BOOKS @ VOLUME #199 (9.10.20)

Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru   {Reviewed by STELLA} A middle-aged writer living in Brooklyn with his human rights lawyer wife and three-year-old daughter is having a crisis. He has writer’s block and is deeply subsumed by a malaise that he can’t shrug off. When an opportunity comes to attend a writers’ residency in Berlin, this seems the perfect way to escape the mill of the freelance writer and the distraction of family life. He’s had the first-book success, but time has passed and the pressure is on to produce the next work. The romantic notion of the lone writer in a creative hub situated on the shores of Lake Wannsee seems ideal. Yet the Deuter Centre is not what he expected. There is no ‘being alone’: participation is expected with the other residents and staying in your room is frowned upon. He is encouraged to take his place in the library, to converse with others, most of whom he finds unbearable, and to eat in the dining room. His work on the new book about "The construction of the self on lyric poetry” becomes more elusive than ever. As our narrator’s inability to write continues, his downward spiral escalates. Initially, he walks around the village, the lake, and through the grounds of the house in a contemplative mood, really avoidance, delving into the history of the German Romantics, in particular Heinrich von Kleist. His obsession with Kleist’s suicide pact keeps his mind occupied. As the director of the Centre becomes increasingly vexed by the writer’s non-participation, our narrator’s resistance ratchets up a level. He avoids the other residents, pretends to be writing in the library and spends his spare time immersed in watching a violent crime drama, Blue Lives, on his laptop obsessively. His paranoia is on the rise and he suspects he is being watched — and maybe this is so — the Deuter Centre has security cameras and a slightly oppressive air. Cut to the second part of the book, an interlude in the narrator’s story. He meets Monika, the cleaner at the house, by chance at a cafe in the village and while, at first, she resists his attempts to talk with her — he’s desperate for human connection in this foreign place where nothing is going to plan — she succumbs, possibly out of pity or empathy. This interlude entitled Zersetzung (Undermining) tells Monika’s story of being in an all-girl punk band as a drummer in East Berlin and the workings of the Stasi as they infiltrate what they deem to be disruptive forces and anything that resonates with 'freedom' or the West. From rebel to informer, Monika’s story is realistic and tragic. Kunzru is starting to draw us a picture, one of obsessive paranoia and authoritarian dictates. And here the novel ramps up. Our narrator meets the director of Blue Lights at a party. Anton is as fascinating as he is frightening, and the writer’s obsession with him deepens to a dangerous level — one where he will lose his mind. Anton is a monster moulded by cynicism and extreme views dressed casually in a cloak of bonhomie and intellectual gymnastics, toying with the writer and using the popular culture channels of his show and his fame to inflame extreme behaviour. When our protagonist is thrown out of the residency programme and instructed to fly home, he instead starts to follow Anton, culminating in a confrontation on a remote Scottish Island, a confrontation which will eventually get him home to Brooklyn, in time to usher in the 2016 American election. The title of the book is drawn from the film The Matrix, in which Neo is offered the red pill or the blue. The red pill will free his mind and allow him to see reality, horrendous as it might be, while the blue will let him live in blissful ignorance. Kunzru’s Red Pill feels more prescient than ever, as the world is rocked by the rise of the alt-right worldwide and the subsequent recognition by the liberal left that something is not right, that the comforts of the past decades have opened a window that has let in a foul draught.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer    {Reviewed by THOMAS} It did not read like a love story, he thought, but it was a love story. It did not even read like a story, not that he likes stories, but it was a story. And he still liked it. It was not just a stream of invective, though it certainly was a stream of invective, and he has nothing against streams of invective, especially literary streams of invective, quite the reverse, he likes them, he even, and he wonders if the word is correct, collects them, if it is possible to collect streams in anything other than a lake. A lake of invective, perhaps, that doesn’t sound right. Fiction always is an essay in time, or on time, though neither sounds right, the act of reading is a linear act and the act of writing is a linear act, no matter how clipped and disordered that act may be in either case, no matter how you cut the strands, all fiction at base is an offence against time, an offence whence springs the hope and splendour of fiction, he thought. There are two strands in this story, he thought, though he wondered why he called it a story, the time of the telling and the time of all that presses upon the telling from the past. The novel, let him call it that, consists entirely of a monologue spoken, if it is even spoken, by a young German woman to a Dr Seligman, a rant of Bernhardian dimensions or proportions, neither of these words seem right, vulgar, surprising, hugely funny, ultimately sad. He could feel the spoilers coming on. Dr Seligman does not speak, or if he speaks he speaks between the paragraphs and his words are not recorded. He is like the auditor in Beckett’s Not I, not speaking but by his silence the enabler of the saying of all that is said, without him the tremendous disburdening, if that is a word, of the voice could not occur, without this receptive silence there would be no story. We might think at first that Dr Seligman might be a psychoanalyst, but he is not a psychoanalyst, nor even a counsellor, though she was sent to a counsellor, Jason, after threatening her workmate with a stapler, of all things, and fair enough, a counsellor who did not keep silent, who could not play the auditor, who shut her down by speaking. “When we are actually forced to talk about ourselves, things always get so awkward, because there is really very little to talk about. … People like Jason only live off making others feel bad about themselves by pretending that they know the way when in the end they will drown just like everyone else,” she says. Dr Seligman is not a psychoanalyst, though he could be to the body what a psychoanalyst is to the mind, whatever that is, a body is more personal than a mind, after all, if indeed there is anything personal at all about a mind, history is an offence on a body by a body, all the rest is stories, and here come some spoilers and it is not too late, even now, even if you have read this far, reader, to stop reading, he thought, I will accept not complaints if you continue, at least no complaints in this regard. What, though, is sayable and what is not sayable? When the Jewish Dr Seligman does not throw her out after her initial provocation-test recounting invented sexual fantasies involving Hitler, if a fantasy can be invented or can be anything but invented, the hurdle at which Jason fell, he begins to gain her trust and she begins to disburden herself to him of her unhappiness, her discomfort, since childhood, with her identity, or, rather, with the identity imposed upon her as all identities are imposed. “And I think that in a way that’s all we are: other people’s stories. There’s no way we can ever be ourselves,” she says, demonstrating, incidentally, how her monologue changes register so often on a comma, passing from vulgar to reflective within a sentence, if not back again as well. Since childhood she has been repelled both by her mother’s body and by her own, she says. At this point, he thought, he might compare the splendid Volckmerian rant with the splendid Bernhardian rant, each filled, he might say, with loathing, each skewering the rot in society, if you want rot on a skewer, each exposing, among other things, the indelible mark of Nazism upon a nation. The Bernhardian rant, as it progresses, though, he thought, rings more wrong, if that is the right way to put it, that is Bernhard’s genius, the narrator’s loathing is seen to be self-loathing, the ills of the world have their bastion within, so to speak, but the Volkmerian rant, as it progresses, rings more right, he thought, that doesn’t sound right, and this is more disturbing, even, what begins as self-loathing spreads out and shows us what is wrong with the world in which the loather sits and soaks, or whatever. All crimes are crimes of identity, he thought, a provocation of his own that he doesn’t really know how to think about, though perhaps he is right. We get everything wrong. “That’s where we differ from animals: with very few exceptions they always look the part, like perfect representations of their species, dignified and in just the right shape.” Bit by bit the monologist’s story is revealed, and we learn of her relationship with K, a relationship that broke all the various taboos with which identity is ring-fenced, though what the difference is between ring-fenced and plain fenced, he does not know, at least in this instance, metaphors aren't fussy. The pact was to remain impersonal, to play out their frustrations and harm upon each other, to use up the harm, to reflect and to become the other in the mirror, but when K. says, “Be with me always,” the monologist, call her Sarah, monologist is a stupid word, if it is even a word, ends the relationship forthwith. When she later hears of K.’s suicide, she completes the journey to deciding to become him, I told you it was a love story, though not the sort you expected, which is why she is delivering her monologue to Dr Seligman, a plastic surgeon who “is fitting a German woman with a Jewish cock,” you were warned about the spoilers, a process paid for with Sarah’s inheritance from her grandfather, the stationmaster at the last stop before Auschwitz. The Holocaust lies at the root of harm. Volckmer lambasts what she sees as the German delusion is having ‘dealt with’ the Holocaust by ensuring “that we remained de-Nazified and full of respect. But we never mourned; if anything, we performed a new version of ourselves, hysterically non-racist in any direction and negating difference wherever possible. Suddenly there were just Germans. No Jews, no guest workers, no Others. And yet we never granted them the status of human beings again or let them interfere with our take of the story.” The victims remain victims, their myriad stories still overwritten by a single story outside their control, Jews still trapped in the German national myth, still othered to the extent that they are Jewish, those losses, those bodies annulled still not seen by the Germans as their own bodies, not properly mourned as their own bodies, writes Voclkmer, or Volckmer seems to write, at least to him, the distance between the story and the body is a scale to measure shame. Guilt is a ritual, he thinks, though he has not yet thought the thought to its end, a ritual that seems to address but actually conceals shame, to address is to preserve, after all, but what else is there to be done? “It takes several minds to be beautiful,” says Sarah, writes Volckmer, and, he thinks, when the desire to be otherwise has more power than identity, when we lose our footing and begin to swim, can he never purge himself of these metaphors, when we submit to or we welcome the urgent undoing of what we are or are seen to be, if there is a difference between them, then, he thinks, though it is not him who thinks the thought, he merely reports what is thought, we can be many things at once or no things, open to whatever. Sarah remarks, writes Volckmer, there comes a time when “someone has split you into two versions of yourself.” This chimes with Bachmann, he thinks, though chimes is not the right word, when she wrote, in Malina, “I am not one person, but two people standing in extreme opposition to one another, which must mean I am always on the verge of being torn in two. If they were separated it would be livable, but scarcely the way it is.” It is hard, he thinks, to find what is livable.

