NEW RELEASES

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter            $17

Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter (author of Lanny and Grief is the Thing With Feathers) translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. 

"Reads like a private communion with the painter." —Guardian

>>"Francis Bacon was my guy."

>>Read our reviews of Porter's previous books. 

little scratch by Rebecca Watson           $35

Watson's remarkable project evokes, to often hilarious effect, the thought processes of its character through the course of a day. Beneath the world of demarcated fridge shelves, office politics, clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications emerges a instance of sexual violence that has shaken and disordered the character's existence. 

"little scratch reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion. The silent and enraged inner testimony of a character trying to maintain 'normalcy', little scratch is daring and completely readable." —Colin Barrett

"Playful precise and insightful, Rebecca Watson's writing bursts with enormous energy." —Nicole Flattery

>>Rebecca Watson talks with Kathryn Scanlan. 

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell            $17

Shaun Bythell, proprietor of The Bookshop, Wigtown, follows his (cuttingly accurate) Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, with a hilarious 'useful' handbook to the types of customers booksellers are faced with every day. Which type are you? 

>>Bythell attempts a justification of this book. 

The Walker: On losing and finding yourself in the modern city by Matthew Beaumont            $43

A literary history of walking From Dickens to Zizek. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker.   From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking the pavement?

Serpentine by Philip Pullman           $24

A story from the world of 'His Dark Materials' and 'The Book of Dust'.

Lyra Silvertongue, you're very welcome. Yes, I know your new name. Serafina Pekkala told me everything about your exploits.

Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon have left the events of 'His Dark Materials' far behind. In this snapshot of their forever-changed lives they return to the North to visit an old friend, where we will learn that things are not exactly as they seem.

A lovely small hardback, beautifully illustrated throughout by Tom Duxbury.

Wars Without End; Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua: New Zealand's land wars, A Māori perspective by Danny Keenan              $40

The possession and dispossession of land continues to cast a long shadow between the partners of the Treaty of Waitangi, and until these issues are adequately addressed a wound will remain in New Zealand race relations. 

Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora         $60

24 Māori academics share their personal journeys, revealing what being Māori has meant for them in their work. 

>>Disturbing the discipline. 

>>"Canons don’t only belong to dead white Englishmen."

News, And how to use it by Alan Rusbridger             $28

An A-Z guide on how we stay informed in the era of fake news, from former Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger. Nothing in life works without facts. A society that isn't sure what's true can't function. Without facts there can be no government or law. Science is ignored. Trust evaporates. People everywhere feel ever more alienated from—and mistrustful of—news and those who make it. We no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We are living through a crisis of 'information chaos'.

Paradise: Dante's Divine Comedy, Part three, Englished in prosaic verse by Alasdair Gray             $33

The posthumously published concluding volume of Gray's inventive vernacular version of Dante's poem. 

>>Three fine volumes. 

>>Is Lanark also some sort of version of The Divine Comedy? 

Sapiens, A graphic history, 1: The birth of humankind by Noah Yuval Harari, David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave       $48

Noah Yuval Harari's remarkable set of thinking tools for looking at human history are now presented as a graphic novel. 

The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold            $24

In 1757, a down-and-out Irish poet, the head waiter at the Shakespear's Head Tavern in Covent Garden, and a celebrated London courtesan became bound together by the publication of a little book: Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. This salacious work—detailing the names and 'specialities' of the capital's prostitutes—became one of the eighteenth century's most scandalous bestsellers. Rubenhold, author of the revisionist history The Five, reveals the lives of women on the list and gives us remarkable insight into women's lives in the 18th century precariat. 

>>The inspiration for the BBC Harlots series. 

Sweet Dreams: The story of the New Romantics by Dylan Jones      $45

Charts the rise of the New Romantics, a scene that grew out of the remnants of post-punk and developed quickly alongside club culture, ska, electronica, and goth. Not only did the movement visually define the decade, it was the catalyst for the Second British Invasion, when the US charts would be colonised by British pop music—Depeche Mode, Culture Club, Wham!, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Duran Duran, Sade, Spandau Ballet, the Eurythmics.

>>Sweet Dreams (are made of this), 1983. 

When We Got Lost in Dreamland by Ross Welford              $18

When 12 year-old Malky and his younger brother Seb become the owners of a "Dreaminator", they are thrust into worlds beyond their wildest imagination. From tree-top flights and Spanish galleons, to thrilling battles and sporting greatness - it seems like nothing is out of reach when you can share a dream with someone else. But impossible dreams come with incredible risks, and when Seb won't wake up and is taken to hospital in a coma, Malky is forced to leave reality behind and undertake a final, terrifying journey to the stone-age to wake his brother.

Beethoven: A life in nine pieces by Laura Tunbridge             $48

Beethoven is for many the archetype of the classical composer, yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his fist at heaven. Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way. Each chapter focuses on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, from heroism to liberty. It's a combination of biographical detail, insight into the music and surprising new angles, all of which can transform how you listen to his works.

>>Septet in E-flat major, Op. 20.

Maxwell's Demon by Steven Hall           $37

With the same white-knuckle thrills as Hall's first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, this new book is also a freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, the bond between parents and children, and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a world that, with each passing season, seems to become more chaotic and untidy.

An Event, Perhaps: A biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon          $43

For some, Derrida is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to "little more than an object of ridicule." For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. An Event, Perhaps presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.

The Japanese: A history in twenty lives by Christopher Harding            $70

An enjoyable introduction to Japanese history, from the earliest records to the present, as distilled in the lives of twenty very various individuals. 

"Harding's book is a marvellous read, full of startling information." —The Times

Erosion: Essays of undoing by Terry Tempest Williams        $38

How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts? We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped our physical landscapes. Here, Williams explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. "These are essays about the courage to face what is most brutal and monstrous by finding what is beautiful and merciful." —Rebecca Solnit

Open Water by Caleb Azuman Nelson           $33

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once a love story and an insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

The International Brigades: Fascism, freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Trewlett          $33

The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to help defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. This is the first major history of the International Brigades. 

"Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best." —Fergal Keane

Max Makes a Million by Maira Kalman            $32

Max's dream is to live in Paris and be a poet—even though no one will buy his poems, and he is penniless. And he's a dog. But living in New York City isn't so bad. Where else could he have friends like Bruno, who paints invisible pictures, or Marcello, who builds upside-down houses? Fun!

