dioramas.
Fake Baby by Amy McDaid $36
Nine Days. One City. Three Oddballs. Stephen's dead father is threatening to destroy the world. If Stephen commits the ultimate sacrifice and throws himself into the harbour, he will save humanity. The last thing he needs is a Jehovah's witness masquerading as a school boy and an admission to a mental health facility. Jaanvi steals a life-like doll called James and cares for him as if he were her dead child. Her husband demands she return him. But she and James have already bonded, and it's nobody's business how she decides to grieve. Lucas, pharmacist and all-round nice guy, is having one of the worst weeks of his life. His employees forgot his birthday, his mother's gone manic, and now his favourite customer is in hospital because of a medication error he made. Can he make things right? Or is life all downhill after forty?
"A darkly funny satire that's both moving and wise." —Paula Morris
>>McDaid introduces the book.
Art is a Tyrant: The unconventional life of Rosa Bonheur by Catherine Hewett $45
Meeting with great success as a painter, Bonheur was remarkable in the nineteenth century as an open lesbian, rational dresser, smoker and scorner of men.
A Nest of Gentlefolk, And other stories by Ivan Turgenev $28
New translations by Jessie Coulson of some of Turgenev's best stories: 'A Nest of Gentlefolk', 'A Quiet Backwater', 'First Love', and 'A Lear of the Steppes'.
How I Make Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz $35
How to use a camera to reclaim the streets as your own, why you need to watch the world always with a sense of possibility, how to set your subjects at ease, and the importance of being playful and of finding a lens that suits your personality.
>>Other books by Meyerowitz.
Choked: The age of air pollution and the fight for a cleaner future by Beth Gardiner $25
Every year, air pollution prematurely kills seven million people around the world, in rich countries and poor ones. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, premature birth and dementia, among other ailments. Gardiner meets the scientists who have transformed our understanding of pollution's effects on the human body, and traces the economic forces and political decisions that have allowed it to remain at life-threatening levels. She also focuses on real-world solutions, and on stories of people fighting for a healthier future.
I Saw It First! Jungle: A family spotting game by Caroline Selmes $35
300 jungle animals! Fun.
Schofield's 74-year-old narrator has finally, she thinks, seen the last of the lodger who has dominated her life for a decade, but can she fathom the secret operations of 'the Group'?
“Insightful. Inventive. Hilarious. Genius.” —Eimear McBride
"Anakana Schofield’s Bina is a fiction of the rarest and darkest kind, a work whose pleasures must be taken measure for measure with its pains. Few writers operate the scales of justice with more precision, and Schofield is no less exacting in what she chooses to weigh. The novel’s themes — male violence, the nature of moral courage, the contemporary problems of truth and individuality, the status of the female voice — could hardly be more timely or germane. Schofield’s sense of injustice is unblinking and without illusion, yet her writing is so vivacious, so full of interest and lust for life: she is the most compassionate of storytellers, wearing the guise of the blackest comedian." —Rachel Cusk
>>"No-one should die unwitnessed."
Drawing from his own family history, and the experiences of others, Wedde's new novel tells of a young woman from northern Germany who straddled two worlds and ended up in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and asks, how reliable are memories? and what is the nature of stories?
"Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories." —Catherine Chidgey
>>"Billed as a masterpiece."
>>Ian Wedde talks with Paula Morris.
Adèle and her younger brother Axel grew up in a hamlet in the spectacular mountains of the Ardèche region in south-east France. Ten years later, they have returned to their childhood home and Adèle now drives the school bus. Adèle is desperate to keep the secret of her past--of when she was a boy. No one recognises her here now, but when a terrifying snowstorm strands the bus on the mountain, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and that's when the stories come out.
