NEW RELEASES

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova           $45

After the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

"A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia." —Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

"Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history." —Esther Kinsky, author of Grove

"Extraordinary – a work of haunting power, grace and originality." —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

>>"Love's labours should be lost."
>>The altar of oblivion. 

The Homely II by Gavin Hipkins             $30

In 2001, Gavin Hipkins unveiled his photo frieze, 'The Homely', at City Gallery Wellington. Consisting of eighty photos taken between 1997 and 2000 on travels in New Zealand and Australia, neighbouring antipodean colonies, it became his best-known and most celebrated work. In 2018, he unveiled its sequel in the exhibition This is New Zealand, also at City Gallery. 'The Homely II' also comprises eighty photos, shot in the same manner, arranged in the same frieze format. Hipkins took the images between 2001 and 2017 on excursions through New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the former colony and the colonial homeland. Contributions by Megan Tamati-Quennell, Robert Leonard, Felicity Barnes, Andrew Clifford, Blair French, Terrence Handscomb, Emil McAvoy, Emma Ng, and Lara Strongman.
>>A few images. 

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre         $34

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

>>Read an extract. 

>>Read Thomas's review. 

>>Alternative edition. 
>>Translating emergencies. 

>>Read Thomas's reviews of Blue Self-Portrait. 

Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez     $35

"It was as if we'd reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That's how low we sank." The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

>>The author has curated a playlist to accompany the novel. 

A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan         $37

A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and painfully honest. A book about love, loss, and the need to belong from a neurodivergent author, and with a protagonist on the autism spectrum.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington           $35

One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounting the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels. With an afterword by Olga Tokarczuk. 
>>The Surreal life. 
>>Surrealism, feminism, and old ladies in revolt. 

The Best American Poetry 2020 edited by Paisley Rekdal and David Lehman      $40

"One of the mainstays of the poetry publication world." —Academy of American Poets

What is Life? Understand biology in five steps by Paul Nurse         $30

"A nearly perfect guide to the wonder and complexity of existence." —Bill Bryson 

"Nurse provides a concise, lucid response to an age-old question. His writing is not just informed by long experience, but also wise, visionary, and personal. I read the book in one sitting, and felt exhilarated by the end, as though I'd run for miles—from the author's own garden into the interior of the cell, back in time to humankind's most distant ancestors, and through the laboratory of a dedicated scientist at work on what he most loves to do." —Dava Sobel

Artifact by Arlene Heyman                $33

By her early twenties, Lottie finds herself trapped in a marriage gone stale, with a daughter she adores but whose existence jeopardizes her place in the lab and her dream of becoming a scientist. How can a young woman make her way in a world determined to contain her brilliance, her will, and her longing to live? Artifact is a celebration of her refusal to be defined by others' imaginations, and a meditation on the glorious chaos of biological life.

Under a White Sky: The nature of the future by Elizabeth Kolbert            $37

The author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking, After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? 

The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking by Vanessa Kimbell          $50

If it rises, it can be made with sourdough. A companion to The Sourdough School, this book focuses on sweet recipes that are gut-friendly and rely on natural sweetness where possible. 

"It is impossible to read this book without wanting to scuttle off into the kitchen." —Nigella Lawson

The Frozen River: Seeking silence in Ladakh by James Crowden          $28

In 1976 James Crowden travelled to Ladakh in the Northern Himalaya, one of the most remote parts of the world. The Frozen River is his extraordinary, luminous account of the time he spent there, living alongside the Zangskari people, before the arrival of roads and mass tourism. Now in paperback.

Signature by Hunter Dukes            $22

Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness—as if the scrawl itself is not enough. What other kinds of beliefs and longings justify our signing practices? Signature addresses these questions as it roams from a roundtable on the Greek island of Syros, to a scene of handwriting analysis conducted in an English pub, from a wedding in Moscow, where guests sign the bride's body, to a San Franciscan tattoo parlor interested in arcane forms. The signature's history encompasses ancient handprints on cave walls, autograph hunters, the branding of slaves, metaphysical poetry, medical malpractice, hip-hop lyrics, legal challenges to electronic signatures, ice cores harvested from Greenland, and tales of forgery and autopens. 

The Language of Thieves: The story of Rotwelsch and one family's secret history by Martin Puchner            $40

Since the Middle Ages, vagrants and thieves in Central Europe have spoken Rotwelsch, a secret language influenced by Yiddish and written in rudimentary signs. When Martin Puchner inherited a family archive, it led him on a journey into this extraordinary language but also into his family's connections to the Nazi Party, for whom Rotwelsch held a particular significance.

The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont            $35

Fremont writes about growing up in a household held together by a powerful glue: secrets. Her parents, profoundly affected by their memories of the Holocaust, pass on to both Helen and her older sister a zealous determination to protect themselves from what they see as danger from the outside world. The family dynamic produced a startling devotion to secret keeping, beginning with the painful and unexpected discovery that she has been disinherited in her father's will. In scenes that are frank, moving, and often surprisingly funny, she writes about growing up in an intemperate household, with parents who pretended to be Catholics but were really Jews—and survivors of Nazi-occupied Poland. 

"Beautifully written, honest, and psychologically astute." —Mary Karr

Bloom by Nicola Skinner          $17

Sorrel Fallowfield is so good at being good that teachers come to her when they need help remembering the school rules - and there are lots. Luckily, Sorrel doesn't have any trouble following them, until the day she discovers a faded packet of Surprising Seeds buried under a tree in her backyard. Now she's hearing voices, seeing things, experiencing an almost unstoppable urge to plant the Seeds in some very unusual places... and completely failing to win her school's competition to find The Most Obedient Child of the School. And all that's before flowers start growing out of her head...

Fossil Men: The quest for the oldest skeleton and the origins of humankind by Kermit Pattison             $40

In 1994, a team led by Tim White uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than "Lucy," then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee—and challenged a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy.

For book news and new books, read our latest NEWSLETTER.

BOOKS @ VOLUME # 221 (19.3.21)

