| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey {Reviewed by STELLA} In Memorial Drive, Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey lays out the path to her mother’s death at the hands of a violent partner. Moving, compelling and insightful, the memoir is both raw and personal, as well as politically charged, revealing of a childhood in the South, her own and her mother’s. Opening with a dream, the poet’s use of language and imagination lead you into this story of tragedy and resolve. Gwendolyn Turnbough was born in New Orleans in1944. When her father, a naval officer never returned amid rumours of a new wife abroad, mother and daughter returned to Mississippi. A resourceful and strong-willed woman, Natasha’s grandmother brought her daughter up to push against the expectations of society and it was while Gwen was at college that she met her husband. It was the sixties, and despite coming of age in the Jim Crow era and the visible and real threat of the Ku Klux Klan, change seemed possible. Even when you have to marry in a different state. Moving to New Orleans so her father could study full-time, Gwen with a young child at home, felt isolated, and the racial prejudice they encountered as a mixed-race couple put pressure on their relationship. It wasn’t long until the couple parted and eventually divorced. Getting on her feet again, Gwen enrols to study social work and juggles motherhood, study and working nights. And she’s successful. At work, she meets the man who will become a life-changing figure in Natasha’s life—Joel Grimmett or, as Natasha nicknames him, Big Joe. At first things hum along, Gwen is doing well with her career and Joel seems happy to be part of the family. But something begins to sour—mixed with alcohol and a jealous streak underpinned by Joel’s need for power and control. Natasha describes the descent into tragedy, for her mother as well as herself. In Atlanta, there is a ring road, and as a form of psychological torture, Joel drives the young girl endlessly on it, threatening to leave her out there or never take her home. This road becomes a symbol of oppression for Natasha well into adulthood—a road she avoids most of her life. As her mother’s career blossoms and they move onwards and upwards in the world, their lives from the outside seem just fine. The reality is far from this and when Natasha, now in the fifth grade, overhears Gwen being beaten, the texture of the family changes. She knows, her mother knows, and so does Big Joe. Escaping into books and school-life can only last so long for Natasha, and as things get worse, Gwen finds a way out, but, unfortunately, the presence of Grimmett in their lives can not be erased, especially as his paranoia and sense of entitlement increases. The memoir is mesmerising. Trethewey’s descriptions of the women in her family, the fraught racial issues over several decades, the political landscape and the societal norms that allowed a woman to be repeatedly beaten, and the inability of the law to protect her when it mattered the most are not just this daughter’s story but the story of many, but Natasha Tretheway’s honesty, care, and her willingness to look this tragedy full in the face reveals something remarkable—the ability to not only endure but push back against a system of repression, to take a victim and make them whole again—visible to the world and to herself. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Math Campers by Dan Chiasson {Reviewed by THOMAS} where the poet writes or wrote it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why the reader writes “it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why” to remember the words or avoid remembering but where the poet writes It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind. He wrote: “It may just be my mind.” how can the reader write or rewrite that he thought who never claimed to be a poet maybe once how can I write or rewrite all those wrotes within wrotes, nests within nests here the poet the reader thought writes or wrote about the writing of the poems he wrote or is writing or soon will either write or not the poem of how the poem is made or will be made or is then being made or could be made or not in some room of the poet’s mind or on some paper less likely or in the house of a dead poet more precisely literally On the upstairs deck, I read about The deck upstairs. In the daybed I read about the daybed. In the books I read about the books I read. the poet wrote the reader wrote or rewrote sharing the labour each expected of the other with the other their separation more a distance of time than a distance of person not that each is one person only the moments flicker because time as the poet’s past is the same age as his sons as the reader knows the poet knows each is not one person only He turned to meet me, but our element was time. He approached me, where I was standing, years later; and I approached him where he stood, but he was too far in the past. the pages turn the poems turn or turn again the poet is carefully squeezed out of the poem or squeezed in the poem changed slightly, crucially— because, you know why, because time this slow precise perfecting process as the poet writes as the reader reads unlike these lines tossed off if that is how to put it in less than a minute and unrevisited the reader can do no justice to the form but to be fair made no such claims in that direction towards the province of the poet he thinks I had no real name. I was the channel through which the mind passed, and then I was a gap, an absence, which frightened me. again this space this wound in time this crack where the words get in or out this rift between the poet and his past if only a moment passed between poet and poem which is to say the poet who breathes and stumbles and the one squeezed out of the poem or in from sleep to type We were held, suspended within the larger dream; we alternate coming into, then stepping out of, the light. the poet wrote the reader wrote if that makes sense then the world wakes up, enlarged— there is not nor can there be anything more than this |
In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race to imagine another world.
>>What lies ahead?
>>Portal to a new world.
>>"Our job is to be unpopular."
>>"At her passionate best."
>>Acting on the present crisis.
>>"The media has enabled fascism in India."
>>The pandemic is a portal.
>>"We need a reckoning."
>>What is the role of fiction today?
>>Your copy.
>>Other books by Arundhati Roy.
NEW RELEASES
Dunedin poet Victor Billot finds in the South Pacific Ocean an oracle of the future and a keeper of our histories. The Sets begins with reflections on the domestic world and the fragility of the family and personal relationships that sustain us, the necessity and refuge of love, and the sometimes catastrophic effects of failure in these relationships. The collection then shifts towards political and social satire, punching out mashups of fake news and rogue algorithms that mix mordant wit with compressed rage at the banality of humanity's descent towards oblivion.
>>A political poet.
The Philosopher Queens: The lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting $40
The Magnetic Fields by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, translated by Charlotte Mandell $30
Freeman's Love edited by John Freeman $38
What Can a Body Do? How we meet the built world by Sara Hendren $50
Sleep Donation by Karen Russell $24
Prague Stories edited by Richard Bassett $37
Ekstedt: The Nordic art of analogue cooking by Niklas Ekstedt $65
The Running Book: A journey through memory, landscape and history by John Connell $38
When the Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand and the Armenian genocide by James Robins $50
Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas $23
Nora by Nuala O'Connor $34
Four Seasons Cookery Book by Margaret Costa $45
Numb and Number: How to avoid being mystified by the mathematics of everyday life by William Hartston $33
The Language Lover's Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos $33
Featuring twenty women who have outstanding but often unseen in various fields of philosophy, this attractively illustrated book ranges through history and around the globe.
>>Who taught Socrates?
The Light Ages: A medieval journey of discovery by Seb Falk $48
Beneath the Night: How the stars have shaped the history of humankind by Stuart Clark $33
An interesting survey of the under-recognised scientific achievements of the Middle Ages, concentrating on the life and journeys of a real-life fourteenth century monk, John of Westwyk—inventor, astrologer, crusader—who was educated in England's grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory.