"Pagano writes about siblings, about love and lies, about life slipping away, and about adolescents who are full of life. She speaks about bodies transforming, seasons changing, and memories that never fade. This extraordinarily beautiful novel, both sensitive and thoughtful, has an astute and deeply affecting ending." —Livre et Lire
Pagano's Faces on the Tip of My Tongue was listed for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
A selection of art looking at Aotearoa New Zealand's connections with the Pacific, with texts investigating the journeys and tensions that shape this world. Te wheke means octopus in te Reo. Te Wheke features work by more than 70 artists from Aotearoa and the Pacific, including Shane Cotton, Fatu Feu’u, Charles Goldie, Bill Hammond, Lonnie Hutchinson, Yuki Kihara, Colin McCahon, Ani O’Neill, Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Lisa Reihana, Bill Sutton, and Robin White.
"This book is like a hybrid of Michael Pollan and Anna Jones. It combines serious food politics with flavour-packed modern recipes. This is a call-to-arms for a different way of eating which seeks to lead us there not through lectures but through a love of food, in all its vibrancy and variety.'" —Bee Wilson
Gagnati's novel, based on her own experiences as a child, refuses to mitigate the pain and isolation of growing up in the French countryside with a brutal father and incompetent mother. As 14-year-old Galla cycles home from her boarding school, we learn of her predicaments and her hopes.
>>"The countryside is a place where tough, alienated people scratch out a thankless existence."
Zora Neale Hurston's candid, exuberant account (first published in 1942) of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. 's candid, exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. New introduction by Jesmyn Ward.
Presenting more than 250 illustrations depicting discoveries, scientific innovations, futuristic visions, and extraterrestrial encounters.
Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) became the 'mother of modern forensics' and was instrumental in elevating homicide investigation to a scientific discipline. She learned forensic science under the tutelage of pioneering medical examiner Magrath, who told her about his cases, gave her access to the autopsy room to observe post-mortems and taught her about poisons and patterns of injury. Lee acquired and read books on criminology and forensic science — eventually establishing the largest library of legal medicine. She went on to create The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas depicting the facts of actual cases in exquisitely detailed miniature.
>>Visit the dioramas.
Nine Days. One City. Three Oddballs. Stephen's dead father is threatening to destroy the world. If Stephen commits the ultimate sacrifice and throws himself into the harbour, he will save humanity. The last thing he needs is a Jehovah's witness masquerading as a school boy and an admission to a mental health facility. Jaanvi steals a life-like doll called James and cares for him as if he were her dead child. Her husband demands she return him. But she and James have already bonded, and it's nobody's business how she decides to grieve. Lucas, pharmacist and all-round nice guy, is having one of the worst weeks of his life. His employees forgot his birthday, his mother's gone manic, and now his favourite customer is in hospital because of a medication error he made. Can he make things right? Or is life all downhill after forty?
"A darkly funny satire that's both moving and wise." —Paula Morris
>>McDaid introduces the book.
Meeting with great success as a painter, Bonheur was remarkable in the nineteenth century as an open lesbian, rational dresser, smoker and scorner of men.
New translations by Jessie Coulson of some of Turgenev's best stories: 'A Nest of Gentlefolk', 'A Quiet Backwater', 'First Love', and 'A Lear of the Steppes'.
How to use a camera to reclaim the streets as your own, why you need to watch the world always with a sense of possibility, how to set your subjects at ease, and the importance of being playful and of finding a lens that suits your personality.
>>Other books by Meyerowitz.
Every year, air pollution prematurely kills seven million people around the world, in rich countries and poor ones. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, premature birth and dementia, among other ailments. Gardiner meets the scientists who have transformed our understanding of pollution's effects on the human body, and traces the economic forces and political decisions that have allowed it to remain at life-threatening levels. She also focuses on real-world solutions, and on stories of people fighting for a healthier future.