Our Book of the Week is The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty compressed stories by Kathryn Scanlan. Scanlan is master of the velocity of her prose, honed to sharpness, careful, devastating, puncturing the imposed limit of the conscious to deliver the reader precisely at the point where rationality, or what passes by that name, flounders in what lies beyond, behind, beneath, or wherever, the point where the unsayable is both revealed and annulled.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>'Fable.'
>>'The Marriage Finger.'
>>'The Imprecation.'
>>'The Poker.'
>>Scanlan reads 'Vagrants' in her living room. 
>>In conversation with Kate Zambreno.
>>What are Scanlan's preferred objects?
>>"Compression indicates pressure is being applied to create a reduction in volume."
>>"I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf."
>>"I’m motivated by the energy and nonverbal communication offered to us by animals."
>>Converting anger to creative energy. 
>>"Is this sort of timelessness purposeful?"
>>A world of human failure. 
>>Aug 9—Fog. 
>>The page repurposed as a stage. 
>>Read The Dominant Animal!

 NEW RELEASES

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey       $35

The compelling new novel from the author of The Wish Child. The eyes of the wife of the new Buchenwald concentration camp administrator are opened to the actualities of her situation when she forms an alliance with one of the inmates, the inventor of a machine he claimed would cure cancer. Whether the machine works or not, it may yet save a life...

"Chidgey's compellingly gentle and empathetic treament of the consequences of very disturbing patterns of human behaviour serves to maintain her position as one of our 'must read' novelists." —Otago Daily Times

Escape Path Lighting by John Newton         $25

Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly. When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to hope he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chilly wind is blowing through Paradise. Meanwhile, at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm, Juanita Diaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover. Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day? John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. Every blow rings true. 

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark            $34

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best-friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention.

"Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power. In funny, acerbic prose, Clark shows us how it feels to inhabit a body that moves through a world full of eyes. She illuminates the cracks that begin to appear when the subject turns voyeur and the violence inherent in the shatter."

–Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater

"Electric, compulsive and extremely dark, Boy Parts blew me away. Eliza Clark is unflinching in this witty and shocking excavation of female rage and desire, and is sure to gain a cultish following. It is unlike anything I've read before, and it left me utterly invigorated and repulsed. I can't wait to read what she writes next." –Elizabeth MacNeal

>>Eliza Clark talks with Katharina Volckmer (author of The Appointment)

People from My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami           $28

Take a story and shrink it. Make it tiny, so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. Carry the story with you everywhere, let it sit with you while you eat, let it watch you while you sleep. Keep it safe, you never know when you might need it. In Kawakami's super short 'palm of the hand' stories the world is never quite as it should be: a small child lives under a sheet near his neighbour's house for thirty years; an apartment block leaves its visitors with strange afflictions, from fast-growing beards to an ability to channel the voices of the dead; an old man has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko are locked in a bitter rivalry to the death. Short stories from the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo. 

Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo (translated by Charlotte Coombe)        $34

Lucía and Pablo are Colombian immigrants who’ve built their lives together in the US yet maintain conflicting attitudes towards their homeland and the extent to which it defines their identity. After undergoing fertility treatment, Pablo finds himself excluded from raising their twins, and the new family situation seems to question the very nature of their relationship and of who they believed they were. In search of respite and time to reflect, Lucía takes the children to her parents’ apartment in Miami. Meanwhile, Pablo learns he is suffering from a syndrome known as ‘Holiday Heart’. But is this just a break, or is it really the final days of their marriage? A well-written and unsparingly perceptive novel from the author of Fish Soup. 

>>Interesting. 

On Time and Water by Andri Snaer Magnason            $40

Icelandic author and activist Andri Snaer Magnason's 'Letter to the Future', an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjokull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven't been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth. 

"The love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll." —Rebecca Solnit

"A cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. It is dark, funny and grim." —The New York Times 

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson          $38

Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative non-fiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the cliches of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it.

Nature, Stilled by Jane Ussher            $70

Astounding images of the natural history collections at Te Papa, from the award-winning photographer. 

>>Look inside. 

>>10 questions.

The Savage Coloniser by Tusiata Avia          $25

"Savage is as savage does. And we’re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world – outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you’ll feel your pulse anew." —Selina Tusitala Marsh

The Elements of Style by William I. Strunk and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman           $26

The classic book about how to make English clearer has now been made even clearer and brighter and more fun with Kalman's colourful and quirky illustrations. 

>>This sort of wonderful. 

An Exquisite Legacy: The life and art of New Zealand naturalist G.V. Hudson by George Gibbs           $60

George Hudson, 1867-1946, was one of New Zealand's pioneer naturalists, who devoted his life to collecting and describing the New Zealand insect fauna. He amassed what is probably the largest collection of New Zealand insects, now housed at Te Papa. Hudson also wrote seven books on insect fauna between 1898 and 1946, each illustrated in colour with immaculate paintings of the specimens, a total of over 3100 paintings, mainly focused on moths and butterflies. 

Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis         $37

What would a post-capitalist society and a post-capitalist economy look like? In a fascinating series of dialogues, the outstanding Greek economist discusses the necessities, the problems and possible solutions for making a society founded on equality, democracy and justice. Urgent. 

Paying the Land by Joe Sacco           $48

Canada's Northwest Territories are a huge, frozen wasteland populated only by the Dene, the indigenous people who once lived by hunting but are now divided in their response to an invasion of their land by mining companies. Some deplore it, arguing that the government misled their forebears with treaties they did not understand; others think the development was bound to happen anyway. Sacco's first work of comics journalism in over a decade is set against the background of a culture that has suffered the shattering impact of the residential school system which took children from their parents and returned them unable to speak their language and unable to relate to their traditional way of life. As recently as the 1970s the children were brutalised and abused in the government's stated policy to 'remove the Indian from the child'. Beautifully drawn, Sacco's latest work is a story of culture as much as it is a story of oil, money, dependency and conflict.

>>Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman. 

The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow       $32

Foucault is remarkable for his dissection of the structures of power and control that pervade all institutions and relations in society. Indefinitely relevant. 

Witcraft: The invention of philosophy in English by Jonathan Rée        $32

Philosophers in Britain and America have often been regarded as narrow-minded and pedestrian compared to their counterparts in continental Europe: this book reveals them instead as colourful, diverse, inventive and cosmopolitan. Philosophy, in Rée's interpretation, turns out to be not the work of a few canonical old men, but of masses of ordinary people who have insisted on thinking for themselves, and reaching their own conclusions about religion, politics, art and everything else.

Where Is It? A wildlife hunt for kiwi kids by Ned Barraud        $20

Can you find the animals in the various habitat? (Some of them really shouldn't be there...).

Wonderland: The New Zealand photography of Whites Aviation by Peter Alsop        $50

Many of New Zealand's best hand-coloured photos were produced by Whites Aviation between the 1950s and 1970s . Once ubiquitous, these prints are now highly collectable. 

>>This sort of thing. 

Eat a Peach by David Chang                        $48

In 2004, David Chang opened a noodle restaurant named Momofuku in Manhattan's East Village, not expecting the business to survive its first year. In 2018, he was the owner and chef of his own restaurant empire, with 15 locations from New York to Australia, the star of his own hit Netflix show and podcast, was named one of the most influential people of the 21st century and had an online following of over 1.2 million.

"David Chang writes about a chef's life in a way that feels completely fresh. The recipes, including those from the ginger-scallion noodles and roasted pork belly served at Noodle Bar, are almost perks; this would be a great read even without them." —The New York Times

All Our Relations: Indigenous trauma in the shadow of colonialism by Tanya Talaga            $35

From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, to Norway, New Zealand, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life — all of which has culminated in a crisis that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children.

