NEW RELEASES

Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam         $35
It is Saturday afternoon and two boys’ schools are locked in battle for college rugby supremacy. Priya — a fifteen year old who barely belongs — watches from the sidelines. Then it is Saturday night and the team is partying, Priya's friends have evaporated and she isn't sure what to do. Gnanalingam's new novel addresses New Zealand's culture of masculinity, racism and sexual predation, and the ways in which institutions seem often to have priorities than acknowledging victims' needs. 
>>"There are ways of being male without it coming at the expense of other people." 
>>"How do brown bodies move in white spaces in New Zealand?"
>>Sodden Downstream was short-listed for the 2018 Acorn Price for Fiction. 

A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne         $37
Some stories are universal. Some are unique. They play out across human history. This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons. One with his father's violence in his blood. One with his mother's artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life among the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. Can this pattern be escaped? An astounding new novel from the author of The Heart's Invisible Furies, A History of Loneliness and A Ladder to the Sky. 
"John Boyne brings a completely fresh eye to the most important stories. He is one of the greatest craftsmen in contemporary literature." —Colum McCann

Rat King Landlord by Murdoch Stephens           $25
Colossal rats invade from the Wellington town belt. Your rent is going up but everyone is calling it a summer of love. Cryptic posters appear around town inciting people to join an evening of mayhem. Until now the rats have contented themselves with scraps. But as summer heats up and the cost of living skyrockets, we can no longer ignore that our friends are seeking their own rung on the property ladder.
>>"The real challenge for a community is how to self-rule beyond the easy villains." 

A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux          $37

Annie Ernaux revisits the night fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, is the vital origin of her writing life, her writer's identity.

>>Other books by Ernaux. 

>>Read Thomas's review of The Years. 

Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton        $65

A beautifully presented and illustrated record of the work and life of one of New Zealand's most recognisable sculptors, a man of warmth and  vitality, whose works are daring, sensual and provocative.

Theft by Luke Brown         $40

What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016. Paul has awoken to the fact that he will always be better known for reviewing haircuts than for his literary journalism. He is about to be kicked out of his cheap flat in east London and his sister has gone missing after an argument about what to do with the house where they grew up, after their mother's death. When Paul is granted a rare interview with Emily Nardini, a cult author, and is then received into her surprisingly grand home, everything begins to skid. A satire of the intersection of personal and political crises under the cloud of Brexit. 

"A wry and stylish look at male privilege." —Financial Times

"Is this the most loathsome hipster in modern fiction?" —Telegraph

Fracture by Andrés Neuman          $33

In 2011, Mr Watanabe, a Japanese electronics executive, is in Tokyo when the earthquake that precedes the Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. In the aftermath, he fins himself on a journey to Fukushima, a tourist of the current day tragedy that mimics his own experiences of World War II. For Mr Watanabe is one of the few double hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The earthquake shifts his and others memories of those events. Meanwhile, four women based in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid tell their own stories of knowing and loving Mr Watanabe, a victim of one of the largest collective traumas of the last century. Fracture encompasses some of the most urgent political, social and environmental questions of contemporary life, about collective trauma, memory and love.

Pencils You Should Know: A history of the ultimate writing utensil in 75 anecdotes by Caroline Weaver        $35
Interesting, quirky and well-illustrated. Recommended for anyone who gets excited about the new Palomino Blackwing or a perfectly sharpened No. 2 Ticonderoga.
>>Also recommended: The Secret Life of the Pencil. 

Summer Kitchens: Recipes and reminiscences from every corner of Ukraine by Olia Hercules          $53

Olia Hercules owes some of her earliest and fondest memories to the 'summer kitchens' of her parents, grandparents, neighbours and friends in Ukraine. These small buildings are separate from the main house, and always positioned near a fruit plot or veg patch so families can enjoy the home-grown produce as it ripens, and preserve the surplus in preparation for winter. The number of summer kitchens is dwindling these days, but there is still so much we can learn about making the most of the vibrant summer produce throughout the rest of the year. 

"A complete revelation." —Nigella Lawson

Bulletproof Vest by Kenneth Rosen           $22

The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and mundane applications are often lost, as it is now synonymous with body armor, war zones, and domestic terrorism. What Rosen learned through intimate use of his vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security. Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulletproof vest on a molecular level and on the world stage. It's also an ode to living precariously, an open letter that defends the notion that life is worth the risk.

Stranger than Kindness by Nick Cave          $70
A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller and cultural icon Nick Cave. This highly collectible book contains images selected by Cave from 'Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition', presented by the Royal Danish Library in partnership with Arts Centre Melbourne. Featuring full-colour reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs and collected personal artefacts, it presents Cave's life, work and inspiration and explores his many real and imagined universes, with texts from Cave and Darcey Steinke on themes that are central to Cave's work.
>>A trailer for the exhibition. 
>>The song, live, 1987. 

Te Papa to Berlin: The making of two museums by Ken Gorbey         $40

After working on the development and realisation of Te Papa, Gorbey was recruited to salvage the Jewish Museum Berlin. 

Island Dreams: Mapping an obsession by Gavin Francis       $45
Blending stories of his own travels with psychology, philosophy and great voyages from literature, Francis sheds new light on the importance of islands and isolation in our collective consciousness.

Environment by Rolf Halden         $22

What do we mean by environment? It affects everything we do and the way we think; we are part of it and yet we are uncertain how to think of it. 

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville         $48

What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? Grenville's first novel in a decade. 

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power           $37

A relentless advocate for promoting human rights, Power has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America's "foremost thinkers on foreign policy." The Education of an Idealist traces Power's extraordinary journey, from Irish immigrant to human rights activist to war-zone correspondent to United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

>>Samantha Power talks with Paula Morris. 

Advice to Young Musicians by Robert Schuman and Steven Isserlis        $25
Steven Isserlis revisits Schuman's perennial text and adds commentary of his own. 
>>Isserlis plays the Schuman 'Cello Concerto Op.129. 

Abigail and the Restless Raindrop by Matthew Cunningham and Sarah Wilkins         $20

Abigail is a little girl with big questions. Find out about the water cycle with her in this beautifully illustrated New Zealand book. 

How to Be Good, Or, How to be moral and virtuous in a wicked world by Gary Cox        $39

What is goodness? Is goodness achievable, and if so, how? If being a good person is a matter of doing the right thing, then what is the right thing to do? Is it acting rationally, promoting happiness, exercising moderation in all things or respecting the freedom of others, or is it somehow a concoction of all these abilities, wisely adjusted to suit circumstances?

Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War 2 by Brent Coutts          $50

A previously untold history of New Zealand homosexual soldiers in World War II, drawing on the experiences of ordinary men who lived through extraordinary times. At the centre of the story are New Zealand soldiers Harold Robinson, Ralph Dyer and Douglas Morison, who shared a queer identity and love of performance. Through their roles as female impersonators in Kiwi concert parties in the Pacific and Egypt they found a place to live as gay men within the military forces.

Pluses and Minuses: How maths solves our problems by Stefan Buijsman           $37
Thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia became the first humans to make complex calculations numbers. Since then, mathematics has become an unstoppable force. It's behind almost everything, from search engines to cruise control, from coffee-makers to timetables. But now that we hardly ever need to do arithmetic, how relevant is mathematics to everyday life?
[Can the case that could be made for 'plusses' over 'pluses' be so easily made for 'busses' over 'buses'?]

Rootbound: Rewilding a life by Alice Vincent         $33

"A book about heartbreak, salvation, nature and balcony gardens. Alice Vincent mixes memoir with botanical history to explore how plants can heal us." —Huffington Post 

"Rootbound is a poignant testimony to the joy that greenery will bring to your life, and it is a magical reminder that humans, like plants, can mend and grow in their own good time." —Independent 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #187 (17.7.20)

Read our latest newsletter.

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell    {Reviewed by STELLA} This evocative, heart-breaking and revealing story of grief lays bare the genesis of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet. Yet in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, Shakespeare as we know him hardly has a role. Set almost exclusively in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon and centred around the domestic life of his wife and family, Will is referred to as the Latin tutor, the glover’s son, the father, the husband. and is often working away — letters arriving at intervals. Who do we meet on the first pages, but the son — desperately searching for an adult to help him. His sister is unwell and the plague is present. From here, as time and the shadow of death make their presence known, we circle back increment by increment into the world of this child and his sister, of the mother, of the extended family and the village. We circle further back to the young Latin tutor gazing out the window, bored by the tedium of his job with boys who will never become any great things, and spying a youth (at first he mistakes his future wife for a lad) with a bird (later we meet this kestrel) upon her arm; and circle back again to the reasons why he is entrenched in this wearisome role — his violent and domineering father. Agnes is central and crucial in this novel. O’Farrell takes what little knowledge of Shakespeare's wife and brings her to the reader as a full and fascinating woman in her own right. She reels from the pages with her supposed eccentricities — she is a gifted healer, a lover of plants and the wilderness (seen by some in the community as a wild thing — a woman shunned by some but needed by others) — and her independent life. Emotional and emotive, sly and quiet, when death visits at her door, her grief is unbounded. Life has been snatched from her in a startling and, to her, an uncomprehending way. Agnes and Hamnet hold you in the grooves of this novel, make you want more, and they will stay with you long after the covers are closed. You reside within Hamnet’s mind as he navigates his twin sister’s illness, as he tries to find sense in the madness of the fever and the adult world that stands just outside his grip. You walk alongside Agnes as she loses herself in nature’s wildness to emerge into a world that can only tear at her, yet is necessary for survival and the memories that bind her child to her. Each character offers up a story —  a way of seeing this world and telling its tale — a tragedy wrapped in intrigue on a small stage with rippling emotions. Hamnet is historical fiction at its best — in the vain of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series — it sets you fair and square in this time with all its life, death and drama. Immersive, compelling and rich in language and tale.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser     {Reviewed by THOMAS} “What is the use of thoughts and ideas if one feels, as I do, that one doesn’t know what to do with them?” says Jakob. He abandons his family, we learn nothing of his family, and enrols himself in the Benjamenta Institute, ostensibly a school for servants, seemingly a school, in the loftier sense of the word, for the nullification of one’s individuality, all the better to conform, all the better to meet the demands of the world upon a person. “As an old man I shall have to serve young and confident and badly educated ruffians, or I shall be a beggar, or I shall perish,” says Jakob, realistically. There are no other options. The relinquishment of the self, so to call it, learned at the Benjamenta Institute is not a path to enlightenment but to its opposite, a path to unknowing, an abnegation, a resignation, an obliteration, a relief from the burden of internal life. Not so different from enlightenment, so to call it, perhaps. To obey, to conform, to suppress thought, to extinguish that part of yourself that resists boredom, the part that smarts from the indignity of existence, from mundanity, how better to fit in, to blend in, just as is expected of us? “What we pupils do, we do because we have to, but why we have to, nobody quite knows. We obey without considering what one day will come of all of this thoughtless obedience, and we work without thinking if it is right and good to do our work,” says Jakob, ominously. “We don’t rebel. It would never cross our minds. We have, collectively, so few thoughts. I have perhaps the most thoughts, that’s quite possible, but at root I despise my capacity for thinking.” What cannot be opposed must be allowed to extinguish us if it is not to cause us anguish. “One must learn to love and cherish necessity,” says Jakob. “Here at the Benjamenta Institute one learns to suffer and endure losses, and that is in my view a craft. We pupils have no hopes, it is even forbidden to us to nourish hopes for life in our hearts, and yet we are completely calm and happy.” This achievement is a non-achievement, an unenlightening. “I have become a quite different person, I have become an ordinary person,” says Jakob, “and I have the Benjamentas to thank for my becoming ordinary.” By conforming to expectations without the slightest resistance, Jakob displaces exactly his own volume in these expectations. His obedience is the ultimate disobedience, his submission is the ultimate escape. To oppose the forces of conformity would be to acknowledge those forces more generously than to submit to them, for one can sarcastically conform where one cannot sarcastically oppose. “It suits me to disappear, as inconspicuously as possible,” said Walser, somewhere else. Not only to disappear but to do so inconspicuously. (>>You can read something I wrote on Walser here.) “We are small, small all the way down the scale to utter worthlessness,” says Jakob. All actions in Walser’s books are without consequence, all details are immediately forgotten, time moves on with the sole result that the moments are left behind, relinquished, obliterated. If existence is anguish, this is the best possible result, this snagless moving-forward of time is almost cheerful. Walser seems capable of expressing anguish only in a cheerful way. He has no other vocabulary. He has inexhaustible anguish. He writes to suppress his anguish. Cheerfully. Walser’s characters are all surplus to the requirements of meaningful occurrence, so to call it, if there could even be such a thing as meaningful occurrence, and they are relieved of the conundrum of whether there could be such a thing as meaningful occurrence by being excluded in any case from meaningful occurrence if there was such a thing. Politeness relieves them of their lack of purpose. Politeness is a way of not existing, or, perhaps, a way of existing in your own absence. Jakob is the sworn enemy of his own individuality. He has no effect on the world and he is not affected by it. He is without reciprocation. His nullity is a blank mirror upon which Fraulein Benjamenta destroys herself by looking to him for love, a blank mirror for which Herr Benjamenta ultimately closes his school, declares his love for Jakob the perfectly unreachable pupil, attempts to strangle him, engages him to accompany him. “The individual in me is only a zero,” says Jakob. “But now I’ll throw away my pen! Away with the life of thought! I’m going with Herr Benjamenta into the desert.”