300 jungle animals! Fun.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | A Bear Name Bjorn by Delphine Perret {Reviewed by STELLA} The third story in this delightful chapter book for youngsters is called 'Nothing' and it reminded me of what we all, hopefully, learnt to do in lock-down. Stop, slow down, and sometimes just do nothing. “Often Bjorn does nothing at all. But he’s never bored.” In this story, our friend the bear watches a tree grow, much to the consternation of his friend Squirrel. “What are you doing Bjorn? —I’m watching the trees grow. —But you can’t see anything! —You can see the leaves. —But they don’t grow! —Give them time.” He plays cards with the rabbit, who wins every hand and then does card tricks for Bjorn. He sits on a stump and rolls in the dust. Sometimes he reads alone, other times with Fox. He wanders home, maybe counting stars with the weasel and sharing a few quail eggs on the way. Bjorn reminds us the ordinary is extraordinary. “The day is done. Bjorn can’t wait to start over again tomorrow.” Not all antics in the forest are ordinary. The opening story sees Bjorn winning a prize! A plush red sofa. It is delivered and positioned into his perfect little cave. All the forest animals think it is mighty fine and Bjorn is so lucky to have a comfy sofa, but the chickadee senses that something isn’t quite right. Bjorn wants his sleeping corner back — there just isn’t enough room in his cave with the new sofa. The solution — they put the sofa in a clearing under some oak trees. The weasel declares, "There you are! After a bit of rain, it will smell wonderfully mossy!” The woodland sofa is declared a success. This is a charming collection of stories, whimsical and slightly gauche, Delphine Perret’s text is delightful in its brevity and deceptively thoughtful. Combined with the simple and illuminating line-drawing illustrations this is sure to become a favourite as a read-aloud and an early reader for curious minds, with its gentle and humorous tone. Bjorn makes a honey sandwich without bread, the forest animals have their annual check-up with the wise owl (Bjorn needs glasses — luckily magpie has several pairs in her treasure trove), the animals dress up as humans for a carnival (which involves ‘borrowing’ some clothes from a camper's washing line), and Bjorn puzzles over the best present to send to his friend — a girl called Ramona — in the city. Ramona has sent him a letter with a wonderful thing called a fork enclosed — the perfect back-scratcher — better than his favourite rough bark tree! What will be the best present to post to Ramona? 'It’s Time' is the perfect bedtime story, as Bjorn gets ready to hibernate. Is he ready? And are you ready to meet A Bear Named Bjorn? |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 |
Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books by Marcel Bénabou {Not reviewed by THOMAS}
If he is not going to write a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books he might as well not write the review in a comfortable spot, he thinks, not doing something being somehow more demanding than doing something of a comfortable spot, he thinks, but he is not sure either if this is so or even if he thinks that this is so. My pleasures these days, he thinks, are increasingly of a negative sort, not being answerable to the world, for example, whatever that is, whatever that means, even for brief periods, being prominent among them. It is not true that all absences are the same absence, an empty box that does not contain chocolate is quite different from an empty box that does not contain dogshit, for example, even if it is the same box, and inactivity, likewise, in a comfortable spot, preferably, such as on this sofa by the window, specifically, is very different depending upon what activity I am not doing, he thinks. Although he lies here and writes nothing, he thinks, it is not incorrect to think of him as a writer as it is specifically writing that he is not doing as opposed to all the many other things he is also not doing. Lying on the sofa by the window and not writing a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books is pleasurable, he thinks, as he lies on the sofa by the window not writing a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, but, he admits, lying on the sofa by the window having already written a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books would likely also be pleasurable, but, probably, not pleasurable enough to forgo the pleasure of lying on the sofa by the window not writing a review. Velleity is enough, he thinks, inclination without action is enough to give specificity to my non-achievement, making it a specifically literary non-achievement, and meaning to my uselessness, making it a meaningful literary uselessness. It is more satisfying, he thinks, as he lies on the sofa by the window, to fail to do something in particular than to fail to do anything at all, one should always be as particular as possible about what one fails to do, he thinks, thinking, he thinks, like a connoisseur of failure, a failure connoisseur, though thinking this puts him off the thought. There are other impediments to writing a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books other than the specific pleasure of not writing a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, a pleasure, if it is a pleasure, that resembles in every way a failure, his failure to write a review of Marcel Bénabou’s book entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, for example there are other impediments in what he terms, politely, being answerable