>>Like this!

BOOKS @ VOLUME #217 (19.2.21)

Read out latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, and about new books and book news. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Blind Spot by Teju Cole   {Reviewed by STELLA} When we can’t travel, we seek the unknown in our familiar environs, whether this is looking up at the sky on a bright day through your fingers, seeing your own back garden differently, or consciously taking a different route to work, to school, to the supermarket. Walking became a defining pastime for many in 2020 (remember the carless roads) and for some of us, it is the constant that keeps giving. When we walk we see. Perspective. The change in the way we view or in how we consciously look again or see anew is how we find out about our familiar worlds, how we see what we missed before helping us build layers of experience and understanding. In my own art practice, I have been always interested in how we view the world, how we interact with it and how art may see us, the beholder. That is why I find Teju Cole’s photography intriguing. Here are moments in time, memory. But more than that. In the postscript of his book Blind Spot he says, "I have used my camera as an extension of my memory. The images are a tourist’s pictures in that sense. But they also have an inquiring feeling to them and, in some cases, showed me more about the place than I might have seen otherwise.” Blind Spot is the accompanying book to a solo exhibition in Milan several years ago, an accumulation of his travel photography—150 countries plotted on a map. Over time Cole visited for numerous reasons, work, pleasure, study and invitation. The book doesn't follow a chronological or thematic framework, and while I imagine it is precisely planned, it doesn't feel intentional taking the reader on a tour where image and text build a network of internal images and thoughts. This is a book where you let the words and thoughts wash over you and the images pique your curiosity, where you will return to reread the texts, look again at the images and build new pathways, ways of seeing. Cole is an artist, writer (novelist, journalist and essayist) and art critic. The succinct pieces of writing that accompany each photograph are fascinating, intelligent and rewarding, taking you on their own journey of discovery. They are sometimes critiques of his own work, drawing on history, literature and referencing other art subjects, while at other times they are lyrical, personal and somehow familiar. Our experience is our own, but the observations are sometimes uncannily similar. Do we all get to the same place, emotionally and psychologically, eventually when we stop and observe or conversely fail to see? From cityscapes to creeks on the fringes of a road to poles, posts and pipes on the edges of our periphery, to people caught in their personal moment—asleep, looking at a sign, waiting for traffic or by chance catching the eye of the man behind the camera—to the debris of everyday human existence, to the form and edges of a hotel room, balcony or the view through the window, Cole captures what it's like to travel, to be elsewhere and somehow to be in any place—and to seek the known in our blind spot.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Disinvent Movement by Susanna Gendall    {Reviewed by THOMAS} He could tell she was a serious writer because she had been photographed in front of a brick wall and it is well known, he thought, that all serious writers, or at least those persons who are keen to present themselves as serious writers, are so photographed, he knew that he would never be taken seriously as a serious writer unless he was so photographed and, actually, he had even been so photographed at some time but usually found that he had been cropped out of the photograph in which he appeared. He at one time had compiled an informal collection of such serious writers photographed against brick walls but he could no longer find this collection, he had perhaps left it on his old computer or deleted it as insufficiently interesting, but he remembered, or it seemed to him that he remembered, if that is not the same thing, that the serious writers in these photographs all looked squarely at the camera, staring down the photographer perhaps, or the reader more likely, each wearing a winter coat of some description, some sporting a cigarette, impressing upon us that they were not only serious writers but writers with grit, attuned to the disaffection of modern urban life. None of them, however, as far as he remembered, had been photographed with her head tilted to one side as had the author here, a posture he thought usually indicative of persons whose desire for approval outstripped their self esteem but in this instance accompanied by a glance so guarded and accusatory or just plain sad that he was compelled to look away, unable to decide whether this photograph reinforced or undermined the concept of a serious writer. He considered the possibility of ceasing the review of actual books and commencing the review of author photographs but he did not consider this possibility for very long. “Once I was in I wanted to get out,” writes the author of The Disinvent Movement, or, more precisely, states the narrator written by that author, if we can make such a distinction. The novel begins as a series of fragments, seemingly unrelated other than being what he called I-related, a grab-bag, if it could be likened to a bag, of snippets and impressions, writing course exercises perhaps, what else can you do with them, verbal jokes, somewhat smart, a bit too cute, lightly irritating, presumably deliberately so, he thought, phrases turned upside down to drain the meaning out of them, phrases expressing their lack of meaning. Fragments are the only truth, as the philosophers say, but these passages are a facade, he thought, a facade constructed of detritus, cast-offs, abandoned matter, abandoned phrases presented strangely, and all this verbal capering, what could it be but some sort of exercise in avoidance, an exercise in staying on the surface, dog paddle, an exercise in not sinking down to the heart of things. Despite, or because of, all that light shone glinting on the surfaces there must be something dark beneath, he thought, there is something horrible hidden but not very well hidden, the impulse to hide is the impulse also to reveal, once he began to look for clues they were everywhere, how could he have not seen them from the start, the narrator calling out for help but stifling her call in pleasantries and cleverness. Once you start to look for it, the truth reveals itself like an injury. What is it that makes people serial victims of relationship violence? Where lies the harm when the harm is endlessly repeated in different situations? “There was a basic outline,” states the narrator of her relationships, “which I filled with different stuffing. There was one role that always had to be filled. It was always a surprise to see who had got that role.” For her, people are interchangeable, everything is replaceable and therefore inescapable. Everything must be repeated. Escape is not possible and therefore has to be “attempted”, rather than actually attempted. One must go through all the motions. “In Switzerland the landscape was not mixed up in my problems yet.” This is my favourite sentence in the book, he thought. The narrator attempts to fool herself, knowing that she cannot fool herself, that running away is possible. “In Switzerland your actions in other countries were of such little consequence that it was unclear if they really mattered at all. I guessed my job didn’t exist any more. That was one way of dealing with it. It didn’t require much imagination to consider that the house we lived in and the unmade beds and the unpaid bills didn’t exist either.” But actually to escape would require a narrative and narrative is only a literary device of no real use in a world of fragments, he thought, narrative is impossible in such a world. The only option left, then, is erasure. The narrator forms The Disinvent Movement, a feckless group of sloppy idealists, or should that be anti-idealists, he wondered, who set out to disinvent the evils of the world but whose only action, if it actually occurs, is to paint the windshields of a few vehicles black to shock their owners with their inability to see. But is not seeing the same as disinventing, he wondered, or just the best we can hope to achieve? The narrator has a pile of ‘Disinvent Yourself’ T-shirts at the back of her drawer. Will the narrator’s self-obliterative impulses, he wondered, result in invisibility or self-destruction? What is the difference between these options? Is not being the only way of not being a victim? Why all these questions? I am guilty, he realised, because I do not help, even though I cannot help. No wonder the accusatory look. The narrator is completely I-obsessed, he realised, because she is intent upon the destruction of the I. Refuge in nullity. There is no helping her. “It turned out to be harder to hurt someone,” she writes, “whose personality kept turning blank.”

