List #7: NEW ZEALAND POETRY 

We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped. 
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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

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker       $25
A strong collection from a vital poet; radio signals crackling across the spaces between people, between cultures, between generations, and between worlds. 
I am not a building I say I have no pull-out map is what I meant to say so we deal with what comes up yes right there in the passersby one horse at a time you stepping 
out into traffic with your hand held up strong and me thanking every fucker for their help 


How To Be Happy Though Human: New and selected poems by Kate Camp       $30
The seventh collection from one of New Zealand's most admired poets. Camp stares down the ordinary until it reveals both its beauties and its threats. 


Nouns, Verbs, etc: Selected poems by Fiona Farrell            $35
Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, Verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'. 

Mezzaluna: Selected poems by Michele Leggott         $35
Mezzaluna gathers work from critically acclaimed poet Michele Leggott's nine collections, from Like This? (1988) to Vanishing Points (2017). Leggott's poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words. 

The Grief Almanac by Vana Manasiadis          $30
This bold hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis shows what alchemy can happen when pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is. Using strikingly unique forms and melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth, The Grief Almanac defies conventions as it steers us over multiple terrains. The grief of the title is the grief of memory, inevitability, and in particular the grief of, and for, a lost mother, but the result goes beyond eulogy. Wry revisions, elegy, and a kind of poetic archiving, point to co-existence and interconnectedness and culminate instead in a guidebook, a legend and expansive lament. 
 "The Grief Almanac is rich, brilliant, with a kind of texturing that feels to me like complex symphonic music. This is not a collection of poems in any conventional sense. It is a sustained work of immense, far reaching intellect. With the two languages at her disposal and the full force of a great mind and heart, Manasiadis lifts her mother up into the light. We see the mother and we see the daughter and the primal truth that lies at the heart of those tragedies and myths that have endured for centuries because they are profoundly true." — Fiona Farrell

Wow by Bill Manhire         $25

Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.
Bill Manhire's new book begins with the song of an extinct bird — the huia —and journeys on into troubling futures. These poems reach for the possibilities of lyric, even as their worlds are being threatened in a range of agitating ways. In the title poem we hear a baby say Wow to life and to the astonishing prospect of language; but almost immediately we hear the world reply: Also. Along the way there are several desperate jokes.
Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles          $30
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London—all are places poet Nina Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another.  The poems dwell within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-heritage girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. 
"This is a book of the body and the senses, whether the million tiny nerve endings of young love; the hunger that turns ‘your bones soft in the heat’; the painterly, edible, physical colour of flowers and the fabric lantern in the pattern of Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam; or ‘the soft scratchings of dusk’. These are poems of ‘warm blue longing’ and understated beauty, poems to linger over, taste, and taste again. As Powles searches for home she leaves an ‘imprint of rain’ in your dreams'." —Alison Wong

Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove         $25
"The first time I read Freya’s work I thought . . . uh oh. And then I thought, you have got to be kidding me. And then I thought, God fucking dammit. And then I walked around the house shaking my head thinking . . . OK – alright. And then – finally – I thought, well well well – like a smug policeman. Listen – she’s just the best. I’m going to say this so seriously. She is, unfortunately, the absolute best. Trying to write a clever blurb for her feels like an insult to how right and true and deadly this collection is. God, she’s just so good. She’s the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever." —Hera Lindsay Bird

The Lifers by Michael Steven         $28
From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second poetry collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. 

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 NEW RELEASES

Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski       $39
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books—selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude—have been described as "virtuoso performances," and "small masterpieces." From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated—and mordantly funny.
"She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." —New Yorker
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville        $15
#29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy.
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us by Nick Hayes       $39
The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, and weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.
"What a brilliant, passionate and political book this is, by a young writer-walker-activist who is also a dazzlingly gifted artist. It tells o through story, exploration, evocation o the history of trespass (and therefore of freedom) in Britain and beyond, while also making a powerful case for future change. It is bold and brave, as well as beautiful; Hayes's voice is warm, funny, smart and inspiring. The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently." —Robert Macfarlane

Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic         $34
Jeftanovic approaches the ruins of memory to source from them the love needed to build her identity as an adult. Theatre of War takes us on a desolate journey into the reconstruction of memory – a universal question that here turns into a reflection on how giant historical events can affect the seemingly insignificant lives of nameless individuals. Tamara, protagonist and narrator, faces the ghosts of a very tangible past that includes her father’s war (an immigrant from former Yugoslavia), a very conflictive family life, suicides, lost landscapes, inherited trauma, absent siblings and a mother who, due to an undefined illness, has suffered from partial memory loss and cannot recognise her own daughter.  
When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist.

Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg by Eli Maor         $40
Music is filled with mathematical elements. The works of Bach are often said to possess a math-like logic, and Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote music explicitly based on mathematical principles. Yet Eli Maor argues that it is music that has had the greater influence on mathematics, not the other way around.
To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss           $33
A collection of stories tracing the fine lines that bisect relationships and societies.
"A supremely intelligent collection." —Guardian
“A nuanced, provocative exploration of what it means to be human.” – Irish Times
“Krauss is less interested in describing life's grand explosions than she is in showing how people make sense of the rubble. Krauss still somehow seems to have invented a new form for each novel, each story—their characters so fully realized that Krauss's deft authorial hand is rarely evident.” – New York Times
The Origins of You: How childhood shapes later life by Jay Belsky, Terrie E. Moffitt, Richie Poulton and Avshalom Caspi         $95
Based on the findings of the world-leading Dunedin Study, which tracked thousands of people from birth to middle age, this book helps us to thnk about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child's early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.
A fable for our times, Joni Murphy's Talking Animals takes place in an all-animal world where creatures rather like us are forced to deal with an all-too-familiar landscape of soul-crushing jobs, polluted oceans, and a creeping sense of doom.
"Joni Murphy's inventive and beautiful allegory depicts a city enmeshed in climate collapse, blinded to the signs of its imminent destruction by petty hatreds and monstrous greed: that is, the world we are living in now. Talking Animals is an Orwellian tale of totalitarianism in action, but the animals on this farm are much cuter, and they make better puns." —Chris Kraus
100% Pure Future: New Zealand tourism renewed edited by Sarah Bennett      $15
Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on New Zealand tourism, but the industry was already troubled by unchecked growth and questionable governance that has put pressure on the environment, infrastructure and communities. In this urgent collection of essays, nine authors outline their vision for sustainable tourism, the barriers to achieving it and how they can be overcome.