NEW RELEASES

Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit          $40
How does a young writer find her voice in a society that would prefer women to be silent? Solnit's memoir is an electric account of the pauses and gains of feminism in the past forty years.
"There's a new feminist revolution — open to people of all genders — and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful voices." —Barbara Ehrenreich

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin            $33
If an individual could be virtually inserted into the life of a random stranger, anywhere in the world, what effects would that have on them both? The characters in Schweblin's nove reveal the beauty of technological connection between far-flung persons — but they also expose the ugly truth of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to love, playful encounters and adventures, but what if it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror?
"Schweblin unveils the hidden horror of our own imaginations and our private spaces deftly and chillingly. Little Eyes is a brilliant, anxiety-provoking novel in a time where our anxiety, personally and societally, is at an all-time high. It is perhaps the novel we both need and deserve, and though it may take courage to pick it up, it is important we do so." —Tor
“Her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic.” —New York Times
>>Read Thomas's review of Fever Dream. 

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay         $37
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Jean is not good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in a wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu — its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too.

Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani          $30
Slimani gives voice to young Moroccan women who are grappling with a conservative culture that at once condemns and commodifies sex. In a country where the law punishes and outlaws all forms of sex outside marriage, as well as homosexuality and prostitution, women have only two approved options for their sexual identities: virgin or wife. 

Aegean: Recipes from the mountains to the sea by Marianna Leivaditaki         $50
Growing up in a taverna in Chania, the relaxed, delicious and achievable food of Crete  and the wider Mediterranean is second nature to Leivaditaki. Very well presented. 
>>The journal of a fisherman's daughter. 

Mazel Tov by J.S. Margot            $30
Unemployed 20-year-old Margot takes up a tutoring job with the Schneiders, an Orthodox Jewish family. Indignant about the insularity and conservatism of their religious life, she dismisses her employers as socially backward, out of step with the modern world. With the Gulf War and the Intifada looming in the background, Margot finds herself caught between clashing cultures: her relationship with her Iranian boyfriend Nima is met with prejudice, while the Schneiders' devotion to Israel provokes similar discontent in him. Through impassioned debates over religion, belonging and cultural heritage, Margot and the Schneider family begin to move past conflict and towards mutual understanding and appreciation.

Designing Disorder: Experiments and disruptions in the city by Richard Sennett and Pablo Sendera         $35
 In 1970 Richard Sennett published the ground-breaking The Uses of Disorder, that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and alongside campaigner and architect, Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City. The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. What the authors call 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off. The book proves that ideas of disorder are still some of the most radical and transformative in debates on 21st century cities.

Orwell: A man of our time by Richard Bradford          $43
Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focused and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump's America are obvious. Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. "Doublethink" features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to "Fake News."

Thinking Again by Jan Morris        $37
In this second volume of her diaries, following In My Mind's Eye, Morris casts her eye over modern life in all its stupidity and glory. From her daily thousand paces to the ongoing troubles of Brexit, from her enduring love for America to the wonders of the natural world, and from the vagaries and ailments of old age to the beauty of youth, she displays her determined belief in embracing life and creativity.

Instructions for a Funeral by David Means          $23
Means writes with compassionate precision about fatherhood, marriage, a homeless brother, the nature of addiction, and the death of a friend at the hands of a serial killer nurse. He transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story; two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey; a man's funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime, real estate ventures, and the destructive force of paranoia. 
"One of the most talented writers of short fiction in America." —James Wood, New Yorker

The Eighth: Mahler and the world in 1910 by Stephen Johnson       $40
The world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his adult life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings, to tumultuous applause. Stephen Johnson recounts its far-reaching effect on composers, conductors and writers of the time — Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Walter and Klemperer, and the writers Zweig and Mann

The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun          $33
Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui. She accepts the offer and travels the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who've paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.

Home Stories: 100 years, 20 visionary interiors by Jasper Morrison, Mateo Kries and Jochen Eisenbrand       $155
Our homes are an expression of how we want to live; they shape our everyday routines and fundamentally affect our well-being. Interior design for the home sustains a giant global industry and feeds an entire branch of the media. However, the question of dwelling, or how to live, is found increasingly to be lacking in serious discourse. This book sets out to review the interior design of our homes. It discusses 20 iconic residential interiors from the present back to the 1920s, by architects, artists and designers such as Assemble, Cecil Beaton, Lina Bo Bardi, Arno Brandlhuber, Elsie de Wolfe, Elii, Josef Frank, Andrew Geller, IKEA, Finn Juhl, Michael Graves, Kisho Kurokawa, Adolf Loos, Claude Parent, Bernard Rudofsky, Margarete Sch tte-Lihotzky, Alison and Peter Smithson, Jacques Tati, Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol. Including historic and recent photographs, drawings and plans, the book explores these case studies as key moments in the history of the modern interior. 

Coffee by Danny Lenney        $22
Coffee—it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing—the beverage, the break, the ritual—we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility—where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?

Book of the Week. Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel, The Glass Hotel. Set in a hotel on Vancouver Island and in New York, the book 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.

>>Read Stella's review. 

>>"A profound study of responsibility in times of crisis."

>>Knowing and not knowing. 

>>"I admire novelists who are pushing the form forward."

>>The art of second chances. 

>>Read an extract. 
>>Auckland, 2015. 
>>Fact, fiction and the familiar. 
>>EStJM in conversation. 
>>Unbridled.  
>>Read the book!
>>Her previous novel, Station Eleven, sets Shakespeare after an apocalypse. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #186 (10.7.20)

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This week's Book of the Week is The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund (published by Gecko Press)   
When her father leaves to save people from a giant who turns them to stone with his gaze, a child in a red dress is left alone. Many days and many nights go by. Every evening the girl says good night to herself in her mirror. When the last light burns down, the girl takes her mirror and a knife and sets out to find her father. "I will save my father from the giant," she says. A beautifully illustrated version of a Swedish fairy tale. 

>>Read Stella's review. 

>>Have a peek inside the book. 

>>The story is based on Elsa Beskow's Tripp Trapp Trull och Jätten Dum-dum.
>>Some artwork by Anna Hoglund. 

>>Look Hamlet. 

>>Look inside Look Hamlet. 

>>Can You Whistle Johanna? 

>>Månansiktet (an animated film).

>>Prominaden (an animated film).

>>A special mention.