From prehistoric cave art and Ancient Egyptian zodiacs to the modern era of satellites and space exploration, Stuart Clark explores a fascination shared across the world and throughout millennia. It is one that has shaped our scientific understanding; helped us navigate the terrestrial world; provided inspiration for our poets, artists and philosophers; and it has given us a place to project our hopes and fears.
An excellent new translation of the 1919 foundational Surrealist text resulting from Breton's and Soupault's experiments with automatic writing and their desire to create a new literature and a new morality after the indictment of Western 'civilisation' manifest by devastation of World War One.
"With distance, a sort of unity has established itself, and The Magnetic Fields have become the work of a single author with two heads. This double gaze has made it possible, as nothing else would, for Philippe Soupault and André Breton to push forward on the path where no one had preceded them, into these shadows where they were both speaking aloud." —Louis Aragon
Is it possible that the greatest force in the world is love? asks John Freeman, former editor of Granta. Some excellent responses from eminent and emerging writers. Contents: 1: Introduction: John Freeman 2: Seven Shorts: Maaza Mengiste, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anne Carson, Mariana Enriquez, An Yu, Tommy Orange, Matt Sumell 3: "Heaven with a Capital H" / Mieko Kawakami 4: Postcard from New Mexico / Deborah Levy 5: Snowflake / Semezdin Mehmedinovic 6: Stone Love / Louise Erdrich 7: The Snowman / Daisy Johnson 8: Poet's Biography / Valzhyna Mort 9: Apples / Gunnhild Oyehaug 10: Exploding Cigar of Love / Sandra Cisneros 11: On a Stone Pillow / Haruki Murakami 12: How to Manage / Niels Fredrik Dahl 13: Good People / Richard Russo 14: High Fidelity / Robin Coste Lewis 15: Seams / Olga Tokarczuk 16: swan / Andrew McMillan
Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.
An epidemic of insomnia has left America crippled with exhaustion. Thankfully the Slumber Corps agency provides a lifeline, transfusing sleep to sufferers from healthy volunteers. Recruitment manager Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the disaster, has spent the last seven years enlisting new donors. But when she meets the mysterious Donor Y and Baby A—whose sleep can be universally accepted—her faith in the organisation and in her own motives begins to unravel.
"Russell's ability to balance the quirky and the absurd with psychological acumen turns this unbelievable world into something more than dreamlike." —NPR
"Russell writes with such assurance and speed that she puts the reader under a spell for the duration of her story." —New York Times
"Russell turns an internal state into its own weather system." —Boston Globe
Stories, legends, and scenes from the city's past and present, from the Jewish fable of the golem to tales of German and Soviet invasions. The international array of writers ranges from Franz Kafka to Ivan Klima to Bruce Chatwin, and includes the Tom Stoppard and Madeleine Albright, both of whom have Czech roots. The book covers the city's Jewish heritage, the glamour of the belle-epoque period, World War II, Communist rule, the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and beyond.
"With equal parts of birch wood and passion, we keep the flames alive. We cook all our ingredients over an open fire. Charcoal and smoke are our most powerful tools. No electric griddle, no gas stove - only natural heat, soot, ash, smoke and fire. We have chosen these ways to prepare our food as a tribute to the ancient way of cooking. At Ekstedt it is the flames that are superior."
Before mammals, there were dinosaurs. And before dinosaurs, there were cephalopods—the ancestors of modern squid, octopuses, and more creatures—Earth's first truly substantial animals. Essentially inventing the act of swimming, cephalopods presided over an undersea empire for millions of years—until fish evolved jaws, and cephalopods had to step up their game or risk being eaten. To keep up, some streamlined their shells and added defensive spines, while others abandoned the shell, opening the gates to a flood of evolutionary innovations: masterful camouflage, fin-supplemented jet propulsion, and intelligence we've yet to fully measure.
Connell sets off on a marathon run of 42.2 kilometers through his native Longford, the scene of his award-winning book The Cow Book. As he runs across woodlands, fields and tiny roads, he tells the story of his life and contemplates Ireland's history, old and new. He also remembers other great runs he has done, from Australia to Canada, tells the stories of some of his running heroes, and speculates on what it means to move through the landscape by foot. Told in 42 chapters, each another kilometer in the 42.2k race, the whole book is 42,000 words long and it captures what it is to undertake a marathon moment by moment, in body and mind.
On April 24th 1915 Armenian intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire were arrested en masse marking the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. The following day, April 25th 1915, saw the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landing at Gallipoli. This book draws the connections between these two landmark historical events—the genocide of the minority Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire and the Anzac soldiers who fought at Gallipoli during World War I. Through eye witness accounts of ANZAC soldiers witnessing the genocide, to a history of the Australasian involvement in the international Armenian relief campaign, and enduring discussions around genocide recognition, James Robins explores the international political implications that this unexplored history still has today.
The son of a drug king, seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter is negotiating life in Garden Heights as he balances school, slinging dope, and working two jobs while his dad is in prison. He’s got it all under control – until, that is, Mav finds out he’s a father. Suddenly he has a baby who depends on him for everything. This Gritty and important YA book tells the story of Starr's father from The Hate You Give.
An evocative novel of the life of Nora Barnacle, partner and muse of James Joyce, whose Ulysses is the novel of the day they met.
"An exceptional novel by one of the most brilliant contemporary Irish writers, this is a story of love in all its many seasons, from ardent sexuality to companionable tenderness, through strength, challenge and courage. Nuala O’Connor has brought to vivid life a woman about whom every literature lover has surely wondered and has done so with immense skill and daring." —Joseph O’Connor
Hugely influential and admired, Costa's 1970 classic cookbook is now back in print.
"If I had to choose only one book to cook from for the rest of my life it would be this one." —Nigel Slater
Like it or not, our lives are dominated by mathematics. Our daily diet of news regales us with statistical forecasts, opinion polls, risk assessments, inflation figures, weather and climate predictions and all sorts of political decisions and advice backed up by supposedly accurate numbers. Most of us do not even pause and question such figures even to ask what they really mean and whether they raise more questions than they answer.