to the world, which situation he increasingly resents. Despite his best efforts, he thinks, he has failed to attain that state of complete uselessness that enables the mind to function without obligation, that state of complete uselessness that is absolutely necessary, he kids himself, for writing. He is neither useful enough nor useless enough, but useful enough for what or useless enough for what he cannot imagine. He does not admit to himself that he might write for he knows that the intention to write is an insurmountable impediment to writing, though not, perhaps, he admits, as insurmountable an impediment as the absence of an intention to write, not that it makes sense to consider relative degrees of insurmountability, he thinks, insurmountability is an absolute, he thinks, if it is impossible for me to leap across the Riverside Pool this does not mean that leaping across the Riverside Pool is less impossible than leaping across the Tasman Sea, at least for me, not that I have or have ever had even an inclination to leap across the Tasman Sea, but if I had such an inclination would that make my failure a work of art? My failure to write is an absolute. But if I write that my failure to write is on account of my absolute failure, he thinks, and that my creative sterility is in fact my creative sterility, I overcome my failure and my sterility and am able to write, and at this point it becomes even more important, he realises, that I do not write, as this would invalidate the mechanism by which my failure and my sterility were overcome. The inclination to write, he thinks, as he lies on the sofa by the window, must be resisted at all costs, and, he thinks, those costs may be high or low, he doesn’t know, immeasurably high or low, the absence that supplies the cost is an unplumbed absence, he thinks, though, if he says unplumbed, perhaps the absence should rather be either deep or shallow than high or low. Same difference. He will not write. When he was young, he thinks, lying on the sofa by the window, squandering his talent was a literary act, it was a literary act not to be dictated to by his talent, whatever that was, a literary act to achieve nothing, but now those decades of achieving nothing through the deliberate squandering of his talent, the deliberate literary squandering of his talent, he corrects himself, resemble absolutely decades of achieving nothing through the simple absence of talent, which is probably the case, he thinks, there is no evidence otherwise, I have been careful of that, my squandering of talent resembles no talent. I am free at last but exhausted by the effort of all that squandering, if there was any talent, and probably there was not, there is no reason to think that there was, not that it matters, I have squandered it all away. Still, he thinks, exhausted, it’s the squandering that counts.
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NEW RELEASES
Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing $50
We’re often told art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can: it changes how we see the world, makes plain inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. This wide-ranging collection of essays on the arts and letters in both their 'high' and 'popular' forms is an urgent response to these times of funny political weather.
"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they're the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful and wonderfully unbound." —Philip Hoare
"Laing is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature." —Irish Times
>>Feeling overwhelmed?
>>Unfixable elements.
>>A discussion.
>>Productivity through pain.
>>Other books by Olivia Laing.
handiwork by Sara Baume $38
"This little book is a love-child of my art and writing practices, or a by-product of novels past and coming. It’s about the connection between handicraft and bird migration, as well as simply the account of a year spent making hundreds of small, painted objects in an isolated house." —Sara Baume
handiwork is a contemplative short narrative from writer and visual artist Sara Baume (author of Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither and A Line Made by Walking). It charts her daily process of making and writing, and her interactions with her partner and with the place she lives. handiwork offers observations at once gentle and devastating, on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well. Baume’s first work of non-fiction offers readers a glimpse into her creative process and is written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as for the fragility of experience.
>>Baume and her dog read from the book.
>>The new book is a love-child.
>>Flights of thought.
Older Brother by Daniel Mella $38
During the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist and narrator, dies after being struck by lightning. This marks the opening of a novel that combines memoir and fiction, unveiling an intimate exploration of the brotherly bond, while laying bare the effects that death can have on those closest to us and also on ourselves.
"This slim and vital novel is a tour de force; it will floor you, and lift you right the way up—I adored it." —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell $38
Set in a plague-stricken Elizabethan England, O'Farrell's tender and incisive novel looks at the effects on William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes of the death of their son Hamnet.
Short-listed for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
"Dazzling. Devastating." —Kamila Shamsie
>>"I wanted to give this boy a voice."