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro    {Reviewed by STELLA} We meet Klara at the store with her best friend Rosa. Soon it will be their turn to be in the window—the sweet spot for attracting attention—and, hopefully, purchased. Manager is very pleased with Klara and, while the week in the window doesn’t yield immediate success, the attention of teenager Josie is garnered. Klara is an AF (artificial friend)—a model with high sensitivity, great observation skills, a talent for mimicry, and superb computational skills. She probably has a perfect EQ score. When Josie and her mother return to the store some weeks later, Klara passes the questions and tests posed by the Mother, and is packed and ready to dispatch to her new home. This is a near-future America where the elites are scaling further ahead with their advantages of education and resources, where children are ‘lifted’—genetically improved—and where company for children can come in the form of an AF. The world is polluted cities, intensive farming, and social anxiety. Josie, like her peers, studies from home with her tutors streamed in (school is too dangerous), has few interactions outside the home (Mother, Melania Houskeeper and Klara are the household)—her childhood friend, Rick (not lifted), and the set social occasions with the other lifted teenagers to help them learn social engagement behaviours are the exceptions. But Josie is often unwell, and it’s Klara’s role to help her through these times—to keep her company and be her friend. Ishiguro’s eighth novel, Klara and the Sun is reminiscent of his wonderful Never Let Me Go (which was a cautionary tale about cloning), and is told solely from Klara’s viewpoint. Klara is highly intelligent, emotionally superior (especially when it comes to empathy), and curious (she questions what she sees and hears—something that may be an unexpected and possibly unwelcome consequence of her model), yet she is fetchingly naive and seemingly without endless knowledge. She’s not hardwired into the internet. She has to piece new experiences together—whether these are physical or emotional—but she can do this extremely well and quickly. We, the readers, may not be as fast as Klara, but we too have to gather the clues and piece together the actions of Josie, her mother, Rick, and the others we meet through Klara’s eyes, to make sense of this future world and the motivations of the players. Not surprisingly, the motivations are familiar—self-improvement and selfishness to retain privilege. As Josie’s illness worsens we discover that the process of 'lifting' can be fatally detrimental. Klara, with her sense of loyalty, love and responsibility, is convinced she can make a difference if she can communicate with the Sun (she is solar-powered), who she believes has special powers—to make a deal that may save Josie’s life. Kazuo Ishiguro will make you love Klara and question the depth of understanding and sensitivity in our humans, despite the real issues of loss and fear that are faced by Josie and her parents. Klara and the Sun is wonderfully narrated, compelling and stimulating. Who has the greater human heart in this tale of loyalty, love, fragility and uncertainty?

Our Book of the Week is Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun.  A hugely empathic AI, Klara is bought as an Artificial Friend for a girl suffering from an undefined illness. As the full extent of the girl's predicament becomes apparent, Klara, with her wonderful mixture of naivety and capacity, does all she can for the girl, and makes us question what it is to be human. Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro's first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. 

>>Read Stella's review. 

>>Bomb under the table. 
>>"Oh you darling robot."
>>On AI and gene editing. 

>>What makes Klara tick?

>>"The sun as in the sun up in the sky."

>>Ishiguro's Nobel lecture. 
>>Your copy. 
>>Other books by Kazuo Ishiguro. 

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre   {Reviewed by THOMAS} How should we occupy ourselves, he wondered, whatever that means, lest we be occupied by someone else, or something else, how do we keep our feet, if our feet at least may be said to be our own to keep, by leaning into the onslaught or by letting it wash through us? Too many metaphors, if they’re even metaphors, he thought, too much thought thought for us by the language we use to think the thoughts, he thought, too many ready-made phrases, who makes them and why do they make them, and what are their effects on us, he wondered, where is the power that I thought was mine, where is the meaning that I meant to mean, how can I reclaim the words I speak from those against whom I would speak them? No hope otherwise. The narrator of Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work happens to be reading Viktor Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich, in which Klemperer demonstrates that the success of, and the ongoing threat from, Nazism arose from changes wrought on the ways in which language was used and thus upon the ways people thought. Whoever controls language controls thought, he thought, Klemperer providing examples, authority exerts its power through linguistic mutation, but maybe, he thought, power can be resisted by the same means, resistance is poetry, he shouted, well, perhaps, or at least a bit of judicious editing could be effective in the struggle, he thought, rummaging in the draw of his desk for his blue pencil, it’s in here somewhere. Fascism depends on buzzwords, says Klemperer, buzzwords preclude thought, and the first step in fighting fascism, says Klemperer, is to challenge the use of these buzzwords, to re-establish the content of discourse, to rescue the particular from the buzzword. Could he think of some current examples of such buzzwords, he wondered, and he thought that perhaps he could, perhaps, he thought, if terms such as the buzzword ‘woke’ or the buzzword ‘cancel’ were removed from discourse and the wielders of these buzzwords had no recourse but to say in plain language what they meant, these once-were-wielders would be revealed to be either ludicrous or dangerous or both ludicrous and dangerous and the particulars of a given situation could be more clearly discussed. That is a subversive thought, he thought, to edit is to unpick power. “There isn’t a lot of poetry these days, I said to my father,” says the narrator at the beginning of Poetics of Work. A state of emergency has been declared in France, it is 2015, terror attacks have resulted in a surge of nationalism, intolerance, police brutality, the narrator, reading Klemperer as I have already said, is aware of the ways in which language has been mutated to control thought, power acts first through language and then turns up as the special police, it seems. What purchase has poetry in a language also used to describe police weaponry, the narrator wonders. “I could feel from the general climate that imagination was being blocked and thought paralysed by national unity in the name of Freedom, and freedom co-opted as a reason to have more of it.” Freedom has become a buzzword, it no longer means what we thought it meant, but even, perhaps, well evidently, its opposite. “Security being the first of freedoms, according to the Minister of the Interior, for you have to work.” You have to work, is this the case, the narrator wonders, you have to work and by working you become part of that which harms you. The book progresses as a series of exchanges between the narrator and their father, the internal voice of their father, of all that is inherited, of Europe, of the compromise between capital and culture, of all that takes things at once too seriously and nowhere near seriously enough. “He’s there in my eyes, he hunches my shoulders, slows my stride, spreads out before me his superior grasp of all things,” the narrator says, embedded in their father, struggling to think a thought not thought for them by their father, their struggle is a struggle for voice, as all struggles are. “I am like my father but much less good, my father can do anything because he does nothing, while I do nothing because I don’t know how to defend a person who’s being crushed and dragged along the ground and kicked to a pulp with complete impunity, nor do I know how to get a job or write a CV or any biography, nor even poetry, not a single line of it.” What hope is there? Is it possible to find “non-culture-sector poetry”, the narrator wonders, or even to write this “non-culture-sector” poetry if there could be such a thing? What sort of poetry can be used to come to grips with even the minor crises of late capitalism, for instance, if any of the crises of late capitalism can be considered minor? “I watched the water flow south, and the swans driven by their insignificance, deaf and blind to the basic shapes of the food-processing industry, ignorant that they, poor sods, were beholden to market price variation over the kilo of feathers and to the planned obsolescence of ornamental fowls.” The book sporadically and ironically gestures towards being some sort of treatise on poetry, it even has a few brief “lessons,” or maxims, but these are too half-hearted and impermanent to be either lessons or maxims, perhaps, he thought, they might qualify as antilessons or antimaxims, if such things could be imagined, though possibly they ironise an indifference to both. “Indifference is a contemplative state, my father said one day when he’d been drinking.” Doing nothing because there is nothing to be done, or, rather, because one cannot see what can be done, is very different from doing nothing from indifference, but the effect is the same, or the lack of effect, so something must be done, the narrator thinks, even if it is the case that nothing can in the end be done. For those to whom language is at once both home and a place of exile, the struggle must be made in language, or for language, resistance is poetry, or poetry is resistance, I have forgotten what I shouted, I will sharpen my blue pencil, after all one must be “someone among everyone,” as the narrator says. “There’s a fair bit of poetry at the moment, I said to my father,” the narrator says at the end of Poetics of Work. “He didn’t reply.”