My Little Book of Big Questions by Britta Teckentrup            $45
Teckentrup’s wonderful collection of questions, one per spread, takes readers on a dreamlike wander through the boundaries of possibility and reality. Beginning with “How will I see the world when I am grown up?” the queries address themes of change, identity and relationships, and hopes and fears. In her signature graphic style, Teckentrup illustrates grainy figures on white backgrounds—the likenesses gaze out of windows, appear in groups and alone, and populate sweeping vistas. In one spread—“Is the world inside or outside of me?—a blue sky and white clouds comprise a person’s torso. Though many of the inclusions feel weighty, all that curiosity can’t help but come with a wink, and the book ends with an amusing ask: “Do all people ask the same questions?”
The Innocents by Michael Crummey       $23
A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. The long-awaited new novel from the author of the wonderful Sweetland. 
Children of Ash and Elm: A history of the Vikings by Neil Price         $75
The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge against the English line at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This book takes a refreshingly different view. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, but more than that, it traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. It presents them, as far as possible, on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of those on the receiving end of their violence. The narrative ranges across the whole of the Viking diaspora, from Vinland on the eastern American seaboard to Constantinople and Uzbekistan, with contacts as far away as China. 
Looking, Writing, Reading, Looking: Writers on art from the Lousiana Collection edited by Georgi Gospodinov       $60
26 poets, writers and essayists, including Anne Carson, Chris Kraus, Chigozie Obioma, Yoko Tawada, Jacques Roubaud, Richard Ford, Roxane Gay, Tóibín, Eileen Myles, Gunnhild Øyehaug, Anne Waldman and Claudia Rankine engage in dialogue with artworks from the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by artists as different as Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Alicja Kwade, Andy Warhol, Julie Mehretu, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Yayoi Kusama and Francesca Woodman. 

The Unreality of Memory: Essays by Elisa Gabbert         $37
“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do—cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel—and how can you not—as if your emotional endurance is exhausted by horrors already well underway? Then you should read this book.” —Sarah Manguso
“Gabbert draws masterly portraits of the precise, uncanny affects that govern our psychological relationship to calamity — from survivor’s guilt to survivor’s elation, to the awe and disbelief evoked by spectacles of destruction, to the way we manage anxiety over impending dangers. Even more impressive is her skill at bending crisp, clear language into shapes that illustrate the shifting logic of the disastrous, keeping the reader oriented amid continual upheaval.” —Alexandra Kleeman in the New York Times
A Business Revolut ion: The first two decades of National Business Review, 1970—1991 by Hugh Rennie           $35
From its small but courageous beginnings, NBR quickly grew to become essential business reading, setting new standards in journalism, and providing a lens through which to assess the New Zealand economy and politics. 
Displacement by Kiku Hughes        $38
A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in California in this graphic novel. 
The Human Cosmos: A secret history of the stars by Jo Marchant       $33
For most of human history, celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are—our religious beliefs, power structures, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us—and that disconnection comes at a cost. Marchant guides us through history and around the globe and reveals the richness of humanity's relationship with the heavens. 

The Best of Me by David Sedaris        $38
For more than a quarter of a century, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It reveals what is both absurd and moving about our daily existence—and it usually leads to laughter of some sort.  This selection from his entire career is chosen by the author. 

Gray's Anatomy Puzzle Book by Gareth Moore and Gabrielle Finn        $33
Who would have thought such a range of puzzles, riddles and questions could be found within the pages of the classic anatomical reference Gray's Anatomy? Fun. 







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Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake, illustrated by Jon Klassen   {Reviewed by STELLA}
No one wants a skunk as a flatmate. Badger lives alone in his Aunt Lula’s brownstone in the township of North Twist. He’s happy doing his Important Rock Work and he does not need any distractions or companions. When a polite knock at the door disturbs his deliberations (rock or mineral?), Badger is not overly impressed to be greeted by a skunk with a small suitcase held together with red twine. Skunk has been invited to live in Aunt Lula’s house and somehow (the Important Rock Work keeps Badger from opening mail) Badger has overlooked the memo. Hmmm. Badger offers Skunk the guest closet in the hall, but Skunk has other ideas and finds a spare room on the second floor — just perfect to be the Moon Room. But that was Badger’s box room! Well, maybe he doesn’t need that many boxes and a few can surely be stored in the guest closet, suggests Skunk. Maybe this will just be overnight, ponders Badger — he must tell Aunt Lula that it is most inconvenient and Skunk is not compatible, with his energetic banter (even though Badger is quite taken with their conversation about Shakespeare’s Henry V) and active padding around the house. To quieten his mind that night Badger gets out his treasured Ukulele, plings a few cords and settles down to sleep intent on resolving this situation in the morning. Awakening to a delicious smell wafting up the stairs, Badger has the most excellent breakfast (usual morning meal: cold cereal with milk) — Skunk is quite the chef. Yet he does create a lot of dishes. Time for Badger to get down to his day’s exploration in his Rock Room. There’s a problem. Skunk likes chickens and he’s invited them over, by blowing his chicken whistle, for storytime. All types of hens like stories, especially tales about Chicken Little. Badger finds out he quite likes them too! Maybe this could be okay, but there are an awful lot of chickens roosting in his Rock Room. And what about that hasty letter to Aunt Lula — well, really Skunk can’t stay, can he? Things come to a head when Badger gets a telegram delivered by Speedy Stoat Delivery. Stoat is very keen to have a chicken, but Skunk will protect them all — they are free hens and belong to no one! Skunk will use his best weapon. Badger will find his actions intolerable. When they part ways, it’s not long until Badger regrets his bad behaviour and goes searching for Skunk. This is a delightful storybook about two odd fellows who will find delight in each other’s company despite their differences, and Skunk will open Badger’s eyes to the world around him. You’ll love Skunk immediately and warm to the foolish (yet very smart) but sentimental Badger before the book is finished. There’s more to come in the adventures of Skunk and Badger, with a trilogy planned. A charming junior chapter book rich in humour and pathos, with excellent illustrations from Jon Klassen.  
VOLUME BooksChildren's books, Review by Stella

 