"Talaga's research is meticulous and her journalistic style is crisp and uncompromising. The book is heartbreaking and infuriating, both an important testament to the need for change and a call to action." —Publishers Weekly

The Oak Papers by James Canton         $30

  Oaks are born and die on the same patch of earth. This is the story of one man's relationship to an ancient tree, the Honywood Oak. Colossal and wizened, it would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. James Canton spent two years sitting with and studying this unique tree. It was an exercise in discipline — he needed to slow down in order to appreciate it fully, to understand the ecosystem around, inside and under it. In this meditative treatise, he examines our long-standing relationship with trees, a material as well as a source of myth and legend, and of solace.    

>>Canton on RNZ.      

299 Cats (and a Dog): A feline cluster puzzle by Léa Maupetit     $35

The all fit together! (even the dog). 

 BOOKS@VOLUME #198  (2.10.20)

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>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Art appreciation for tots {Reviewed by STELLA} It’s never too early for art appreciation. From the moment we open our eyes we are stimulated by the shapes, objects, colours and light that surround us. Art is a potent visual communicator that helps us to see the world anew and allows us reflection and joy, and challenges our senses as well as our intellect. Babies and children recognise bold shapes and contrasting colours and refine these with experience and interaction with visual language. Here are a few excellent art books for the youngest people in our lives from our shelves. My First Book of Patterns is a zany, colourful introduction to line and shape which any potential designer will appreciate. Starting with the simple straight line, the book takes the child on an exploration of pattern. Line makes stripes and plaid. And here is Square creating crazy checks. Circle makes the world wonderfully polka-dotted and Diamond produces harlequin and argyle. The textile references give this shape book a quirky, unexpected flavour. Each shape has a full picture spread with an active scene. Yachts in the harbour with their checked sails, a summery beach scene with paisley sun umbrella and swimming towels, floral cars, buses and trucks merrily making their way across the page. The end boards fold out to reveal some tasty treats showing all the shapes and patterns learnt through your interaction with this sturdy board book. For a step up in pattern intrigue, a pop-up book of Madam Sonia Delaunay’s art is just the thing. Not just exploring pattern and colour but three-dimensional form, this is playful as well as informative as an introduction to the sculpture and costume of this artist, and the concept of shape and dimensionality. The playful rhyming text keeps the beat with the visual structure that literally pop out on the page. “Red and yellow, round they go. Circles dancing, how entrancing! Green and blue, the planets trace their rotating paths through space.” These are first step lessons in looking at art and expressing what you see and feel as you interpret the form, colours and arrangements of shapes in relation to each other. Simple and deceptively clever — learning about art and ways of seeing without pretension from the Tate. Themed art books for small children are excellent. Phaidon has recently produced a series of sturdy board books that are bold and beautiful. One of these is My Art Book of Sleep. With thirty-four works it's an excellent way to bring art into your young person’s realm. Ranging from Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy to Van Gogh’s beautiful starry night to Kusama’s wondrous Infinity Room Mirror and Hockney’s Little Stanley Sleeping, the book tells the simple story of ending your day, reading your last page, the sun going down, the moon coming up, the goodnight cuddles, and the dreams that await until you awake and start a brand new day, encompassing the universal act of sleeping and dreaming — as well as the emotions you may have when you are sleep deprived! Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Weeping Woman. Sure to become a bedtime favourite. Also in this series My Art Book of Love and My Art Book of Happiness.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Murmur by Will Eaves     {Reviewed by THOMAS} No algorithm can entertain a proposition as being both true and not true at the same time. This necessary computational allergy to contradiction enabled Alan Turing during his time at Bletchley Park in World War 2 to significantly decrease the time it took to break the German codes (“from a contradiction you can deduce everything,” he wrote), thus saving many lives. It would also provide a good test for ‘thought’ as opposed to ‘computation’ in artificial intelligence, and have implications for the eventual personhood or otherwise of machines. “Machines do nothing by halves,” writes Will Eaves in Murmur, a beautifully written, sad and thoughtful novel based on Turing. Machines cannot but incline towards explication, whereas it is our inability to access the mind of another that verifies its existence as a mind.* “It isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing,” writes Eaves. In 1952 an English court found Alan Turing guilty of ‘Gross Indecency’ for admitted homosexual activity (then a crime in Britain), and he submitted to a year-long regime of chemical castration via weekly injections of Stilboestrol rather than imprisonment. Turing’s chemical reprogramming, speculates Eaves, struck at the core of his identity, his mind at first barricading itself within the changing body and then seemingly inhabiting it once more, but resourceless and compliant. Is personhood always thus imposed from without, or does personhood lie in the resistance to such an imposition? What conformity to expectations must be achieved or eschewed to accomplish personhood? The murmur in Murmur is an insistent voice that rises from Alec Prior’s (i.e. Alan Turing’s) sub-computational mind as it reacts to, and reconfigures itself on the basis of, its chemical reorientation. A narrator in the third person, waiting in ambush in mirrors and other reflective surfaces, Prior’s reflection, assails and supplants Prior’s first-person narrative, breaches the functional boundaries of his identity, describes Prior as “a man in distress, a prisoner of some description?”, unpicking his autonomy, and acting as a catalyst for the emergence of material (memories, voices, impulses) from the deep strata of Prior’s mind, much of it foundational (such as Prior’s formative relationship with a fellow student at high school), atemporal or, increasingly, counterfactual (a series of imagined letters between Prior and his friend and colleague June, with whom he was briefly engaged (parallelling Turing’s relationship with Joan Clarke, June was unconcerned by Prior’s homosexuality but he decided not to go through with the marriage) veers towards a confused and non-existent future in which a child of theirs remarks to Prior, “You’re changing. You’re lots of different people, lots of things, and all at once.”). What is the relationship between memory and fantasy, and what is the pivot or fulcrum between the two? When the first-person narration restabilises it is a new first person, one constructed from without (“There was another me, speaking for me.”). Consciousness is detached from what it contains, but made of it. “I am the body in the bed. I’m what sees him. I am the room.” But it is consciousness’s detachment from its object, its resistance to connection (a machine cannot help but connect), its yearning for what it is not and what is not (“yearning is a sort of proof of liberty”), its inaccessibility, its ability to see itself from the couch of its exclusion (“a shared mind has no self-knowledge,” writes Eaves-as-Prior-as-Turing), its cognisance of the limitations of narrative, its capacity to suspend disbelief in fictions, its ability to use a contradiction as a stimulant to thought rather than a nullification, its fragility and tentativeness that distinguishes thinking from computation. Artificial intelligence will not achieve personhood through mimesis, learning or algorithmic excellence, but only, if ever, through qualities that eschew such virtues: “We won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think.”   * “As soon as one can see cause and effect working themselves out in the brain, one regards it as not being thinking, but a sort of unimaginative donkeywork. From this point of view one might be tempted to define thinking as consisting of ‘those mental processes that we don’t understand’. If this is right, then to make a thinking machine is to make one that does interesting things without our understanding quite how it is done.” - A.M. Turing (‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think’ (1952))

Book of the Week: Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon

"Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries, exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some follow-up reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English." — Lydia Davis

>>Read Thomas's review. 

>>On a sentence by Elizabeth Hardwick. 

>>A wonderful, beautiful, almost failed sentence by Virginia Woolf. 

>>On the perfect prose of a Joan Didion photo caption. 

>>Wee have a winding sheete. 

>>On the sentences of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

>>A desire for the sentence. 

>>Book to hear Dillon discuss the book with Olivia Lang. 

>>Barthes and Me. 

>>A short history of hypochondria. 

>>Dillon on Essayism. 

>>Read Thomas's review of Essayism. 

>>Read Thomas's review of In the Dark Room. 

>>Ruins.

>>Dillon at Frieze. 

>>Dillon in Cabinet. 

>>Start supposing. 

 NEW RELEASES

Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon          $38

Dillon has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, his roaming love letter to literature. In this new book Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to Janet Malcolm, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.

"Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote, linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you happily up late, incites you to note some follow-up reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few joined words of English." — Lydia Davis

"Dillon has brilliantly reinvented the commonplace book in this witty, erudite, and addictively readable guide to the sentences that have stayed with him over the years." — Jenny Offill

>>On a sentence by Elizabeth Hardwick. 

>>On the perfect prose of a Joan Didion photo caption. 

>>On the sentences of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

>>An interview with Dillon about sentences. 

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan             $37

In a world of perennial fire and growing extinctions, Anna's aged mother is dying—if her three children would just allow it. Condemned by their pity to living she increasingly escapes through her hospital window into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her others are similarly vanishing, but no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider...