 NEW RELEASES

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández         $35

How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? Who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? In Fernández's novel, it is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.
>>Read an extract.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar                     $35

A young Muslim woman in Kolkata is accused of a terrorist outrage, in a novel about poverty and social aspiration that is also a moral drama. 

"Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism."
"Brilliant." —Guardian

"Indelible." —Washington Post

"Fierce and assured." —New York Times

How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson           $37

Swedish immigrant Kristin won't talk about the Project growing inside her. Her Brazilian-born Scottish boyfriend Ciaran won't speak English at all; he is trying to immerse himself in a Swedish språkbad language bath, to prepare for their future, whatever that means. Their Edinburgh flat is starting to feel very small. 

As this young couple is forced to confront the thing that they are both avoiding, they must reckon with the bigger questions of the world outside, and their places in it.
"How We Are Translated is the most contemporary of novels; set somehow both in the now and in the distant past; in one city that could be many cities, and in two different languages, though also in defiance of language, with as much focus on the silences between words as the words themselves. It's a novel that maintains just the right balance of oddity, intimacy and illumination. It's a novel that anyone interested in the future of the English novel needs to read!" —Sara Baume

"One of the gentlest and most patient, humane, and quirky things I have read in a long time. Hugely original." —Niamh Campbell

Poor by Caleb Femi             $28

"Lyrical, heart-breaking and hopeful, the Peckham poet’s debut collection celebrating the lives of young black boys and the architecture that shapes them." —Judges' citation for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize

>>Other books on the Folio Prize short list.

Murder in the Age of Enlightenment by Ryunosuke Akutagawa           $28

The stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of human desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, to a lantern festival in Tokyo, to the Emperor's court, they offer glimpses into moments of madness, murder, and obsession. Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, they unfold in elegant, sometimes laconic, gripping prose.
>>Read Thomas's review of Patient X, David Peace's outstanding. novel of Akutagawa's life. 

Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Will Stone          $28

In 1916 Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook containing twenty-two poems meticulously copied out in his own hand which bore the title Poems to Night. This cycle of poems are now thought to represent one of the key stages of the poet's development. Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume.

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow           $40
In 1877, Kate Edger became the first woman to graduate from a New Zealand university. The New Zealand Herald enthusiastically hailed her achievement as 'the first rays of the rising sun of female intellectual advancement'. Edger went on to become a pioneer of women's education in New Zealand. In 1883, she was the founding principal of Nelson College for Girls. She also worked to mitigate violence against women and children and to fortify their rights through progressive legislation. She campaigned for women's suffrage and played a prominent role in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and in Wellington's Society for the Protection of Women and Children. Later in life she advocated international diplomacy and co-operation through her work for the League of Nations Union.

A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago             $33

Frances Howard has beauty and a powerful family and is the most unhappy creature in the world. Anne Turner has wit and talent but no stage on which to display them. Little stands between her and the abyss of destitution. When these two very different women meet in the strangest of circumstances, a powerful friendship is sparked. Frankie sweeps Anne into a world of splendour that exceeds all she imagined—a Court whose foreign king is a stranger to his own subjects; where ancient families fight for power, and where the sovereign's favourite may rise and rise so long as he remains in favour. Based on the true scandal that rocked the court of James I.

The Octopus Man by Jasper Gibson           $33

Once an outstanding law student, Tom is now lost in the machinery of the British mental health system, talking to a voice no one else can hear: the voice of Malamock, the Octopus God—part-comforter, part-autarch, part-guide. After Tom is coerced into a drugs trial, his loving sister, along with his doctors and carers, all celebrate the loss of Malamock. However, Tom's own sense of relief soon turns to despair. He was Jacob, wrestling with the angel. Now he is just Tom, struggling on benefits. Tom decides to get his voice back.

"The Dharma Bums meet Clozapine." —DBC Pierre

Entitled: How male privilege hurts women by Kate Manne           $26

Philosopher Kate Manne offers a new framework for understanding misogyny. The idea that a privileged man is tacitly deemed to be owed something is a pervasive problem, manifesting in society in all sorts of unexpected and unrecognised ways. Manne shows that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels, and sheds new light on gender and power. 

The Arabesque Table: Contemporary recipes from the Arab world by Reem Kassis             $60

The Arabesque Table takes inspiration from the traditional food of the Arab world, weaving Reem Kassis's cultural knowledge with her contemporary interpretations of an ancient, diverse cuisine. She opens up the world of Arabic cooking today, presenting 130 delicious, achievable home recipes. Organised by primary ingredient, her narratives formed by her experiences and influences bring the dishes to life, as does the book's vivid photography. From the author of The Palestinian Table. 
>>"Food is more than just sustenance."

You Don't Belong Here: How three women rewrote the story of war by Elizabeth Becker           $37

Catherine Leroy, Frankie Fitzgerald and Kate Webb were the first female frontline journalists in the history of the US war reporting. Over the course of the Vietnam War they challenged the rules imposed on them in an effort to get the story straight. Kate Webb, an Australian reporter was captured by the Vietcong only to continue her reporting after her release. American Frankie Fitzgerald's coverage earned her bylines in The New Yorker, and she became the first female war reporter for the magazine. And at only twenty-two, the French Catherine Leroy was the only female photojournalist covering the war. 

Office by Sheila Liming          $22

From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's Office narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy.

>>Other 'Object Lessons'.

October Mourning: A song for Matthew Shepard by Lesléa Newman         $20

On the night of October 6, 1998, a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was lured from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to die. October Mourning, a novel in verse, is Lesléa Newman's response to the events of that day. The author creates fictitious monologues from various points of view, including the fence Matthew was tied to, the stars that watched over him, the deer that kept him company, and Matthew himself.

Game Changer by Neal Shusterman            $22

A football head injury triggers an interesting YA exploration of parallel worlds from the author of the 'Arc of Scythe' series. 

Seven (and a Half) Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett          $40

An excellent introduction to the latest developments in brain science. Why do we have brains, why are the formed the way that they are, how do our brains relate to our thoughts? 

I Am In Bed With You by Emma Barnes            $25
Playful and fluid but completely serious, Emma Barnes’s surreal poetry collection I Am in Bed with You leads us through the very personal worlds of sex, gender and the body. Barnes cracks jokes, makes us uncomfortable, shows us a little tenderness, leaves a lot unsaid and does it all with language that provokes and confounds.

How to Live. What to Do. In search of ourselves in life and literature by Josh Cohen          $40

What can Alice in Wonderland teach us about childhood? Could reading Conversations with Friends guide us through first love? Does Esther Greenwood's glittering success and subsequent collapse in The Bell Jar help us understand ambition? And what can we learn about death from Tolstoy? Not only does literature provide escapism and entertainment, it also holds a mirror up to our lives to show us aspects of ourselves we may not have seen or understood. From jealousy to grief, fierce love to deep hatred, our inner lives become both stranger and more familiar when we explore them through fiction.

Couch Fiction: A graphic tale of psychotherapy by Philippa Perry and Flo Perry          $48

Have you ever wanted to know what goes on in a psychotherapist's consulting room? This compelling study of psychotherapy in the form of a graphic novel vividly explores a year's therapy sessions as a search for understanding. 