"A wise, witty and insightful guide to clear thinking amid a deluge of percentages and probabilities." —Ian Stewart
Lexical perplexities and cracking conundrums from around the globe.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Weather by Jenny Offill {Reviewed by STELLA} A novel made from snippets of conversation, observations, facts and wry asides, Jenny Offill’s Weather is contemplative and challenging in its examination of human nature and climate change. You won’t see the dystopic disaster trail here, nor the high-minded rhetoric, as Lizzie, a university librarian navigates the minutiae of her Brooklyn world—mother, wife, sister, daughter, academic dropout, comfortable middle class—and the monumental nature of the changing environment. You will feel a sense of companionship with a woman who sees the approaching crisis but isn’t sure how to tackle it. Lizzie is self-deprecating and highly likeable—even when she puts her ‘recovered addict’ brother ahead of her own partner and child. Who hasn’t had a conflict of loyalty? Her wry observations of the regular library users and her immediate community—the school where her son is in the gifted class but it’s still a liberal heaven with its diversity and philosophy, the other parents, and the increasing polarised views she encounters in her side-line job—shine a darkly funny beam into this novel with serious intent. Employed by her friend, Slyvia, who has a popular climate change podcast, to answer questions sent to her, the letters and emails come from across the spectrum—from the left-liberals who want a solution to the preppers, the deniers, and the confused. These questions send Lizzie on her own quest to understand and counter her growing anxiety about the weather. Running alongside her desire to reassure others and herself is her commitment to her brother, who is battling his feelings of inadequacy in the face of being newly married (to a controlling—probably necessarily so—woman) and their newborn. Lizzie steps in, as she always has, to ‘rescue’ him—her own addiction. In the hands of a different author, this could be melodrama or heavy-handed prophesying but Jenny Offill’s episodic style and her cleverness makes Weather an unexpected joy to read. It’s a novel rich in ideas, both serious and playfully ironic. Like Lizzie, how do we have a sense of urgency when all is comfort with the occasional pinprick? |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Extinction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection and self-annihilation appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself.” In the first of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise this wonderfully claustrophobic novel, the narrator, Murau, has received a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident. While looking at some photographs of them at his desk in Rome, he unleashes a 150-page stream of invective directed personally at the members of his family, both dead and living. Murau is alone, but he addresses his rant to his student Gambetti in Gambetti’s absence or recounts, however accurately or inaccurately, addressing Gambetti in person at some earlier time. Gambetti, in either case, is completely passive and non-contributive, and this passivity and non-contribution acts—along with Murau’s over-identification with his ‘black sheep’ Uncle Georg, an over-identification that sometimes confuses their identities—as a catalyst for Murau’s invective, as an anchor for the over-inflation of Murau’s hatred for, and difference from, his family. Without external contributions that might mitigate Murau’s opinions, his family appear as horrendous grotesques, exaggerations that here cannot be contradicted due to absence or death. Being dead puts an end to your contributions to the ideas people have of you—stories concerning you are henceforth the domain entirely of others and soon become largely expressions of their failings, impulses and inclinations. We can have no definite idea of ourselves, though—we exist only to others, unavoidably as misrepresentations, as caricatures. Murau states that he intends to write a book, to be titled Extinction: “The sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish anything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction.” Murau has not been able to even begin to write this account because his hatred gets in the way of beginning, or, rather, what we soon suspect to be the inauthenticity of his hatred gets in the way of beginning. There is no loathing without self-loathing. As Murau’s invective demonstrates, there can be no statement that is not an overstatement—every statement tends towards exaggeration as soon as it is expressed or thought. By exaggeration a statement exhausts its veracity and immediately begins to incline towards its opposite, just as every impulse, as soon as it is expressed, inclines towards its opposite. Only a passive witness, a witness who does not contradict but, by witnessing, in effect affirms—Gambetti in Murau’s case—allows an otherwise unsustainable idea to be sustained. In the second half of the book, Murau returns to Wolfsegg in Austria for the funeral of his parents and brother. Until this point, Murau’s ‘character’ has been defined entirely by his exaggerated opposition to, or identification with, his ideas of others, but when he is brought into situations in which others have a contributing role, Murau’s portrayal of others and of himself in the first section is undermined at every turn. Without the ‘Gambetti’ prop, he is responded to, and, in response to these responses, he overturns many of his opinions - about his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his mother’s lover, the nauseatingly perfectly false Spadolini that Murau had hitherto admired, and about himself—and reveals his fundamental ambivalence, an ambivalence that is fundamental to all existence but which is usually, for most of us, almost entirely suppressed by praxis, by the passive anchors, the Gambettis to which we affix our desperate attempts at character. We resist, through exaggeration, indifference and self-nullification. “We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration. I’ve always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavour.” In this second part, Murau reveals his connection with Wolfsegg and his suppressed feelings of culpability in what it represents. “I had not in fact freed myself from Wolfsegg and made myself independent but maimed myself quite alarmingly.” Separation, or, rather, the illusion of separation, is only achieved by ‘art’, that is to say, by exaggeration, by the denial of ambivalence, by the denial of complicity, by suppression—a desperate negative act of self-invention. Once his hatred of his sisters, and of his parents and brothers, has been undermined by his presence and contact with his sisters and others at Wolfsegg, and without a Gambetti or Georg in his mind to sustain this hatred, the underlying reason for his hatred, a fact that he has suppressed since his childhood as too uncomfortable, the fact that has made “a gaping void” of his childhood, of his whole past, the fact to which he was a passive witness, a complicit witness, namely that Wolfsegg hid and sheltered Nazi war criminals after the war (Gauleiters and members of the Blood Order, who now attend the funeral of Murau’s father) in the so-called ‘Children’s Villa’ (which “affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood.”), can now be faced, and, on the final page of the book, at last in some way addressed. Murau also attains the necessary degree of remove to write Extinction before his own death, either from illness or, more likely, suicide. This, his last, is the only Bernhard novel I can think of in which the protagonist makes anything that resembles an effective resolution. |
Our Book of the Week is Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles.
Shanghai, Aotearoa, Malaysia, London are all places Powles calls home and not-home; from each she can be homesick for another. The poems dwell within the shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-heritage girlhood. Powles's poetry is attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words.
>>Simultaneously published by Seraph Press in New Zealand and Nine Arches in the UK.
>>I Spy.
>>Your copy.
NEW RELEASES
A poet, father and husband's meditation on love and adolescence, the poet's art is also revealed in stages in this 'making-of' book, where we watch as poems take shape—first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world.
With her characteristic verbal fury, Jelinek exposes Wagner's 'Ring Cycle' as a precursor of the social ills of late capitalism. Structured as a sort of a dialogue between Wotan and Brünnhilde, the book is hyperattuned to issues of power, inequality, sexism, exploitation and self-interest that feed contemporary society and also presage its downfall.
"Rein Gold is a masterful, obsessional, hypnotic journey. Jelinek brings a sharp modernity and relevance to a series of inward wanderings. She is equal to a great myth and makes it new." — A.L. Kennedy
In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
Bennett has written two further monologues to extend his adored Talking Heads series. Bennett's immense sympathy with his characters and the subtlety of his observations on the interplay of individuality and conformity in the lives of ordinary people make for compelling reading. These two monologues, pitch perfect and unsettling, feature women who must rethink their relationships in ways they had not expected.
"Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain." So begins Mary Gaitskill's stunning long essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir, about a lost cat and a pair of adopted children. In this searing piece about loss, love, safety and fear, Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.
Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest's first work of non-fiction: a hopeful theory of creativity. The increasingly hyper-individualistic, competitive and exploitative society that we live in has caused a global crisis at the turn of the new decade; in order to survive, numbness has pervaded us all. Tempest reckons against this system, placing our legacy in our own hands. Creativity holds the key: the ability to provide us with internal and external connection, to move us beyond consumption, to allow us to discover authenticity and closeness to all others, to deliver us an antidote for our numbness.
A new collection of short stories from one of Ireland's most accomplished voices. In That Old Country Music, we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.
Patch Work: A life amongst clothes by Claire Wilcox $45
>>Read Thomas's reviews of Beatlebone and Night Boat to Tangier.
Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's wedding outfit to her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in a series of intimate and compelling close-ups. Wilcox tugs on the threads that make up the fabric of our lives—a cardigan worn by a child, a mother's button box, the draping of a curtain, a pair of cycling shorts, a roll of lace, a pin hidden in a seam. Through the eye of a curator, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories.
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her co-worker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. She goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. The new novel from the author of Will and Testament.
The Paper Chase: The printer, the spy-master, and the hunt for the rebel pamphleteers by Joseph Hone $48
I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke $50
A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio $23
"The Paper Chase is a remarkable achievement. Hone transforms what is essentially a case study of English press censorship following the expiry of the 1695 Licensing Act into a fast-paced, captivating narrative about the attempt to track down the individuals responsible for a pamphlet called The Memorial of the Church of England (1705). This was an anti-Dissenter work which sought to destabilise the government in the early years of Queen Anne’s reign by arguing that the Church of England was in immediate danger from current tolerationist policies. The queen herself was distressed by the pamphlet’s arguments that she and her ministers were letting established religion go to ruin, and her secretary of state, Robert Harley, set about uncovering and rounding up those responsible for the assertion." —Spectator
The intriguing and long-awaited memoir of the poet and performer who has been an enduring countercultural knot stubbornly refusing to be disentangled from a Britain still impacted by Margaret Thatcher's economic policies (and all that followed).
"I was the Arminuta, the girl returned. I spoke another language, I no longer knew who I belonged to. The word 'mama' stuck in my throat like a toad. And, nowadays, I really have no idea what kind of place mother is. It is not mine in the way one might have good health, a safe place, certainty." Without warning or a word of explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother, and deprivation. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build anew and enduring sense of self. Translated by Ann Goldstein, who has also translated the works of Elena Ferrante.
There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, And other thoughts on physics, philosophy, and the world by Carlo Rovelli $40
Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick $25
Black Spartacus: The epic life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh $65
From Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism, Rovelli is always thinking and rethinking, giving us now insights into reality.
In these seven essays Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her, and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She describes her introduction to the feminism of the 1970s and the lessons it taught her, reflects on a friendship with an older female writer that faltered, and analyses the failure of connection among like-minded people. She considers what it means to live alone, and the absorbed solitude of writing letters.
The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age—slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, "the most unhappy man of men", imprisoned in a fortress in France.
Antlers of Water: Writing on the nature and environment of Scotland edited by Kathleen Jamie $45
How Life on Earth Began by Aina Bestard $45
The Look of the Book: Jackets, covers and art at the edges of literature by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth $100
Featuring prose, poetry and photography, this collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens. With contributions from Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Amanda Thomson, Karine Polwart and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.
What did the Earth look like 300 million years ago? Here's a chance to travel back through time and discover the days when the Earth was a very different place. Packed with fascinating beautiful illustrations and glassine overlays, this is a wonderful way to understand the story of evolution, from the earliest single-cell lifeforms to the mighty dinosaurs and onwards to the first human beings.
As the outward face of the text, the book cover makes an all-important first impression. The Look of the Book examines the interface of art and literature through notable covers and the stories behind them, galleries of the many different jackets of bestselling books, an overview of book cover trends throughout history, and insights from dozens of literary and design luminaries.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #212 (15.1.21)
Read our newsletter and find out what we have been reading and recommending.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry {Reviewed by STELLA} “I am Winona. In the early times I was Ojinjintka.” From the opening lines of Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons you are immersed in the world of a young Lakota woman and you will not want to leave. Her voice will command your attention and draw you to 1870 post-Civil War America, with its tension, danger and promise. Although a sequel to Days Without End, it stands alone while still encompassing the relationship between Winona and her adoptive parents, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, and the histories that haunt them and the hopes that drive them forward. Now working on a farm in Paris, Tennessee, the family are shaping a home for themselves. The land is new and raw, as are the people, adjusting to the new order. Winona, John Cole and the Bouguereau brother and sister (all working and living on Lige Magan’s farm) watch their backs and keep to themselves—it still doesn’t pay to be Indian or Black in this 'New World'. When Winona is attacked and Tennyson Bouguereau beaten, the Lakota girl decides to take matters into her own hands. She swaps her dress for britches and takes to the road with a knife and a gun to confront anyone that might have information. Her memory of the violence perpetrated on her is hazy, and what she will actually do unsure. Her revenge isn’t quite what she expects, and setting upon a camp of renegades she encounters a young woman much like her—a Chickasaw orphan, Peg, taken in by the rakish outlaw Aurelius Littlefair. A tender friendship, soon love, blossoms between the two young women. Yet the attack on Winona is still unpunished, and despite the efforts of John and Thomas and the lawyer Briscoe, nothing is resolved. “It wasn’t a crime to kill an Indian because an Indian wasn’t anything in particular.” And Winona knows the law isn’t for her. As her own past and the murder of her family by those that surround her haunts her and as tensions in the township increase—there are outlaws, militias, crooked lawmen and opportunists ready to cause mayhem—Winona can’t rest easy until she knows the truth. A young man, Jas Jonski, who was sweet on Winona, is the main suspect. When he is murdered, Winona finds herself under fire. Sebastian Barry writes with lyricism and conviction. A Thousand Moons is compelling and beautiful in both its violence and desire—in the determination of a young woman to make her own future and not the one enforced upon her. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Three by Ann Quin {Reviewed by THOMAS} Boredom is a sub-optimal mode, he thinks, but it is at least a functional mode compared with the revulsion it conceals, boredom at least connects one end of the day to the other, boredom is doubtless detrimental but it is by definition tolerable, let us all hope for boredom. That is not a good way to start his review, he thinks, it has some bearing on the book but it is not a good introduction to the book. Two is a situation of stasis, he thinks, three is dynamic, three is the catalyst that reveals the harms hidden in two, the harms that mathematics suppressed mathematics reveals, or not mathematics, physics perhaps, or chemistry, more likely. This also is not a good way to start. Well, he thinks, the review is far enough through not to worry any longer about starting it, a bad start is at least a start, that is something, I can adjust the performance using the choke, or perhaps the throttle, I need to find out the difference between these two obstructions, he thinks, these two forms of respiratory impediment, our relationship with engines is a violent one, he thinks, and this thought stalls the review. There is no access to the interior save through performance, he thinks, restarting, there is perhaps only performance, who can know, a middle class couple converse, the words pass between them but also bounce off their surroundings, language is a force-field, he thinks, a sonar, and a conversation is the pattern of disturbance, the pattern of interference, produced by two emitters, or should that be transmitters, of language. In this book, he thinks, Quin reproduces, well actually produces, that disturbance, those two voices, the Ruth voice and the Leon voice, as they run together as one entity, caught on the page, as if there is anything about a novel that is not on the page. In the Ruth-and-Leon sections of the novel, these verbal slurries, that is not the word, are both Ruth’s and Leon’s, caught on the framework of descriptions as bald and precise and mundane as stage directions, they are stage directions in the past tense, so hardly directions, stage descriptions perhaps. We learn that S, a younger, working-class woman who had lived with them, has committed suicide by drowning, Quin’s fate eventually incidentally, she left a note, but they still hope it might have been an accident. Are they guilty? In S’s room they find some tapes she has recorded, and her journals, and these are transcribed, if that is the word, inscribed is more accurate perhaps but we have to play the fiction game so transcribed is the better word, in other sections of the novel, but Ruth and Leon do not find either the absolution nor the indictment they both hope for and fear in these tapes and these journals, the tapes and the journals merely complicate the picture, add other layers of performance, leave more unsaid than said. The more that is unsaid, the greater the weight of what is unsaid, the stronger its gravity, the more distorted the said, the said, even in its utter mundanity, points always at the source of its distortion. As the book progresses, though progresses is not the word, there is no progress in Quin, we read also a tape made by Ruth and a diary written by Leon as, respectively, Leon and Ruth gain access to them, they take access, if that is the way to put it. There is no progress but the tension increases, tension in the past, if that which is in the past can be said to increase, each mundanity is freighted, that is not the word, with the catalytic action of each one upon each other two, a sexual static that builds and cannot discharge but reveals ultimately the fundamental destructive incompatibility not only of Ruth and Leon but of any combination of Ruth and Leon and S, and, perhaps, of any persons whatsoever, if Quin held this misanthropic view, perhaps she did. The instance of sexual violence eventually revealed is no surprise, but its awfulness floods backwards through all that precedes it in the book. Boredom is all that holds the horrible at bay, but the horrible is no less horrible for that. |
>>Produced by the Economic and Social Research Aotearoa think tank.
>>On future-proofing Aotearoa New Zealand for life after Covid-19.
>>Productivity and the future of technology.
>>Ecological crises and equitable futures.
>>Preparedness and recovery as a privilege.
>>Other ESRA research.
>>New Forms of Political Organisation.
>>Your copy of Whose Futures?
NEW RELEASES
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval $33
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting 'Puberty', who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. Awful things happen in aspic. Jenny Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art.
"By the close of Girls Against God, the boundaries between reality and film, the corporeal and the fantastic, the coagulated and the fertile have all dissolved. The novel has journeyed from melodramatic teenscape to horror-saturated social panorama. A story that had seemed pointedly provincial has now sprouted universal wings." —Guardian
Contributors from Economic and Social Research Aotearoa challenge dominant narratives of the future by bringing together a broad collection of voices and perspectives on the question of possible futures. Chapters interrogate whose lives are at stake in different visions and projects of the future, whose voices and visions count, and what elements are at play in the unfolding of certain futures over others. The chapters highlight the need to be attentive to how various social technologies and institutions invite certain ways of being, thinking and acting and exclude others. In doing so, they offer a series of reflections on futures ‘from below’ to amplify voices and fight for alternatives. Many of us have become accustomed to speaking of what comes next in terms of a singular ‘future’. Such accounts of the future tend to operate within the narrow confines of colonial capitalism and assume continued economic growth. But there is no ‘one’ future; there are many. As contributions to this book attest, irreconcilable and interrelated futures are already playing out in the present. When futures are approached in this way – in the plural and in relation – they open to questions of which futures and whose futures. In other words, they open to politics. Contributors: Hana Burgess, Luke Goode, Kassie Hartendorp, Aitor Jiménez González, John Morgan, Anna-Maria Murtola, Te Kahuratai Painting, Anisha Sankar, Sy Taffel, Arcia Tecun, Samuel Te Kani, Shannon Walsh, Toyah Webb. From the group who brought us New Forms of Political Organisation.
Household gizmos with a mind of their own. Constant cold calls from unknown numbers. And the creeping suspicion that none of this is real. Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of chilling entertainments to be read amidst the ghstly shlock of everyday life.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut $33
The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined. Using extraordinary, epoch-defining moments from the history of science, Benjamin Labatut plunges us into exhilarating territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness.
"A monstrous and brilliant book." —Philip Pullman
"Wholly mesmerising and revelatory. Completely fascinating." —William Boyd
Gilmour's developing relationship with a magpie leads him to deeply consider his relationship with his father, anarchist poet and absconder Heathcote Williams, and also Williams's relationship with a jackdaw. What repeats across generations? Can birds 'run in the blood'? What else 'runs in the blood'?
"The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years." —Neil Gaiman
"Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly." —Helen Macdonald
"Essex Girls" are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient. They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes.Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar. They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling. They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they? In this exhilarating feminist defence of the Essex girl, Sarah Perry re-examines her relationship with her much maligned home county. She summons its most unquiet spirits, from Protestant martyr Rose Allin to the indomitable Abolitionist Anne Knight, sitting them alongside Audre Lorde, Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau, and showing us that the Essex girl is not bound by geography. She is a type, representing a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain.
There is always a war in progress somewhere—is it an essential part of being human? What is the relationship between society and war? Economies, science, technology, medicine, culture: all are instrumental in war and have been shaped by it—without conflict it we might not have had penicillin, female emancipation, radar or rockets. Throughout history, writers, artists, film-makers, playwrights, and composers have been inspired by war—whether to condemn, exalt or simply puzzle about it. If we are never to be rid of war, how should we think about it and what does that mean for peace?