>>Buy The Stone Giant — we can send it anywhere. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund   {Reviewed by STELLA} Another new favourite from the Gecko Press stables, The Stone Giant is both beautiful and taut. It is fairy-tale telling reminiscent of Grimms', but not too scary for little ones. Anna Höglund, inspired by the Swedish author Elsa Beskow’s Tripp, Trapp, Trull, brings us a tale of bravery, audacity and cleverness. A child lives with her father on an island. When her father, who just happens to be a knight, has to leave her to fight a giant who is turning everyone to stone, she waits for his return. After everything is mended and tidied, she watches out the window for his return by day and lights a candle at the window by night to guide him home over the dark seas. She says goodnight to herself as she gazes into her hand mirror. As the days and nights go by, she starts to think about the stone giant, how the gaze of a giant might turn you to stone and wonders whether her father will ever return. She realises that she must venture out to find him. The sea is dark and cold, but luckily this girl can swim — she can swim a long way. When she reaches land again, the sun shines down and dries her, and ahead of her is a shining path. A path that leads her into the forest. She walks and walks. The sun sets and through the trees, she spies a cottage. An old woman invites her in, feeds her, gives her a bed for the night and sends her on her way with a useful item — an umbrella. She continues her quest until she reaches a barren and dismal land and here she meets the monster. Quickly the umbrella opens and covers the girl.  The monster is curious — who is hiding under the umbrella? What will the girl do? Clever and quick thinking makes the child the hero of this story. And yes, there is a happy ending! Anna Höglund’s text is sparse and direct, creating a harmonic synergy with the illustrations which are delicate and subtle in their detail. The quiet and contemplation in the first part of the book moves towards anticipation and endeavour as we venture with the girl in search of her father and the giant (who just happens to be a giant stone woman). Höglund’s illustrations are made by copper plate etchings and watercolour. They are expressive and have layers of depth, with her use of black and small petals of colour, not often seen in children’s books. Add to this the charm of the book’s design with its swirly green and red endpapers and a shiny hand mirror on the back cover and you will be charmed too with the brave young girl stepping out into the world to rescue her father in her red dress complete with pocket (useful for those everyday items that may defeat a giant).

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick   {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careering, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a we of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic you that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a he or she, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.”

NEW RELEASES

Dance Prone by David Coventry              $35
The much-anticipated new novel from the author of The Invisible Mile. During their 1985 tour, two events of hatred and stupidity forever change the lives of a band's four members. Neues Bauen, a post-hardcore Illinois group homing in on their own small fame, head on with frontman Conrad Wells sexually assaulted and guitarist Tone Seburg wounded by gunshot. The band staggers forth into the American landscape, investigating each of their relationships with history, memory, authenticity, and violence. With decades passed and compelled by his wife's failing health to track down Tone, Conrad flies to North Africa where her brother is rumoured to be hiding with a renowned artist from their past. There he instead meets various characters including his former drummer, Spence. Amongst the sprawl and shout of Morocco, the men attempt to recall what happened to them during their lost years of mental disintegration and emotional poverty.
"A gorgeous panegyric to the purity, poison and impossibly high stakes of punk. Funny, filthy, erudite and rude." —Carl Shuker
>>Read a sample. 
>>The Invisible Mile.
>>Transit at Marrakech. 

Lost Property by Laura Beatty           $23
In middle age, a writer finds herself despairing and uncomprehending at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a van and journey across France to the Mediterranean, across Italy to the Balkans and Greece and on to the islands. To travel through space is also to travel through time: along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the wars with the Huguenots, the fragility of the Italian Renaissance, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current refugee crisis, meeting figures from Europe's political and artistic past — a Norman knight, Joan of Arc, Ariosto, d'Annunzio and Alan Moore's nihilistic Rorschach, each lending their own view of humanity at its best and at its very worst. 
"The closer they get to their destination, the further they are from finding any definitive answers, and even the questions have become elusive. But this shifting, unsure quality, made luminous with an extraordinary descriptive brilliance, emerges as the book’s strength." —Guardian

The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund        $27
When her father leaves to save people from a giant who turns them to stone with his gaze, a child in a red dress is left alone. Many days and many nights go by. Every evening the girl says good night to herself in her mirror. When the last light burns down, the girl takes her mirror and a knife and sets out to find her father. "I will save my father from the giant," she says. A beautifully illustrated version of a Swedish fairy tale. 
>>Artwork by Anna Hoglund. 

Machines in the Head: Collected stories by Anna Kavan          $36
This new selection of Kavan's stories gathers work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940),  evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). 
>>The awful force of inanimate things. 

How Do You Make a Baby? by Anna Fiske        $33
A very effective and informative blend of good information and hilarious illustrations. 
>>See also Tell Me.

The U.S. Antifascism Reader edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials         $43
Antifascism: as American as apple pie. Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of "white nationalism," the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.

Ocean by Steve Mentz        $22
The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Unlike familiar stories of agricultural settlements and conquering empires, an oceanic context immerses human bodies in alien waters. Our engagement with the world ocean can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic waste and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasises the frailty of human experience.
>>Some other books on the 'Object Lessons' series. 

Merchant, Miner, Mandarin: The life and times of the remarkable Chole Sew Hoy by Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew and Trevor Gordon Agnew        $50
A history and legacy of a businessman from China's Guangdong Province who arrived in Port Chalmers in 1869. Good insight into New Zealand race relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

The Big Book of Blooms by Yuval Zommer         $30
Beautifully illustrated and highly informative. 
>>Other books by Yuval Zommer. 

Obsessive About Octopuses by Owen Davey         $33
...and silly about squid. Did you know that an octopus has three hearts and a doughnut-shaped brain? You'll discover that these incredible creatures are super-smart and have great survival skills.From the truly terrifying giant Pacific octopus to the inventive common octopus, find out where members of this eight-armed family live, what they eat and how we can protect them.

Madness in Civilisation: A cultural history of insanity by Andrew Scull        $35
From the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Scull questions what we mean by madness and what place this construct plays in the functioning of society through time. 

Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon          $35
A novel of stories exploring the impact of American interference in Southeast Asia on three teenagers living in Laos.
"The chapters exercise hypnotic intensity, but the overall effect is even more profound. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power." —The Washington Post

Turned On: Science, sex and robots by Kate Devlin           $25
An exploration of sexuality, technology, and humanity through the promises of artificial intelligence.

The Quick and the Dead: True stories of life and death from a New Zealand pathologist by Cynric Temple-Camp         $40
More from the author of the very popular The Cause of Death. 