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The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The room in which he had sat, according to L, had been the quietest room in the house, the house being similarly quiet except for the few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of houses, the noise of the refrigerator impressing itself most prominently upon him, though to hear the refrigerator from the room in which he sat would only be possible, according to L, if the house was indeed very quiet, quiet both inside and outside, the entire valley being quiet, which it was, he told L, excepting of course those few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of valleys, the occasional distant car being most prominent among them, or, when no cars could be heard, the sound of the river, not quite so distant. He had apparently told L. that his obsession with finding quiet had made his hearing remarkably sensitive to the least noise, and at the greatest distance, for it is a property of hearing that it strains to find whatever it wishes most to avoid. If there is even the slightest noise, he said, according to L, I cannot write my review, so I must withdraw from all noise in order to write, I must have quiet. The extreme outward quiet of the house, though, to the extent that it was quiet and to the extent that he was not troubled by the noise of the refrigerator or the occasional distant car or the river, as he had mentioned to L. before, did not bring him the quiet needed to complete, or even to commence, his work, as he had hoped, for the extreme outward quiet revealed to him the extent of his inward disquiet, or whatever is the opposite of quiet, and this he found infinitely more depressing than the lack of external quiet. It is to avoid recognising this inward disquiet that we place ourselves continually in far-from-perfect circumstances, situations of noise, he said to L, for we would do everything to avoid the realisation that the disquiet that prevents our doing what we claim we want to do is an internal disquiet, and not something external that we can use as an excuse for not doing what we claim we want to do but really would rather not do. There is no length to which we will not go, he told L, to avoid what could pass as fulfilment. The very steps he took, according to L, in order to write the review, were the very steps that made it impossible to write the review, he told L. The review cannot be written but the review still demands to be written, demands that I write it, that I put myself in the best possible circumstances for writing, but the fact that this writing is impossible, that the review cannot be written, even in the best possible circumstances, does not reduce the demand to write, in fact it makes the demand ever more urgent, he told L. This impossibility and this urgency, he told L, are probed to the point of exhaustion, if probing can lead to exhaustion, in The Lime Works, the most nihilistic of Bernhard’s many nihilistic and somewhat nihilistic books. Konrad withdraws to the limeworks, though he would, he told L, write limeworks as one word, he said, though the translator made it two, two English words of Bernhard’s one German word, he observed, though he attached no significance to this observation, to write his great work on the sense of hearing, his life’s work that presses ever more urgently upon him and becomes more impossible to write, if impossibility can come in degrees, he thought not, the work becomes ever less possible to write though it was never possible to write, no better. Konrad experiments ever more strenuously upon his invalid wife, upon her hearing, during their years in the limeworks, according to the informants, mainly Weiser and Fro, who tell the narrator what Konrad and others had told them about Konrad and his wife and the experiments on hearing and the book and the complete hopelessness of their life at the limeworks, the whole book being a complex of hearsay at two to five removes, Konrad’s and his wife’s life at the limeworks that began there as hopeless and had that hopelessness increased, if a lack can be increased, with the worst outcome possible. “Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something,” he told L. that Bernhard had written that his narrator, an insurance salesman, had recorded that Konrad had told Fro, or possibly Weiser, he couldn’t remember and had not noted this down, at least according to L. “Words were made to demean human thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought. Depression derives from words, nothing else.” He could not write the review, he told L, but neither could he not write the review. The lime sets as concrete. It is as Bernhard wrote, he told L, “No head can be saved.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

In our Book of the Week,   Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima, the writer and the photographer visit a series of locations in New Zealand in an attempt to capture something of the experiences there of Iris Wilkinson/Robin Hyde, brilliant, desperate, still refreshingly unassimilable to the literary canon. This is a thoughtful, moving, and beautifully produced book, full of sharp observations about the New Zealand literary community and wider society that made life difficult for this unconventional woman. 
>>Paula Morris talks about the book. 
>>On Sameshima's photographs. 
>>In the footsteps of Robin Hyde. 
>>Look inside the book. 
>>Lloyd Jones launches the book. 
>>About the collaboration. 
>>In the same series: High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

The Silence by Don DeLillo          $30
Five people are meeting for dinner in a Manhattan apartment, but when all the screens go dark they are forced to face what is left of themselves without the internet. 
"DeLillo is a master stylist, and not a word goes to waste. DeLillo looks for the future as it manifests in the present moment." —Anne Enright, Guardian
"Mysterious and unexpectedly touching. DeLillo offers consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world." —Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review
"DeLillo has almost Dayglo powers as a writer." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Brilliant and astonishing...a masterpiece...manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions...The effect is transcendent." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey          $34
"The Mermaid of Black Conch is an extraordinary novel in which myth, fairy tale, adventure and history are combined to produce a magical tale that provokes as much as it delights. This timeless story of an ancient mermaid who captures the heart of a local fisherman is a powerful feminist tale which speaks artfully to the nature of love and possession, race and class, creolization and colonialism.  Filled with unforgettable characters and scenes, the story moves effortlessly between prose, poetry, and journal entries with playful interweaving of various Englishes including patois and English Creole. This is one of those rare gems of a novel that can be read and enjoyed on many levels—it’s a whimsical love story, a history of the Caribbean and its indigenous peoples, an ode to Mother Earth, and an allegory for our times. The book sings with warm echoes of Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston." — Judges' citation, shortlisting the book for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize. 
Billy Apple: Life/work by Christina Barton         $75
The long-awaited monograph on this New Zealand artist of long relevance who burst onto the world stage in the 1960s alongside David Hockney. Well illustrated. 
>>Se also Anthony Byrt's The Mirror Steamed Over. 

The New York Times, aware that only fiction could help readers grasp reality in strange times, commissioned these stories. Includes Caitlin Roper, Rivka Galchen, Victor LaValle, Mona Awad, Kamila Shamsie, Colm Tóibín, Liz Moore, Tommy Orange, Leila Slimani, Margaret Atwood, Yiyun Li, Etgar Keret, Andrew O'Hagan, Rachel Kushner, Téa Obreht, Alejandro Zambra, Dinaw Mengestum Karen Russell, David Mitchell, Charles Yu, Paolo Giordano, Mia Cuoto, Uzodinma Iweala, Rivers Solomon, Laila Lalami, Julián Fuks, Dina Nayeli, Matthew Baker, Esi Edugyan, John Wray, Edwidge Danticat.
Raised in Captivity: Fictional non-fiction by Chuck Klosterman         $37
Stories of what could be called philosophical fiction, undermining any residual certainty we might feel we have about the functioning of 'reality'. 
>>Back in captivity. 