The Hargraves want their new baby to grow up big and strong. But the puny mite will hardly eat a thing. One day Mrs Hargraves finds an avocado in the fruit bowl and the baby gobbles it up. Soon, the strangest things start to happen... One of our favourite children's books is now back in print as a board book.
A radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley—author of the contemporary Grendel-positive adaptation The Mere Wife—which brings to light elements never before translated into modern English. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment—of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child—but this version brings new context to an old story. While writing The Mere Wife, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.
When Anne Boyer was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in her early forties, it was an initiation into a whole new way of thinking about herself, about illness, and about mortality. Her harrowing, beautifully written memoir of survival explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain 'dolorists', the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of 'pink ribbon culture' while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. Now in paperback. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. Winner of the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction.
"Profound and unforgettable." —Sally Rooney
"A classic. I have long thought of Boyer as a genius." —Patricia Lockwood
"An outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner
"Some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read." —Hari Kunzru
Fifteen-year-old Berta says that beautiful things aren’t made for her, or that she isn’t destined to have them, or that the only things she deserves are ugly. It’s why her main activity, when she’s not at school, is playing the ‘prosopagnosia game’ — standing in front of the mirror and holding her breath until she can no longer recognise her own face. An ibis is the only animal she wants for a pet. Berta’s mother is in her forties. By her own estimation, she is at least twenty kilos overweight, and her husband has just left her. Her whole life, she has felt a keen sense of being very near to the end of things. She used to be a cultural critic for a regional newspaper. Now she feels it is her responsibility to make her and her daughter’s lives as happy as possible. A man who claims to be the famous Mexican artist Vicente Rojo becomes entangled in their lives when he sees Berta faint at school and offers her the gift of a painting. This sets in motion an uncanny game of assumed and ignored identities, where the limits of what one wants and what one can achieve become blurred.
Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops in East Africa. After years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the army, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble, and security and the beautiful Afiya.
"A remarkable novel, by a wondrous writer, deeply compelling, a thread that links our humanity with the colonial legacy that lies beneath, in ways that cut deep." —Philippe Sands
"To read Afterlives is to be returned to the joy of storytelling. The story of Hamza and Afiya is one of simple lives buffeted by colonial ambitions, of the courage it takes to endure, to hold oneself with dignity, and to live with hope in the heart." —Aminatta Forna
Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascists that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funnelling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
From the author of Blitzed.
A groundbreaking attempt to construct a non-deterministic theoretical framework for the study of mechanisms of exchange, price and profit. It relies on probabilistic and statistical methods of the kind used in the modern foundations of several other sciences, introducing scientific modelling into economics.
A readable exploration of the relationship between Pliny the Elder, author of the first natural history encyclopedia and casualty of Vesuvius, and his nephew Pliny the Younger, lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, curator of drains.
How to Grow Your Own Poem by Kate Clanchy $40
An introduction to writing poetry, using other poems as guidance and inspiration.
It's Luka Kane's sixteenth birthday and he's been inside The Loop for over two years. Every inmate is serving a death sentence with the option to push back their execution date by six months if they opt into "Delays", scientific and medical experiments for the benefit of the elite in the outside world. But rumours of a war on the outside are spreading amongst the inmates, and before they know it, their tortuous routine becomes disrupted. The government issued rain stops falling. Strange things are happening to the guards. And it's not long until the inmates are left alone inside the prison. Were the chains that shackled Luka to his cell the only instruments left to keep him safe? In a thrilling shift, he must overcome fellow prisoners hell-bent on killing him, the warden losing her mind, the rabid rats in the train tunnels, and a population turned into murderous monsters to try and break out of The Loop, save his family, and discover who is responsible for the chaos that has been inflicted upon the world. An exciting YS dystopia. 
Let's Play Outside: Exploring nature for children by Carla McRae and Catherine Ard $40
Nature activities for a new generation of environmentally conscious children.
A Long Time Coming: The story of Ngai Tahu's Treaty settlement with the Crown by Mark Fisher $40
"The Ngai Tahu settlement, like all other Treaty of Waitangi settlements, was more a product of political compromise and expediency than measured justice." The Ngai Tahu claim, Te Kereme, spanned two centuries, from the first letter of protest to the Crown in 1849 to the final hearing by the Waitangi Tribunal between 1987 and 1989, and then the settlement in 1998.
Claudia Orange's writing on the Treaty of Waitangi has played a central role in national understanding of this foundational document. This fully revised and updated and illustrated edition takes the narrative into the twenty-first century, with a new chapter recounting the Treaty history of the last ten years, covering major developments such as the Tuhoe settlement, territory `personhood', and issues around intellectual property and language.
Grown Your Own Spices: Harvest homegrown ginger, turmeric, saffron wasabi, vanilla, cardamom, and other incredible spices—no matter where you live by Tasha Greer and Greta Moore $37
Well, why not?
NEW RELEASES
"What would Beethoven have done with another seven years of life, and where, in the 1830s, might he have gone? The answer, in this audacious but exacting extension of the composer’s late period, is America, where an oratorio, Job, is completed (and performed) in Boston. Suffering and revelation are the subject-matter, but in Paul Griffiths’ hands, the Biblical sorrow undergoes a lasting modulation into a new key of delight in friendship, communication, and creativity." —Judges' citation shortlisting the novel for the Goldsmiths Prize
"Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath. Takes its time in desensationalizing the life and the art; this lets Clark place both firmly in the literary and politically engaged contexts that formed them and simultaneously demonstrate how Plath’s work, in return, gifted the writing life unimaginable new sinew.” —Ali Smith, The Guardian
“Mesmerizing. Comprehensive. Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life. Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry. There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.” —Daphne Merkin, The New York Times
Gessen's coverage of Trump's norm-smashing presidency has been essential reading for a world struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence. This incisive book provides an overview of the calamitous American trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and cultural norms, but is also lights a beacon to recovery.
A completely fascinating look at the objects and artworks at the Freud Museum (in the building where Freud developed his ideas of the unconscious).
In their heyday, Europe's spas were the main meeting places for aristocracy, politicians and cultural elites. They were the centres of political and diplomatic intrigue, and were fertile sources of artistic, literary and musical inspiration. The spas epitomised style and were renowned for their cosmopolitan atmosphere in a glittering whirl of balls, gambling and affairs, as much as for their healing waters. Health, Hedonism & Hypochondria reveals the hidden histories of traditional spas of Europe, including such well-known resorts as the original Spa in Belgium; Bath, Buxton and Harrogate in Britain; Baden-Baden and Bad Ems in Germany; Vichy and Aix-les-Bains in France; Bad Ragaz in Switzerland; Bad Ischl and Baden bei Wien in Austria and Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně in the Czech Republic.