"I loved it. I smiled and laughed. And nodded. One to read." —Susie Orbach

"Full or wit and good sense. Philippa is a tonic even if you're not her patient." —Rachel Cooke, Observer

>>Excavations of the mind. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #220 (12-3-21)

For new books and book news, read our latest newsletter. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth   {Reviewed by STELLA} Still residing in Japan this week, but flipping a century and a bit on, I’ve been walking with Alan Booth in The Roads to Sata. Booth walked the length of mainland Japan from its most northern tip Cape Soya to the southern Cape Sata in 1977. After living in Japan for seven years, in Tokyo, initially, to study theatre, and then writing for various newspapers and magazines, he felt he wanted to better understand the country he lived in, and had married into. First published in 1985, recently reissued, The Roads to Sata is a wonderful account of the ordinary and surprising. Eloquent and witty, Booth is keenly observant of the landscape, the culture and the people. His descriptions are vivid and honest, revealing the best, worst and curious of this time. 1970s Japan is moving fast—new highways, big industry, expanding cities—but retains a slower pace in the byways, on the old tracks, and in the villages that Booth passes through. Within a few pages, you will be hooked. By the landscape descriptions: “The mist lay so thick on the hills that it hid them, and the rain continued to flatten the sea.” “In the silent gardens of the old houses in Kakunodate the tops of the stone lanterns are lumpy and green, the stone wells drip with dark water that congeal in the summer heat. The moss is black-green and thick as a poultice.” By his hilarious and at times frustrating encounters: So many offers of a ride to the gaijin who wants to walk! “On the road into the city I was twice greeted in English. At a drive-in a young truck driver jumped out of his cab and said, ‘You, foot, yes, and good for walk, but sun day—rain day, oh, Jesus Christ!’ Further on, a businessman stopped his car to offer me a lift and, clearly, puzzled by my refusal, said, ‘Then what mode of transportation are you embarking?’ Japanese slipped out: ’Aruki desu.’ ‘Aruki?’ 'Aruki’. A digestive pause. ‘Do you mean to intend that you have pedestrianised?’ I nodded. He drove away, shaking his head.” By Booth’s observations of culture, both ancient and modern, of history and folklore: “But at the village of Kanagawa that night they were dancing. Four red demons with clubs made of baseball bats, a snow queen covered in silver cooking foil, a black nylon crow, three coal miners with lamps, a robot with a body of cardboard boxes—all danced in the small school playground, round the car whose battery powered the microphone into which a bent old woman was singing. Her only accompaniment was one taiko drum and the scattered clapping of the dancers.” With laugh out loud passages, his encounters with oddities on the road and in the ryokans (tradition inns) he stays in, as well as haunting and searingly honest moments as he meets ordinary people who reveal their personal histories, Booth relates his conversations with humility and insight. All this taken together with both the grind and beauty of walking for 128 days over 3300 km, makes The Roads to Sata an illuminating travelogue, vivid and rich—and all the more so for Alan Booth’s turns of phrase, superb language and witty style.

Book of the Week: The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter
In a condensed marvel of linguistic and imaginative virtuosity, Porter conjures the final workings of the artist's mind as he lies dying in a hospital in Spain. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
>>"My attempt to write as painting." 
>>"Francis Bacon was my guy."
>>A painterly surface. 
>>"Does the screaming pope have eyes?"
>>"A masterpiece in miniature."
>>"The loudest, rudest, drunkest, most sought-after British artist of the 20th century."
>>Your copy of the book. 
>>Read our reviews of Porter's previous book, Lanny. 
>>Grief is the Thing with Feathers. 

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter   {Reviewed by THOMAS} A slice from the rump of a pig, he thought, raw and pink and veined with fat or crisped like a piece of dirty cardboard, is there a patron saint for a pig in this condition, he wondered, some other Francis, all animals are meat, some antisaint worthy of the name, his name, some name, insistent on the name and possessed of the rare ability to display both sides of his face when viewed from any angle, we’re little more than meat, he thought, meat animated by who knows what, some electricity wanting nothing more than to expend itself, arking between terminals, blurring instants, do and be done, the pain of the building charge, insufferability, release, vacuity, the whole works, no respite, images decaying on the retina, imitations but imitations failed to such an extent that they resemble originality, a resemblance only, each staled from inception, rancid cigarette breath overlaid with peppermint or mince, rot, some carcass that no amount of blows can animate, the painting “pretending it confronted death when all it did was illustrate again and again a lazy fear of it,” as Porter puts in this little book The Death of Francis Bacon, Porter nonetheless obsessed, splicing himself into the mind of the painter as he lies on his death-bed in Spain, hospitalised, wheezing, morphined, memories rising, incohering, there is no doubt some degree of biographical knowledge on display but there is no need to recognise this, it is not conveyed and who cares in any case, he thought, the degree of Porter’s invention is of no importance, these words the words of the writer ventirloquising who, Bacon, himself, the paintings, ventriloquising the moment of painting, if that can be termed ventriloquising, not “an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak,” as Porter claims, or not in the sense that the paintings would or could or should speak to us and tell us anything other than the painting experienced from the point of view of the paint, not then representational but visceral, physical, coloured matter, paint has no interest in the image, such must be negotiated between the other parties, and there are many who would force meaning on the paint beyond the meaning it enjoys just by being spread when wet on canvas, or on whatever, “it’s an attempt to get at the sense of what is looming up behind the person being hurt,” Porter writes, “it’s an attempt to hold catastrophe still so you can get a proper sniff at it,” though I would say, he thought, it’s an attempt to decatastrophise through overemphasis, to forget through iteration, though it is unclear, he thought, whether these attempts are Bacon’s, Porter’s, the viewer’s, the reader’s, or whose, no matter, what if words came out where ordinarily you would expect paint, or vice versa, is this the nub of Porter’s project, he wondered, to reach into his subject and squeeze out words, not as he spoke but as he painted, “the mouth is the habit the eye has to teach,” writes Porter, words worked wet, out on the page, “it is exhausting to behold such huge quantities of paint being wasted,” writes Porter, perhaps as himself, but no such truck with his words, there on the page, each reading revealing a little less and what was there after all in the first place to reveal, this life, a little more than nothing but not much more.

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A hugely empathic AI, Klara is bought as an Artificial Friend for a girl suffering from an undefined illness. As the full extent of the girl's predicament becomes apparent, Klara, with her wonderful mixture of naivety and capacity, does all she can for the girl, and makes us question what it is to be human. Ishiguro's first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. 

 "People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love." —Anne Enright

>>Bomb under the table. 
>>"Oh you darling robot."

On We Go by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle            $35

This exquisite little hardback of 21 poems and 26 watercolour paintings is the result of a long-time poet-and-artist collaboration and grew out of their thinking about the natural world, childhood memories and thoughts about the climate change crisis. It’s part of a growing literary genre based on emerging forms of ecological thinking that cross genres and scientific disciplines. An adult picture book to be read aloud to all ages, and a gesture of playful joy, this small treasure can be enjoyed in one sitting and returned to on a regular basis.