Basquiat: Boom for Real by Eleanor Nairne, Dieter Buchhart and Lotte Johnson          $90
Basquiat first came to prominence when he collaborated with Al Diaz to spray-paint enigmatic statements under the pseudonym SAMO(c). From there he went on to work with others on collages, Xerox art, postcards, performances, and music before establishing his reputation as one of the most important painters of his generation. This book places his collaborations in a wider art historical context and looks at his career through the lens of performance.

Architek by Dominique Ehrhard         $55
An introduction to architectural creation, the 95 precut cardboard elements in this book can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to build all sorts of fantastical structures. Follow the full-color idea diagrams to create more than 20 unique projects, then disassemble them and try something different. Developing direction-following skills and 3-D creativity, this kit allows young architects to both learn traditional design rules and break them.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #185 (3.7.20)

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>> Read all Stella's reviews.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St, John Mandel    {Reviewed by STELLA} Mirage and subterfuge, reality and counterlives, transformation and invention are the players in Emily St.John Mandel’s latest novel. Her previous novel, Station Eleven, was centred in the aftermath of worldly collapse, complete with a pandemic. The Glass Hotel takes us back to the early 2000s, with its escalating wealth capital and house-of-cards financial boom and bust. Vincent is an attractive young woman loitering in her hometown, working as a bartender at an upmarket exclusive hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island: The Glass Hotel, owned by financier Jonathan Alkaitis. The night Vincent and Alkaitis meet, an unnerving action has occurred: someone had written graffiti on the glass window of the entry lounge. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” A message for Alkaitis we presume — one he never sees — but which shakes Vincent and a guest, shipping executive Leon Prevant, to the core. What does it mean? And why has someone bothered to display this message so viciously (when its target could have easily been accessed in New York), in one of the remotest places Vincent knows, a place she describes as two roads to nowhere. The novel opens and closes with a first-person narrative of falling through the ocean — it is lyrical and strangely eerie. A ghostly theme that recurs in several places in The Glass Hotel — either with hallucinatory drugs or stress-induced experiences, or within the counterlife narratives of Alkaitis. Between these ocean fallings, we follow Vincent, her half-brother Paul, and Alkaitis as their lives unfold and intertwine. Here is the complacency of being a ‘trophy wife’, the denial of a crime (Alkaitis’s financial activities parallel Bernie Madoff’s schemes and his eventual downfall) and the stories one tells to justify rotten behaviour and errors of judgement. Paul is shallow, but wanting to be wonderful — a recovering drug addict who will stoop to any depths to pull himself up. Alkaitis is successful, blooming with the confidence of money. Vincent is ready and able to reinvent herself with merely a blink of an eye. In The Glass Hotel, we move in the dance-drug scene, we traipse through the mundanity of dead-end jobs and the precariat class, we luxuriate in the world of the moneyed, and edge into the knife-sharpened pretence of the art scene. But mostly what we are called out for, as are all the players in this game, is our complacency in being part of this structure. As Alkaitis sits in jail, he questions who is the biggest crook: his criminal activity — a Ponzi scheme — or the investors who want more and better returns on their precious dollars? When Vincent starts life again after her days with Jonathan, can she escape her belief that she knew nothing? When Paul becomes a well-known avant-garde composer can he let loose his demons? Hauntings pervade The Glass Hotel.  Emily St.John Mandel’s excellent writing, from the main threads to the bit players, familiar settings as well as oblique passages, makes The Glass Hotel a fascinating, compelling novel. The more you walk away from The Glass Hotel, the more it will come back to you with its questioning voice and its insistence that responsibility is necessary and long overdue  a  haunting that refuses to be quiet.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Other Name by Jon Fosse   {Reviewed by THOMAS} And I see myself sitting and reading the thick blue book of two parts, not that thick, actually, and I have reached that point in the book, though it is not in fact a point in the book for there is nothing in the book that would mark such a point, but rather a point in my reading of the book, which just happens to be around page seventy-five, that I came to realise that the book is written entirely in one sentence, one slow, patient, uninterrupted flow of words, no, I think, that is not correct, the book is written in two parts, though each begins with the word And, but neither part ends, each rather just leaves off, so it would not be correct that the book is written in one sentence, or in two sentences, one for each part, but rather in no sentences, one, or two, slow, patient, uninterrupted flow, or flows, of words, that much at least I got right, I think, just the kind of thing I like, but done with such virtuosity and with such little display of virtuosity that I had not realised until page seventy-five or thereabouts that there are no full stops to be found in this book, or no full stop, I am uncertain if this absence should be singular or plural, possibly both, this Jon Fosse and his translator Damion Searles having built these words without one misstep, or missomething, the metaphor seems mixed and I has not even realised that it was a metaphor, I must be more careful, capturing the flow of thought, so to call it, and speech, realistically, seemingly of the narrator, a middle-aged painter named Asle, living, I am almost tempted to put, as such people do, in a small town in western Norway, driving in the snow to and from a city on the western coast of Norway, the city of the gallery which shows, which is a euphemism of sorts for sells, his paintings, but also the city in which lives a middle-aged painter named Asle, resembling both in looks and clothing, if clothing is not part of looks, the narrator, the narrator narrating in the first person and this other Asle, the alter-Asle if you like, this alter-Asle to the thoughts and memories of whom the narrator-Asle has extraordinary access, though there is no evidence of any reciprocal mechanism, we are, I am sure, never given an instance of the alter-Asle even being aware of the existence of such a person as the narrator, this aler-Asle, being confined to the third person, and, I wonder, what sort of trauma confines a person to an existence only in the third person? presumably a trauma, I think, this alter-Asle being also an alcoholic and a person who “most of the time, doesn’t want to live any more, he’s always thinking that he should go out into the sea, disappear into the waves,” but not doing so because of his love for his dog, there is, I think as I am reading, some relationship between the two Asles, well, obviously there is, my thought, or the thought I have, being that the alter-Asle is the actual Asle and the narrator-Asle is the Asle that the alter-Asle-who-is-actually-the-actual-Alse would have been if he was not the Asle he became, which, I think, I have made sound a bit confusing, and the opposite of an explanation, not that that matters, on account of whatever trauma, or whatever it is that I speculate is a trauma, that confined him to a third-person existence, the characters being one character, all characters being one character as they are in all books, I speculate, though in this book The Other Name, almost all the characters have, if not the same name, almost the same name, which tightens the knot somewhat, if I can be forgiven another metaphor, though I will not forgive myself for it at least, I will try to avoid, I think, thinking of the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, or, in any rate, describing the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, in any way other than a literary way, whatever that means, nothing, I think, the person that Asle could have been sees the Asle that Asle became, though Alse cannot know him, the person that Asle could have been rescues Asle when he has collapsed in the snow and takes him to the Clinic and to the Hospital, and takes the dog to look after, who knows, though, if the third-person Asle, the one I was calling the alter-Asle until that became too confusing, at least for me, survives, neither we nor the first-person Asle know that, but after the first-person Asle goes to the city and rescues the third-person Asle from the snowdrift, how could he know where to find him, I wonder, he begins, in the second part of the book, to have access to some deeply buried memories of the Asle that perhaps they once both were, memories all in the third person, for safety, I think, memories firstly of Asle’s and his sister’s disobedience of their parents in straying along the shore and to the nearby settlement, a narrative in which threat hums in every detail, a narrative in which colour impresses itself so deeply upon Asle that, I think, he could have become nothing other than a painter, a narrative that seems searching for a trauma, for a misfortune, a narrative assailed by an inexplicable motor noise as they approach the settlement but which resolves with a misfortune that is anticlimactic, at least for Asle, a trauma but not his trauma, what has this narrative avoided, I wonder at this point, what has not been released, or what has not yet been released, I wonder, Fosse is a writer who writes to be rid of his thoughts, I think, just as his narrator says, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, to get rid of them in a way, to be done with them, I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, I try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away,” and, yes, when the narrator lies in bed at the end of the book and is unable to sleep, he does recover the memory, a third person memory, the memory of the trauma that split the Asles and trapped one thereafter in the third person, the memory that explains the awful motor noise that intruded on the previous narrative of disobedience as the children approached the locus of the trauma, and, I think, all the sadness of the book leads from here and to here