A new edition of this seminal work, presenting a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers's original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds.
In an era of political polarisation and heated debate, what can be learned from studying how our personal space becomes the setting for both through the presence of political signs, badges and stickers? Understanding political signs can help us understand our current political moment—and how we might transcend it.
In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth aeroplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit.
"One of the best books ever written about the early attempts to conquer Everest. A fine, fine slice of history by a truly special writer who proves time and time again that he is among the best of his generation." —Dan Jones
Taking us on a journey through comfort reads, street book stalls, mythical libraries, itinerant pedlars, radical pamphleteers, extraordinary bookshop customers and fanatical collectors, bookseller Martin Latham uncovers the curious history of our book obsession—and his own.
Mirabelle has always known she is a monster. When the glamour protecting her unusual family from the human world is torn and an orphaned brother and sister stumble upon Rookhaven, Mirabelle soon discovers that friendship can be found in the outside world. But as something far more sinister comes to threaten them all, it quickly becomes clear that the true monsters aren't necessarily the ones you can see.
Shakespearean: On life and language in times of disruption by Robert McCrum $40
Why do we return to Shaekspeare in times of crisis, and what can we learn from him about the times we are living through?
A collection of philosophically weird and phantasmagorical fictions from the Russian master. Mostly written in the 1920s and 1930s, the stories were not published until 1989. Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. “I am interested,” he said, “not in the arithmetic but in the algebra of life.”
Five Seasons of Jam by Lillie O'Brien $45
These innovative recipes are separated into 5 seasons:
ALIVE/spring- blossoming florals and awakenings (Peach & Fig leaf Jam, Salted Cherry Blossom, Wild Garlic Pesto)
HOT/summer - vivid sweetness (Nectarine & Thyme Jam, Strawberry & Wild Fennel Jam, Pickled Walnuts)
BLUSH/early autumn - smoky warmth and rich spice (Blackberry & Cocoa Nib Jam, Elderberry & Pomegranate Molasses, Tomato Jam, Marjoram Jelly)
BARB/late autumn - robust and bristling (Pear & Masala Jam, Pumpkin Jam, Damson Cheese)
FROST/winter - biting, dark and cosy (Salted Mandarins, Seville Orange & Chamomile Marmalade)
A beautifully written nature portrait of this fascinating predator.
"Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor." Fuelled by anger at injustice and optimism about humankind's ability to make a better, truly communal society, the anarchist writings of Peter Kropotkin have influenced radicals the world over, from nineteenth-century workers to today's activists.
Europe's leading scientist in the latter part of the seventeenth century, Huygens made contributions in the fields of astronomy, optics, mechanics, and mathematics. Many of his innovations in methodology, optics and timekeeping remain in use to this day. He developed the theory of light travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn, using a telescope that he had also invented.
A very informative picture book about the woman who defied gender norms by pursuing a scientific career in the 1940s and 1950s, becoming the outstanding oceanic cartographer, mapping the ocean floor and discovering the Mid-Ocean Ridge and Rift Valley. Her discovery supported the theory of continental drift, which led to the theory of plate tectonics, yet she struggled to gain recognition for her achievements.
This remarkably fluid combination of essay and autofiction splices together the stories of an Irish noblewoman who wrote a remarkable poem on finding her husband murdered by English soldiers in 1773, and a young mother today who narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life and feels spoken to directly across the centuries through the poem.
"An extraordinary book that braids the past and present, self and other into a new kind of poetry. Doireann Ní Gríofa writes with a magical kind of knowledge of herself and the world, and of the remembered and imagined, Eibhlín Dubh. This is a book about life, its wonder and its pain, written with hunger and grace, every line a charm." —Emilie Pine
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Enchantment by Daphne Merkin {Reviewed by THOMAS} He gazes at the young man standing in front of the tree, the young man probably, he thinks, between the ages of his own children but not one of his own children. It seems to him that the young man is gazing back at him, but this, of course, is not the case, the young man is gazing, certainly, but not at him, he is gazing, or appears to be gazing, at the least visible person, perhaps even his own father but who knows, hidden at the place in the young man’s gaze that he now occupies, a usurper of another’s place in the gazes, uncomfortable with his intrusion into this moment not or no longer of not yet his yet drawn back yet again to this moment and to his uncomfortableness about it. He feels as if he has some responsibilities towards the young man in the photograph but it is very unclear to him what these responsibilities might be or might have been, different responsibilities, certainly, or possibly, from the responsibilities he has or has had towards his own children, who now approximate the age of the young man in the photograph, rising twenty he would say, making them in some way his peers if not his contemporaries, but responsibilities less clear, at least now, than the responsibilities he has or has had towards his children, which are themselves not exactly clear. He cannot help feeling, as he glances a little embarrassedly at the young man’s gaze, hardly meeting his gaze, a gaze both expectant and accusatory, it seems to him, that this expectation and this accusation are directed at him personally, rather than at the world in general, the gazer is not gazing at him but at the world in general after all, as far as he can tell, but he is convinced that he now knows better than the young man about his own gaze, and that the gaze is somehow directed at him, at least that the expectation and the accusation he identifies in that gaze are directed at precisely him and that he has somehow failed this young man by failing to recognise and fulfill his responsibilities towards him, whatever they might be, in a way that he has not failed in his responsibilities towards his own children, he has failed in his responsibilities towards them no doubt in other ways, although, since his responsibilities towards the young man are unclear, and therefore his failure in these responsibilities is unclear, how can he be certain that he has not failed similarly, or by extension, in these responsibilities towards his own children in addition to the ways he has no doubt failed towards them in other ways. He glances again at the gaze of the young man in the photograph, if a photograph can be said to have a gaze, there is something at once both fascinating and off-putting about that gaze, he thinks, and probably more off-putting than fascinating, he thinks, here is a gaze that pushes away whatever it fixes itself upon, a gaze that repels its object, what you might perhaps but misleadingly call a repellant gaze, a gaze that keeps its object at a safe distance, whatever that means, at a distance from which the object cannot act upon the gazer. There is a tragedy here, he thinks, though it is almost impossible to see and the reasons for this tragedy are impossible to see. The young man, presumably, has hopes and wishes not dissimilar from the hopes and wishes of other persons of his age, though, as is common, perhaps even general, with persons of his age, he is probably unaware of these hopes and wishes in any definite way, they are probably unconscious hopes and wishes, if it is possible to call them hopes and wishes if they are unconscious, anyway he supposes the young man has them, whatever they are, though he might be wrong. With a gaze like that anything hoped or wished for