Landfall 240 edited by Emma Neale           $30
Results and winning essay from the: • Landfall Essay Competition 2020 • Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2020 • Frank Sargeson Prize 2020. WRITERS: John Allison, Nick Ascroft, Wanda Baker, Peter Belton, Victor Billot, Ella Borrie, Cindy Botha, Liz Breslin, Brent Cantwell, Marisa Cappetta, Catherine Chidgey, Jennifer Compton, Lynn Davidson, Breton Dukes, Norman Franke, Jasmine Gallagher, Giles Graham, Charlotte Grimshaw, Rebecca Hawkes, Nathaniel Herz-Edinger, Zoe Higgins, Gail Ingram, Ash Davida Jane, Pippi Jean, Stacey Kokaua, A.M. McKinnon, Cilla McQueen, Alice Miller, Jessica Le Bas, Art Nahill, Jilly O’Brien, Chris Parsons, Sarah Paterson, Robyn Maree Pickens, Angela Pope, Sugu Pillay, essa may ranapiri, Vaughan Rapatahana, Alan Roddick, Ruth Russ, Lynda Scott Araya, Tracey Slaughter, Matafanua Tamatoa, Jessica Thompson-Carr, Catherine Trundle, Chris Tse, Iain Twiddy, Oscar Upperton, Tim Upperton, Dunstan Ward, Harris Williamson, Sharni Wilson, Sophia Wilson, Anna Woods. ARTISTS: Scott Eady, Yonel Watene, Fatu Feu`u. 
Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith         $38
From the human being to the octopus, the shark to the humble sea squirt, all animals are physical beings made up entirely of cells. And yet they can think, to varying degrees. How did this come to be? How did a mind first grow from the matter that is the body? And at what stage did that clump of cells become a 'self'? From the author of Other Minds. 
Shaping the World: Sculpture from prehistory to now by Anthony Gormley and Martin Gayford              $90
How has sculpture been central to the evolution of our thinking and feeling?  

Caste: The lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson        $40
"The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not." Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste — and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. From the author of  the acclaimed The Warmth of Other Suns. 

Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe          $37
A young woman finds herself on the set of Billy Wilder’s 1978 film Fedora, in Coe’s love letter to the spirit of cinema.
"The life and light that flooded Middle England is preserved and multiplied in Mr Wilder & Me. This is a book that looks back to Coe’s brilliant early period, engaging, like What a Carve Up!, with cinema in a formal as well as a thematic way, delivering the reader a satisfyingly sweeping novel that still manages to push the form in new directions. This is as good as anything he’s written – a novel to cherish." —Guardian
Illumisaurus by Carnovsky and Lucy Brownridge       $40
Three coloured lenses reveal dinosaurs of all kinds almost leaping from the pages. A large amount of fun. 

Hoffman argues that how we see the world is determined by our species's imperative t survive, and that this means not only that our world view may be very different from beings with different survival imperatives, but also may contain a large number of useful errors, or once-useful errors, that may no longer be so useful at all. What we see is determined more by our minds than by actuality: evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Interesting. 
A Promised Land by Barack Obama         $70
The first volume of Obama's presidential memoirs. Thoughtful and revealing. 

"This is a radically important, timely work." —Miranda July

History of Information Graphics by Sandra Rendgen          $180
An utterly astounding lavish large-format volume showcasing the ways in which information has been presented graphically from medieval times to the present. Desirable. 


Anthony Bourdain meets Ryszard Kapuściński.




In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
Boy on Fire: The young Nick Cave by Mark Mordue         $45
From the fast-running dark river and ghost gums of Wangaratta, to the nascent punk scene which hit staid 1970s Melbourne like a bomb, right through to the torn wallpaper, sticky carpet and the manic, wild energy of nights at the Crystal Ballroom. 
VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

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The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands         {Reviewed by STELLA}
Philippe Sands is an excellent historian. His book East West Street, an intensely personal and important book focusing on the township of Lemberg during the Third Reich, and on the origins of the atrocities that occurred there, won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016. In The Ratline, he is still searching for missing pieces. With the same forensic eye, the story of SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter, Nazi Governor of Galicia, is investigated. A fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, answerable directly to Himmler in a region where thousands of Jews and Poles perished, he was one who escaped the authorities and trial after the Second World War. This is the story of his disappearance, of his son Horst’s denial of his father as a bad man ( he prefers to see him as a good man entrenched in a terrible system)m and of the passionate, and often intensely difficult, relationship between Otto and his wife Charlotte. It is also about a friendship between two men that shouldn’t be possible. Sands likes Horst, a gentle and sensitive man still haunted by his father’s disappearance sixty years later, in spite of the obvious different perspectives and Horst’s inability to accept the truth of his father’s actions as an SS officer, and Philippe finds himself gravitating towards Horst, listening and attempting to understand his denial while enjoying his hospitality and genial nature. As Horst and Philippe meet over several years, discussing their connections with this place and its history, and as Horst reveals more to Philippe, allowing him access to the family archives (vast quantities of documents and letters collected and maintained by Charlotte) and slowly breaking with his sanitised view of the past, more secrets are revealed and the mystery of Otto’s death unpicked. When Poland fell to the Russian forces, Otto took to the mountains, on the run — a fugitive — for several years. He made it to Rome and had some protection from the church and past colleagues while waiting for an opportunity to escape Europe to join The Ratline — the journey many fascists were taking to Argentina and other South American countries that welcomed fleeing Nazis. Yet the circle was closing in. Delving into the family archive with forensic precision, his heartfelt conversations with Horst, documenting this family’s life during the Third Reich, at its fall and since, Sands has empathy for Horst in spite of the direct implications of Otto’s actions on his own Jewish family. Are we absolved of our individual actions by the wider ideologies we live under or partake in? Can future generations survive the trauma, and by consequence the guilt which arises from actions, of the past? Philippe Sands reveals to the reader in this compelling detective-style narrative the importance of telling the story and exposing the truth. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 