This week's Book of the Week has just been awarded Australia's richest literary prize. Its author lives in Palmerston North. The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay has as its protagonist a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed alcoholic grandmother who, as the result of a pandemic, is suddenly able to understand the speech of animals and sets off, accompanied by a dingo, to find her granddaughter in an Australia in which the relationship of humans to their environment and to other animals has been drastically reconfigured. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Stella reviews the book on Radio NZ. 
>>Laura Jean McKay talks with Kim Hill. 
>>The author interviewed by a dog. 
>>On winning the Victorian Prize for Literature. 
>>Other consciousnesses and the the limits of language. 
>>Stranger than fiction. 
>>With her back to the sea.
>>A Kafkaesque crisis. 
>>Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Literature. 
>>The author's website. 
>>Read the book!

 NEW RELEASES

The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book: An interactive guide to life-changing books by Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent        $48

The authors of this lovingly assembled book instigated a phone service on which callers could leave messages about their favourite books. Now, in The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book, these messages are collected for book lovers everywhere. Designed in the style of the classic Yellow Pages, there is something exciting to discover on each page, from unique phone extensions that have been assigned to each voicemail, as well as transcripts of those calls, literary advertisements, bookstore checklists, bookish Easter eggs, all organised by category.  
>>Like this!

Passages by Ann Quin                  $33

A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome. Reflecting the schizophrenia of its characters, the novel splits into alternating passages, switching between the sister and her lover's perspective. The lover's passages are also fractured, taking the form of a diary with notes alongside the entries. An intricate system of repetition and relation builds across the passages. 

"Passages stirred up a certain kind of curiosity that I hadn’t felt kindling in me for so long. It’s difficult to describe – it’s almost like the omnipotent curiosity one burns with as an adolescent – sexual, solipsistic, melancholic, fierce, hungry, languorous – and without limit." —Claire Louise Bennett

"To read Passages is to look down through clear water. It's absolutely lucid and blindingly reflective. It moves and you don't know how deep it goes. Perhaps there's a body down there. Perhaps it's your own." —Joanna Walsh

>>Read an excerpt. 

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux           $32

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly, admires.

"Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation." —Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

"A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage. Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man's Place so lacerating." —Frances Wilson, Telegraph

Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman            $38

Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist and bemused commentator on the contemporary world. Zeke has carved out an academic career studying family photographs, gender and images. Meanwhile – now 38 – he still contends with his own family’s perversities and pathologies, which charge his chaotic love life. While living in London, Zeke finds himself spiralling into crisis. As the centre ceases to hold, so too does any pretence of his having a dispassionate, purely academic interest in these issues. Zeke finds a new research topic: himself. He embarks on a quixotic new project, studying the ‘New Man’, born under the sign of feminism. What, he asks his male subjects, does masculinity mean today, in a world in which all the old models are broken? What do you expect from women? What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke – is he enlightened or misguided, chauvinistic or simply delusional?

"A true force in American literature." –George Saunders

"A new thought in every sentence." –Lydia Davis

>>Long-listed for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. 

The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven               $37

On a remote mountaintop somewhere in Europe, accessible only by an ancient funicular, a small pharmacy sits on a square. As if attending confession, townspeople carry their ailments and worries through its doors, in search of healing, reassurance, and a witness to their bodies and their lives. One day, a young woman arrives in the town to apprentice under its charismatic pharmacist, August Malone. She slowly begins to lose herself in her work, lulled by stories and secrets shared by customers and colleagues. But despite her best efforts to avoid thinking and feeling altogether, as her new boss rises to the position of mayor, she begins to realise that something sinister is going on around her.

"In prose reminiscent of Fleur Jaeggy, The Weak Spot is a prismatic fable spiked with dozens of elegant relevations." —Catherine Lacey

"This eccentric, intensely observed book—full of dry humour and sturdy, elegant sentences—examines the slippery quality of the self in relation to others and the treacherous terrain of a world governed by manipulative men." —Kathryn Scanlan

Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes         $34

In seven interconnected short stories, the Guatemalan countryside is ever-present: a place of timeless peace, and the site of sudden violence. Don Henrik, a good man struck time and again by misfortune, confronts the crude realities of farming life, family obligation, and the intrusions of merciless entrepreneurs, hitmen, drug dealers, and fallen angels, all wanting their piece of the pie. Told with precision and a stark beauty, Trout, Belly Up is a beguiling, disturbing ensemble of moments set in the heart of a rural landscape in a country where brutality is never far from the surface.

Grimoire by Robin Robertson           $40

The new book from the author of The Long Take, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of both the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. Like some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition, Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer—a man, beast or god. 

"'I've long admired Robin Robertson's narrative gift. If you love stories, you will love this book." —Val McDermid

"Robin Robertson is a fearless and thrilling poet in what he confronts in himself as well as what he unearths from the commons of myth and balladry." —Marina Warner

Marie Curie and Her Daughters by Imogen Greenberg and Isabel Greenberg           $30

Meet Marie Curie. Shy and reserved, she loved science more than anything else in the world. But she lived at a time when women couldn't be scientists. Marie followed her passion and is now remembered for her game-changing discoveries. But while she tinkered away with test tubes and experimented with a glow-in-the-dark chemical elements, Marie became a mother. Irene and Eve grew up to be fiercely independent and determined women just like their mother, and had many adventures of their own.