"This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical. This book is vintage Flanagan. It is urgent and angry and fierce. But it is also a kind book, a sorrowful book. It is a book that offers notes of grace and gratitude in the face of beauty, asking its readers to be vigilant in how we take care of our world, of each other, of ourselves. Nothing disappears, it suggests, if we’re brave enough to pay it the attention and regard it deserves. What an astonishing book this is." —Sydney Morning Herald

Amazing Aotearoa Activity Book by Gavin Bishop           $25

Puzzles, games and creative activities that explore Aotearoa, its history and people. Endless fun, and attractively presented. You'll learn to introduce yourself in Maori, solve puzzles and crack codes, play games, invent a superhero, draw your future home, make maps, curate your heroes in a wall of fame, design a flag, create a menu, and much more!

Skunk and Badger by Amu Timberlake, illustrated by Jon Klassen         $25

No one wants a skunk. They are unwelcome on front stoops. They should not linger in Rock Rooms. Skunks should never, ever be allowed to move in. But Skunk is Badger's new roommate, and there is nothing Badger, who prefers to be left alone to do Important Rock Work, can do about it. Skunk ploughs into Badger's life, and Badger's life is upended. Tails are flipped. The wrong animal is sprayed. And why are there so many chickens?

Machiya: The traditional townhouses of Kyoto by Kumiko Ishii        $60

An astounding record of traditional construction, detail and design, this book is full of ideas and solutions for contemporary applications. 

Crossed Lines by Marie Darrieussecq          $37

When her mother offers Rose a Mediterranean cruise with her two children, she jumps at the chance to get away from her husband who drinks too much, and the renovations of their holiday house in the south. But one night the cruise ship comes upon a shipwrecked boat full of refugees, who are taken aboard. Without telling her teenage son, Rose gives his mobile phone to a young Nigerian refugee. Does she want to be some kind of a hero, ease her conscience? Now what is she in for? The secret phone connection takes Rose and her family on a journey of discovery.

"A moving, humane, often funny novel about instances of heroism that can save a life…Darrieuessecq champions an ordinary, powerless individual, who proves herself nonetheless capable, now and again, of doing good things that, without saving the world, can reduce the suffering of another individual. What would we have done if we were Rose? Or rather: what are we doing?" —Les Inrockuptibles

India: An Area of Darkness; A Wounded Civilisation; A Million Mutinies Now by V.S. Naipaul         $40

Naipaul first visited India in 1962 at twenty-nine. He returned in 2015 at eighty-two. The intervening years and visits sparked by an inquisitiveness about a country he had never seen but had been a dream of his since childhood have resulted in three books. India is the collection of all three. An Area of Darkness is Naipaul's semi-autobiographical account, at once painful and hilarious, of his first visit to India, the land of his forebears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival he experienced a cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. India was land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled. What emerged was a work of literature that provides a revelation both of India and of himself: a displaced person who paradoxically possesses a stronger sense of place than almost anyone. A Wounded Civilisation casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes, while recapitulating and further probing the feelings aroused in him by this vast, mysterious, and agonized country. A work of candour and precision, it is also a description of one man's complicated relationship with the country of his ancestors. A Million Mutinies Now is the account of Naipaul's return journey to India and offers a kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, encompassing a wide collage of religions, castes, and classes at a time when the percolating ideas of freedom threatened to shake loose the old ways. 

Pew by Catherine Lacey           $28

Fleeing a past they can no longer remember, Pew wakes on a church bench, surrounded by curious strangers. Pew doesn't have a name, they've forgotten it. Pew doesn't know if they're a girl or a boy, a child or an almost-adult. Is Pew an orphan, or something worse? And what terrible trouble are they running from? Pew won't speak, but the men and women of this small, god-fearing town are full of questions. As the days pass, their insistent clamour will build from a murmur to a roar, as both the innocent and the guilty come undone in the face of Pew's terrible silence.

All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton       $38

The new novel from the author of Boy Swallows Universe. 
Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain overhead, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot.

Parwana: Recipes and stories from an Afghan kitchen by Durkhanai Ayubi       $45

These fragrant and flavourful recipes have been in the family for generations and include rice dishes, dumplings, curries, meats, Afghan pastas, chutneys and pickles, soups and breads, drinks and desserts. Some are everyday meals, some are celebratory special dishes. Each has a story to tell.  

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels among the collectors of Iceland by  Kendra Greene        $37

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections–nearly one for every ten people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can’t be seen?

>>A few of the museums. 

Wild Kitchen: Nature-loving chefs at home by Claire Bingham         $55

This glimpse into the home kitchens and dining areas of twenty of the world's top chefs, food bloggers, and restauranteurs reveals inspiring ways that the food-obsessed are embracing the "wild" at home in their everyday cooking and dining. From a chef who experiments with herbs in a city apartment to a blogger who forages with her family in a local forest, each personality's featured kitchen story offers a behind-the-scenes view of their unique cooking philosophy along with their insider tips for creating a unique kitchen space. 

How Zoologists Organise  Things: The art of classification by David Bainbridge        $45

Long before Darwin, our ancestors were obsessed with the visual similarities and differences between the animals. Early scientists could sense there was an order that unified all life and formulated a variety of schemes to help illustrate this. This human quest to classify living beings has left us with a rich artistic legacy, from the folklore and religiosity of the ancient and Medieval world through the naturalistic cataloging of the Enlightenment to the modern, computer-generated classificatory labyrinth.

October, October by Katya Balen         $17

 October and her father live in the woods. They sleep in the house Dad built for them and eat the food they grow in the vegetable patches. They know the trees and the rocks and the lake and stars like best friends. They read the books they buy in town again and again until the pages are soft and yellow - until next year's town visit. They live in the woods and they are wild. And that's the way it is. Until the year October turns eleven. That's the year October rescues a baby owl. It's the year Dad falls out of the biggest tree in their woods. The year the woman who calls herself October's mother comes back. The year everything changes. 

"The world is not a simple place, and Balen draws a touching, spikey, sparky, dangerous, heartful portrait of a girl slowly learning that." —A.F. Harrold

Watch Over Me by Nina LaCour          $24

Eighteen-year-old Mila has been in the foster system since her mother abandoned her. Now that she's graduating high school, she has nothing to do and nowhere to call home. So when she gets an offer to work as an intern on the Farm, she readily accepts. Her main job is to take care of eight-year-old Lee. At first the Farm seems like an idyllic paradise, a remote place on the cliffs with view of the sea far below. But Mila soon realises there's something more sinister going on. Lee's recent trauma causes Mila's own frightening memories to bubble to the surface.

Honeybee by Craig Silvey           $37

The new novel from the author of Jasper Jones. Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.

Future Girl by Asphyxia          $28

Piper's mother wants her to be 'normal', to pass as hearing, and get a good job. But when peak oil hits and Melbourne lurches towards environmental catastrophe, Piper has more important things to worry about, such as how to get food. When she meets Marley, a CODA (child of Deaf adult), a door opens into a new world — where Deafness is something to celebrate rather than hide, and where resilience is created through growing your own food rather than it being delivered on a truck. Piper finds herself falling hard for Marley. But Marley, who has grown up in the Deaf community yet is not Deaf, is struggling to find his place in the hearing world. How can they be together? Future Girl is the art journal of sixteen-year-old Piper, an extravaganza of text, paint, collage and drawings, woven into a  coming-of-age story set in the near future.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix        $28

Authorised to kill... and sell books! Eighteen-year-old art student Susan Arkshaw arrives in London in search of her father. But before she can question crime boss Frank Thringley he's turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin in the hands of the outrageously attractive Merlin. Merlin is one of the youngest members of a secret society of booksellers with magical powers who police the mythic Old World wherever it impinges on the New World — in addition to running several bookshops. Merlin also has a quest of his own: to find the Old World entity who arranged the murder of his mother. A remarkably accurate portrayal of life in the book trade. 

The Abstainer by Ian McGuire              $38

A gripping new novel from the author of the acclaimed The North Water. Manchester, 1867: Stephen Doyle, an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War, arrives from New York with a thirst for blood. He has joined the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland by any means necessary. Head Constable James O'Connor has fled grief and drink in Dublin for a sober start in Manchester. His job is to discover and thwart the Fenians' plans whatever they might be. When a long-lost nephew returns from America and arrives on O'Connor's doorstep looking for work, he cannot foresee the way his fragile new life will be imperilled — and how his and Doyle's fates will be intertwined.