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Água Viva by Clarice Lispector      {Reviewed by THOMAS}
A jellyfish is an entity that exists only as a skin suspended in a continuum, dependent upon and at the mercy of that continuum. Clarice Lispector’s novel Água Viva (‘living water’ or ‘jellyfish’ in Portuguese) takes the form of a fragmented interior monologue addressed by an ‘I’ to a ‘you’ from whom the ‘I’ has recently been separated and liberated. Other than being a constraining force, we learn nothing of this ‘you’, so it could be an element of the same person as the ‘I’ as much as it could be another person (of course, the same could be said of the characters of all novels so this is a bit of an idle speculation). The liberation experienced by the ‘I’ is a dissolution of form (is ‘you’ form per se?), a surrender to the forces which, to her, underlie and animate the medium of fiction. As with a jellyfish, the novel reveals more of the currents and fertility of its medium than it is concerned with any of the more solid containers (plot, character, development) into which the medium is, by convention, constrained. “This is not a book because this isn’t how anyone writes.” The novel, so to call it, is a conscious membrane held up and animated by, and bourn upon, the storms and currents of the vast unconscious tohubohu of its medium. “I’m after whatever is lurking behind thought.” The work seeks only to give access to the instant, or, “more than the instant, I want its flow,” wrested from the imposed concept of time upon which linear narratives depend. “The next moment, do I make it? Or does it make itself?” In some ways the novel is an interrogation of the tension between the ecstatic hyperawareness of a single moment, relieved of illusions of past and present but transforming itself by its innate momentum, and the configuration of that eternal moment in written form. “What I say is pure present and this book is a straight line in space. Even if I say ‘I lived’ or ‘I shall live’ it’s present because I’m saying them now.” Lispector’s attempts to write a novel totally free of the dependence upon being ‘about’ anything, to “write with my whole body, loosing an arrow that will sink into the tender and neuralgic centre of the word” in an attempt to use words as an attempt to touch a reality beyond words: “Writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief.” All writing is fundamentally about writing, but Lispector is exploring the possibility that writing, properly examined, may give access to something beyond it that it also obscures. “Reality has no synonyms. I want to feel in my probing hands the living and quivering nerve of today.” She wants to access the “lucid darkness, luminous stupidity” which can only be found somewhere beyond meaning: “I renounce having a meaning. … I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that a pulsing vein has.” Attaining liberation is simultaneously an extinction, the ends of the circle meet, meaning resembles inanity, individuality is indistinguishable from cliché, the inspired segues into the unreadable. “I, anonymous work of anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then? Then all that I lived will be a poor superfluity. When I die, I’ll never have been born and lived.” Fertile mud is, after all, still mud. But, there, despite it all, is the ‘I’, still pulsing, still irresolvable, still clamouring for an existence that neither be contained or expressed. “They wanted me to be an object. I’m an object. An object dirty with blood. That creates other objects and the typewriter creates all of us. It demands. The mechanism demands and demands my life. But I don’t totally obey: If I must be an object let me be an object that screams. What saves me is the scream.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 NEW RELEASES

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima       $45
Writer Paula Morris and photographer Haru Sameshima visited various locations in search of the writer Robin Hyde's experiences there the greater part of a century beforehand. "We set off for some of the small places Hyde lived, wondering how they managed to contain her. Everything is smaller in the past. Hyde bursts from it, vivid and roaring, all the time wanting too much, too wild inside. I try to douse my own wildfires. Hers I fear and pity and admire, watching them there, in the distance, burning out of control." The second in the series of kōrero between writers and artists published by Massey University Press.
Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan             $40
Scanlan found a stranger's five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. The owner of the diary was eighty-six years old when she began recording the details of her life in the small book, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next fifteen years, Scanlan played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the remarkable composition that became Aug 9—Fog. 
>>Read Thomas's review of The Dominant Animal. 

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada           $34
Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.  One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole—a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.
Monsters in the Garden: An anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand science fiction and fantasy edited by Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen       $35
Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians one of which includes the first description of atmospheric aerobreaking in world literature to the bleeding edge of now. Includes Godfrey Sweven, Janet Frame, Margaret Mahy, Maurice Gee, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall, Phillip Mann, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Juliet Marillier, Elizabeth Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Bernard Beckett, Anon, Craig Gamble, Danyl Mclauchlan, Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall, Tina Makereti, Lawrence Patchett, Octavia Cade, Rachael Craw, Karen Healey, Jack Barrowman, Emma Martin, Samantha Lane Murphy, Jack Larsen, Tamsyn Muir, and some worried sheep. 
Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices from Aotearoa edited by Tom Doig        $15
The devastating summer of Australian bush fires underlined the terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic shift. Fears have been raised that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a post-pandemic ‘new normal’: a cleaner, greener, fairer and safer world. This book brings together researchers, commentators, activists and writers to bear witness to the current crisis. 

Enchantment by Daphne Merkin          $35
 "My mother," says Hannah Lehmann, "is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world." Although Hannah, a 26-year-old from an Upper East Side Jewish family, lays blame upon her mother, her plight is rather more complicated. How is the revenge for perceived hurts played out upon oneself? 
"Daphne Merkin's exquisitely written novel about a young woman who can't let go and who never learned to cut her losses is a supremely delicate and intelligent fiction." —Stanley Elkin
"A truly Proustian effort to conquer time, Hannah's painful, humiliating, and self-pitying narrative nevertheless burnishes some indelible portraits in the reader's memory." —Kirkus
The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick        $33
"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story—an indisputably American story.
On the Move: Poems about migration by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Quentin Blake               $28
Rosen's poems are divided into four groups: in the first series, he draws on his childhood as part of a first-generation Polish family living in London; in the second, on his perception of the War as a young boy; in the third, on his “missing” relatives and the Holocaust; and in the fourth, on global experiences of migration.


Chosen by Geoff Cochrane            $25
The nineteenth collection of poems by cult Wellington poet and pedestrian Geoff Cochrane.
"Over the years, Cochrane’s work has been a joy to me, a solace, a proof that art can be made in New Zealand which shows ourselves in new ways." —Pip Adam
He Pukapuka Tātaku: Ngā Mahi a Te Rapuaraha Nui (A Record of the Life of the Great Te Rauparaha) by Tamihana Te Rauparaha (translated and edited by Ross Calman)           $60
A 50,000-word account in te reo Māori of Te Rauparaha's life, written by his son Tamihana Te Rauparaha between 1866 and 1869. A pioneering work of Maori (and, indeed, indigenous) biography, Tamihana's narrative weaves together the oral accounts of his father and other kaumatua to produce an extraordinary record of Te Rauparaha and his rapidly changing world. Published for the first time in a bilingual Māori/English edition. "Kāore kau he kaumātua hei rite mō Te Rauparaha te mōhio ki te whawhai, me te toa hoki, me te tino tangata ki te atawhai tangata. / There has never been a man equal to Te Rauparaha in terms of knowledge of warfare and prowess in battle, and in being so dedicated to looking after people." —Tamihana Te Rauparaha

This is Not a Pipe by Tara Black          $28
"I've decided to document my life in pictures. It's hard to draw the pole, because of the pole. Beth has a pole through her arms. This is not a metaphor. A metaphor would be a lot less inconvenient. On the other side of the room, Kenneth is creating a new religion. He thinks narrative is the operating principle of the universe. He also thinks he's the hero of Beth's story. Beth is worried he's going to leave her. The creatures living in the pole may have stolen her cat. Tara Black's comic is surreal, dark, sad, perversely joyful, and if you bet someone they couldn't find another book remotely like it, you would win. It's a little bit about being married to Kenneth. It's a little bit about losing your cat. It's definitely not about the pole. I've been told I hold my pen wrong. But it's the only way I can."
"One of the most potent, unsettling texts I've encountered." —Tracey Slaughter 
"Poetic, whimsical and painfully honest." —Dylan Horrocks 
"A strange and wonderful book, both surreal and very real." —Tina Makereti 
"A freaking masterpiece." —Pip Adam
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots          $35
Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn't glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called "hero" leaves her badly injured. And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she's the lucky one. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realises she might not be as powerless as she thinks — data is her superpower. Hench explores the individual cost of justice through a mix of Millennial office politics, heroism measured through data science, body horror, and a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.
In the Half Room by Carson Ellis        $30
The half room is full of half things. A half chair, a half cat, even half shoes—all just as nice as whole things. When half a knock comes on half a door, who in the world could it be? Completely fun. 