Bolt from the Blue by Jeremy Cooper         $38

An epistolary novel charting the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enroll at Saint Martin's School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their only form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. Bolt from the Blue captures the waxing and waning of the mother-daughter relationship over time, achieving a depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.

Winner of the 2018 Novel Prize. 

>>Read an excerpt. 

The Emperor's Feast: A history of China in twelve meals by Jonathan Clements           $38

There are barely a dozen words for cooking processes in English. But in Chinese there are 26 verbs for preparing food, from stir-frying to cooking in embers (wei) and baking in moist clay (baozai). Its ancient cuisine reflects China’s long history of invasion and conquest, as each new emperor has sought to unify this diverse land. Modern Chinese cooking brings together many regional and foreign influences, from the fresh seafood of Fujian province in the south to the love of roast meat in the north (“the Manchus ate little else”). Even the habit of eating rice varies across China: in the wheat-growing north, rice formed only 1% of the diet in the 20th century, whereas in the south it was a quarter of all calories.

"A splendid introduction to the cooking and history of China." —Guardian

Vitamin D3           $110

An astounding survey of contemporary drawing from over 100 artists, selected by over 70 international experts. 

The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish short stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson          $55

a radical revision of the canon of the Irish story, uniting classic works with neglected writers and marginalised voiceswomen, LGBT writers, Traveller folk-tales, neglected 19th-century authors and the first wave of 'new Irish' writers from all over the world now making a life in Ireland. Sinéad Gleeson brings together stories that range from the most sublime realism to the downright bizarre and transgressive, some from established literary figures and some that have not yet been published in book form. The collection draws on a tremendous spectrum of experience: the story of a prank come good by Bram Stoker; Sally Rooney on the love languages of the new generation; Donal Ryan on the pains of ageing; Edna O'Brien on the things we betray for love; James Joyce on a young woman torn between the familiar burdens and oppression of her home and the dangerous lure of romance and escape; and the internal monologue of a woman in a coma by Marian Keyes. Here too are vivid and less familiar stories by Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Oein De Bharduin, Blindboy Boatclub and Melatu Uche Okorie. Sinead Gleeson's anthology is a marvellous representation of a rich literary tradition renewing itself in the 21st century. 

Waves Across the South: A new history of revolution and empire by Sujit Sivasundaram              $38

Too often, history is told from the northern hemisphere, with modernity, knowledge, selfhood and politics moving from Europe to influence the rest of the world. This book traces the origins of our times from the perspective of indigenous and non-European people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From Aboriginal Australians to Parsis and from Mauritians to Malays, people asserted their place and their future as the British empire drove unexpected change. The tragedy of colonisation was that it reversed the immense possibilities for liberty, humanity and equality in this period. Waves Across the South insists on the significance of the environment: the waves of the Bay of Bengal or the Tasman Sea were the context for this story. Sivasundaram tells how revolution, empire and counter-revolt crashed in the global South. Naval war, imperial rivalry and oceanic trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, knowledge and the pursuit of being modern.

"Fresh, sparkling and ground-breaking, Waves Across the South helps re-centre how we look at the world and opens up new perspectives on how we can look at regions, peoples and places that have been left to one side of traditional histories for far too long." —Peter Frankopan

"Global history at its finest: eloquent, surprising, and deeply moving." —Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters

The New Possible: Visions of our world beyond crisis edited by Philip Clayton and Kelli M. Archie           $45

Will pandemic, economic instability, and social distance lead to deeper inequalities, more nationalism, and further erosion of democracies around the world? Or are we moving toward a global re-awakening to the importance of community, mutual support, and the natural world? The New Possible offers twenty-eight visions of what could be, if, instead of choosing to go back to normal, we choose to go forward to something better. With essays by Mike Joy, Rebecca Kiddle, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Pollan, Varshini Prakash, Vandana Shiva, Jack Kornfield, Mamphela Ramphele, Justin Rosenstein, Jack Kornfield, Helena Nordberg-Hodge, David Korten, Tristan Harris, Eileen Crist, Francis Deng, Riane Eisler, Arturo Escobar, Natalie Foster, Jess Rimington, Jeremy Lent, Atossa Soltani, Mark Anielski, Ellen Brown, John Restakis, Zak Stein, Oren Slozberg, Anisa Nanavati, and Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam.

Cane Warriors by Alex Wheatle             $33

Nobody free till everybody free. Moa is fourteen. The only life he has ever known is toiling on the Frontier sugar cane plantation for endless hot days, fearing the vicious whips of the overseers. Then one night he learns of an uprising, led by the charismatic Tacky. Moa is to be a cane warrior, and fight for the freedom of all the enslaved people in the nearby plantations. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson. Time is ticking, and the day of the uprising approaches. A gripping YA novel following the true story of Tacky's War in Jamaica, 1760.

>>Find out more about Tacky's War. 

Under-Earth by Chris Gooch                 $60

The most ambitious graphic novel yet from the devastating Chris Gooch. Under-Earth takes place in a subterranean landfill, hollowed out to serve as a massive improvised prison. Sunken into the trash and debris of the past -- gameboys, iphones, coffee cups, old cars -- we follow two parallel stories. In the first, a new arrival struggles to adapt to the everyday violence, physical labour, and poverty of the prison city. Overwhelmed and alone, he finds a connection with a fellow inmate through an old, beat-up novel. While these two silent and uncommunicative men grow closer thanks to their book, the stress of their environment will test their new bond. Meanwhile, a pair of thieves pull off a risky job in exchange for the prisons' schematics and the promise of escape — only to be betrayed by their employer. On the run with their hope for escape now gone, the two women set their minds to revenge. Yet as they lay their plans, their focus shifts from an obsession with the outside world to the life they have with each other. Equal parts sincerity and violence, Under-Earth explores humanity's inextinguishable drive to find meaning, connection, and even family — and how fragile such constructions can be.

The Corona Crash: How the pandemic will change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley             $23

The pandemic has caused the deepest global recession since the Second World War. Meanwhile the human cost is reflected in a still-rising death toll, as many states find themselves unable—and some unwilling—to grapple with the effects of the virus. This crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism, argues Blakeley, as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and the tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions. We need a radical response. The recovery could see the transformation of our political, economic, and social systems based on the principles of the Green New Deal. If not, the alternatives, as Blakeley warns, may be even worse than we feared.