would remain forever safely beyond reach, he thinks, as if safety consists of remaining beyond reach, remaining joined to whatever you are joined to by a rod long enough to prevent contact, so to speak, avoiding failure by presupposing failure and avoiding fulfilment by the same means, for there is nothing that destabilises hopes and wishes more than their fulfillment, he thinks, or he thinks the young man thinks, or, rather, he thinks the young man thinks but is unaware that he thinks, if thinking can be unaware. In any case, the young man does not know either how to take or how to receive, so there is not much hope for him, not that he lives on hope, and perhaps he has no hopes, perhap he does not even know how to formulate a hope, other than perhaps the hope for his own non-existence, if that is something that could sensibly be said to be one’s own, not that any of the various ways by which non-existence may be reached by someone who already exists holds any attraction, at best, for him, or fills him, at worst, with anything other than revulsion or fear. I presume too much, though, upon this young man, he thinks, these last thirty-five years are an unfair burden upon him, no wonder he gazes at me, or seems to gaze at me, with such seeming accusation and also with such seeming expectation, a gaze I can barely meet, could I, and perhaps should I, in the course of those thirty-five years that he is younger than me, have assuaged the threat he feels, or felt, or from then to now will feel, both from taking and from receiving when, I realise now, I am no better at this now than I was at his age? Did he get his hopelessness at the same place I got mine, he thinks, or if not hopelessness, that is not the word, perhaps this reluctance to exist. Or uncertainty how to exist. “Doesn't everyone begin happy? More or less inclined to embrace the world?” asks Daphne Merkin in the novel he has been reading, or, more precisely, asks the novel’s narrator Hannah. “Or are there those who sense the sorrow the world has in store for them already in the cradle, furrowing their infant brows in an adult manifestation of distress?” His life as a child was a happy one, but he was incapable, even at the time, he thinks now, of being happy with it, or was there was perhaps some point at which this incapacity began, but he does not know what point, if there was one. When Merkin writes in this memoir of childhood, a fictional memoir, but one written with the authenticity of a psychoanalytic project, an autofictional memoir of childhood, “Somewhere in this story is a tragedy, but it is almost impossible to see,” he finds this *relatable*, to use a term that he despises, even though there is no instance of ostensible tragedy, even unseen, in his life, although he knows there is, or must be, at least he assumes, in Hannah’s. “No-one has it in for me but my memory,” she says. Hannah’s problems are not his problems, or, rather, not the problems of the young man of whom he writes, nor of the child that came before him, Hannah’s particular problems seemingly concern her mother, who withheld and thus made a thirst in Hannah for her love. “I was stuck forever, immured behind unbreachable walls, my mother’s dominion stretching on as far as I could see. Beyond it I knew was the world, what I needed in order to survive, but how was I to get to it?” says Hannah. “My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.” He has no such problems, but, perhaps because they are so well written, he feels a certain empathy for hers. Hannah learns to seek the love of those whose love for her is at best uncertain, rather than seek the love of the amiable, and this is also not his problem, but he is completely hooked, if that is not a metaphor, for reasons he has mentioned above, when Hannah describes how “the future falls out of my grasp,” reasons enmeshed, if that is not another metaphor, in his responsibilities, or seeming responsibilities, towards the young man in the photograph about or for or to whom or as whom he writes. “I am not a naturally well-planned person and Sundays aren’t good, I’ve come to think, for people with leanings towards the void,” writes Merkin as Hannah at one point, and, at another, “it is from somewhere around this time that I date the awakening of my impulse to disappear from the scene of my life—what I recognise years later, while sitting on the beach playing with my niece, as a chronic but undramatic wish to die.” Where does his wish come from, this wish without a corresponding wish to act upon this wish, why does Hannah have this wish and not her sisters and her brothers? Where do children disappear to as they age? As the years pass, where does an ungrasped future go? Is there no cure for the young man’s angst but ennui? He, and not the young man, if he can still maintain the distinction, nor the one whose place he occupies when he meets, or does not meet, the young man’s gaze, is the least visible person, but even that is not enough. It is never enough. For better or worse he exists. He exists and cannot achieve invisibility without the gaze of others. |
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  | {REVIEWS BY STELLA} Dipping into two quite different teen fantasies has been an excellent way to spend some summer hours. I’ve had Havoc, the sequel to The Bridge, by Jane Higgins on my shelf for a while. It was great to be back in the world of Southside and Cityside and reconnect with the excellent characters from The Bridge. The tension has been building and Southside is under attack and cut off from supplies. Out of the chaos comes the voice of a young girl, disorientated by an unknown trauma, calling ‘Havoc'. What does it mean and where did she come from? When Nik decides to seek out the truth, with Lanya by his side, they embark on a dangerous journey across the river. Something is happening at Pikerrin Marsh—something not good. Nik’s father is missing and suspicion grows about his loyalty to Southside. As Southside reels from being isolated from work, food and medicine, the underground networks in Cityside are raising their heads. Nik and Lanya are betrayed and Nik is given an impossible choice. Save the South or save Lanya. But what is really going on? Who is the mysterious girl? What or who is Havoc? And why are the wealthy Citysiders leaving for the Drylands? Even with several years between reading The Bridge and Havoc, I was easily captivated again by this world, the characters and their relationships. This is excellent fantasy for teens with just the right amount of intrigue, action and drama. Maggie Tokuda-Hall's debut, The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea, took a few chapters to crank up the gears, but once it got going it was all hands on deck. Flora/Florian is our main protagonist. Orphaned and alone in the world with her brother, they are taken aboard the pirate ship Dove, after proving themselves—a trial by knife! Flora quickly learns to fight, clean the deck and tough it out like the pirates and takes on her boy selfhood to survive in the cutthroat world of piracy. She’s also the sound one in the sister/brother relationship. When the young Lady Evelyn Hasegawa is promised in marriage—much to her annoyance—to an up-and-coming lord on a far-flung island, passage comes in the form of a berth on the Dove. But not all is what it seems on the Dove, and an arranged marriage isn’t the worst thing that’s planned for Evelyn. Meeting Florian changes the path plotted for Evelyn by her parents, who couldn’t wait to be unbridled from their disappointment, and the pirates who have trading in mind. A relationship blossoms between the young people, one that will surprise and eventually delight them both. But there's a long and complicated road towards this delight (be warned—it is bittersweet), twisting and turning in unexpected ways and involving spies on the sea, wealthy imperialists, the Pirate Supreme who seeks vengeance against those that harm the Sea, an ancient Witch on the Floating Island who will reveal more than she intended and The Sea herself and her mermaids who come to rescue those who respect them and curse those who do not. It’s high drama, in turns both brutal and delicate, on the sea with dark magic and gender fluidity. And the ending suggests there will be more adventures to follow. |