Life, A user's manual: Philosophy for (almost) any eventuality by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro          $40
There are no easy answers to the big questions, but at least we have the questions. 
The Berlin Shadow: Living with the ghosts of the Kindertransport by Jonathan Lichtenstein             $38
In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behaviour. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. 
White Shadow by Roy Jacobsen          $28
The sequel to The Unseen finds Ingrid back on the island of Barrøy as Norway is occupied by the Nazis. How will she protect what is important to her when the world is changing in unexpected ways? 



Tableland: The history behind Mount Arthur by Ray Salisbury         $60
Generations of Nelsonians have lived in sight of the Arthur Range on the western border of the Nelson district. But few of them know the stories that were played out on the Tableland, the high tussock plateau of Mt Arthur, in the adjacent Cobb Valley or in the ranges and valleys beyond.

Raymond Briggs by Nicolette Jones       $45
Raymond Briggs changed the face of children's picture books with his innovations of both form and subject. In this insightful commentary, children's book editor Nicolette Jones illuminates how Briggs's eclectic use of style helped him approach profound and resonant themes.
The Sqirl Jam by Jessica Koslow         $55
Sqirl all began with jam—organic, local, made from unusual combinations of fruits, fragrant, and not overly sweet—the kind of jam you eat with a spoon. The Sqirl Jam book collects Jessica Koslow's signature recipes into a cookbook that looks and feels like no other preserving book out there, inspiring makers to try their own hands at preserving and creating.
This book illustrates Dillon's working process by combining many of the drawings and watercolour sketches done directly from life, with finished paintings completed in his studio. 
Animal Farm: The graphic novel by George Orwell and Odyr        $30
Well done. 

The Climate Cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of Covid-19 by Tim Flannery       $30
If governments can be guided by science to limit the impact of a pandemic, why can they not be guided by science to limit the impact of the climate crisis?  Flannery has a plan.

Mophead Tu: The Queen's poem by Selina Tusitala Marsh          $25
In this sequel to the wonderful Mophead, Selina is crowned Commonwealth Poet and invited to perform for the Queen in Westminster Abbey. But when someone at work calls her a 'sellout', Selina starts doubting herself. Can she stand with her people who struggled against the Queen . . . and serve the Queen? From the sinking islands in the south seas to the smoggy streets of London, Mophead Tu: The Queen's Poem is a hilariously thought-provoking take on colonial histories and one poet's journey to bridge the divide. Selina has to work out where she stands and how to be true to herself.




VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Although best known for her fiction, especially the 'Wolf Hall' trilogy, Hilary Mantel also writes some of the sharpest essays on historical and contemporary political and social matters. MANTEL PIECES, our Book of the Week this week, assembles thirty years of incisive essays from the London Review of Books, including 'Royal Bodies', 'In Bed with Madonna', and ruminations on Jane Boleyn, Robespierre, the murder of James Bulger, Britain's last witch, the Hair Shirt Sisterhood, and numerous other— sometimes surprisingly—relevant and urgent topics. Compelling. 
>>"Witty and ferocious."
>>"Fun isn't high on my list."
>>Some of the essays, in the LRB.
VOLUME BooksBook of the week


 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #203 (6.11.20)

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Rat King Landlord by Murdoch Stephens   
Ever wanted a crash course in Marxist theory, class structure, exploitation and capitalist advantage through property ownership, but found the reading a little too onerous? Well, then this novel is for you. Rat King Landlord, newly out of the excellent Lawrence & Gibson stable from the pen of Murdoch Stephens, is a satire that places you squarely in the continuing saga of our housing crisis — specifically the rental dilemma. Looked for a flat in Wellington lately; lived in an overpriced damp and mouldy house with strange flatmates and yet stranger landlord? — you need to look no further than here for a slice of almost-truth. Meet our flatmate, getting up early to make coffee in his haze of infatuation for Freddie, before she needs for work at the hip Broviet Brunion cafe located at the edgy end of the city, while flattie number three, Caleb, sleeps on or whatever else he does, behind his closed door. While this is set squarely in the now, it could be scenario many of us have encountered in our flatting lives (apart from the shocking rent cost if you are post-40). Yet things getting strange. Everyone wants to get on the property ladder, including the rats. Maligned and misunderstood, the rats are taking back the yard and the house, they are not content to live off your scraps and have to avoid your traps any longer. Rats have rights too! At the same time, strange posters are popping up over the city advertising an event unlike any other — The Night of the Smooth Stones. Unauthorised and taking the billboard space owned by a corporate or a council, the posters resist being painted over or torn down. The message is oblique and the word on the street — well, on social media and in the huddled conversations of the politically leveraged hipsters — is that a revolution is about to hit the streets. Targets: property agents (loud hiss), landlords (hiss) and house owners (half-hearted small hiss). While the street is heating up, at home the temperature is rising too. The human landlord has died falling off a shonky ladder and his odd will results in the ownership of the house ending up in the hands paws of the Rat — the last being to witness him. Don’t even think about being animalist. As the Rat adjusts to his newfound status, learning English through texting (specifically with Caleb — the reclusive — who has an odd fascination with his Rat associate and an employer/employee relationship in due course — one that favours him over his flatmates), upgrading his shed, and making a slippery agreement to get himself into the house as a flatmate/landlord (alarm bells!), our protagonist becomes more agitated by the situation. Fire in the backyard, vigilantes on the street, pseudo-rebellion in the streets — who’s a landlord and who’s a renter? Have you got proof of your status or lack of? And the nights of rebellion just keep getting stranger. Who's behind the call to arms, and why is Freddie's boss acting weird? Rat King Landlord is a hilarious trip with a serious underbelly. Shitty houses, rip-off rents, exploitative agencies and landlords funded by the structure of the capitalist system fuel the beast we call the housing market. Satisfying satire — mad, fast-paced and audacious. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 

