The Dead are Rising: The life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne           $70

Thirty years in the making, this remarkable book is as much a history of racism in the United States of America as it is the story of the revolutionary Black separatist whose deep understanding of the mechanisms of inequality illuminates many of today's problems. 

The Happy Reader #15              $12

Featuring a literary interview and photo session with Sarah Jessica Parker, and an exploration of the legacy of Lafcadio Hearn and his strange and interesting collection of Japanese Ghost Stories. 

 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #216 (12.2.21)

Read our latest newsletter!

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

The Kiosk by Anete Melece  {Reviewed by STELLA} If you sat inside a kiosk all day what would you dream about? Olga dreams about a place far away, watching a beautiful sunset. Olga has worked in the kiosk in a busy city for many years; some may think too many. Every day regular customers come by with their wants and needs, some like clockwork, running past at exactly 10:35 am to buy water, and others collecting their morning papers or magazines or just stopping for a chat. There are always tourists who have lost their way and Olga is adept at giving instructions on how to get to the art gallery or museum. Every night Olga settles down with her magazine about faraway places and armchair travels. Olga has worked in the kiosk for so long she can no longer fit out the door. One day the bundled newspapers are left a little further away from her door than usual. While she reaches out with a stick to drag the papers closer, two boys take the opportunity to grab some goodies from the front of the kiosk! Olga in her attempt to stop them topples over, bringing the kiosk with her. Upright again, she goes about making order in her small world and surprises herself. She can walk about—and so she does! She goes for a walk, encased in the kiosk. It’s a fine feeling, even if some of the locals look either startled or a bit bemused. All is fine until she meets one of her regular customers, the man with the excitable dog, on a bridge across the river in the park. The dog runs around her feet and she topples over into the water. Olga floats, which is a good thing—the kiosk is proving to be a suitable vessel—but where will she end up? Let’s just say it involves ice cream... Anete Melece’s illustrations are delightful, with plenty to seek out in the pictures adding to this simple but charming tale. Whether it’s the expressions on people’s faces or the funny magazine covers (No Time) or the bird’s-eye-view pages of the city or Olga floating on the river, each page is lively in content and colour palette. The front of the book has a square cut out—the window to the kiosk—while the back is, of course, the door. Open the cover and the front endpaper is Olga’s wonderful home inside. She’s happily eating a biscuit and reading a travel magazine (palm trees and sun) surrounded by toilet paper rolls, bags of chips, lotto cards, lollipops and so on. The text is both funny and a little melancholy, but this story is mostly joyful and has a wonderful ending—you never know where an unexpected incident may take you!

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Good Morning, Mr Crusoe The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the year MDCCXIX, which for 300 Years has instructed the Men of an Island off the Coast of Mainland Europe to Contemn all Foreigners and Women by Jack Robinson   {Reviewed by THOMAS} When Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name discovers the footprint of a stranger on the margins of the island he considers his domain, he builds defences and prepares violence. He wants to keep for himself his table, made with his own hands, his rude bowl, likewise the project of a man who has brought to DIY the gravitas of a spiritual exercise, and his parasol, but even more he wants to keep for himself the puritanical practices of useful labour, useful thought, austerity and self-restraint—he made a very small amount of rum last for ten years!—that are both the expression and the perpetuation of his isolation. He remains resistant to all that is not him. When given the opportunity, upon a suitably disadvantaged other, he shows himself prepared to teach but not to learn. The propagation of Defoe’s novel as an English classic over the centuries has both epitomised and contributed to a particularly noxious strand of Anglo-Saxon masculinity compounded of an arrogance and a superiority complex on the one hand and a concomitant deep insecurity and fear on the other, resulting in an instinct to devise rules, build defences and prepare violence. Jack Robinson, in this quick and subtle little book, not only sketches the deleterious effect upon English society of this thread of Englishness, leading to the Brexit crisis resulting from the projection of threat onto difference, but also traces the literary offspring of Ur-Crusoe, so to call him: Robinsons in books by Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Spark and others, and in the films of Patrick Keillor, each either or both perpetuating or degrading the character with whom they are inescapably associated. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains a central topos for reactionary British nativism. It is no coincidence that, in the space of populist disaffection resulting from Conservative austerity policies, a prominent contemporary British fascist adopted the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’ in his xenophobic campaign for “respect for British heritage, values and tradition.” Robinson Crusoe, despite circumstances that make his attitudes increasingly ridiculous, cannot help but insist, with increasing violence, that he is master of ‘his’ island. Jack Robinson’s quarrel “is less with Defoe than with Crusoe and the uses which the book has been put to.” He observes that “Crusoe has amassed such gravitas—or rather, his emblematic status in British culture became so far reaching—that the natural development of his descendants was inescapably stunted.” Can this be healed? In Crusoe’s unthinking adherence to ‘heritage, values and tradition’, he is incapable of change or growth or understanding, incapable of opening himself to new experience, of accepting as an equal anyone different from himself. When Crusoe leaves the island he remains the slaver and misogynist he was when he arrived. All he has done is survived. “Defoe denies Crusoe self-doubt, which is another way of infantilising him. His blind trust in God shuts off all radical introspection.” Without that self-doubt and introspection there is no hope.

 In an era of extreme technologies and climate catastrophe, where do we look for new ways of doing things? Lo-TEK is a design movement using indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture to generate sustainable, resilient infrastructure, housing and interactions. Our Book of the Week, Lo-TEK: Design by radical indigenism by Julia Watson, takes us from Peru to the Philippines, from Tanzania to Iran, exploring millennia-old human approaches to design for living.
>>The author takes us through her book. 
>>Indigenous philosophy and vernacular architecture. 
>>The power of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. 
>>How to build a resilient future using ancient wisdom. 
>>Nature-based technology. 
>>The author's website. 
>>Your copy. 
>>No relation. 

 NEW RELEASES

Tōku Pāpā by Ruby Solly          $25

"When you first told me that you gave me the name of our tupuna so that I would be strong enough to hold our family inside my ribcage, I believed you. Here you are. Here is how I saw you, trapped in your own amber. Now it’s time for you to believe me. Tōku Pāpā is a book that serves as a map of survival for Māori growing up outside of their papakāika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tūpuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us?"
>>Read an extract. 
>>'Karaka—Tau'. 
>>'Karaka—Wana'.