>>Look inside. 

>>Meet the poet and the illustrator. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, In which four Russians give a masterclass in writing, reading, and life by George Saunders          $48

For the last twenty years, George Saunders (whose Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize) has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
>>Read our reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo. 

From AK79 to The Class of 81: Photos from 1978 to 1982 (and a few more) by Anthony Phelps            $79

In 1978 a young man began to take photographs of the bands that visited his school, playing lunchtime concerts. From there, Anthony Phelps followed the bands to the other venues they were playing and over the next five years, he visually documented one of the most exciting eras in New Zealand rock and roll history: the punk and post-punk years. The 40 bands featured include Toy Love, Androidss, The Scavengers, Pop Mechanix, The Terrorways, The Spelling Mistakes and The Screaming Meemees, as well as touring acts The Clash, Madness and The Ramones.
>>More about the book (and a few of the photographs). 

>>The AK79 album brought an urgent new musical sensibility to a wider audience. 

>>The Class of 81 concert and record took the racing pulse of a changing cultural scene. 
>>The Enemy live at the Beneficiaries' Club. 

>>Androidss. 

>>The Screaming Meemees. 

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks                $35

"I’d wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place – to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air." Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, then abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether – one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom? Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellín, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals. 

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford             $33

1944. It's a Saturday lunchtime on Bexford High Street. The Woolworths has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans, and a crowd has gathered to see the first new metal in a long time. Everything else has been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone. Incinerated. Atomised. Among that crowd were five little children. What future did they lose? The only way to know is 'to let run some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be'.

"A brilliant, capacious experiment with fiction. An audacious meditation on life and death." —Guardian

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen          $38

In this sequel to The Sympathiser, Nguyen takes up the story as the Sympathizer arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his re-education at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise—but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Granta 153: Second Nature edited by Isabella Tree          $28

This issue encapsulates the state of nature and our different cultural relationships with it worldwide. It features interviews with Amazonian shaman Manari Ushigua, Inuit activist Siila Watt-Cloutier and Indigenous elder Rod Mason; fiction by Caoilinn Hughes and Amy Leach; poetry by John Kinsella and Daisy Lafarge; and photography by Xavi Bou and Merlin Sheldrake. Plus, reportage and memoir by: Rebecca Priestley, Patrick Barkham, Robert Becker, Ellen Coon, Tim Flannery, Cal Flyn, Derek Gow, Trevor Goward, Barry Lopez, Dino Martens, Charles Massy, Callum Roberts, Judith D. Schwartz, Sue Stuart-Smith, Samanth Subramanian, Ken Thompson, and Adam Weymouth.

Sumac: Recipes and stories from Syria by Anas Atassi          $55

Over eighty recipes, both traditional and contemporary, both from Atassi's family and from various parts of a country bursting with rich culinary traditions. 

Is Capitalism Broken? by Yanis Varoufakis,  Arthur Brooks,  Katrina vanden Heuvel and David Brooks             $17

There is a growing belief that the capitalist system no longer works. Inequality is rampant. The environment is being destroyed for profits. In some Western nations, life expectancy is even falling. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. But for proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of progress, not just making all of us materially better off, but helping to address everything from women's rights to political freedoms. We seem to stand at a crossroads: do we need to fix the system as a matter of urgency, or would it be better to hold our nerve, or completely rethink our approaches? Four thinkers debate the issues. 

Bluffworld by Patrick Evans           $35

Who better than Patrick Evans to produce a savage and hilarious satirical on literary academia and the bullshit, envy and plagiarism that underlies its operations? 

Things OK with You? by Vincent O'Sullivan         $25

This foremost poet's first collection since 2016. 

Raids and Settlements: On Seamus Heaney as translator edited by Marco Sonzogni and Marcella Zanetti         $30

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of Heaney as translator. The authors have approached their contribution from different perspectives but are united by their fascination or preoccupation with the works of one of the greatest poets and poet-translators in the English language. This interdisciplinary combination of individual expertise and shared interest was essential to offer a holistic appreciation of Heaney's translations from fifteen languages, literatures and cultures.

The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt          $55

When interior designer Frida Ramstedt moved from a characterful old apartment to a functional new build, she started to think about design in a new way. Rather than relying on high ceilings and architectural features, she had to make full use of essential principles to transform a blank canvas into a cosy, attractive and harmonious home. In doing so, she distilled the secrets of successful interior design and styling. This is a book about what looks good and why, filled with practical tips and illustrations to help you work out what's best for your space and lifestyle—and to discover what your individual tastes really are.

Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano, illustrated by Sempé         $17

Catherine lives with her gentle father, Georges Certitude, who runs a shipping business in Paris with a failed poet named Casterade. Father and daughter share the simple pleasures of daily life: sitting in the church square, walking to school, going to her ballet class every Thursday afternoon. But just why did Georges change his name to Certitude? What kind of trouble with the law did Casterade rescue him from? And why did Catherine's ballerina mother leave to return to New York?

Ellis Island by Georges Perec            $28

Employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, Perec conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 and 1954, arrived in America as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: "To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up." A new edition to re-emphasise the importance of migrants and refugees to a host culture. 

Kia Whakanuia te Whenua: People, place, landscape edited by Carolyn Hill          $55

A collection of essays, poems, photographs and other texts challenging us to consider better ways of listening to and responding to the needs of our land, environment and waterways, and to find these solutions in Māori perspectives in a changing world. 

A Mother is a House by Aurore Petit               $30

A mother is a nest, a mirror, a moon. The baby sees their mother in every aspect of their day. As the pages go by, the child grows. The mother who was a refuge becomes a road, a story, and a show. On the final page, the child is ready to take their first steps. This beautifully illustrated story looks through the baby's eyes for an unexpected and affecting picture of parents and home. 

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura          $33

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits- it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly, how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

Lote by Shola von Reinhold             $36

Mathilda has long been enamored with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

Listed for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize. 

>>Encountering a baroque mind. 

Places of Poetry: Mapping the nation in verse by Paul Farley and Andrew McRae             $33

Arising from a public arts project which recorded submissions of poems associated with specific locations in Britain, the book presents the best poems of the 7500 submitted. Includes new work by Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield.

>>Visit the Places of Poetry website. 

>>Use the Nelson Poetry Map. 

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021 edited by Tracey Slaughter           $40

182 poems by 129 poets, including Elizabeth Morton, Michele Leggott, essa may ranapiri, Bob Orr, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Jordan Hamel, David Eggleton and Mere Taito, the winning entries in the Poetry New Zealand Prize, essays, and reviews of 25 new poetry books. Featured poet: Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor.