NEW RELEASES

Jerningham by Cristina Sanders         $37
Bookkeeper Arthur Lugg is tasked by Colonel William Wakefield with keeping tabs on his charismatic and erratic nephew Edward Jerningham. This is a novel of Wellington's colonial beginnings and of the rise and fall of one of New Zealand history's remarkable characters. 

Dominicana by Angie Cruz          $37
Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she must say yes. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So, in 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by César, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay.
"In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world." —judges' citation for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction 
>>Other books on the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction short list.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar        $30
Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a 13-year-old girl whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across the country, a madness that affects both living and dead, old and young.
"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to make sense of the world through the ritual of storytelling. Through her unforgettable characters and glittering magical realist style, Azar weaves a timely and timeless story that juxtaposes the beauty of an ancient, vibrant culture with the brutality of an oppressive political regime." —judges' citation, 2020 International Booker Prize
>>Other books on the 2020 International Booker Prize short list.

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman         $45
New Zealand enfranchised women in 1893, but it took a further forty years before there was a woman MP. Women were not entitled to stand as candidates until 1919. 

Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our civilisation's last chance by Srećko Horvat      $40
Capitalism and historical revisionism have constructed a new world of normalized apocalyptic politics in which our passivity is guaranteed if we believe there is no future. This is a radical manifesto for hope in democracy, union and internationalism. 
>>"The current system is more violent than any revolution."

Fathoms: The world in the whale by Rebecca Giggs       $37
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis?
"A work of bright and careful genius. Equal parts Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard, Giggs masterfully combines lush prose with conscientious history and boots-on-the-beach reporting. With Giggs leading us gently by the hand we dive down, and down, and down, into the dark core of the whale, which, she convincingly reveals, is also the guts of the world." —Robert Moor

Losing Eden: Why our minds need the wild by Lucy Jones         $48
What happens as we lose our bond with the natural world — might we also be losing part of ourselves? Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland's primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. 

Wilberforce by H.E. Cross          $35
A novel following the misadventures of several boys at a British public school in 1926, especially those of a particularly hapless young man and his possible redemption.

The Island by Ana María Matute          $30
Matute's 1959 novel is a stifling story of rebellious adolescence, narrated by Matia, as she struggles against her domineering grandmother, schemes with her mercurial cousin Borja and begins to fall in love with the strange boy Manuel. Steeped in myth, fairy tale and biblical allusion, the novel depicts Mallorca as an enchanted but wicked island, a lost Eden and Never Never Land combined, where the sun burns through stained glass windows and the wind tears itself on the agaves. Ostensibly concerned with Matia's anxieties about entering the adult world, this internal conflict is set against the much wider, deeper, and more frightening conflict of the civil war as it plays out almost secretly on the island, set in turn against the backdrop of the Inquisition's mass burning of Jews in previous centuries. These two conflicts shimmer at the edges of Matia's highly subjective account of her life on the island, where life is drawn along painful and divisive lines.

The Butchers by Ruth Gilligan         $37
A photograph is hung on a gallery wall for the very first time since it was taken two decades before. It shows a slaughter house in rural Ireland, a painting of the Virgin Mary on the wall, a meat hook suspended from the ceiling — and, from its sharp point, the lifeless body of a man hanging by his feet. The story of who he is and how he got there casts back into Irish folklore, of widows cursing the land and of the men who slaughter its cattle by hand. But modern Ireland is distrustful of ancient traditions, and as the BSE crisis in England presents get-rich opportunities in Ireland, few care about The Butchers, the eight men who roam the country, slaughtering the cows of those who still have faith in the old ways.

Riding in the Zone Rouge: The Tour of the Battlefields 1919 — Cycling's toughest ever stage race by Tom Isitt        $28
The Circuit des Champs de Bataille (the Tour of the Battlefields) was held in 1919, less than six months after the end of the First World War. It covered 2,000 kilometres and was raced in appalling conditions across the battlefields of the Western Front, otherwise known as the Zone Rouge. The race was so tough that only 21 riders finished. It was never staged again, and has largely been forgotten. 
>>Ideal to read in conjunction with David Coventry's The Invisible Mile. 

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, translated by Ciaran Carson       $33
"Quite simply the best version of Dante there is." —Paul Muldoon

Fresh from Poland: New vegetarian cooking from the Old Country by Michael Korkorsz          $38

Authentically Polish. All vegetarian. Rozkoszny!