>>At the Auckland Writers Festival. 

>>'Metronome'. 

The Disinvent Movement by Susanna Gendall           $30

Assembled from the jumble of cultural detritus that comprises everyday life, Gendall's novel tests experiences and relationships by subjecting them to either reinvention or disinvention—but what, at core, does the narrator most want to disinvent? 

"Like Olivia Laing or Renata Adler, Susanna Gendall strips back the everyday to get at life’s extraordinary oddness; this novel conjures a strange magic, pierced with little darts of hope." —Emily Perkins

>>Read an extract. 

Land: How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world by Simon Winchester           $40

Winchester explores the the possession of land, the ways it is delineated and changes hands, the great disputes, and the questions of restoration – particularly in the light of climate change and colonialist reparation. A global study, this is an exquisite exploration of what the ownership of land might really mean for the people who live on it.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion           $45

These twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time.

Not a Novel: Collected writings and recollections by Jenny Erpenbeck          $33

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

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

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

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

Tranquillity and Ruin by Danyl McLauchlan            $30

In these essays McLauchlan explores ideas and paths that he hopes will make him freer and happier – or, at least, less trapped, less medicated and less depressed. He stays at a monastery and meditates for eight hours a day. He spends time with members of a new global movement who try to figure out how to do the most possible good in the world. He reads forbiddingly complex papers on neuroscience and continental philosophy and shovels clay with a Buddhist monk until his hands bleed. He tries to catch a bus. Tranquillity and Ruin is a light-hearted contemplation of madness, uncertainty and doom. It’s about how, despite everything we think we know about who we are, we can still be surprised by ourselves.

"McLauchlan is likely the most intelligent essayist in New Zealand and this is likely to be the most thought-provoking book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2021." —Steve Braunias
>>Writing in his head. 

He Iti te Kupu: Māori metaphors and similes by Hona Black            $40

He Iti te Kupu contains nearly 500 sayings that draw a comparison between something (often the natural world) and people, events or contexts. Written in Māori and English, this accessible guide explains the use, meaning and context of a host of the principal figures of speech in te Reo. Divided into themes, including birds of the land and sea, parts of the body, acknowledgements, animals and insects. The title derives from the proverb, ‘The words are small, yet their meanings are substantial,’ highlighting the importance of these sayings in the landscape of Māori language learning and speaking. Invaluable for beginning and advanced learners of te Reo Māori.

The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida             $25

Derrida’s thoughts are haunted by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “My friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. Derrida recalls and restages the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy. The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy.

“Derrida has never written more illuminatingly on Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger than he does here.” –Choice

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson             $26

Good Friday, 1612. Two notorious witches await trial and certain death in Lancaster Castle, whilst a small group gathers in secret protest. Into this group the self-made Alice Nutter stakes her claim and swears to fight against the rule of fear. But what is Alice's connection to these witches? What is magic if not power, and what will happen to the women who possess it?

"A gripping gothic read." —Sarah Hall, Guardian

"Utterly compelling, thick with atmosphere and dread, but sharp intelligence too." —Telegraph

A Kick in the Belly: Women, slavery, and resistance by Stella Dadzie           $35

A revelatory history of the ways in which enslaved women in the West Indies found ways to fight their oppressors, and of the ways that their histories have both been suppressed and endured. 

Time's Monster: History, conscience and Britain's empire by Priya Satia            $48

For generations, the history of the British empire was written by its victors. British historians' accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised the force of decolonisation. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem             $33

After an event that means the end of pretty much all the technology we have taken for granted, two former Hollywood friends find themselves at odds. 

"Inventive, entertaining, and superbly written." —New York Times

"This is a dystopian novel in thrall to its own genre, full of knockabout comic book bravado, with regular knowing nods to literary and cinematic history. It is, in short, a blast." —Guardian

House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family by Hadley Freeman              $43

When Hadley Freeman found a shoebox filled with her French grandmother's treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of her grandmother, Sala, and her three siblings, Henri, Jacques and Alex Glass. The search takes Freeman from Picasso's archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz.  

Fat by Hanne Blank          $22

Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonised in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs, simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people "fat" is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, "feeling fat" and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one another with richer, fattier meanings.

>>Other 'Object Lessons'. 

The Mermaid's Purse by Fleur Adcock          $25

Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.

Prehistoric Man in Palliser Bay edited by Foss Leach and Helen Leach           $50

Detailing 1,000 years of life in Palliser Bay, this landmark book presents, in 14 papers by 9 authors, the results of a pioneering, multifaceted, archaeological research programme carried out between 1969 and 1972 in the south-eastern coastal part of the North Island of New Zealand. The volume reviews archaeological evidence from the time of first settlement from Polynesia through to the 19th century. More than 25 excavations were carried out, focussing on midden sites, house areas, kumara storage pits and prehistoric gardens. Laboratory analysis of middens revealed details of the history of fishing, birding and sea mammal hunting. Artefacts of stone, bone and shell are described in the volume, and analysis of land snails provides evidence for environmental change during the period of occupation. Analysis of human bone samples provided detailed medical histories of the people who lived in the region. Two concluding chapters consider the significance of the evidence for early horticulture in Palliser Bay and the nature of prehistoric communities in the area. Back in print at last.

Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories, The early years by Michael Posner           $55

The first of three volumes--The Early Years--follows him from his boyhood in Montreal to university, and his burgeoning literary career to the world of music, culminating with his first international tour in 1970. Through the voices of those who knew him best at that time, the book probes both Cohen's public and private life. It also paints a portrait of an era, the social, cultural, and political revolutions that shook the 1960s.

>>'Suzanne' with Judy Collins. 