The Table by Francis Ponge $30
Written from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge's most personal, overlooked, and—because it was the project he was working on when he died—his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured "durable mother" of the table on and of which he here writes.
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel $35
The long-awaited new novel from the author of Station Eleven is set in a hotel on Vancouver Island and in New York, and explores the fragility of both capital and esteem when crises both financial and personal are triggered by the collapse of a ponzi scheme. A devastating look at emotional turbulence in the age of late capitalism.
"The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece, just as good — if not better — than its predecessor." —NPR
>>Read an excerpt.
>>EStJM in conversation.
Hinton by Mark Blacklock $40
A fascinating novel set somewhere between fact and fiction, concerning the mathematician Howard Hinton, who fled to Japan following a bigamy scandal and developed the concepts that underlie quantum geometry.
"Blacklock weaves a distinct and original fiction, a fittingly four-dimensional representation of lived reality. Questions of societal convention versus individual freedom and Classical enlightenment versus Romantic self-expression play themselves out against a backdrop that, as we familiarise ourselves with its complexities, jumps glowingly to life. Blacklock’s attention to detail, his imaginative reach, not to mention his willingness to wrestle with problems of geometry, have produced a singular literary achievement." —Guardian
Faces of the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano $38
The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour.
Long-listed for the 2020 Booker International Prize.
"Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism." — Chris Power, Guardian
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm $28
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In this compelling metabiography, Malcolm Malcolm examines the biographies of Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history.
>>Read Plath's letters.
Europe Against the Jews, 1880—1945 by Götz Aly $58
An important book, examining the wider roots of the Holocaust throughout Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unpublished sources, Aly traces the sequence of events that made persecution of Jews an increasingly acceptable European practice.
Ultimately, the German architects of genocide found support for the Final Solution in nearly all the countries they occupied or were allied with.
The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive by Philippe Sands $38
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the Poles and the British, as well as groups of Jews, Wächter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by a Vatican bishop. He remained there for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. Sands, author of the magisterial East West Street unravels the mysteries and implications of the story.
>>Sands talks with Paula Morris.
>>Sands talks with Kim Hill.
The Vegetarian Silver Spoon: Classic and contemporary Italian recipes $75
Over 200 authentic and achievable recipes.
The Apartment: A century of Russian history by Alexandra Litvina and Anna Desnitskaya $40
A wonderful large-format picture book illustrating a century of Russian history through the lives of the residents in an apartment in Moscow. Beautifully done.
Now! Painting in Germany today edited by Stephan Berg, Frédéric Bußmann and Alexander Klar $100
Now! brings together their selection of fifty-three artists who are breaking artistic ground in their work. Showcasing the artwork of the next generation of young artists taking over the modern-day painting scene in Germany, this book presents two hundred illustrations that speak to the diversity of the current work.
Notes from an Apocalypse: A personal journey to the end of the world and back by Mark O'Connell $33
Meet the people preparing for the end of the world In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota, and in the valleys of New Zealand: environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate change, billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars, and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilisation as we know it.
I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider $30
One- and two-page comics skewering bibliophilia and related phenomena from the New Yorker cartoonist.
>>Incidental comics.
We’re often told art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can: it changes how we see the world, makes plain inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. This wide-ranging collection of essays on the arts and letters in both their 'high' and 'popular' forms is an urgent response to these times of funny political weather.
"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they're the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful and wonderfully unbound." —Philip Hoare
"Laing is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature." —Irish Times
>>Feeling overwhelmed?
>>Unfixable elements.
>>A discussion.
>>Productivity through pain.
>>Other books by Olivia Laing.
"This little book is a love-child of my art and writing practices, or a by-product of novels past and coming. It’s about the connection between handicraft and bird migration, as well as simply the account of a year spent making hundreds of small, painted objects in an isolated house." —Sara Baume
handiwork is a contemplative short narrative from writer and visual artist Sara Baume (author of Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither and A Line Made by Walking). It charts her daily process of making and writing, and her interactions with her partner and with the place she lives. handiwork offers observations at once gentle and devastating, on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well. Baume’s first work of non-fiction offers readers a glimpse into her creative process and is written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as for the fragility of experience.