"The Abstainer is truly terrific — a can't-put-down book. It's no less than a tight and spare and suspense-filled noir novel, masterfully set in 1860s Britain and America. And like all superb historical novels, it seems as modern and as contemporary as this morning." —Richard Ford

Hollowpox: The hunt for Morrigan Crown ('Nevermooor' #3) by Jessica Townsend           $20

Morrigan Crow and her friends have survived their first year as proud scholars of the elite Wundrous Society, helped bring down the nefarious Ghastly Market, and proven themselves loyal to Unit 919. Now Morrigan faces a new, exciting challenge: to master the mysterious Wretched Arts of the Accomplished Wundersmith, and control the power that threatens to consume her. Meanwhile, a strange and frightening illness has taken hold of Nevermoor, turning infected Wunimals into mindless, vicious Unnimals on the hunt. As victims of the Hollowpox multiply, panic spreads. There are whispers - growing louder every day - that this catastrophe can only be the work of the Wundersmith, Ezra Squall. But inside the walls of Wunsoc, everyone knows there is a new Wundersmith - one who's much closer to home. With Nevermoor in a state of fear and the truth about Morrigan threatening to get out, the city she loves becomes the most perilous place in the world. Morrigan must try to find a cure for the Hollowpox, but it will put her - and everyone in Nevermoor - in more danger than she could have imagined.

Use It All: The Cornersmith guide to a more sustainable kitchen by Alex Elliott-Howery and Jaimee Edwards           $45

Buy less — buy whole — use it all! 

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood          $24

The sequel to The Handmaid's Tale is now in paperback. 

Co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. 

>>Read Stella's review. 

Spots and Dots by Chez Picthall         $18

High-contrast patterns for stimulating visual development. 

BOOKS@VOLUME #197 (25.8.20)

Read our latest newsletter. 
 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami    {Reviewed by STELLA} Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs is a book of two parts. The first, originally written in 2008 as a novella, describes the encounter between two sisters during a hot weekend in Tokyo. Makiko, the older sister, is visiting from Osaka with her 12-year-old daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess, has come to the city to get a boob job, something that neither her sister nor daughter can quite see the point of. Midoriko, on the cusp of womanhood, finds her body abject and keeps a journal outlining her thoughts and reactions to her changing body and those around her. She’s also so angry with her mother that she’s not speaking to her, nor to anyone else. Her interactions are physical shrugs, hand gestures and written notes which declare her wishes and objections in clear terms. Makiko is obsessed with taking control of her body and her situation — life is a struggle with no clear way of stepping out of poverty. Natsuko is a young woman working and living as cheaply as possible as she tries to establish herself as a writer. She’s not making much headway, but she has escaped the binds that would make it impossible for her to even contemplate such a dream if she had remained in Osaka. With the advantage of being first written as a novella, this part of Breasts and Eggs is sharp and fast-paced, with insight into the sisters’ family life, their lives as single women, and both hilarious and edgy conversations and observations. Midoriko’s witty, sometimes angry, contemplative journal entries create a contrast to the sisters’ dialogue as they attempt to understand each other and their relative circumstances. Each is dealing with their bodily discomforts, as well as their gender roles in a society that has certain expectations. In the second part of the novel, we meet Natsuko ten years later. She’s now a successful author, struggling in the depths of her current second novel. She is single and finds the idea of sex abhorrent and has no desire to be in a relationship, yet she desires a child or the idea of her child: she does not want to have a child, but to meet her child, and her days and nights are filled with this preoccupation. Here, we delve further into the psyche of Natsuko and her investigation of a woman’s access to fertility treatments, including artificial insemination, an investigation that leads her to meet two adult children of assisted conception, who crave knowledge of their sperm donors, interactions that allow Natsuko a window on an unknown future. While Kawakami pulls us in close to Natsuko’s research, conversations and dreams, as well as her bodily preoccupations, she is also drawing our attention to the socio-political currents that determine who has control over women's reproductive rights, and cultural norms which undermine choice in the Japanese society that Natsuko and her contemporaries live in. Breasts and Eggs is a novel about freedom and a feminist exploration of Japanese society, as much as it is about conception, preoccupation with bodily functions, and the body as a vehicle for reproduction. A bestseller and divider in Japan, both lauded and condemned by her fellow male Japanese authors, it is subtle, quirkily witty, and strangely dark at times. Kawakami deftly layers the deeper concerns of class, autonomy and gender within the character of Natsuko, who is a strangely innocent, yet perceptive, protagonist. >>Order a copy of Breasts and Eggs.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler    {Reviewed by THOMAS} He wanted the review to be a non-review. He wanted his reading of the work to be part of the work, but he wasn’t sure how this could be so. Maybe, though, his reading of the work is always the whole of the work, whatever the work, at least for him, how could it not be so, he thought. If he wrote about the work, is that, too, a part of the work, or is it another work, he wondered. He wanted everything to be about the work, in other words part of the work, but he had no idea, or only very little idea, about the limits of the work, so he didn’t know how to tell if this was so. He didn’t know how to proceed. Circumstances, he thought, are, as far as thinking about those circumstances goes at least, a set of information, he hoped this term was generous enough and without unwanted implication, circumstances are a set of information, but, in order to think about this information, or to make it available to thought, or, possibly, as a consequence of this process of thought, and, he thought, thought processes information, the information undergoes processing by thought just as animals undergo processing at the Alliance meat processing plant on the way the Richmond, a journey he seldom makes, but, anyway, in order to think about a set of information it is necessary to array it on a grammatical rack, for, he thought, it is grammar that determines how we think and not the content of the thoughts, and it is for this reason that he is more interested in novels for their punctuation that for their subjects, what novels are ‘about’ are seldom really what novels are about, or only superficially so at best. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler describes itself, or is described by her in it, or, rather, is described by the text’s putative author Kate Ennis in the text she has putatively written, the text which comprises the novel, as “a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language,” the language of the novel seemingly a means of access to a set of information that lies behind it, or before it, depending upon whether you are thinking spatially or temporally, spatially being presumably a metaphor in this case, though it is interesting that we tend to think that we are facing the future while referring to the past as what happened before, when what is before us is what we face, suggesting that really we are moving backwards into the future, facing the past, as in most novels, writer and reader both advancing with their backs towards the end of the book, sharing experiences in the past tense, always looking backwards though their backs are to the fore. The novel, this novel, Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, is, among other things, about how to write a novel about the set of information that comprises it. The book is about the telling of the story, not about the story as such. “Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves somebody else.” The novel concerns, if that is the right word, the attempts of its protagonist, if that is the right word, to leave her lover of some years, or, possibly, also concerns her fear that her lover of some years will leave her, though, considering the fact that her lover has a marriage, home and life of his own, none of which depend upon her, the word ‘leave’ may be the wrong word. “But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life,” she says. She has little else. The text is unravelled, threads leave off, snap, loop back, extraneous strands are caught in and peter out, really this is too much a metaphor and he is against metaphors, there is an extended section in which the protagonist, who has fled to Ireland flees Ireland, seemingly the only actions she takes or is capable of taking in the entire book, finding Ireland populated by characters who could well be minor characters from a Flann O’Brien novel caught off-guard between their appearances in that novel, caught unprepared at times when they have no role, resentful and perplexed at being so found, and by obnoxious ex-pats from America. She is more comfortable with her dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui than she is in taking action when such action is little more than exchanging a familiar dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui for one without the comfort of familiarity. Her identity is no more than the sum of her situation, the set of information that she attempts to make her way out of, or into, with her punctuation. Voices break off, or break in. “Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.” Sometimes she is ‘she’ and sometimes ‘I’, she is uncertain of the degree of intimacy she has with us, or with her lover, her text is full of tentative commas, ambivalence, and a lack of direction or obvious goal, if, that is, something can be full of a lack. What could be more life-like, or like life, than that? The novel wonders how a novel treats the same set of information differently from any other way in which that set of information could be treated. Is the evidence, and are the proceedings, so to call them, of a novel anything like the proceedings of a court of law? What is the value of whose evidence in these proceedings, the proceedings either of a novel or the court? “The only ones permitted to bring the story to the court’s attention, the only storytellers, are the ones to whom the story happened, whom the facts befell. … The story is a dispositive for all stories that cannot be proven to be unlike it,” she writes, but all she has is a set of information that is an incomplete set, uncertain evidence, no context or statute, no precedent, no culpability that can be felt without sharing. “I look at you for signs of leaving me and find to my despair that one of us has already left. Maybe it’s me.” The ‘you’ addressed throughout, we realise, is the lover who she does not want to leave, in both senses in which that phrase can be read, the lover she wants at last to leave, or fears that she has lost, the lover whose attention she also wants to keep upon her. This ‘you’, though, also is the reader, who, like the lover, has a complete and separate life to which she is not essential, to which she is an aspirant rival. The lover and the reader spend some time, perhaps each evening, with her, intimately, she tries to hold them both with the text, but ultimately, she knows, both the door and the book will close as such things always close. “I understand that there must be others who are and always have been alone. In this way. They were never, how can I put this, going to be part of life. It is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite make it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.”   >>Order a copy of Pitch Dark.