The Handbook of New Zealand Mammals edited by Carolyn M. King and David M. Forsyth               $160

The definitive reference on all the land-breeding mammals recorded in the New Zealand region (including the New Zealand sector of Antarctica). It lists 65 species, including native and exotic, wild and feral, living and extinct, residents, vagrants and failed introductions. It describes their history, biology and ecology, and brings together comprehensive and detailed information gathered from widely scattered or previously unpublished sources. The description of each species is arranged under standardised headings for easy reference. Because the only native land-breeding mammals in New Zealand are bats and seals, the great majority of the modern mammal fauna comprises introduced species, whose arrival has had profound effects both for themselves and for the native fauna and flora. The book details changes in numbers and distribution for the native species, and for the arrivals it summarises changes in habitat, diet, numbers and size in comparison with their ancestral stocks, and some of the problems they present to resource managers.

Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847—1947 by Norman Lebrecht          $25

In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. All these people had Jewish origins. In 1847, Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world's population, and yet they were influential far beyond their numbers. Why? 

What If We Stopped Pretending? by Jonathan Franzen        $15

"Today, the scientific evidence for climate change verges on irrefutable. If you're younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilisation of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you're under thirty, you're all but guaranteed to witness it. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope."

Sylvie by Sylvie Kantorovitz              $20

Sylvie lives in a school in France. Her father is the principal, and her home is an apartment at the end of a hallway of classrooms. As a young child, Sylvie and her brother explore this most unusual kingdom, full of small mysteries and quirky surprises. But in middle and high school, life grows more complicated. Sylvie becomes aware of her parents' conflicts, the complexities of shifting friendships, and what it means to be the only Jewish family in town. She also begins to sense that her perceived "success" relies on the pursuit of math and science-even though she loves art. In a funny and perceptive graphic memoir for children, author-illustrator Sylvie Kantorovitz traces her first steps as an artist.

>>Meet Sylvie Kantorovitz.

Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey     $22

Although early medical textbooks treated it as a healing agent, early alchemists (as well as their critics) claimed gin's base was a path to immortality and also Satan's tool. In more recent times, the gin trade consolidated the commercial and political power of nations and prompted a social campaign against women. Gin has been used successfully as a defense for murder; blamed for massive unrest in 18th-century England; and advertised for as an abortifacient. 

From its harshest proto-gin distillation days to the current smooth craft models, gin plays a powerful cultural role in film, music, and literature.

>>Behold!. 

>>Other 'Object Lessons'. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #215 (5.2.21)

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

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Spellslinger by Sebastien de Castell   {Reviewed by STELLA} Looking for a bit of magic and wit? Then Spellslinger might just be the next teen read for you. Kellen from the House of Ke is ready to face his four trials to become a spellcaster. The only problem is that his magic has gone. His bands haven’t sparked and no one seems able to help. Neither his powerful mage parents, his friends who try to help him duel, nor his teacher. Yet Kellen is cunning and able to perform tricks. Maybe it’s all trickery anyway? Why can’t he keep up with his friends or even his younger sister? If he doesn’t succeed, it's a life of shame and servitude as a Sha’Tep. As the trials progress, Kellen has more questions than answers—if he can’t make it in the Jan’Tep world is there a place for him in his hometown? Why can’t he summon the magic when he needs it? And what’s behind all this anyway? Shadowblack. A curse—a powerful one. One which is feared and abhorred. This fantasy builds and twists moment by moment. Kellen is an excellent sixteen-year-old: useless and brilliant by turns—wanting to fit in but ultimately knowing he’s different and will become an outcast. But not so fast in this fantasy world (a series that gets better as it goes on), as we are introduced to our main players. Enter Ferius Parfax—a mysterious redhead cardshark—an Argosi wanderer with a curious pack of painted cards and some sharp-edged ones useful in a fight. She’s sardonic, clever and not above playing dirty when needed so long as it meets her Argosi code of ethics. Why is she here and why is she keeping an eye on Kellen? Even more strangely, Kellen finds an unlikely partner in a squirrel cat. Reichis, who loves stealing baubles and loves an enemy—especially if he can eat their eyeballs, has his own issues and is keen to avenge the Jan'Tep. Reichis will consistently lead Kellen into trouble and always fight alongside him—it's a love/hate bond with each suspicious of the other's motivations and simultaneously deadly loyal. Ultimately, Kellen is destined for the Spellslinger road with his explosive powders, perceptive mind, and small sparks of magic. For answers, he will have to journey further. Luckily there are six books in this series, each more intriguing. Dangerous, exciting and hugely enjoyable, Sebastien de Castell blends ancient civilisations with the wild west in a fantasy that is sure to please.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

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

 NEW RELEASES

Nativity by Jean Frémon and Louise Bourgeois        $30

"One day in 2007," recalls Jean Frémon about a visit to artist Louise Bourgeois’s studio, "I discovered an entirely new series of drawings…. silhouettes of women with embryos in their wombs, drawn with a brush full of water and red gouache. These drawings were, for me, the most poignant of her long career. Each time I visited, Louise would ask me about what I was writing. … I said: it’s the story of the first painter who had the idea of representing the baby Jesus completely naked rather than in swaddling clothes…. Louise asked me for the text, which I sent to her. When I next came to visit her, five drawings were awaiting me to illustrate the book."
>>Read an excerpt. 
>>Read our reviews of Now, Now, Louison. 

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko            $35

Exuberant feminist retellings of Japanese folktales. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts.

"These ghosts are not the monstrous, vengeful spirits of the original stories; they are real people with agency and personalities, finally freed from the restraints placed on living women. Funny, beautiful, surreal and relatable, this is a phenomenal book." —Guardian

Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music by Alex Ross             $45

For better or worse, Wagner is arguably the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
>>How a Wagner opera defined the sound of Hollywood blockbusters. 