>>Baume and her dog read from the book.
>>The new book is a love-child.
>>Flights of thought.
During the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist and narrator, dies after being struck by lightning. This marks the opening of a novel that combines memoir and fiction, unveiling an intimate exploration of the brotherly bond, while laying bare the effects that death can have on those closest to us and also on ourselves.
"This slim and vital novel is a tour de force; it will floor you, and lift you right the way up—I adored it." —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
Set in a plague-stricken Elizabethan England, O'Farrell's tender and incisive novel looks at the effects on William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes of the death of their son Hamnet.
Short-listed for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
"Dazzling. Devastating." —Kamila Shamsie
>>"I wanted to give this boy a voice."
Written from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge's most personal, overlooked, and—because it was the project he was working on when he died—his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured "durable mother" of the table on and of which he here writes.
The long-awaited new novel from the author of Station Eleven is set in a hotel on Vancouver Island and in New York, and explores the fragility of both capital and esteem when crises both financial and personal are triggered by the collapse of a ponzi scheme. A devastating look at emotional turbulence in the age of late capitalism.
"The Glass Hotel is a masterpiece, just as good — if not better — than its predecessor." —NPR
>>Read an excerpt.
>>EStJM in conversation.
A fascinating novel set somewhere between fact and fiction, concerning the mathematician Howard Hinton, who fled to Japan following a bigamy scandal and developed the concepts that underlie quantum geometry.
"Blacklock weaves a distinct and original fiction, a fittingly four-dimensional representation of lived reality. Questions of societal convention versus individual freedom and Classical enlightenment versus Romantic self-expression play themselves out against a backdrop that, as we familiarise ourselves with its complexities, jumps glowingly to life. Blacklock’s attention to detail, his imaginative reach, not to mention his willingness to wrestle with problems of geometry, have produced a singular literary achievement." —Guardian
The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour.
Long-listed for the 2020 Booker International Prize.
"Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism." — Chris Power, Guardian
Is it ever possible to know 'the truth' about Sylvia Plath and her marriage to Ted Hughes, which ended with her suicide? In this compelling metabiography, Malcolm Malcolm examines the biographies of Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, to discover how Plath became an enigma in literary history.
>>Read Plath's letters.
An important book, examining the wider roots of the Holocaust throughout Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unpublished sources, Aly traces the sequence of events that made persecution of Jews an increasingly acceptable European practice.
Ultimately, the German architects of genocide found support for the Final Solution in nearly all the countries they occupied or were allied with.
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the Poles and the British, as well as groups of Jews, Wächter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by a Vatican bishop. He remained there for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. Sands, author of the magisterial East West Street unravels the mysteries and implications of the story.
>>Sands talks with Paula Morris.
>>Sands talks with Kim Hill.
Over 200 authentic and achievable recipes.
A wonderful large-format picture book illustrating a century of Russian history through the lives of the residents in an apartment in Moscow. Beautifully done.
Now! brings together their selection of fifty-three artists who are breaking artistic ground in their work. Showcasing the artwork of the next generation of young artists taking over the modern-day painting scene in Germany, this book presents two hundred illustrations that speak to the diversity of the current work.
Meet the people preparing for the end of the world In the remote mountains of Scotland, in high-tech bunkers in South Dakota, and in the valleys of New Zealand: environmentalists who fear the ravages of climate change, billionaire entrepreneurs dreaming of life on Mars, and right-wing conspiracists yearning for a lost American idyll. One thing unites them: their certainty that we are only years away from the end of civilisation as we know it.
One- and two-page comics skewering bibliophilia and related phenomena from the New Yorker cartoonist.
>>Incidental comics.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Magic hemmed by protocol.
>>The book has become a film.
>>A tour of Tokyo's traditional kissatens.
>>A brief history of the kissaten.
>>Start reading the book before your coffee gets cold.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #179 (23.5.20)
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