Book of the Week. Gavin Bishop's beautiful new te reo board book, Mihi, introduces concepts of family and belonging in the form of a mihi or pepeha. The pictures are simple and sensitive, and make for an excellent first book. Older children and adults will learn to introduce themselves with their own mihi using this book as a guide. 
>>Gavin Bishop uses the book with his own mihi. 
>>Adding your own story. 
>>How Gavin Bishop discovered his own whakapapa. 
>>Welcome to the world of Gavin Bishop!
>>"How important is your Māori heritage?"
>>Bishop talks with Selina Tusitala Marsh. 
>>Meet Bishop in his studio. 
>>Create your own pepeha (you will probably need to enter your maunga and your awa manually).
>>Mihimihi.
>>Some other books by Gavin Bishop.
>>Your Mihi. 

NEW RELEASES

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The Appointment by Katharina Wolckmer         $30

In a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr Seligman. Though she can barely see above his head, she holds forth about her life and desires, and her struggles with her sexuality and identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has been living in London for several years, determined to break free from her family origins and her haunted homeland. In a monologue that is both razor-sharp and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from outré sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the enduring legacy of shame. With The Appointment, Volckmer challenges our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed and injects a dose of Bernhardian snark into contemporary British fiction.

"Surprising, inventive, disturbing and beautiful – The Appointment is an overdue, radical intervention." — Chris Kraus

"A book destined to enter the list of great monologues of literary history. If Dostoevsky’s underground man had read both Thomas Bernhard and Maggie Nelson, he might have conjured something as brave as this." — Carlos Fonseca

"The Appointment is an epic truth bomb, a radical, hilarious roller-coaster, raw and wild as they come. The way this novel delights in itself, taking pleasure in its singularity and perversity, is the perfect antidote to boredom and bullshit. To read stories that are unapologetic is to be granted the courage to be more honest ourselves, which is one way literature actually can save the world." — Elisa Albert

>>Read an extract.

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti (translated by Fionn Petch)      $36

In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.
Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti takes on the role of Scheherazade to recount us story after story, interwoven in subtle and surprising ways to create unexpected harmonies. He leads us on a journey from the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands. A Musical Offering traverses the same shifting sands of fiction and history as the tales of Jorge Luis Borges, while also recalling the ‘constellation’ structure of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. 
>>Internal harmonics. 

Broken Consort: Essays, reviews, and other writings by Will Eaves        $36
"We are taught by what we find … And what we find, we have to give away."
Broken Consort is a chronicle of close attention (to books, films, plays, paintings, music, notebooks and car-boot sales) which will confound anyone who thinks rigour and generosity are contradictory. It includes an account of the evolution of the author’s prize-winning novel Murmur, an essay on Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and practical reflections on the business of writing.
"Curiosity may fuel every writers heart, but very often it’s coffee that powers the writer’s mind. When all the coffee runs out, we will be even more grateful for Will Eaves and his essays – each one a shot of artistic adrenalin and a euphoric psychostimulant." –Nancy Campbell
>>Read Thomas's review of Murmur. 

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru            $38

A writer on a residency in Berlin falls into a web of frightening associations through the internet. Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning.    

Veilchenfeld by Gert Hofmann (translated by Eric Mace-Tessler)           $36

This remarkable novel, narrated by a young boy, begins and ends with the news of the death of Bernhard Israel Veichenfeld. Upon his dismissal from the university in Leipzig, Veilchenfeld, an elderly professor of philosophy, moves to live in a small town in Saxony at the beginning of 1936. After his existence as a Jew in this community becomes unbearable, he puts an end to his life in September 1938. Within this time frame the narrative reveals how Veilchenfeld is gradually deprived of all of his civil and human rights and subjected to various forms of physical and mental abuse. Numerous members of the small town community—his neighbors, his housekeeper, Nazi youth, low-level bureaucrats in the police and other city offices—become culprits in the persecution and humiliation of the old man.

"One of the best holocaust novels in German literature." –Milena Ganeva, Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature

>>Read an extract. 

Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi        $36

A wonderful novel for book lovers, based on the life of Edmond Charlot, the publisher best known for discovering Albert Camus and for opening the famed bookstore Les Vraies Richesses in Algiers, in 1936. Episodes from Charlot's life are intercut with the story of a young man who comes to clear and repaint the empty shop in 2017.

"An understated, lyrical story of reading and resistance over the tumultuous generations. A lovely book about books—and freedom." —Kirkus

"The truly potent effect of the book is that by taking on literary history from the underbelly of the French nation — from the colony just across the sea — Adimi confronts us with episodes that are simply never spoken of in France: the grand celebration of the end of World War II, in May 1945, which, in Algeria, turned into a massacre by the colonial administration; another massacre, this time in Paris, in 1961, of Algerian protesters, who were thrown into the Seine by French police officers. It is in unhappy nations, we are meant to understand, that history is a relentless companion." —Elisabeth Zerofsky - The New York Times

"If you're in a bookshop browsing, then Our Riches is for you, by definition. A beautiful little novel about books, history, ambition and the importance of literature to everyone, especially people who are trying to find a voice." —Nick Hornby

Bill & Shirley, A memoir by Keith Ovenden         $35

Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith were two of New Zealand's most significant twentieth-century figures: Sutch as an economist, influential civil servant, and inspirational proponent of innovation in the fields of social and economic development, and Smith as glass-ceiling breaker in the formerly male-dominated world of the law. Keith Ovenden's memoir begins with the early years of his marriage to Sutch and Smith's only child, Helen Sutch, and carries through Sutch's trial on charges under the Official Secrets Act to Smith's death over 30 years later. It offers unprecedented insights into both the accusations against Sutch and Smith's remarkable legal practice and, behind both, some of the dramas of their domestic life.

>>Helen Gaitanos's Shirley Smith: An examined life was short-listed for the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. 

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald           $38

Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK, and from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why.

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates        $35

Imagine a world in which a vast network of misogynists is able to operate, virtually undetected. Imagine a world in which these extremists commit terrorist acts, united by their deep hatred of women. Imagine a world in which they groom and radicalise vulnerable teenage boys, shielded by veils of irony and 'banter'. Imagine a world in which their community swells to become an international movement, tens of thousands strong. You don't have to imagine that world... you already live in it. Laura Bates lifts the lid on the communities of men who hate women, going undercover, both on- and offline, to explore the ideology and impact they have worldwide. Chilling. 

The Girl Who Became a Tree by Joseph Coelho, illustrated by Kate Milner      $33

A YA novel told in poems and based on the Myth of Daphne and Apollo. Daphne is unbearably sad and adrift. She feels the painful loss of her father acutely and seeks solace both in the security of her local library and the escape her phone screen provides by blocking out the world around her. As Daphne tries to make sense of what has happened she recalls memories of shared times and stories past, and in facing the darkness she finds a way back from the tangle of fear and confusion, to feel connected once more with her friends and family.

Imperial Mud: The fight for the fens by James Boyce         $28

Between the English Civil Wars and the mid-Victorian period, the proud indigenous population of the Fens of eastern England fought to preserve their homeland against an expanding empire. After centuries of resistance, their culture and community were destroyed, along with their wetland home — England's last lowland wilderness. But this was no simple triumph of technology over nature — it was the consequence of a newly centralised and militarised state, which enriched the few while impoverishing the many. Boyce brings to life not only colonial masters such as Oliver Cromwell and the Dukes of Bedford, but also the defiant 'Fennish' themselves and their dangerous and often bloody resistance to the enclosing landowners. We learn of the eels so plentiful they became a kind of medieval currency; the games of 'Fen football' that were often a cover for sabotage of the drainage works; and the destruction of a bountiful ecosystem that had sustained the Fennish for thousands of years and which meant that they did not have to submit in order to survive.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine        $40

Through a series of exquisitely observed autobiographical sketches in the form of a journal, Adrian Tomine explores his life in comics — from an early moment on the playground being bullied, to a more recent experience, lying on a gurney in the hospital, and having the nurse say 'Hey! You're that cartoonist!' As he mines his conflicted relationship with comics and comics culture, and people at large, he once again animates the absurdities of modern life and how we choose to live it.

>>Looking backward in order to look ahead. 

>>Tomine's website. 

Unmooring by Bridget Auchmuty        $25

"The work of a poet who knows how important people and places are. I kept thinking, too, about life’s voyagings. I found the whole very affecting — touching, tender, rueful at times. And all the more impressive for being unsentimental." —Brian Turner

After living more than 30 years in the Nelson region, Auchmuty recently moved to the Ida Valley following her partner's death. 

Kalimpong Kids: The New Zealand story, in pictures by Jane McCabe        $35

In the early 20th century, 130 young Anglo-Indians were sent to New Zealand in an organised immigration scheme from Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district of India. They were the mixed-race children of British tea planters and local women, and were placed as workers with New Zealand families from the Far North to Southland. Their settlement in New Zealand was the initiative of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary, the Rev Dr John Anderson Graham, who aimed to 'rescue' and provide a home and an education for children whose opportunities would have been limited in the country of their birth. Jane McCabe is the granddaughter of Lorna Peters, who arrived with a group from Kalimpong in 1921. Jane is one of many hundreds of descendants now spread throughout New Zealand. Most grew up with little or no knowledge of their parent's Indian heritage. The story of interracial relationships, institutionalisation — and the sense of abandonment that often resulted — was rarely spoken of. But since the 1980s increasing numbers have been researching their hidden histories.