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren by Paul Gorman         $38
"The Diaghilev of punk." —Melvin Bragg
>>The Sex Pistols © Malcolm McLaren

Parlour Games for Modern Families by Mfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras        $30
All the games you have forgotten and all the games you never knew. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #184 

(26.6.20)

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Whose Story is This? Old conflicts, new chapters by Rebecca Solnit    {Reviewed by STELLA} In her most recent collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit continues her discussions and observations on the political and social structures that shape power relationships. Looking at the major issues — race, gender, climate — and the major movements — Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Climate Strike — Solnit digs into the language of power and the depths of these activisms. Who gets to be heard? Who is telling the story? And where did these stories come from? The collection is sub-titled Old Conflicts, New Chapters. In her introduction, 'Cathedrals and Alarm Clocks', her tone is upbeat — she sees the recent rise in collective action as a questioning of the structures which have kept the elite, predominately men, in power and their needs protected and justified. “You can see change itself happening, if you watch and keep track of what was versus what is...the arising of new ways of naming how women have been  oppressed and erased, heard the insistence that the oppression and erasure will no longer be acceptable or invisible.” And this change comes through the power of language — words that define, record and speak out: “This project of building new cathedrals for new constituencies….the real work is not to convert those who hate us but to change the world so that haters don’t hold disproportionate power”. In the essays that follow some of the facts and figures on sexual assault, racial crimes and the legislative changes that attempt to control the autonomous body and the choices people — women — can make about their own bodies are dispiriting. Yet it is the resistance to these actions through direct protest, legal avenues and political channels that have culminated into a perfect storm — a storm that Solnit is clear to point out resides in the now and in the actions of the past. Resistance to hatred, abuse and control is not new and has not been ineffectual, even when it has been silent. While the essays focus on American politics and culture, Solnit’s observations are relevant wherever you happen to reside: the same power structures exist and persist in all places. As our societies become more diverse, so too comes the opportunity to have more just and equal ones. In several of her essays, Solnit touches on the growing diversity of the voting population and what this means for American politics. With younger politicians, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for example (who was inspired to stand for Congress by Standing Rock), a new generation, Greta Thunberg and the School Climate Strike movement and indigenous voices holding sway in political arenas, it does feel like a time of change  even in the face of the counter megaphonic voices of Trump and Boris. Solnit’s essays are always interesting, thought-provoking and rich. Her ability to bring yesterday’s dissent into today’s realm and tie these historic important actions to what happens now and next, her clarity of thought and exploration of language and how words play an important role in acting out injustices and taking action to overcome silenced lives makes Solnit a voice to be read by everyone, especially those in positions of privilege. I read this last year, but in light of our present socio-political situation, it is even more relevant now.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin    {Reviewed by THOMAS} What form would literature take if it was the expression of the organising principles of an urban street rather than those of literary tradition? Between 1923 and 1926, Walter Benjamin wrote a series of unconventional prose pieces in which “script — after having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence — is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisement and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.” On the street, text, long used to being organised on the horizontal plane in a book, is hoisted upon the vertical plane, and, having been long used to a temporal arrangement like sediment, layer upon layer, page upon page, text is spread upon a single plane, requiring movement from instance to instance, walking or, ultimately, scrolling across a single temporal surface, a surface whose elements are contiguous or continuous or referential by leaps, footnotes perhaps to a text that does not exist, rather than a structure in three dimensions. Even though Benjamin did not live to see a scroll bar or a touch screen or a hyperlink he was acutely aware of the changes in the relationship between persons and texts that would arrive at these developments. “Without exception the great writers perform their combinations in a world that comes after them,” he wrote, not ostensibly of himself. As we move through a text, through time, along such one-way streets, our attention is drawn away from the horizontal, from the dirt (the dirt made by ourselves and others), away from where we stand and walk, and towards the vertical, the plane of desire, of advertising, towards the front (in all the meanings of that word), towards what is not yet. It is not for nothing that our eyes are near the top of our bodies and directed towards the front, and naturally see where we wish to be more easily than where we are (which would require us to bend our bodies forwards and undo our structural evolution). In the one-way street of urban text delineated by Benjamin, all detail has an equivalence of value, “all things, by an irreversible process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character, while ambiguity displaces authenticity.” The elitism of ‘the artwork’ is supplanted by the vigour of ‘the document’: “Artworks are remote from each other in the perfection [but] all documents communicate through their subject matter. In the artwork, subject matter is ballast jettisoned by contemplation [but] the more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows. In the artwork, the formal law is central [but] forms are merely dispersed in documents.” What sort of document is Benjamin’s street? It is a place where detail overwhelms form, a place where the totality is subdued by the fragment, where the walker is drawn to detritus over the crafted, to the fumbled over the competent, to the ephemeral over the permanent. The street is the locus of the personalisation and privatisation of experience, its particularisation no longer communal or mediated by tradition but haphazard, aspirational, transitory, improvised. Each moment is a montage. Writing is assembled from the fragments of other writing. Residue finds new value, the stain records meaning, detritus becomes text. In the one-way street, particularities are grouped by type and by association, not by hierarchy or by value. The here and now of the street is filled with referents to other times and other places. The overlooked, the mislaid, the abandoned object is a point of access to overlooked or mislaid or abandoned mental material, often distant in both time and space, memories or dreams. Objects are hyperlinked to memories but are also representatives of the force that drives those experiences into the past, towards forgetting. But the street is the interface of detritus and commerce. Money, too, enables contact with objects and mediates their meaning. New objects promise the opportunity of connection but also, through multiplication, abrade the particularity of that connection. Benjamin’s sixty short texts are playful or mock-playful, ambivalent or mock-ambivalent, tentative or mock-tentative, analytic or mock-analytic, each springing from a sign or poster or inscription in the street, skidding or mock-skidding through the associations, mock-associations, responses and mock-responses they provoke, eschewing the false progress of narrative and other such novelistic artificialities, compiling a sort of archive of ways both of reading a street as text and of writing text as a street, a text describing a person who walks there.

NEW RELEASES

No Maori Allowed: New Zealand's forgotten history of racial segregation by Robert Bartholomew        $26
There was a time when Maori were barred from public toilets, segregated at the cinema and swimming pools, refused alcohol, haircuts and taxi rides, forced to stand for white bus passengers and not allowed to attend school with other students. It happened in the South Auckland town of Pukekohe in the twentieth century. Using records from the National Archives and first-hand interviews, No Maori Allowed looks at what happened in Pukekohe and the extent of racial intolerance across the country at this time. In Hamilton, stores refused to let them try on pants, on Karangahape Road in Auckland, shop signs read No Credit for Maori. Councils jacked up prices for state houses to keep them out of white neighbourhoods, hospitals had segregated maternity wards and gave them less expensive cutlery, and banks and shops held official policies of not hiring Maori. 
>>The book was apparently rejected by publishers for being "too pro-Maori".

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld         $37
What if Hilary Rodham had turned down Bill Clinton's proposal of marriage? How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton?
"Brilliantly re-imagined and enjoyable." —Guardian

Last Vanities by Fleur Jaeggy            $32
These seven stories do not take long to read but the images in them will be embedded in your mind for a long time, so precisely sharp are Jaeggy’s tiny burrs of observed detail. The stories typically begin in the fantastic but resolve in what may be the actual, the actual as experienced on many levels at once, the small made large and the large made small, perhaps as Jaeggy alone experiences the actual.

