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Sparring with the spectre of an overbearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. A blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idle.
"A smart, timely, and novel proposal for poetics in the age of personal and political patriarchy." — Joanna Walsh
On the periphery of Aotearoa New Zealand’s publishing scene, there is a rich and varied cottage industry of small press publishers. They work in collaboration, in gaps between paid gigs and with the support of like-minded peers: poets who print, curators-cum-editors, self-publishing photographers, and cross-disciplinary designers. Dwelling in the Margins introduces some leading figures of independent publishing in their own words. Through stories and essays, thirty practitioners reflect on their craft, speculate on the changing landscape of book-making, and imagine alternative frameworks for the future of publishing. Featuring Dominic Hoey, Imogen Taylor, Judy Darragh, Catherine Griffiths, Bruce Connew, Bridget Reweti, Matariki Williams, Luke Wood, Sarah Maxey, Ella Sutherland, Jonty Valentine, Haruhiko Sameshima, Matthew Galloway, Louise Menzies, Sophie Davis, Alan Deare, Chloe Geoghegan, Alice Connew, Anita Tótha, Balamohan Shingade, Chris Holdaway, Erena Shingade, Gabi Lardies, Simon Gennard, Harry Culy, Katie Kerr, Lizzie Boon, Melinda Johnston, Samuel Walsh, Sophie Rzepecky and Virginia Woods-Jack.
In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the scattering of desire to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page 'Me' to the sprawling 70-page 'Summer 80', there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.
"While reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever? Her nonfiction, written in the same blood and seawater as her fiction, produces the same sensation." —Paris Review
Hassan's poems chartan intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and ask difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging.
The Age of Wood: Our most useful material and the construction of civilisation by Roland Ennos $55
How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalised economy? Ennos shows that the key factor has been our relationship with wood. Synthesizing recent research with existing knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering, and carpentry, Ennos reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood's unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives.
The first collecting from an exciting emerging poet. "Take part in a new transformation with every new page as the speaker becomes by turns an egg, multiple trees, a town crier, a needle in a haystack, and a cone of blue light in this incisive and pathos-filled exploration of what it means to be anything at all."
The Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning. Years after the Ark was cut off from the world, a chance of survival within its confines is granted to a select few who can prove their worth. Among their number is Markriss Denny, whose path to future excellence is marred only by a closely guarded secret: without warning, his spirit leaves his body, allowing him to see and experience a world far beyond his physical limitations. Once inside the Ark, Denny learns of another with the same power, whose existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. He is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself and the people he thought he once knew.
"A masterful reimagining of the African diaspora's influence on England and on the world. It's a grand tale and still an intimate portrait of loss and love. What glory and influence would Africa enjoy if colonialism had never occurred? Courttia Newland reshapes our vision of the past, present and future by taking this one question seriously. The result is something truly special. No other way to put it, this book is true Black magic." —Victor LaValle
Metropolis: A history of the city, humankind's greatest invention by Ben Wilson $60|
The Penguin Book of OuLiPo edited by Philip Terry $26
The Flying Couch, A graphic memoir by Amy Kurzweil $40
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm $25
With a Little Kelp from Our Friends: The secret life of seaweed by Mathew Bate and Liz Rowland $35
An exhilarating tour of more than two dozen cities and thousands of years, examining that invention’s good and bad effects. The bad effects (“harsh, merciless environments,” for instance) are produced not so much by roads and buildings but by what’s invisible. The city, as Wilson sees it, is less of a warehouse of architecture and more of an organism that shapes the creatures living inside.
A fascinating look at the work and workings of the exclusive group of writers and mathematicians who use constraints as a laboratory to generate literary texts. Featuring work by Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and other OuLiPo members, as well as "anticipatory plagiarists" preceding them, the book gives a good introduction to the OuLiPo's novel ways of generating texts and exercising our literary capacities.
Amy weaves her own coming-of-age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a psychologist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile. Captivated by Bubbe's story, Amy turns to her sketchbooks, teaching herself to draw as a way to cope with what she discovers.
>>"How do you feel about being a character in my book?"
>>A page evolves.
>>"The thing in the middle is drawing."
>>How to draw literary cartoons.
>>"How do you feel about being a character in my book?"
>>A page evolves.
>>"The thing in the middle is drawing."
>>How to draw literary cartoons.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. Moving from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us a challenging and urgent discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics.
Beyond the tideline, there are around 10,000 types of seaweed. An essential ingredient for life on Earth, seaweed has sustained animals and people for many thousands of years. From ancient history and mythology to modern uses in food, health and medicine, discover how seriously cool seaweed is, and how it can even help tackle climate change.
"An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the parties and famous friends, but also identifies the emotions that drive much of his work. An exceptional biography." —Guardian
>>Noises off.
On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day—Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.' What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which is only now unravelling.
Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell $33
In Japan it is Yuki-onna - 'a goddess'. In Icelandic, Hundslappadrífa - 'flakes as big as a dog's paw'. In Hawai'ian, snow is hau - 'mother of pearl', but also 'love'. From Iceland to Greenland, mountain top to frozen forest, school yard to park, snow is welcomed, feared, played with and prized. Arctic traveller and award-winning writer Nancy Campbell digs deep into the meanings, etymologies and histories of fifty words for snow from across the globe. Held under her magnifying glass, each of these linguistic snow crystals offers a whole world of myth, culture and story.
Childhood, Youth, Dependency ('The Copenhagen Trilogy') by Tove Ditlevsen $26
Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, 'The Copenhagen Trilogy' is a searingly honest, utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, art, ambition and the terrible lure of addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers.
"Utterly, agonisingly compulsive. A masterpiece." —Guardian
"Sharp, tough and tender, wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy. Ditlevsen can pivot from hilarity to heartbreak in a trice." —Spectator
"Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end, devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded, but still eloquent." —Observer
Organized around a central timeline that charts the development of film from the earliest moving images to present-day blockbusters, this volume features key films, film commentaries, and contextual information about the period in which they were produced. By revealing the social, political, and cultural environments in which these films were created.
Red Sands: Reportage and recipes through Central Asia by Caroline Eden $55
In a quest to better understand the vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. The book is filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure. Eden is a guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. From the author of the equally wonderful Black Sea.
A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion $33
This is the story of Libby and her siblings over one long hot summer, and how one decision can have terrible unintended consequences. Rage. That's the feeling engulfing the car as Ellen's mother swerves over to the hard-shoulder and orders her daughter out onto the roadside. Ignoring the protests of her other children, she accelerates away, leaving Ellen standing on the gravel verge in her school pinafore and knee socks as the light fades. What would you do as you watch your little sister getting smaller in the rear view window? How far would you be willing to go to help her? The Gallagher children are going to find out. This moment is the beginning of a summer that will change everything.
"Yoking a classic coming-of-age narrative to the pacier engine of a thriller takes skill and A Crooked Tree is more than persuasive, emanating nostalgia, foreboding and clear-eyed empathy." —Guardian
"Yoking a classic coming-of-age narrative to the pacier engine of a thriller takes skill and A Crooked Tree is more than persuasive, emanating nostalgia, foreboding and clear-eyed empathy." —Guardian
Featuring photographs from African studios and photographers from 1870—1970, this collection contrasts the fresh and vital information in these images with those of colonial photographers who all to often figuratively crushed their subjects under their prejudice, projections and expectations.