Granta 151: Membranes edited by Rana Dasgupta          $28

Poetry from Andrew McMillan and Tishani Doshi; photography from Ruchir Joshi, Arturo Soto Gutierrez, Monica de la Torre and Anita Khemka: fiction and essays: Fatin Abbas on the border between Sudan and South Sudan, Lydia Davis on faultlines in families, Mark Doty on homelessness in New York City, Anouchka Grose on infidelity and the idea of the unwanted third, Kapka Kassabova on lakes and Europe, Anita Roy on the newt, Eyal Weizman on contemporary architectural strategies for repelling and dividing people. 

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi           $37

The new novel ffrom the author of Homegoing. Gifty is the younger child in a family of four who have emigrated from Ghana to the American South. While her brother is a sports hero, her father longs to return home and her mother is desperate to hold this family of four together. When Gifty's brother's glorious success on the basketball court falters, addiction strikes and her mother turns to religion., whereas Gifty turns to science. Can family love survive when the family itself feels like it is on the edge of disappearing?

You and Me and Everybody Else by Marcos Farina         $40

Everybody feels the same, sometimes. Our wishes, dreams, thoughts, and feelings are personal to us but all experienced by others. Guided by a friendly page-hopping cat, this picture book tackles the topics of emotions and experiences in a sympathetic manner, encouraging empathy with others. 

 BOOKS@VOLUME #196 (18.9.20)

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>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell    {Reviewed by STELLA} Utopia Avenue is the band you've never heard of but could have been plausibly real. Enter David Mitchell’s latest novel, a book about a band in late 60s London, thrown together by happenstance, shaped by music promoters and ‘making it’ on a heady whirlwind journey from obscurity to fame. Under any other pen, this could have been predictable rags-to-riches-in-the-music-industry rant, but Mitchell, as readers of his work will know, is adept at getting inside the time and the emotional lives of his characters. The setting is pitched perfectly, with the band members coming from different social and class aspects of 1960s Britain and embracing the social and political changes of their time. Elf Holloway is a folk singer who already has a bit of a following — a nice girl from a middle-class background. Dean Moss is a blues bassist, East End working class, and from the world of hard knocks. Jasper de Zoet, guitar virtuoso, is of aristocratic stock (if you are a reader of Mitchell’s work you will recognise the name — the lead player in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is Jasper’s ancestor); and Griff Griffin, jazz drummer, is a Yorkshire lad. The novel is scattered with references to actual musicians and bands — some of whom the band members meet at parties or in the green rooms of the television studios, and mentions of historic events — protests, scandals and politics, alongside imagined encounters with artists, writers and musicians, making the scene all very believable. The novel follows each of the band members via the development of the albums and their contributions, with chapters cleverly titled by their songs. But it is not the music that carries this novel, in spite of Mitchell’s obvious passion for the form, but the stories of each of our four musicians: their upbringings, passions, weaknesses and genius. Elf Holloway, seemingly dominated by her boyfriend who has convinced her that he’s the winning ticket in their duo, finds her voice and her feet, as well as solidarity with the band, which surprises her and them. Dean Moss, used to bad luck, still makes mistakes (fame is a cosy and dangerous bedfellow), but his ability to write a song enables him to face his traumatic childhood and overcome his fear of his father. He’s also the unlikely glue in this quartet. Jasper's psychedelic imagination both drives him to madness and genius — those lines blurred in his transfixing playing. His story is endlessly interesting and Mitchell’s insight into an altered consciousness is pitch-perfect. Griff is the ballast holding the beat steady as only a drummer does, yet he’s also the guy who can get them in and out of a scrap, and the one to overcome an obstacle which puts the band in jeopardy. Needless to say, there are plenty of spills, splits and fireworks in the relationship between the four, and in the band's interactions with the music industry and those who wish to control them. Fame doesn’t come easily and the price can be high. Utopia Avenue is addictive and enjoyable, complete with lyrics. Maybe someone will make the album...

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno   {Reviewed by THOMAS} He finishes the book and draws up the green table to write his review. He takes a slip of paper from between the pages of the book, his reading notes, he calls such slips upon which he usually notes down quotes from the book he is preparing to review, or ideas he may have had during reading the book, which may or may not have arisen from the book, reading notes which are intended to make the writing of each week’s review a little easier for him, though ease is not exactly his aim in writing the reviews, in fact, if he wanted ease, he wouldn’t write reviews at all, or he would just say, Read this book. I enjoyed it and I think you will too. Or words to that effect. He looks at both sides of the slip of paper, but the only thing he has written on it this week seems to be a sentence that is presumably a quote from the book Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno. “When one writes, one is already someone else.” Fair enough, he thinks. That is the sort of thought he might think if he thought thoughts, he thinks, but more likely it is the sort of thought he would copy out of a book, though this sense of the word ‘copy’ seems more appropriative than he is comfortable with, perhaps, he thinks, revealing something shamelessly (or shamefully, he can’t decide) acquisitory about his reading. Appropriative and not appropriate. Kate Zambreno’s book consists of 58 “stories”, some of them as short as a sentence, some as long as a few pages, followed by five “essays”, written a few years earlier, somewhat longer. In fact, the only real difference between the “stories” and the “essays”, he thinks, is their length. The “essays” are more obviously the result of sustained effort, that sense of essaying, he thinks, though they take no real effort to read, they are easy and pleasurable to read, he thinks, even if not quite as easy and pleasurable to read as the “stories”, which are written with such lightness and quickness that they are already inside the reader’s mind, fully formed, claiming space, before the reader is aware that their beauty is snide, prickly, misanthropic, resonant with misery and failure. Both the “stories” and the “essays”, he thinks, are commonly about, or “about”, writers, artists, actors, filmmakers, photographers and others, engaged in a doomed, and therefore, perhaps, heroic, or, if not heroic, then pathetic, or, if such a thing is possible, both heroic and pathetic struggle with the forces of entropy, age, boredom, depression, addiction, AIDS, poverty, prejudice, and so forth, forces that will strip them of the benefit of their intellectual labour and convert it into intellectual capital that can be appropriated by someone else. He doesn’t know if this intellectual labour/ intellectual capital model is useful, even of itself, though it has been something he has been thinking a bit about lately, suspicious as he is of the workings of intellectual capital just as he is of those of financial capital, and, anyway, it is too heavy and clumsy a tool with which to grasp the poignant evanescences of Screen Tests. When he does write his review, he thinks, if he actually manages to write a review, he will instead say something about the way in which Zambreno’s intense interest in, he will probably call it obsession with, her subject matter identifies her, in her own mind, with another precarious, tentative creative person unable to distinguish a tightrope from a tripwire. “Can one’s obsession be a form of autobiography?” she asks, and it soon becomes evident, he will write, that the unfiltered openness of an obsession allows an immeasurable quantity of cross-contamination between the parties, or, if not so much between the parties, between the obsessor and the idea she has of the other with whom she is obsessed, to the extent that the two can no longer be usefully distinguished. All Zambreno’s pieces in the book are in the first person, he has noted, though this note is mental and not on the almost empty slip of paper that pretends to be his reading notes, all Zambreno’s pieces are I pieces, all her obsessions are self-obsessions, indeed surely all obsessions must be self-obsessions, for reasons already roughly sketched, all Zambreno’s obsessions are self-obsessions but what better access to the experience of another could be provided than through the aperture of obsession? Is this not what literature is for? For Zambreno, as for us all, he thinks, identity is porous, she is the people she writes about, she writes to be them, she writes to somehow exist, to survive, to enact, as they do, a “revolt against disappearance.” She is someone else in order to be herself, he thinks, maintaining the first person but destabilising its referent, in much the same way, he thinks, as he might write in the third person to give the impression that he is not writing about himself, to deflect the eye of a reader but also to destabilise the third person referent, for, he thinks, it must be the case that obsession transgresses identity in both directions. When Zambreno has writer’s block when working on one of her essays she says to herself, “I am unsure of what is the use of all this first person anymore,” and when he similarly has reviewer’s block when faced with reviewing Screen Tests, a book about which it would perhaps be better if he merely wrote, Read this book, I enjoyed it and I think you will too, or words to that effect, he finds himself unable to proceed because he fears that, even if he writes in the third person it might seem as if he is writing about himself instead of about the book Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno even though he really is writing about the book Screen Tests. He would not like people to think he was writing about himself, especially when he was not, and, even worse, he would not like them to think that he was expecting them to be interested in his writing about himself when he certainly would never expect them to be so interested, even if he was writing about himself, which he was not. This is the nature of my reviewer’s block, he thinks. I cannot proceed because I do not wish to be present in the text but I cannot proceed without being present in the text. He drinks his fourth cup of coffee and stares at the blank screen of his computer, the screen upon which he was to compose his review. I have still made no progress, he thinks, though, he supposes, four cups of coffee are in themselves a form of progress.