Where is the Dragon? by Leo Timmers            $20

The king can't sleep until the dragon is found. Luckily, three knights know everything about dragons and are armed to the teeth! Now they just have to find him. They set out into the night with a candle in hand. Soon they find something that looks very much like a dragon…

>>A day in the life of Leo Timmers. 
>>On translating the text. 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #219 (5.3.21)

Read our newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, about new books that have arrived this week, and about the short-listed books for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese woman and her worlds by Amy Stanley   {Reviewed by STELLA} An appealing history of Japan in the nineteenth history, Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a tale both personal and encompassing. Tsuneno is the daughter of a priest. Growing up in a small mountainous village, the temple is central to her life and expectations. Married at 12, life seems mapped out: she will be a diligent temple wife. Yet 15 years on and with no children in sight, she is sent home again with the divorce papers—not an uncommon occurrence in the nineteenth century, where women would be remarried—a failed relationship not necessitating disaster. Two more marriages down the road and the picture for Tsuneno isn’t quite as rosy, her family are losing patience with her and she has other ideas. Seeking independence, she goes against her family’s wishes and knowledge, pawns her belongings (mostly clothes), and makes her way to the city of Edo in the care of a family acquaintance—someone she thought she could trust. In a relatively short time, Tsuneno’s world is turned upside down. Not only has the trustworthy friend betrayed her, physically and emotionally, but he has also left her in financial peril and abandoned her in the city. Living in a tiny room, at the mercy of her landlord, without money or warm clothes, bedding or utensils, she is desperate to find work. Her dreams of a good position in a Shogun household are remote, but she does get a job working long hours as a housemaid. It isn’t ideal, but it enables her to stay in Edo, a lively city with prospects. Tsuneno rises and falls alongside the city. This is the story of a woman and the story of a city, Edo, at the end of a golden age, known as the Great Peace, a time just prior to the arrival of the American gunship and Commodore Perry. As we read we fall into step beside Tsuneno, seeing the informal structures of the city—the migrant workers and peddlers— that underpins the economic structure of the more formal organisations, the geisha and the theatre performers that brighten the evenings, the temple priests, the samurai of all classes (one of whom will impact this woman’s life more than she expected) and the hierarchies of the ruling shogunate classes. Pieced together from letters (between Tsueno and her family), family records kept at the temples, combined with historical events (famine, fire, political machinations) and research, Amy Stanley creates a gripping account of a woman who chose between family and freedom, who made the most of the hand she was dealt. Rich in detail with its vivid descriptions of the environs (urban and rural), and lively portraits of Tsuneno, her family and the people of Edo, Stranger in a Shogun’s City is a compelling history of an ordinary woman in a fascinating time and place.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Even on a blue day you could tell this sky had a knack for breaking into storms,” she writes, she someone, she the pharmacist-to-be, as she arrives in the Alpine town, a town anyway that seems like an Alpine town, high up, reached only by funicular railway, there’s a certain steepness involved, the town is depopulating, certainly you have the feeling that the only people living there are those you are aware of at any given time and that soon they too may be gone. When the narrator arrives she remembers visiting the town as a child in the company of her uncle and her mother at a time when her mother was ill but her uncle did not yet know that she was ill. From what has she run away to come here this time, or what has she otherwise left if it is not the case that she has run away? She takes a job as a pharmacist at the pharmacy owned by a Mr Malone, it seems she was a pharmacy student before she came here, though the main tasks of a pharmacist, at least in Mr Malone’s pharmacy, are not the main tasks of a pharmacist as we know them although certainly allied to those tasks. Mr Malone “believed that a pharmacist’s role was to enhance the locals’ potential by listening carefully,” to allow others to tell their stories, to reduce one’s presence to that of a listener only, to abnegate oneself, “the more absent I seemed, the more they talked,” she says, having a natural talent for the work of disappearing, a natural talent for undoing what we ordinarily think of as existing. “It occurred to me,” she says, “that there was something reassuring about the obviously dangerous Mr Malone to someone like me who worried all the time.” He is corrosive to her idea of herself; she wants to be corroded. Mr Malone eventually leaves the pharmacy to her and stands for mayor, though he hardly leaves, she supports his campaign, there hardly seems to be another candidate, Mr Malone becomes mayor, still he in the centre of his coterie of occupationally defined men, he is the centre of some void sucking at her always. Was there really a wolf-beast once in the town that ate little girls? Somehow it’s a fable but not exactly a fable, more a dream, everything is described with the same degree of portentious detail and the same lack of overall shape as an account of a dream, a dream in this case from which the dreamer, the young pharmacist, cannot awaken, from which waking will never be possible. Within this dream that the dreamer does not realise is a dream, the dreamer struggles to differentiate the actual from her reveries, the stories get away from her, “I was easy to derail,” she says. “I derailed myself on my own. Unless I was busy I was distracted by daydreams,” though she and we struggle and fail to tell what is actually the case and what is dreamed, the same residue remains in either case, the same damage done. “After I articulated this sort of reverie I felt a sense of revulsion,” she says. “I had started to feel as though I wouldn’t wake up, was scared I would disappear.” All stories are told stories, but the compounding of detail here erodes knowledge rather than constructs it, all detail is a subtraction, a relinquishment, written and rid of, the shape of things is lost, the self annulled. “I experimented with how little I could let pass over my face,” she says. All memory and identity are stripped away by iteration, vacancy expands, pushing everything out of sight and into non-existence, if there is such a place to be pushed. Even the descriptions eventually become descriptions primarily of absence: “The room had no decoration, nothing personal, no photographs of strict-looking characters standing in front of wrought-iron gates,” the narrator nothing more than a mirror: “I also was a reflective surface,” no longer sure even how to present herself before the customers of the pharmacy, “walking around in a long pause, an ellipsis,” her escape from herself complete, she has become the phantom she has unconsciously always sought to become. “All feelings would pass if I didn’t engage with them,” she says. “I have a weak spot, I had taken to telling people, a magic phrase that I used to trick my way out of an emotional hole,” out of existing, now ready to leave even this, the town of her attenuation. When her uncle comes to collect her he remembers nothing, he is a stranger to the town, he too has lost his history, he too has become nothing more than a label on an absence. And we are left with nothing, nothing that is except an oddly-shaped void, mountain air,  sublime sentences, surprising details, words, phrases, oddness coming at us like something beautiful, sharp and cold. On the iterative level, Elven’s book has something of the disconcerting clarity of the work of Fleur Jaeggy, but more as if a work of brilliance had been translated a little awkwardly and inaccurately and somehow enhanced by the process no matter what was lost, though if this is a translated work, and perhaps all works are translated works in the way in which this work is a translated work, it is not a work translated between languages but between minds if there are such things as minds. Elven describes a new employee at the pharmacy as “perching his opinions at the end of pointed lips,” and how, during a storm, the storm promised perhaps by blue skies mentioned earlier, “we saw slanted people walking along the grass, trees gesticulating like conjurors, the wind throwing water off the river.” We may forget the sentences but we are left with the strange effect upon us of these sentences, just as we may forget a dream but still be left strangely affected.

NEW RELEASES
Click through to reserve your reading!

Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre         $34

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

>>Read an extract. 

>>Read Thomas's reviews of Blue Self-Portrait. 

Dwelling in the Margins: Art publishing in Aotearoa edited by Katie Kerr        $45

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.

Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras           $40

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

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan           $35

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.

>>Short-listed for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

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. 

I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland         $20

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."

A River Called Time by Courttia Newland           $33

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|

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.

The Penguin Book of OuLiPo edited by Philip Terry     $26

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.

The Flying Couch, A graphic memoir by Amy Kurzweil           $40

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 to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm          $25

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.

With a Little Kelp from Our Friends: The secret life of seaweed by Mathew Bate and Liz Rowland         $35

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.

>>Beneath the sea. 

Tom Stoppard, A life by Hermione Lee       $70

"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

>>Read an extract. 

>>Noises off. 

L.E.L: The lost life and scandalous death of the 'female Byron' by Lucasta Miller         $30

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

A Chronology of Film by Ian Haydn Smith          $45

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

The African Lookbook: A visual history of 100 years of African women by Catherine E. McKinley         $55

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. 

>>Find out more about the book. 

Book of the Week. What are the Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops, and, more importantly, which kind are you? Shaun Bythell, who brought us the cuttingly accurate Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, has devised this hilarious handbook to the types of people booksellers encounter every day. He has some words about booksellers too...
>>"Pantomime misanthropy tempered with bursts of sweetness."
>>Bythell attempts to justify the book. 
>>Live (eventually) at the Wigtown Book festival. 
>>The perils of being a bookseller. 
>>The bookshops of Wigtown. 
>>Diary of a Bookseller
>>Confessions of a Bookseller
>>How to fix a Kindle. 
>>And a Kindle Fire. 
>>A shop with books in. 
>>As it happens. 
>>Your copy of Seven Kinds. 
>>To Shaun with love (more bookselling truths (>>and there's a book of these, too!))

 Find out about the books short-listed for the 2021 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS!

Read the judges' citations below and click through to our website to obtain your copies. 

Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourite book in each category and to go in the draw for a copy of each of the eventual winners. 

JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION

Bug Week, And other stories by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press)

Atmospheric and refined, Bug Week is compelling from start to finish. A tightly wound collection of short stories which explore the weird, the eerie and the mordantly funny, there’s a sense of quiet unease and slow-burning rage. A talking albatross at an open mic night, an envious sibling, a desperate ex-lover and a melancholy brothel owner are some of the characters encountered in this collection, which delves into the female experience, anger, male entitlement and restless malaise.

Nothing to See by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press)

Looking at surveillance, identity, gender and people living on the margins under the fallout of capitalism, Nothing to See follows the lives of Peggy and Greta, who are recovering alcoholics (or rather, one alcoholic who has splintered off into two). And just when you think you’ve cracked what is going on, Pip Adam turns everything in this dazzling novel inside out, leaving the reader momentarily disoriented but exhilarated.

Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press)

This transcendent novel about ‘wilful blindness’ is written as a series of letters, interviews and diary entries told from four different angles — the newly-appointed camp administrator at Buchenwald labour camp Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, his wife Frau Greta Hahn, Dr Lenard Weber, who has invented a machine called a Sympathetic Vitaliser which he believes can cure cancer by using a process called ‘remote sympathy’, and the collective reflections of Weimar citizens. Immersive, profound and plotted with a breathtaking dexterity, Remote Sympathy is vividly evoked.

Sprigs by Branavan Gnanalingam (Lawrence & Gibson)

A searing novel which examines violence, racism and toxic masculinity, Sprigs looks at the consequences of a sexual assault at a high school rugby game aftermatch, and the ripple effect of trauma that follows. Brannavan Gnanalingam deftly brings together a hefty cast of characters, skillfully orchestrating multiple voices and perspectives. Written with sensitivity, nuance and not without bursts of comic relief, Sprigs is an unflinching novel which forces us to reckon with uncomfortable truths about power and privilege in Aotearoa.

MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY

Funkhaus by Hinemoana Baker (Victoria University Press)

The language of Funkhaus pumps and flows as if the collection were a great red heart. Hinemoana Baker’s poems reference Sylvia Plath, Wi Parata, aunties, and P.J. Harvey. Vacuum cleaners, dogs, and polaroids also appear in imaginative ways. The book’s shifts in subject matter, migratory metaphors and language encompass satirical political poetry, tender love lyrics and memorable street tunes. Like the emanations from the radio station of the title, these poetry messages travel; from Lake Geneva to Waitangi, Berlin to Ihumātao, Funkhaus transmits an unstaunchable array of emotions in rhythmic form.

Magnolia 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles (Seraph Press)

Magnolia 木蘭 grows and blooms through mother-daughter conversations across generations, cultures and languages. Seeking to understand her place in the world, a young writer journeys from New Zealand to China, England to Malaysia, from film to contemporary art, and from English to Mandarin, Hakka and Māori. Subtly but insistently exploding prejudices and expectations, Nina Mingya Powles presents a poetic mosaic that more than lives up to the brilliant elegance, or mingya 明雅, promised by her Chinese name.

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan (Dead Bird Books) 

Mohamed Hassan shapes the emotional outpouring of performance and the fast footwork of slam into perfectly timed poems of political commentary, personal awareness and metaphorical virtuosity. Refusing the easy refrains of nationalism, National Anthem syncopates family history, displacement and personal trauma with a devastating commentary on racism’s most ugly manifestations. It mixes compromise and commitment, Egypt and Aotearoa, English and Arabic, laughter and anger, skepticism and love to sound out a new beat for poetry in this country and beyond.

The Savage Coloniser Book by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University Press)

Tusiata Avia turns her vociferous intellect and satirical vehemence to recording recent events and finds a base space for poetry in which to pick up the pieces and keep on moving. While furiously rejecting the destructive legacies of colonialism, her poems acknowledge that contradictions live at the centre of contemporary commitments. From garrulously hilarious observations to expressions of profound grief, the collection activates her insights, reforming our consciousness of what constitutes poetry as she goes.

BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

An Exquisite Legacy: The life and art of New Zealand naturalist G.V. Hudson by George Gibbs (Potton & Burton)

George Hudson’s grandson has produced a glorious tribute to his grandfather, not only one of New Zealand’s greatest naturalists but also an artist of dazzling skill. In reproducing so many of these paintings for the first time, the author is scientifically and artistically scrupulous, with detailed captions and superb production values. Crucially, this is also an enlightening and lovingly written biography — we are drawn inside the world of an insect-mad fellow who became a significant figure in our natural history landscape.

Hiakai: Modern Māori cuisine by Monique Fiso (Godwit, Penguin Random House)

Hiakai is no ordinary cookbook but rather one which, unusually, lets us see our natural environment with fresh eyes. Coming from award-winning chef Monique Fiso, it is the result of years of labour and research into Māori cuisine and all it represents. Passionately written, well edited, beautifully illustrated and presented, Hiakai weaves tikanga, history, cultivation, foraging and hunting into an influential classic of the kitchen, and also of cultural history; in these recipes Fiso shows the range of indigenous ingredients with sophisticated flair.

Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists by Leonard Bell (Auckland University Press)

This elegantly produced collection of photographs, the bulk of which have never been published before, is exquisitely designed and edited — and the image reproduction is exceptional. The accompanying text breathes life into these individuals and, thanks to the layout, Marti Friedlander’s uncanny ability to capture the spirit of her subjects shines through. With images of over 110 artists, photographed over several decades, this important volume is a wonderful cultural account of mid-to-late twentieth century creative life in New Zealand.

Nature—Stilled by Jane Ussher (Te Papa Press)

This sumptuously beautiful book presents a wondrous selection of specimens from Te Papa’s natural history collection. Brilliantly photographed and produced, it highlights not just the breadth of these collections but also the knowledge and passion of those who care for them. Jane Ussher is one of Aotearoa’s most accomplished photographers and she has clearly approached this project with great respect and enthusiasm for the exhibits which represent our vanishing natural world, and have never been more worthy of our attention.

GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press)

This compulsively readable collection charts the inner life of someone who often feels at odds with those around her. Madison Hamill traces her sense of difference in fresh, razor-sharp prose, via encounters ranging from a bullying primary school teacher, whom she quietly bests, to the clients at an under-funded drug clinic in Cape Town, for whom she can do nothing. It is as memorable for her unblinking view of herself as it is for her compassionate awareness of others’ struggles.

Te Hāhi Mihinare: The Māori Anglican Church by Hirini Kaa (Bridget Williams Books)

This is both a history of an institution and a corrective for ‘fatal impact’ narratives in which Māori are presented as the passive victims of colonisation; Hirini Kaa shows how iwi adapted the new religion to make it their own. His emblematic example is the haka ‘Te Pārekereke’, which celebrates the arrival of Christianity and the gift of seedling kumara — both of which promise a new start. Performing the haka acknowledges the renegotiation of mātauranga through Christianity, and embraces both continuity and change.

The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A biographical portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan (Penguin Random House)

In this exemplary instance of the biographer’s art, Vincent O’Sullivan transcends what in other hands may have proved an insurmountable obstacle — writing about an artist without illustrations of the work — by producing a life story that ‘feeds back’ into the imagery, deepening and enriching all subsequent encounters. He has given us a sensitive, meticulously researched portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists.

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books)

The question at the heart of educationalist Alison Jones’s multi-stranded memoir is what it means, for her, to be Pākehā: a non-Māori New Zealander who belongs nowhere else. It is a coming-of-age story, a family story, and a story of place. It also charts a personal journey at a time of intellectual foment, when making a difference meant protesting. Above all, it’s about friendship, and about learning how to listen in order to work collaboratively towards positive change.

Use the VOLUME OCKHAMETER to vote for your favourite book in each category and to go in the draw for a copy of each of the eventual winners. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #218 (26.2.21)

Find out about new books and book news in our latest newsletter!

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

One of a Kind: A story about sorting and classifying by Neil Packer     {Reviewed by STELLA} Big beautiful children’s books are beguiling and informative. One Of A Kind is one such book. Opening the cover reveals endpapers that I would have spent hours looking at when I was young. An array of small drawings of objects and animals, food and buildings loosely circled with curly arrows making connections, gives a taste of what is to follow: a wondrous selection of objects, and the relationships that particular objects have to each other. This is a book of classifications, of organising that is sure to please a young mind and lead to explorations of subjects as diverse as musical instruments, the family tree and cheese. It starts with Avro walking along with his musical instruments—maybe on the way to a class. Turn the page and here is his family tree right back to his great-greats and branching in all directions—with a clear visual explanation of the various sorts of cousins (first cousin, second, third along with first cousin once removed, second once removed, etc). Next we get to meet his cat, Malcolm, and then, of course, Malcolm’s family of cats. There are ones you know—cheetah, lynx and tiger—but what about the sand cat, fishing cat and kodkod? And all these people and cats you have met belong to the wider group—the animal kingdom (species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, animal kingdom). Packer goes on to classify a few other things, arranging them in their groups, actions and linkages. Musical instruments (wind, string, electrophones, percussion) from the voice to the bombarde to the hurdy-gurdy to drum machine and the cabasa. Vehicles—choose your means of transport. The tool shed—learn your hammers! Clouds—sky-gazing becomes a new adventure spotting the cirrus, nimbostratus and altocumulus. Buildings by use, age and material will start the conversation of form and function. How well do you know your apples? And then the books at the library—classifications galore. Avro finds the art books—sorted into their periods and styles each with an apt feline illustration. After we follow Avro through his day’s explorations, there are explanatory pages about each section and what it means to sort things into groups—how that makes sense of the world. And how in all this wide world with all the different things—some strange, others familiar, some opposites, many similar—there is just one unique you. One Of A Kind is a book for curious minds, with its striking illustrations and excellent classifications.    >>Order your copy of this book.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Calamities by Renee Gladman   {Reviewed by THOMAS} I began the day remembering, or what for me passes for remembering, or at least attempting to perform what passes for me for remembering, the book I had read, a torrent of short essays written by Renee Gladman, each of which begins with, I began the day. The essays, or what pass for Gladman as essays, start out being about not very much, small ordinary particulars of Gladman’s life, or small observations such as a poet might make about the ordinary particulars of life, but really they are not so much about these things as they are about the writing about these things, that is to say about the relationship of a writer to her experience and to her work and about her trying to decide what sort of relationship there might be, both actually and ideally, between this experience of hers and this work. The essays that start out being about not very much end up being about even less or rather more, depending on your point of view, depending on whether you think the universals that open from particulars lie within them or beyond them. Gladman is concerned not so much with the signified, or even with the signifier, as she is with the act of signification, the act of conduction which causes, or allows, a spark to sometimes leap across. Gladman’s touch is light, and she constructs some beautiful sentences, and the sparks leap often, and she usually avoids being precious. In the final, numbered, section of the book, Gladman ties the compositional knot as tight as it can be tied, removing content almost entirely from her writing other than the act itself of writing. “I was a body and it was a page, and we both had our proverbial blankness.” What is her relationship to the text she produces, irrespective of the content of that text? “ I didn’t know whether at some point in my past, perhaps at the very moment that I set out to write, the page had fallen out of me or I had risen out of it.” She relates her prolonged rigours in attempting to find the essence, so to call it, of writing, to reduce writing to the irreducible, the making of a mark, the drawing of writing. “Language was beautiful exposed; it was like a live wire set loose, a hot wire, burning, leaving a trace. The wire was a line, but because it was electrified it wouldn’t lie still: it thrashed, it burned, it curled and uncurled around itself. … I was amazed that I was talking about wires when really I was talking about prose.” I’m not sure that the making of a mark is the irreducible essence of writing, but it is the irreducible essence of something, something which may perhaps be taken for some aspect of writing, at least in the physical sense. But maybe this is what Gladman is trying to isolate and understand, or to split, the duality between content and form, literature’s version of the mind-body problem (or, rather, the mind-body calamity). Although writing is all her art, Gladman wants to reach the limits of this art, of narrative, of words, of the act of writing, “writing so as not to write, so to find the limit (that last line) beyond which the body is free to roam outside once more.” >>Order your copy of this book.