 
I am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“It is not clear just when we stopped being ourselves and became something else.” These stories do not take long to read but the images in them will be embedded in your mind for a long time, so precisely sharp are Jaeggy’s tiny burrs of observed detail. The stories typically begin in the fantastic but resolve in what may be the actual, the actual as experienced on many levels at once, the small made large and the large made small, perhaps as Jaeggy experiences the actual. Perhaps these stories are not fiction but memoir, perhaps Jaeggy’s brother committed suicide, perhaps her family’s veins ran with schmertz, certainly she knew Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, Italo Calvino, was married to Roberto Calasso, met Oliver Sacks (her account of this, after noting that Sacks needed a very cold room, resolves into the narrator’s affinity with a fish in the restaurant tank, Sacks forgotten), perhaps she realised only by looking at a photograph long after her mother’s death that her mother had been depressed (“Like a flash of lightning, there is an instant that descends, wounds, and it gone.”), but this is of no consequence to us to whom it makes no difference whose experience this is save that it is an experience seemingly shared by reader and author (and what is real about reality other than the experience of it?). Jaeggy’s characters are isolated in the extreme, hypochondriac, melancholy to the point of elegant insanity. They find company in objects rather than in persons. Often, objects take on motive force at the rate at which is is surrendered by these characters, relieving them of will, leaving the stories suspended at that moment of relinquishment that comes immediately before actual dissipation. The characters’ surrender to what thenceforth can be considered, for all practical purposes, to be fate opens their eyes to a grand equivalence of detail, to a topography of experience in which the resonance between things is more powerful, or at least memorable, than the things themselves, in which nuance overwhelms the facts. Memory conflates time, the past flows into, and is confused with, or dissolved into, the present. The intensity of experience, or of nuance, continues to increase until, at the moment of greatest intensity, the character’s fated self-destruction comes as an epiphany of detachment. Relief comes as the first reaction to disaster. All passion removes its bearer from the possible.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

Book of the Week: Mayflies, by Andrew O'Hagan, tells the story of the coming-of-age of a group of working-class Scottish youths in the 1980s, and the effect of the bonds then formed as they gather thirty years later, suddenly confronting their mortality. O'Hagan writes beautiful prose, and this is a sharp, funny and tender book exploring the strength of friendships. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan           $45
Hotere invited O'Sullivan to write his life in 2005, and this nuanced and insightful portrait of one of Aotearoa's most important and interesting artists is the long-awaited and supremely fulfilling result. 

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West and the afterlives of empire by Pankaj Mishra           $37
Decades of violence and chaos have generated a political and intellectual hysteria ranging from imperial atavism to paranoia about invading or hectically breeding Muslim hordes that has affected even the most intelligent in Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines this hysteria and its fantasists, taking on its arguments and the atmosphere in which it has festered and become influential. In essays that grapple with colonialism, human rights, and the doubling down of liberalism against a background of faltering economies and weakening Anglo-American hegemony, Mishra confronts writers from Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson to Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata          $33
The remarkable new novel from the author of Convenience Store Woman. Natsuki isn't like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what. Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki's family are increasing, her friends wonder why she's still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki's childhood are pursuing her.
A Lover's Discourse by Xiaolu Guo            $35
An exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a Britain still reeling from the Brexit vote, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their relationship, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling flat share in east London. Full of resonances with Roland Barthes's book by the same name and with Xiaolu Guo's own novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. 
One of a Kind: A story about sorting and classifying by Neil Packer        $35
Framed by a charming narrative about a father and son, this is a book about categories. On a journey into town, a boy called Arvo explores the many ways in which we classify the world around us, to fascinating. A stunningly beautiful large-format picture book.
The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams           $35
mountweazel n. a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. 
It is the final year of the nineteenth century and Peter Winceworth has reached the letter 'S', toiling away for the much-anticipated and multi-volume Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. He is overwhelmed at his desk and increasingly uneasy that his colleagues are attempting to corral language and regiment facts. Compelled to assert some sense of individual purpose and exercise artistic freedom, Winceworth begins inserting unauthorised, fictitious entries into the dictionary. In the present day, young intern Mallory is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels as the text of the dictionary is digitised for modern readers. Through the words and their definitions she finds she has access to their creator's motivations, hopes and desires. More pressingly, she must also field daily threatening anonymous phone calls. Is a suggested change to the dictionary's definition of marriage (n.) really that controversial? What power does Mallory have when it comes to words and knowing how to tell the truth? And does the caller really intend for the Swansby's staff to 'burn in hell'? As their two narratives combine, Winceworth and Mallory must discover how to negotiate the complexities of an often nonsensical, untrustworthy, hoax-strewn and undefinable life. From the author of Attrib. (winner of the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize). 
99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording          $55
An exploration of mathematical style through 99 different proofs of the same theorem. This book offers a multifaceted perspective on mathematics by demonstrating 99 different proofs of the same theorem. Each chapter solves an otherwise unremarkable equation in distinct historical, formal, and imaginative styles that range from Medieval, Topological, and Doggerel to Chromatic, Electrostatic, and Psychedelic. With a rare blend of humor and scholarly aplomb, Philip Ording weaves these variations into an accessible and wide-ranging narrative on the nature and practice of mathematics. A wonderful book, the mathematical equivalent of Raymond Queneau's Elements of Style. 
Dog by Shaun Tan          $23
Shaun Tan writes of this book: "A story in verse and paintings, Dog imagines the bond between humans and dogs as an ongoing cycle of death and rebirth through different places and times, from prehistory to the present and future. The relationship between dogs and humans is unlike that of any other. There are perhaps few inter-species friendships so epic and transforming, spanning some 15,000 years, enduring the vagaries of history, the rise and fall of countless societies, shaping each in turn. Every time I see people walking their dogs at my local park, I never cease to be heartened by the endurance and affection of this bond, its strangeness, its apparent naturalness. But fates are never quite aligned and our hearts so frequently broken. For many years I’ve had a news clipping on the pin-up board that overlooks my desk, a picture of a dog whose owner died in a tragic house-fire. There is something about the dog’s hard-to-read gaze that I’ve always found compelling. It reminds me of many stories such as that of the famous Hachiko, the Japanese dog that waited patiently at Shibuya train station every evening, up to nine years after his owner, a university professor, had died suddenly at work. The sheer loyalty and urgent optimism of dogs has always been a great inspiration for their human companions, who so often wander from such virtuous paths and anxiously question their place in the world. No matter what future meets our planet, no matter how transformed or tragic, even apocalyptic, it’s hard to imagine that a dog will not be there by our side, always urging us forward."
Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou nā J.K. Rowling, nā Leon Heketū Blake i whakamāori         $25
"No te huringa o te kopaki, i tana ringa e wiri ana, ka kite iho a Hare i tetahi hiri-wakihi waiporoporo e whakaatu ana i tetahi tohu kawai; he raiona, he ikara, he patiha me tetahi nakahi e karapoti ana i tetahi pu 'H' e rahi ana. Kaore ano a Hare Pota i paku rongo korero e pa ana ki Howata i te taenga haeretanga o nga reta ki a Mita H. Pota, i Te Kapata i raro i nga Arapiki, i te 4 o te Ara o Piriweti. He mea tuhi ki te wai kanapanapa i runga i te kirihipi ahua kowhai nei, i tere ra te kohakina e nga matua keke wetiweti o Hare, e nga Tuhiri. Heoi, i te huringa tau tekau ma tahi o Hare, ka papa mai tetahi tangata hitawe ake nei, a Rupehu Hakiri, me etahi korero whakamiharo: he kirimatarau a Hare Pota, a, kua whai turanga ia ki Te Kura Matarau o Howata. I te pukapuka tuatahi o nga tino korero ma nga tamariki a mohoa nei, ka whakamohio a Rana ratou ko Heremaiani, ko Tamaratoa, ko Ahorangi Makonara i a Hare me te kaipanui ki te Kuitiki me Tera-e-Mohiotia-ra, ki te whainga o te matarau me te oha mai i mua. I te whakaawenga o te whakawhitia ki te reo Maori e Leon Blake, ka timata te korero i konei." Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in te reo Māori!
Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle conventional wisdom about culture, society and politics. Exploring unexamined episodes in the school's history and reading its work in unexpected ways, these essays provide ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. 
Me, According to the history of art by Dick Frizzell        $65
Throughout his long career, New Zealand painter Dick Frizzell has often goneway out on a limb to see where it would take him. From his early Pop Art influenced approach to his experiments with landscape and the contested area ofappropriation, he's always been provocative. Now, he takes on the history of art, starting with cave art to discover the key threads of Western art that sit in his DNA as a painter in the 21st century. Despite the humour, it sits on a bedrock of serious scholarship and reverence for the painters of the past. And there’s one thing that makes this book different from any other: all the reproductions of significant paintings, from Rubens and Tintoretto to Cezanne and Lichtenstein, are by Frizzell himself, painted over a twelve-month period.
Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Messud's most personal essays — reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into the precarious nature of girlhood, the role narrative plays in giving shape to a life and the power of language. As the book progresses, we then see how these questions translate into her criticism. In sections on literature and visual arts, Messud opens up the 'radical strangeness' of childhood in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; the search for the self in Saul Friedlander; the fragility and danger of girlhood captured by Sally Mann; and the search for justice in Valeria Luiselli's The Lost Children Archive.
The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame by William Feaver            $75
Following Youth, this volume of Feaver's outstanding biography covers the years 1968—2011. 