The strangest British band you've never heard of lies at the heart of Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, this week's Book of the Week. Mitchell's books are all different, but each of them provides direct access to the emotional lives of their characters, their development and their vulnerabilities. 

>>Read Stella's review. 

>>"Hello, I'm David Mitchell."

>>David Mitchell plays with Sam Amidon at the Edinburgh Book Festival. 

>>This book needs a playlist more than most. 

>>David Mitchell vs. David Byrne. 

>>He chats with Kim Hill. 

>>How can you listen to a fictional band? 

>>Neil Gaiman in one ear. 

>>Facing the blank page. 

>>Let's hope this is a hotel room. 

>>"If my stories are children, I want them to have distinct personalities." 

>>Other books by David Mitchell.

>>Start reading!

 NEW RELEASES

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante          $37

Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape. An astounding new novel from the author of the quartet that began with My Brilliant Friend. 

"An astonishing, deeply moving tale of the sorts of wisdom, beauty and knowledge that remain as unruly as the determinedly inharmonious faces of these women." —Guardian

>>You are reading Anne Goldstein. 

Summerwater by Sarah Moss       $35

On the longest day of the summer, twelve people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. In twenty-four hours they reveal their capacity not only for kinship but for cruelty. 

"Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched. ... A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself." —Guardian 

Box Hill: A story of low self-esteem by Adam Mars-Jones          $34

On the Sunday of his eighteenth birthday, in 1975, Colin takes a walk on Box Hill, a biker hang-out. There he accidentally trips over Ray, a biker napping under a tree – and that’s where it all starts. 

"Adam Mars-Jones has never needed to write at great length to convince readers of his talent. Box Hill is not a novel for the prudish, but it is a masterclass in authorial control. Despite its diminutive length, it is rich with detail and complexity, and has plenty to demonstrate Mars-Jones’s well-deserved place on any list of our best." —Alex Nurnberg, Sunday Times

"The biggest small book of the year." —Guardian

"An exquisitely discomfiting tale of a submissive same-sex relationship. Perfectly realised." —Anthony Cummins, Observer

"It is a testament to Mars-Jones’s skill that we finish the book with everything illuminated, and yet, quite properly, everything left in the dark." —Telegraph

"I very much enjoyed Box Hill. It is a characteristic Mars-Jones mixture of the shocking, the endearing, the funny and the sad, with an unforgettable narrator. The sociological detail is as ever acutely entertaining." —Margaret Drabble

"A tender exploration of the love that truly dare not speak its name – that between master and slave. In plain unadorned prose, Mars-Jones shows us the tender, everyday nature of this. Self-deprecating, sad, and wise." —Fiona McGregor

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan         $33

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news — news that forces the life-long friends to confront their own mortality head-on. What follows is a moving examination of the responsibilities and obligations we have to those we love.

"This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a 'litany of small tragedies', these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either." —Guardian

Not a Novel: A memoir in pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck         $36

Following astonishing, insightful, and pellucidly written novels, including Visitation and Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck turns her pen on herself and reveals aspects of her life, her literary and musical influences and preoccupations, and thoughts on society. Her essays are as astonishing, insightful and pellucidly written as her fiction. 

"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating. Ferocious as well as virtuosic." —Deborah Eisenberg

"Her restrained, unvarished prose is overwhelming." —Nicole Krauss

"Erpenbeck's writing writing is a lure that leads us — off-centre as into a vortex — into the most haunted and haunting territory." —Anne Michaels

>>"Will I come to a miserable end?"

Work: A history of how we spend our time by James Suzman           $33

We live in a society where work defines who we are, what we do and who we spend our time with. But this wasn't always the case. For 95% of our history, our ancestors had a radically different view of its importance; hunter gatherers rarely worked more than fifteen hours per week. How did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? What are the social, economic and environmental consequences of a culture of work? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke           $30

An astounding new novel, reaching right to the shared core of fantasy and loneliness, from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.  Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

"A remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention." —Guardian

>>"I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness."

>>Some prints by a non-fictional Piranesi.

A Year of Simple Family Food by Julia Busuttil Nishimura        $40

At last, the new book from the author of Ostro (one of our favourite cookbooks)! This book, too, is beautifully presented and contains approachable recipes for  recipes for delicious food. 

>>Find out more about Julia Busuttil Nishimura and her food. 

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn         $40

In The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth went out to find the sea, the windswept and wild coastline, to find a way through homelessness, to find themselves again. Now, in The Wild Silence, they come back to what should be home, but four walls no longer feel that way. For Raynor, recovering self-esteem and trust in herself, and in others, is harder than she expected. She continues to face Moth's debilitating illness and struggles to find a way to adjust to a life in one place, unmoving. Then an incredible gesture by someone who read their story changes everything. 

"In this unflinching sequel to The Salt Path, nature provides solace against forebodings of mortality." —Guardian

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi             $35

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

Short-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize. 

"Taut, unsettling, ferocious." —Fatima Bhutto

"Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us." —Sharlene Teo

"Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman's fight for her sense of self." —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

D: (A tale of two worlds) by Michel Faber       $37

A contemporary Dickensian fable about moral courage and self-determination. 12-year-old Dhikilo was born in a faraway country, though she's doing her best to feel at home with her new parents in the crumbly seaside town of Cawber-on-Sands. One day, the letter D disappears from the language, and Dhikilo is the only person who notices it's gone. You'd think the loss of one little letter wouldn't make much of a ifference to aily life. But it actually makes things very ifficult and, eventually, quite esperate. Determined to rescue the D, Dhikilo teams up with her old history teacher, Professor Dodderfield. In moments, she is in the wintery land of Liminus where she meets the Magwitches, the Quilps, the Spottletoes, and other strange tribes. Can she escape from the terrifying Bleak House? Can she stop the D from disappearing for ever? And can Dhikilo — a girl with no past and no country — discover who she is and where she really belongs?

Protection by Paul Hersey         $25
A gripping and authentic mountaineering novel from one of New Zealand's foremost outdoors writers. 
"Paul Hersey writes from a place of deep understanding of the mountain environment and the ways in which climbers are defined and shaped by their profound and precarious interactions with the natural world as well as each other. Protection is simply one of the most gripping novels I have read in recent years." —Laurence Fearnley

Real Life by Brandon Taylor          $23

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms, a slow and painstaking process. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that's a world away from his childhood growing up in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace has not been home, and he hasn't told his friends. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. Over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, a catastrophic mishap and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.

Short-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize.

First They Took Rome: How the populist right conquered Italy by David Broder      $33

A chilling history of the abrading of democracy since the Cold War, with lessons for us all.

>>Eeek! 

The House by the Lake: The story of a home and a hundred years of history by Thomas Harding and Britta Teckentrup        $30

A beautiful picture book adaptation of Harding's book telling the history of twentieth-century Germany through the stories of five families who lived in a house on the outskirts of Berlin. 

>>The House by the Lake. 

>>The house by the lake. 

>>See also. 

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss         $40
A timely and arresting new look at affluence by a consistently surprising writer. 'My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,' Eula Biss writes, 'the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.' Having just purchased her first home, she now embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism.

The Art of Love: The romantic and explosive stories behind art's greatest couples by Kate Bryan and Asli Yazan          $45

Francoise Gilot & Pablo Picasso; Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera; Carl Andre & Ana Mendieta; Christo & Jeanne-Claude; Robert Delaunay & Sonia Delaunay; Lee Krasner & Jackson Pollock; Barbara Hepworth & Ben Nicholson; Georgia O'Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz; Lee Miller & Man Ray; Max Ernst & Dorothea Tanning; Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg; Elaine de Kooning & William de Kooning; Maria Martins & Marcel Duchamp; Hans Arp & Sophie Taeuber-Arp; Raoul Hausmann & Hannah Hoch; Josef Albers & Anni Albers; Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence; Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy; Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson; Marina Abramovic & Ulay; Gilbert & George; Joseph Cornell & Yayoi Kusama; Carroll Dunham & Laurie Simmons; Camille Claudel & Auguste Rodin; Maud Hunt Squire & Ethel Mars; Frances Loring & Florence Wyle; Alexander Rodchenko & Varvara Stepanova; Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely; Leon Golub & Nancy Spero; Lili Elbe & Gerda Wegener; Bernd Becher & Hilla Becher; Emilia Kabakov & Ilya Kabakov; Tim Noble & Sue Webster; Idris Khan & Annie Morris.

>>Visit Asli Yazan's website.