Humankind: A hopeful history by Rutger Bregman       $35
From 'the folk hero of Davos', Fox News antagonist and author of the international bestseller Utopia for Realists comes a radical history of our innate capacity for kindness. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, human beings are taught that we are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest. Providing a new historical perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, Humankind makes a new argument — that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. When we think the worst of others, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics too.
"Humankind challenged me and made me see humanity from a fresh perspective." —Yuval Noah Harari

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty        $37
From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, 15-year-old Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries of his intense connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of campaigning. "In writing this book," Dara explains, "I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child's eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere."
>>Taking the world by storm. 

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami          $38
A novel exploring the inner conflicts of an adolescent girl who refuses to communicate with her mother except through writing. Through the story of these women, Kawakami paints a portrait of womanhood in contemporary Japan, probing questions of gender and beauty norms and how time works on the female body.
>>Kawakami gives a feminist critique of Haruki Murakami's novels. 

I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos       $38
"I don't expect anyone to believe me," warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin, who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make Laia, the daughter of a corrupt politician, fall in love with him. He accepts, though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature. Bonkers.

The Motion of the Body through Space by Lionel Shriver         $35
Shriver's new novel draws on her own experience as an exercise obsessive, and is also shot through with her contrarian views on cultural appropriation. 
"Scabrously funny. The Motion of the Body Through Space is proof, if it were needed, that Shriver’s natural response to an open wound is to pour on more salt. Few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver." —Guardian

Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawm          $35
Although he is guided and inspired by the people he respects, and despite the insufficiency of his knowledge and experience — an insufficiency shared by most (or all) other humans, Wallace Shawn can't see any real alternative to trying to figure out his own answers to the most essential questions about the world he lives in.Having recently passed the age of seventy, before which he found it difficult to piece together more than a few fragments of understanding, Shawn would like to pass on anything he's learned before death or dementia close down the brief window available to him, but he may not be ready yet.
>>Wallace Shawm talks with Paula Morris. 
>>My Dinner with Andre.

Necropolis by Boris Pahor         $25
Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Bergen-Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau and Natzweiler-Struthof. Twenty years later, as he visited the preserved remains of a camp, his experiences came back to him: the emaciated prisoners; the ragged, zebra-striped uniforms; the infirmary reeking of dysentery and death. 

Yes to Life — In spite of everything by Viktor E. Frankl         $30
Available in English for the first time, this collection of talks delivered just months after Frankl's liberation from Auschwitz reveal how he developed his life-affirming philosophies in the most horrific circumstances. 

Days in the Caucasus by Banine          $30
In her extraordinary memoir of an 'odd, rich, exotic' childhood — of growing up in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early twentieth century, caught between East and West, tradition and modernity. Banine remembers her luxurious home, with endless feasts of sweets and fruit; her beloved, flaxen-haired German governess; her imperious, swearing, strict Muslim grandmother; her bickering, poker-playing, chain-smoking relatives. She recalls how the Bolsheviks came, and everything changed. How, amid revolution and bloodshed, she fell passionately in love, only to be forced into marriage with a man she loathed — until the chance of escape arrived. First published in 1945 and only now translated into English.

The Address Book: What our street addresses tell us about identity, race, wealth and power by Deirdre Mark          $40
From Ancient Rome to Kolkata today, from cholera epidemics to tax hungry monarchs, Mask discovers the different ways street names are created, celebrated, and in some cases, banned. Filled with fascinating people and histories, this incisive, entertaining book shows how addresses are about identity, class and race. But most of all they are about power: the power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't, and why.

Just Another Mountain by Sarah Jane Douglas           $27
When her mother died of breast cancer when Sarah Jane Douglas was 24, she set off to walk the mountains of Scotland in her mother's footsteps. As she walked, she came to accept her grief and her own troubled past, and to come to a new and deeper relationship with nature. 

I Want You to Know We're Still Here by Esther Safran Foer        $38
The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. Even as she built a successful career, married, and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching. So when Esther's mother mentions that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust, Esther resolves to find out who they were, and to learn how her father survived.

The Garden of Inside-Outside by Chiara Mezzalama        $30
In the summer of 1981, Chiara and her family join their father in Iran. At their beautiful palace, there is an inside and an outside, separated by a wall. Inside, there is a wild garden where princes and princesses used to walk. Outside, in the black city, there are soldiers with heavy boots and bombs. One day, a boy from outside climbs the wall into the garden. The garden no longer feels inpenetrable but Chiara has made a friend, Massoud, who will keep the secret of the inside-outside. Inspired by the childhood of the author, whose father was appointed Italian ambassador to Tehran in 1980, this picture book is a beautiful evocation of a country struck by war, where friendship arises despite the rising walls.

The Other's Gold by Elizabeth Ames          $33
As they move through their university years to their days as new parents, each of four friends make a terrible mistake. With one part of the novel devoted to each mistake — the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite — this novel reveals the ways life-defining turning points prompt our relationships to unravel and re-knit, as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving.
>>The intersection of obliteration and power. 

El Deafo by Cece Bell           $20
A funny, deeply honest graphic novel memoir for middle graders. It chronicles the author's hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with a powerful and very awkward hearing aid called the Phonic Ear. It gives her the ability to hear--sometimes things she shouldn't--but also isolates her from her classmates. She really just wants to fit in and find a true friend, someone who appreciates her, Phonic Ear and all. Finally, she is able to harness the power of the Phonic Ear and become 'El Deafo, Listener for All'. And more importantly, declare a place for herself in the world and find the friend she's longed for.

Alphamaniacs: Builders of 26 wonders of the word by Paul Fleischman and Melissa Sweet         $30
Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his memoirs by blinking his left eyelid, unable to move the rest of his body. Frederic Cassidy was obsessed with the language of place, and after posing hundreds of questions to folks all over the United States, amassed (among other things) 176 words for dust bunnies. Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter e (so well that at least one reviewer didn't notice its absence), then followed with a novella in which e was the only vowel. A love letter to all those who love words, language, writing, writers, and stories, Alphamaniacs is a illustrated collection of mini-biographies about the most daring and peculiar of writers.

This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division, the oral history by Jon Savage         $45
Jon Savage's oral history of Joy Division is the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on 18 May, 1980. It weaves together interviews conducted by the author, but never used in the making of the film Joy Division (2007) which told the story of the band in their own words, as well as those of their peers, collaborators, and contemporaries. Now in paperback. 
>>'I Remember Nothing'.

Unorthodox: The scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots by Deborah Feldman          $33
The memoir of a young woman's escape from the repressive Satmar Hasidic sect that became a Netflix series. 
>>Trailer. 

Every Now and Then I Have Another Child by Diane Brown         $30
A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker... are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown's tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is a meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #183 (20.6.20)

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