Himalaya: A human history by Ed Douglas          $40

"Douglas surveys the dazzling geology and ecology of the world’s highest mountain range and the unique civilisations it fostered, which produced a flowering of Buddhist philosophy, art, and architecture during Tibet’s medieval glory days. He also probes the tectonic geopolitical forces that molded Tibet and Nepal as they confronted powerful neighbors in China and British India and then diverged in the post-WWII era, with Tibet succumbing to Chinese colonization while Nepal struggled through monarchical dictatorships and Maoist insurgency to become a democracy and tourist mecca. It’s a colorful story, full of bloody palace intrigues in Kathmandu and Lhasa and nervy exploits by the many foreign (primarily British) outsiders drawn to the region—merchants, missionaries, cartographers, and, above all, mountaineers, whose conquests of Himalayan peaks Douglas recounts in vivid detail. Providing a corrective to romantic Western stereotypes of the region as the homeland of spiritual purity, Douglas notes the allure of Himalayan cultures but is clear-eyed about the prosaic economic motives that shape life there. Written in elegant prose with sharply etched profiles of historical figures, this engrossing account offers a fresh, revealing portrait of a much-mythologised place." —Publishers Weekly

How We Live Now: Scenes from the pandemic by Bill Hayes        $35

 As he wanders the increasingly empty streets of Manhattan, Hayes meets fellow New Yorkers and discovers stories to tell, but he also shares the unexpected moments of gratitude he finds from within his apartment, where he lives alone and—like everyone else—is staying home, trying to keep busy and not bored as he adjusts to enforced solitude with reading, cooking, reconnecting with loved ones, reflecting on the past—and writing. Featuring Hayes's street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time, offering a long-lasting reminder of the importance of community—however that is constructed. 

Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates           $35

A haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas:

A Pennsylvania academic discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of.

A pubescent girl overcome with loneliness befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her.

A brilliant but shy college sophomore realizes she is pregnant and, distraught, allows a distinguished visiting professor to take her under his wing.

A widower remarries, but his young wife is haunted by his dead wife's voice dancing in the wind.

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art by Revecca Wragg Sykes          $40

Neanderthals became a distinct population 450,000 to 400,000 thousand years ago, and lived all over the world from north Wales to China and Arabia, in climates ranging from glacial to tropical, until about 40,000 years ago. They were shorter than we are, with strong arms for working hides and fine motor skills for making small tools, but probably saw, heard, smelled and possibly even spoke much like we do. With a sketch and a short piece of fiction at the start of each chapter, Wragg Sykes paints a vivid picture of life as lived by a Neanderthal parent, hunter or child. She doesn’t just want us to see Neanderthals for who they (probably) really were; she wants us to see their world through their eyes.

In this impressive reassessment Neanderthals emerge as complex, clever and caring, with a lot to tell us about human life." —Guardian

>>Summoning wraiths from time. 

The Power of Words by Simone Weil             $13

How is language manipulated by the powerful, and how to our obligations towards each other imply obligations towards the ways in which we use language? 

Sexuality in the Field of Vision by Jacqueline Rose          $25

An exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory.

The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw            $70

After World War 2, millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or, in the case of many, had no home to which to return. They would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, divided by nationalities, temporary homelands in exile, with their own police forces, churches, schools, newspapers, and medical facilities. The international community couldn't agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of fruitless debate and inaction, an International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany.

Going Home: A walk through fifty years of occupation by Raja Shehadeh          $25

Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day—the day that happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank—the book is a powerful and moving chronicle of the changing face of his city.

>>On human rights and walking. 

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma            $24

"You wake up. You go to work. You don't go outside for twelve hours at a time. You have strategy meetings about how to use hashtags. After work you order expensive drink after expensive drink until you're so blackout drunk you can't remember the circumstances which have led you to waking up in bed with your colleague. The next day you stay in bed until the afternoon, scrolling through your social media feeds and wondering why everyone else seems to be achieving so much. Sometimes you don't get out of bed at all. Then you hear about Life on Nyx, a programme that allows 100 lucky winners the chance to escape it all, move to another planet and establish a new way of life. One with meaning and purpose. One without Instagram and online dating. There's one caveat—if you go, you can never come back. But you aren't worried about that. After all, what on Earth could there possibly be to miss?"

"Wry, beautiful, surprising and deeply moving." —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian

Frida Kahlo: The last interview and other conversations             $37

Featuring conversations with American scholar and Marxist, Bertram D. Wolfe, and art critic Raquel Tibol, this collection shows an artist undervalued, but also a woman in control of her image. 

The Glamour Boys: The secret story of the rebels who fought for Britain to defeat Hitler by Chris Bryant         $33

In the early 1930s, a group of young, queer British MPs visited Berlin on a series of trips that would change the course of the Second World War. As Hitler rose to power, they watched the Nazis arrest their gay and Jewish friends, send them to concentration camps and murder them. These men were some of the first to warn Britain about Hitler, repeatedly speaking out against their government's policy of appeasing him. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hated them. Branding them 'the glamour boys', he had them followed, harassed, spied upon and derided in the press. They suffered abuse, innuendo and threats of de-selection. At a time when even the suggestion of homosexuality could land you in prison, the bravery these men were forced to show in their personal lives gave them extraordinary courage in public. Adept at hiding their true nature, some became talented spies, while others witnessed the brutality of Hitler's camps first hand. Four of them died in action.

Chavs: The demonisation of the working class by Owen Jones          $25

Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.

"A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society." —Guardian

What is Existentialism? by Simone de Beauvoir           $13

"It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity." Rejecting received notions of good and evil, Beauvoir celebrates a destiny and meaning that comes only from the fact of existing. 

The Women's Atlas by Joni Seager          $25

A wealth of maps and infographics on the status of women under various criteria throughout the world. 

The Narrative of Trajan's Column by Italo Calvino            $13

What is it that the things we leave behind can tell us about space and time and the place of human experience in the wider scheme of things?  

Ex Libris: 100 books to read and reread by Michiko Kakutani            $40

What does the most feared critic of The New York Times think you should actually read? 

What is decolonisation? Why is it urgent? What would Aotearoa be like if it were decolonised? Certainly the way in which Aotearoa was colonised is responsible for many of the social, ethical and environmental problems we face collectively today—could a process of decolonisation remedy some of these problems and create a more equitable, healthy and sustainable approach to living in this place in the twenty-first century?
Our book of the Week is Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton, and Amanda Thomas.

>>What is decolonisation? 
>>With stories, anything is possible. 
>>Why colonisation is bad for everyone. 
>>Where to next? 
>>Why colonisation was bad for Pākehā too. 
>>'Decolonisation, Irish summer camps and my dumb Māori Dad.'
>>Why decolonisation is good for everyone. 
>>Matters arising. 
>>Your copy.
>>Other BWB texts. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #214 (29.1.21)

Read our latest newsletter. 

>> 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

Our Book of the Week is Azadi: Freedom, fascism, fiction by Arundhati Roy. 
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.