Inside Story by Martin Amis            $37
What will time take from me? Has it taken anything from me already? How will I know? In this novel, a heady mix of autobiography and fiction, Amis explores his formative relationships with his father Kingsley, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Christopher Hitchens, and others.
Te Ruānuku nā Paulo Coelho (nā Hemi Kelly i whakamāori)         $30
The Alchemist in te reo Māori!


Nōu te Ao, e Hika e! nā Dr Seuss (nā Karena Kelly i whakamāori)         $30
Oh, the places you'll go with a bit of te reo Māori!

LandMarks by Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner and Owen Marshall       $75
25 years after their collaboration on A Timeless Land, three friends return with another evocation of Central Otago in words and paint.


Navigating the Stars: Māori creation myths by Witi Ihimaera      $45
"Step through the gateway now to stories that are as relevant today as they ever were."
Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on collective action and radical thought edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah     $37
Black, anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist thought is often sidelined in mainstream discourse. This unique book sets the record straight. Through interviews with thinkers, including Angela Davis and Silvia Federici, Bhandar and Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions. Collectively, these interviews trace the ways in which Black feminists, Third World and post-colonial feminists, and indigenous women have created new ways of seeing, and new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems.
A Glorious Freedom: Older women leading extraordinary lives by Lisa Congdon       $46
A beautifully hand-drawn and hand-lettered book celebrating women, both famous and not famous, who have found that, in the second half of their lives, they worry less about what other people think, become more themselves, pursue new endeavours.
100 entertaining sentences are waiting for you, the copyeditor, to correct—or, alternatively, to STET. The first person to spot the error, or else call out "STET!" (a copyeditor's term that means "let it stand") if there is no error, gets the card. There are two ways to play — compete for points in a straightforward grammar game, or play with style and syntax and whip the author's sentences into splendid shape. The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins! 
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The Harpy by Megan Hunter     {Reviewed by STELLA}
A marriage, a betrayal and a punishment. Meet Lucy, wife and mother, mid-30s. She’s put her career on hold for the children — never finished her PhD — and works part-time editing on contract. It fits in with the children. Jake is her charming husband and life is good, even if they can’t afford their own home in the increasingly expensive suburbs. A message from David Holmes breaks the fairytale. Jake’s been having an affair with a work colleague (David’s wife Vanessa). Lucy is understandably shocked and an inner rage starts to build. To save the marriage Lucy and Jake make a deal. She can hurt him three times unexpectedly and without any discussion. Life carries on and the hurts are dealt out. Yet Lucy, despite her best intentions to play her roles, particularly for the boys, becomes incensed by the reactions of her husband, the other parties involved, and the neighbours. As she hosts the neighbourhood pre-Christmas party she becomes increasingly aware of the double standards of her community. Jake is as popular as ever, while she is either maligned or pitied by his actions. This would be another relationship drama about motherhood, wifedom and sacrifice if it wasn’t for Hunter’s superb writing style, which invites you into Lucy’s world in episodic fragments — rich and nuanced — and the mythical fascination that Lucy has with the harpy — that monstrous, powerful bird-woman, a creature she has been curious about since childhood. And her childhood, the impact of parental behaviour, is a pivotal aspect of this novel. Under Lucy’s skin claws a beast, a rage, adamant to be heard and seen. When the punishment crosses the line, her revenge tips out of control. Will she be consumed by her rage or will her rage avenge the wrongs perpetrated upon her? This is brilliant and, like her first book, The End We Start From, the language is pointed, sparse and beautiful — taut and finely tuned. The Harpy is an exploration of love, revenge and female rage, drawing on mythology and the dark recesses of the psyche with precision and spine-chilling unease, set in the normality of the suburban middle-class home.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella