NEW RELEASES

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami            $45

The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself.
>>Eight ways of looking at Haruki Murakami. 

The Things We've Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo        $40

A novrl in three parts, The Things We've Seen is a dazzling and anarchic exploration of social relations which offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of humanity, history, violence, art and science. The first part follows a writer who travels to the small, uninhabited island of San Simon, where he witnesses events which impel him on a journey across several continents, chasing the phantoms of nameless people devastated by violence. The second book is narrated by Kurt, the fourth astronaut who secretly accompanied Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on their mythical first voyage to the moon. Now living in Miami, an ageing Kurt revisits the important chapters of his life: from serving in the Vietnam War to his memory of seeing earth from space. In the third part, a woman embarks on a walking tour of the Normandy coast with the goal of re-enacting, step by step, the memory of another trip taken years before. On her journey along the rugged coastline, she comes across a number of locals, but also thousands of refugees newly arrived on Europe's shores, whose stories she follows on the TV in her lodgings.

"There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too. This novel, which ranges across the world and beyond it, is hugely ambitious in scope. It’s a weird, recursive, paranoiac, funny, menacing and thrilling book." —Chris Power
>>A trick mirror held up to history. 

>>The B-side of war. 
>>Read an extract. 

More Favourable Waters: Aotearoa poets respond to Dante's Purgatory edited by Marco Sonzogni and Timothy Smith          $25

Each of the 33 poets has written a poem of 33 lines inspired by and including a short passage from one of the 33 cantos of Dante's Purgatory, for the 700th anniversary of his death. Airini Beautrais, Marisa Cappetta, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Mary Cresswell, Majella Cullinane, Sam Duckor-Jones, Nicola Easthope, David Eggleton, Michael Fitzsimons, Janis Freegard, Anahera Gildea, Michael Harlow, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Anna Jackson, Andrew Johnston, Tim Jones, Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, Hugh Lauder, Vana Manasiadis, Mary McCallum, Elizabeth Morton, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Robin Peace, Helen Rickerby, Reihana Robinson, Robert Sullivan, Steven Toussaint, Jamie Trower, Tim Upperton, Sophie van Waardenberg, Bryan Walpert, Sue Wootton.

Consent by Vanessa Springora              $35

Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France's most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her forties and the director of one of France's leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story. Devastating in its honesty, Springora's memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man. Drawing parallels between children's fairy tales, French history and the author's personal life, Consent offers insights into the meaning of love and consent, the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women's lives.
>>On the limits of sexual freedom. 
>>Breaking news: France changes its laws. 

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler         $33

A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell. 

"Fake Accounts is a novel about the enigmatical spectacle of our extremely online world that is itself both enigmatic and spectacular – a dark comedy about a dark time, and a prismatically intelligent work of art. Brilliant." —Guardian

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn            $37

An unsparing yet curiously sympathetic novel of ideas, brain science, love, capital and rewilding from the author of the remarkable 'Patrick Melrose' novels. 

"More humorous but just as intellectually inclined as Richard Powers and David Mitchell, among other contemporaries, St. Aubyn explores human foibles even as he brilliantly takes up headier issues of the human brain in sickness and in health. A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom." —Kirkus

Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind by Courtney Sina Meredith               $30

A beautifully presented collection of surprising and shifting poems, focused on connection and displacement, the blurring between internal landscapes and longed-for realities.

"Courtney Sina Meredith is one of New Zealand's most talented and influential authors. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind will find an eager audience." —Paula Morris. 

"Courtney Sina Meredith has grown a distinctive voice. Her arrangements are formally inventive. She surprises in ways that writers ought to." —Lloyd Jones

Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý         $35

Malmö, Sweden. A cellist meets a spun-out junkie. That could have been me. His mind starts to glitch between his memories and the avant-garde music he loves, and he descends into his past, hearing all over again the chaotic song of his youth. He emerges to a different sound, heading for a crash. From sprawling housing projects to underground clubs and squat parties, Wretchedness is a blistering trip through the underbelly of Europe's cities.

>>Listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize. 

Quantum of Dante edited by Marco Sonzogni          $40

Limited, numbered edition. 

"In order to transform a work into a cult object, you must be able to take it to pieces, disassemble it, and unhinge it in such a way that only parts of it are remembered, regardless of their original relationship with the whole." — Umberto Eco

A typographical intervention in Dante's text, with illustration by Art Sang and book design by Sally Greer, reveals an entomological dimension to the work while leaving the text both entirely unchanged and strangely transformed. 

Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley             $35

Pungent, steamy, insatiable Soho; the only part of London that truly never sleeps. Tourists dawdling, chancers skulking, addicts shuffling, sex workers strutting, punters prowling, businessmen striding, the homeless and the lost. Down Wardour Street, ducking onto Dean Street, sweeping into L'Escargot, darting down quiet back alleyways, skirting dumpsters and drunks, emerging on to raucous main roads, fizzing with energy and riotous with life. On a corner, sits a large townhouse, the same as all its neighbours. But this building hosts a teeming throng of rich and poor, full from the basement right up to the roof terrace. Precious and Tabitha call the top floors their home but it's under threat; its billionaire-owner Agatha wants to kick the women out to build expensive restaurants and luxury flats. Men like Robert, who visit the brothel, will have to go elsewhere. Those like Cheryl, who sleep in the basement, will have to find somewhere else to hide after dark. But the women won't go quietly. Soho is their turf and they are ready for a fight.

"Hot Stew is expansive and ribald where Elmet, set in rural Yorkshire, was claustrophobic and restrained. It’s ambitious, clever, brilliant and very funny. It shows what happens when an author, rather than letting expectations weigh upon her, uses them to catapult her writing to a whole new plane." —Guardian

>>Read our reviews of Elmet. 

How to Be Animal: A new history of what it means to be human by Melanie Challenger           $33

Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal writes a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this psychology evolved, the book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the ways we distance ourselves from other species.

“Melanie Challenger’s wonderful book teaches me this: our blazing continuity with the depth of time and the whole of life. It is a huge, complex and triumphant thing: challenging, but also celebratory, courageous, mournful and apprehensive. Her language is lovely: exact and lyrical and sparklingly full of suggestion and implication. It is a hymn to generosity. I know it will be something I will return to again and again.” —Adam Nicholson
>>How to be a trailer. 

>>Do we need to rediscover our animal selves? 

Breaking Things at Work: Why the Luddites were right about why you hate your job by Gavin Mueller            $33

In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. Breaking Things at Work is a rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. 

In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard           $48

Essays ranging from intensely personal readings of literature, philosophy and art, to the limits on privacy, how we view ourselves and the world, and how our daily and creative lives intertwine.

The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran           $24

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach." Cioran is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing).

My Beautiful Island: From England to New Zealand via Hong Kong and a war by Chris Potter         $40

Chris Potter was born in Hong Kong just prior to the 1941 Japanese invasion and spent most of his first four years in Stanley Internment Camp before being repatriated to England and then emigrating to New Zealand in 1948. This illustrated book springs from his mother's journals and letters, and outlines also her ongoing activity opposing nationalism and racism and promoting women's rights and international co-operation.

The Who's Who of Grown-Ups by Owen Davey            $50

What does a soccer player or surfer actually need? What is the robe of the samurai called and what is the archaeologist packing next to her for her next expedition? What occupations and hobbies do adults have and what do they need? With this large-format picture book, small readers get to know different professions and leisure activities and the necessary objects. From clothing to accessories to work tools, Owen Davey uses graphic illustrations to present a wide range of leisure activities and professions. This large-format book simplifies and explains what you need for it.

Wild Seas to Greenland by Rebecca Hayter           $40

Hayter's gripping account of four months spent voyaging into the Arctic Circle with 1994 Whitbread Round the World Race winner Ross Field. 
>>"Just tell me I'm not going to die!"

The Pattern Seekers: A new theory of human invention by Simon Baron-Cohen           $48

Why can humans alone invent? In this book, psychologist and renowned autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen puts forward a bold new theory: because we can identify patterns, specifically if-and-then patterns. And he argues that the genes for this unique ability overlap with the genes for autism. From the first musical instrument to the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions, Baron-Cohen shows how this unique ability has driven human progress for 70,000 years. By linking one of our greatest human strengths with a condition that is so often misunderstood, The Pattern Seekers challenges us to think differently about those who think differently.

City Monster by Reza Farazmand             $40

A graphic novel set in a world of rather ordinary supernatural creatures, following a young monster who moves to the city. As he struggles to figure out his future, his new life is interrupted by questions about his mysterious roommate—a ghost who can't remember the past. Joined by their neighbor, a centuries-old vampire named Kim, they explore the city, meeting a series of strange and spooky characters and looking for answers about life, memories, and where to get a good beer.
>>Poorly Drawn Lines.

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #224 (9.4.21)

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

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar    {Reviewed by STELLA} Writing a comment on Facebook could land you in a whole heap of trouble. Particularly if you are young, Muslim, female, and poor. Jivan lives in the slums of Kolkata. She’s been lucky: attended school as a charity case, passed her year 10 exams (just) and now has a job in a department store. Saving up her meagre wages, she has just got herself a shiny new phone. When a shocking incident happens at the train station near her home, she is horrified not only by the actions of the terrorists but also by the inaction of the police. It is her criticism of the police on the social media platform and the subsequent reactions from others that cause the perfect storm. A storm that puts her firmly in the view of the authorities. Arrested as an accomplice on the flimsiest of grounds, Jivan finds herself in a precarious position attempting to prove her innocence. With a public braying for someone to blame, the police wanting a criminal, and a political election in the midst of it all, the situation easily escalates. Jivan’s hopes lie with the testimonies of two people. PT Sir, her former PE teacher at the girl’s school, and Lovely, a hijra, who she had been teaching English. These character references could make a difference and get her out from behind bars. Yet, as you can imagine, Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, won’t let Jivan off the hook so easily, nor release PT Sir and Lovely, each of whom have their own issues to deal with, from some difficult dilemmas. This is a story of injustice, corruption, kickbacks, political expediency, and social positioning told with a forcefulness (not surprisingly, Majumdar’s novel has been met with both praise and criticism in India) and an observant eye. It’s emotionally charged, as well as subtly wry. The small descriptive moments carry weight without being heavy. The stories of the three main characters in this moral tale are all compelling and the interplay between the perspectives keeps you engaged in all, not just one of them. From Jivan’s experience in jail and with her lawyer and her internal hopes and disappointments to Lovely’s dream to be an actress, her ‘family’ of friends as they navigate begging on the street, entertaining and blessing newborns or the newly wed for a small fee, to PT Sir’s ambition for a sense of importance (to be noticed) and a better life, we are given a microcosmic view of the dilemmas, ironies and inequalities of this city with its class systems, extreme poverty, rising middle class, cultural complexities and political machinations. With comparisons to Jhumpa Lahiri and Yaa Gyasi in reviews, A Burning is a worthy contender for the praise. It also brought to mind Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire in style and content. Powerful and unsettling.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

The Cemetery at Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici   {Reviewed by THOMAS} Meaning, in literature as in life, is to be found in its form rather than in its content. This subtly disconcerting novella, told almost entirely in the habitual past tense (“he would”, “he used to”), portrays how memory works as an endlessly repeated palimpsest, constantly erasing and overwriting the impress of actual events, at the same time and by the same procedure both providing and preventing access to the past. The tension between what is erased and what cannot be erased intensifies through the novella, which assembles its layers of narration as if gleaned from conversation by a guest in the house in Wales of a translator and his wife, but somehow at the same time providing access to the private thoughts and self-narratives of the translator. Josipovici’s lightness and fluidity moving between speech, reported speech and thought, and his remarkable ability to encompass many versions of a story in one text, is alluded to by the translator as we learn of his fantasies of drowning himself in the Seine after he moved to Paris following the death of his first wife: “He knew such feelings were neurotic, dangerous even, but he was not unduly worried, sensing that it was better to indulge them than to try and eliminate them altogether. After all, everyone has fantasies. In the one life there are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies, he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death.” It is the death of the translator’s first wife that the text constantly attempts to avoid but toward which it is constantly pulled. The translator takes refuge in the stories of others to provide relief from his own. “It was only when the meaning of what he was translating began to seep through to him, he said, that he found it difficult.” After her death he moves from London to Paris, experiences detachment and detachment from detachment. “Sometimes, as he was walking through the Parisian streets, he would suddenly be seized with the feeling that he was not there, that all this was still in the future or else in the distant past. He would examine this feeling with detachment, as if it belonged to someone else, and then walk on.” Some experiences leave a wound, however, that is not easily erased, or which one is too attached to to erase, such as the wound on the thigh the narrator receives during an encounter with a young woman in a beret about whom little else has been retained. “We’ve all got something like that somewhere on our bodies. Maybe if we got rid of it we wouldn’t be ourselves any more.” Moments of the past sit with specific sharpness in the generalisation of the habitual past tense narration which seeks but fails to erase them, to keep the narrator functioning at the cost of the events makes him himself. “Listen to him, [his second wife] would say. He never sticks to the subject but always manages to generalise. It’s another way of avoiding life.” But the unspeakable pulls so hard upon the narrative that does not speak of it that that narrative becomes patterned entirely by that which it does not represent. “There are times when the order you have so carefully established seems suddenly unable to protect you from the darkness.” The unassimilable specifics of the circumstances of his first wife’s death start to show through, and our suspicions are both intensified and undermined by the means by which we form them. We are left, as is the translator, in the words of a poem by du Bellay that he translates, “at the mercy of the winds, / Sitting at the tiller in a ship full of holes.”

NEW RELEASES 

Devil's Trumpet by Tracey Slaughter          $30

When the stars were rhinestones. When your car was a blue Holden god. When kisses spread to your back teeth, marathons of sucking. When we pashed through jokes, through tunes, through homework, through the leftovers we shovelled out our schoolbags. When you let me tattoo you with talk. Thirty-one new stories from the author of Deleted Scenes for Lovers.

"If Slaughter is writing from the black block in her chest, she is also speaking directly into yours." —Charlotte Graham-McLay

On the Line: Notes from a factory by Joseph Ponthus            $35

Factory you shall never have my soul
I am here
And I count for so much more than you
And I count so much more because of you
Thanks to you 

Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line—the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces created by his insistent return to a new line of text—mirroring his continued return to the production line—we discover the woman he loves, the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the smell of the sea. A poet's ode to manual labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable.

The Back of the Painting: Secrets and stories from art conservation by Linda Waters, Sarah Hillary and Jenny Sherman          $45

Behind the scenes with the experts on famous paintings. The seal of the Prince of Yugoslavia, the icon that protected persecuted Russians, Monets repurposed canvas, the excised first wife, the stolen Tissot—all these stories can be found on the backs of paintings in New Zealand art museums. This fascinating book by three painting conservators explores the backs of 33 paintings, ranging from 15th century artworks to the present day, from Claude Lorrain to Ralph Hotere, and held in the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Join them on their art-detective explorations. Fascinating. 

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet              $45

A group of twelve eerily mature children endure a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders—including Eve, who narrates the story—decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.

"A blistering classic. Millet writes brilliantly about everything — politics, physics, mermaids — and she’s one of the leading writers of environmental fiction. Millet addresses the existential crisis of climate change with a technical understanding of the science and a humane understanding of the heart. She’s also ferociously witty. That rare combination has made her stories about species extinction and global warming profound and weirdly amusing." —The Washington Post

Rag and Bone: A family history of what we've thrown away by Lisa Woollett        $45

From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London's barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, Rag and Bone traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption. In a series of beachcombing and mudlarking walks—beginning in the Thames in central London, then out to the Kentish estuary and eventually the sea around Cornwall—Lisa Woollett also tells the story of her family, a number of whom made their living from London's waste, and who made a similar journey downriver from the centre of the city to the sea. Nicely written.

How to Live with Mammals by Ash Davida Jane           $25

we love an underdog especially when it’s a whale

we see ourselves in them literally in them lounging

in their cathedral of a mouth just looking for love

All around us, life is both teeming and vanishing. How do we live in this place of so many others and so many last things? How to Live With Mammals is not a book of instruction but a book of reimagining and a book of longing. In these poems, Ash Davida Jane asks how we might reorient ourselves, and our ways of loving one another, as the futures that we once imagined grow ever more precarious.

"Urgent, funny and tender: these poems shine." —Louise Wallace

A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist           $44

On November 1, 1911, over the North African oasis Tagiura, Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti leaned out of the cockpit of his primitive aircraft and dropped a Haasen hand grenade. Thus began one of the most devastating military tactics of the twentieth century: aerial bombing. With this point of entry, Sven Lindqvist, the author of the acclaimed Exterminate All the Brutes, tells the fascinating stories behind the development of air power, bombs, and the laws of war and international justice, demonstrating how the practices of the two world wars were born from colonial warfare.

The Calling by Fleur Beale           $20

A YA novel about finding your calling, the extraordinary nun Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, and the realities of religious bigotry in late-nineteenth century New Zealand.

"One of the most consistently accomplished and versatile writers for teenagers in the country." —The New Zealand Listener

Rita Angus: An artist's life by Jill Trevelyan        $60

A revised edition of Trevelyan's consummate illustrated biography. 

Life Savers: A day in the lives of 12 real-life emergency service workers by Eryl Nash and Ana Albero           $33

Leonie the Fire Fighter from the UK, Ahsan the Surgeon from Pakistan, Fabien the Mountain Rescuer from France, Tamika the Veterinarian from the US, Nick the Police Officer from the UK, Cecilia the Nurse from Spain, Koen the Lifeguard from the Netherlands, Jin the Research Scientist from China, David-Lawrence the Paramedic from Switzerland, Johanne the Counsellor from Germany, Andy the Flying Doctor from Australia, Giovanna the Foreign Aid Worker from Italy. Lots of visual appeal and interest. 

The Lenin Plot: The unknown story of America's war against Russia by Barnes Carr           $55

It remains the most audacious spy plot in American history—an operation to invade Russia, defeat the Red Army, and mount a coup in Moscow against Lenin. After that, leaders in Washington, Paris, and London aimed to install their own Allied-friendly dictator in Moscow as a means to get Russia back into the the First World War against Germany. The Lenin Plot had the "entire approval" of President Woodrow Wilson. As he ordered a military invasion of Russia, he gave the American ambassador, the U.S. Consul General in Moscow, and other State Department operatives a free hand to pursue their covert action against Lenin. The result was thousands of deaths, both military and civilian, on both sides. Why don't we know more about this?

Our First Foreign War: The impact of the South African War 1899—1902 on New Zealand by Nigel Robson           $55

When war broke out between the British Empire and the Boer republics in 1899, New Zealand was among Britain's most enthusiastic supporters. The South African War was a chance for New Zealand to prove its military capabilities and loyalty to the Empire. There was a huge surge in nationalist feeling and intense interest in the fortunes of the imperial forces. Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith became household names. Fundraising events were packed, and as men enlisted in contingents and Volunteer corps, women and children joined patriotic groups and cadet corps. This is the first book to examine in detail the enduring impact of the country's first overseas war.

The Philosophy Cure: Lessons in living from the great philosophers by Laurence Devillairs        $33

Useful.

 Book of the Week. If you did or if you didn't hear Richie Poulton speak this week at the book launch at the Nelson Provincial Museum, you will be fascinated by the book, The Origins of You: How childhood shapes later life by Poulton, Jay Belsky,  Avshalom Caspi and Terrie E. Moffitt. The book explicates for both a general and a specialist readership findings from The Dunedin Study, the world's foremost longitudinal study of human behaviour and social development, which has been running for five decades. 
>>We are offering the book at a special price of $95 (RRP $106). 
>>Looking through the lens of 1000 lives. 
>>Find out more about The Dunedin Study. 
>>How do childhood traits affect adult circumstances? 
>>The Nelson Provincial Museum's current exhibition Slice of Life highlights the significance of The Dunedin Study. 
>>The findings of the study are also explored in the television series Why Am I?
>>Your copy. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME #223 (1.4.21)

Book news! New Books! Read our newsletter. 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Flavour by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belphrage    {Reviewed by STELLA} Just when you think you have enough Ottolenghi books you are proven incorrect. Last year, as a result of some housekeeping and rearranging at home, the cookbooks ended up on their own bank of shelves in the kitchen rather than scattered between several shelves throughout the house. Result—a good collection of Ottolenghi cookbooks. The most well-used—the excellent Plenty and Plenty More. That combination of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern with a splash of other cuisine influences seems to suit my style of cooking, vegetable preferences and taste buds. The recipes place ingredients with each other in ways I had previously not considered. So when Flavour turned up last year, I really did have to question another Ottolenghi. But this one, another focused on vegetables, feels quite different from the previous books. Produced in concert with chef Ixta Belfrage, it plays with combinations of spices, herbs and those all-important salts, acids and heat in exciting and accessible ways. There’s plenty of text and asides from the recipes to keep the thinking cook happy, but again the focus is on the recipes. There is more Asian influence here, with soy and miso featuring, but the core remains Ottolenghi’s favourite Middle Eastern participants. A few new spices are featuring in our kitchen cupboard—harissa has become a constant on the shopping list. There’s plenty to enjoy here. The Aubergine Dumplings Alla Parmiginia tasted as good as they looked. They reminded me of the softness and full flavour of my father’s Greek-influenced meatballs (I don’t eat the meat any more, so aubergine is a great substitute). The Bkeila, Potato and Butter Bean Stew is delicious and super comfort food with a tang! The cooking down of the spinach into its concentrated form is quite remarkable and one would think unappealing. Absolutely not. And the tangy lemon and spice mix makes this recipe a wonder. The Portobello Steaks and Butter Bean Mash—just delicious, retaining all that is delightful about mushrooms with very tasty spices and olive oil all layered over the calming bean mash. Perfect for brunch or a late evening meal when you’ve had a busy day. And what if you get given a cabbage or two—not the most exciting vegetable (apologies to cabbage-lovers)? Cabbage with Ginger Cream and Numbing Oil, of course! This is perfectly cooked cabbage with lashings of cream cheese (gingered) and that Numbing Oil—wow!—chilli, ginger, star anise and more chilli. Scoop it up and enjoy. And this I think is the rationale of Flavour. It’s fulsome and enjoyable—all about sharing food together and exploring with your taste buds. And coming later this year is a new Ottolenghi. Test Kitchen will take you on a journey through your kitchen cupboards, celebrating humble ingredients and embracing the concept of flexible cooking. You can order this now. In the meantime, explore the Ottolenghi choices on our shelves (or due back in soon).

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

This Little Art by Kate Briggs     {Reviewed by THOMAS} A translator interposes themselves invisibly (or quasi-invisibly (invisible by convention)) between the author of a text, for whom the translator stands in the position of a reader, and the reader of that text, for whom the translator stands in the position of the author. The translator negotiates the text on behalf of a reader whose language is not that of the author, and adds, for the eventual reader, another layer in the suspension of disbelief in their willingness to accept that the words of the translator *are* the words of the author while at the same time acknowledging that they are entirely different words in a different language. To translate, in the words of Kate Briggs in her fine, thoughtful work on translation, “complicates the authorial position, sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it.” Although the translator aspires to invisibility as a remaker of text, translators are not, and should not be considered as, by themselves or by others, “neutral, impersonal transferring devices.” The remaking of text in the person of the translator refracts both in their capacities as a reader and as a writer. “I read with my body,” says Briggs. “I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours. Translation is a responsive and appropriative practising of an extant work at the level of the sentence, working it out, a work-out on the basis of the desired work whose energy source is the inclusion of the new and different vitality that comes with and from me.” Translation is the most intimate possible relationship between two persons, though one of those persons may well be unaware of this intimacy. The translator assumes responsibility not only for the words and intentions of the author, but also for their identity as an author, at least in so far as the readers in the host language are concerned. The translator *becomes* the author for those readers. Or, rather, translation is the most intimate possible relationship between three people, for the willingness of a reader to allow the subsuming of their awareness by the author is replicated in the translator-as-reader who must concurrently become the translator-as-author for the host language reader. Briggs describes the relationship she has with Roland Barthes, whose ‘Le Préparation du Roman’ she is translating as ‘The Preparation of the Novel’, and, indeed there are passages in her account in which the identities of the two elide and it is uncertain whose words, and whose ideas, are on the page. Briggs sees the role of the translator as to *identify* with the author, rather than to supplant, or to be compared with, the author. The translator “undertakes to write translations not as a means to demonstrate their expertise but precisely because they know, without knowing exactly how or in what particular ways, doing so will be productive of *new* knowledge.” The constraint of the extant text liberates the translator-as-writer from the perils of self-expression and the impediments to discovery imposed by one’s identity. To express oneself lies within one’s capabilities and is a fundamentally reductive procedure. Only constraints will lead a writer beyond safe territory, and the constraints of an extant text can lead a translator-as-writer to new discoveries about language and about the limits and potentials of praxis of both writing and reading. “Don’t all writing projects,” Briggs asks, “involve working within existing rules and parameters that guide and to some degree direct what is possible to write? All writing is to some greater or lesser extent determined by constraints. The constraints on how far I can go, the limits on my making-up, the limits on doing what I want, are what interest me. They interest me because they instruct me, leading me (forcing me?) outside of what I might already be capable of writing, knowing and imagining. I don’t want to just make something up.” An effective way to make without making up is to remake. Praxis without ego reveals much about the mechanisms of personhood, so to call it, readership, authorship, and about the mechanisms of language that give rise to these roles of praxis. A translation is a product of its time can be replaced by new translations, more in keeping with the times of new readers, perhaps, in the way that the original cannot be so renewed or updated. An original text goes on being the original text. For someone to write it again in the original language is generally considered a crime against the text (except perhaps when the rewriting is so different from the original as to constitute a commentary or a riff upon it). A translation can be remade without affecting the authenticity of the work. Does this suggest that translation is more akin to reading than to writing (as in the generation of texts), in that the text is fulfilled in an interchangeable other? Is all reading in effect, in any case, a translation from the language of the text’s composition to the language of the reader’s comprehension, even though those languages are ostensibly the *same* language? Is an interlingual translator nothing more (and nothing less) than a textual vector, broadening the scope of the writing/reading project performed by persons whose intimacy is entirely inherent in this vector? In this respect, translation should be considered to take its risks on criteria of soundness and comeliness, rather than on criteria of exactitude or goodness. “My work is fascinating and derivative and determining and necessary and suspect,” says Briggs. “It is everywhere taken for granted and then every so often [inappropriately] singled out to be piously congratulated or taken apart.”

Book of the Week. In Alex Pheby's strange, darkly playful and hugely inventive fantasy Mordew, the patriarchal Master draws his magical power from the body of God, buried beneath the city. When Nathan Treeves's mother sells him to the Master it becomes apparent that Nathan has a power of his own, one that could destroy all that the Master has wrought—if only Nathan can find out how to use it. 
"Mordew is a darkly brilliant novel, extraordinary, absorbing and dream-haunting. That it succeeds as well as it does speaks to Pheby’s determination not to passively inhabit his Gormenghastly idiom but instead to lead it to its most extreme iteration, to force inventiveness and grotesqueness into every crevice of his work." —Guardian 
>>Read an extract.
>>Meat and birds. 
>>Talking dogs debate philosophy. 
>>Death/sentence. 
>>He doesn't seem to be moving his lips. 
>>Which Mordew character are you? 
>>The rewards of risk. 
>>Read Thomas's review of Pheby's psychologically unsettling first novel, Playthings. 
>>Diving deep into a disturbed mind. 
>>Pheby's second novel, Lucia, is a multivocal exploration of the tragic and complicated fate of Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce).
>>Building reader communities. 

>>Your copy of Mordew is waiting for you. 

 NEW RELEASES

Baby Meets Bird by Kate Muir         $20

A beautiful high-contrast board book introducing various native birds of Aotearoa. 

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint            $35

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur—Minos's greatest shame and Ariadne's brother—demands blood every year. When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in love with him. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that in a world ruled by mercurial gods—drawing their attention can cost you everything. In a world where women are nothing more than the pawns of powerful men, will Ariadne's decision to betray Crete for Theseus ensure her happy ending? Or will she find herself sacrificed for her lover's ambition? Ariadne gives a voice to the forgotten women of one of the most famous Greek myths, and speaks to their strength in the face of angry, petulant Gods. 

Ghostland: In search of a country by Edward Parnell            $28

Parnell goes in search of the 'sequestered places' of the British Isles: lonely moors, moss-covered cemeteries, stark shores and folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children's fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift's Waterland to the 'folk horror' film The Wicker Man.

Te Matau a Maui: Fishhooks, fishing and fisheries in New Zealand by Chris Paulin            $48

Te Matau a Maui discusses the form and function of the traditional Maori fishhook, customary fishing, and development of commercial fishing in New Zealand since European settlement (including the adoption of the rotating hook design as a re-discovery of the innovative and highly effective Maori hook design by present day commercial long-line fisheries), and changes in Maori lifestyle associated with the increasing availability of European agricultural cultivars and domestic animals in the nineteenth century, and urbanisation in the twentieth century that led to a decline in Maori fishing activity and the loss of indigenous knowledge.

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience, 500 years of women's self-portraits by Jennifer Higgie            $38

Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have, often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval.

"A bewitching, invigorating history of women artists, the work they've made and the impossibly hard conditions in which it was produced. I can't think of a more satisfying riposte to anyone who asks why there have been no great women artists than to present them with this incandescent book." —Olivia Laing

A History of Islam in 21 Women by Hossein Kamaly           $25

Khadija was the first believer, to whom the Prophet Muhammad often turned for advice. At a time when strongmen quickly seized power from any female Muslim ruler, Arwa of Yemen reigned alone for five decades. In nineteenth-century Russia, Mukhlisa Bubi championed the rights of women and girls, and became the first Muslim woman judge in modern history. After the Gestapo took down a Resistance network in Paris, British spy Noor Inayat Khan found herself the only undercover radio operator left in that city. 

Every Day : My Darling Lemon Thyme by Emma Galloway           $60

Spiced pumpkin snacking cake, Pea, mint + halloumi fritters, Mushroom + lentil lasagne, and Roasted strawberry + ginger 'ice cream' are among the 100 nourishing, simple-to-make, delicious vegetarian and gluten-free recipes celebrated in Emma Galloway's third book from her home kitchen.

The Invisible Land by Hubert Mingarelli           $28

Dinslaken, Germany. July 1945. The war is over, and the allied forces are beginning to assess the damage. Among them, is a war photographer. As the rest of the press corps return home, he finds himself reluctant to leave and, in the company of the young and sensitive driver he has been assigned, he sets out to photograph ordinary German people in front of their homes. As the pair continue their journey, it becomes clear that the young driver has his own reasons for not wishing to return home.

Aesthetics and Politics by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács            $28

Key texts from the 1930s—1950s on the twentieth-century controversies over the place and interpretation of literature and art, with an afterword by Frederic Jameson showing their continued relevance today. 

Four Hundred Souls: A community history of African America, 1619—2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain           $40

A chronological account of four hundred years of Black America as told by ninety of America's leading Black writers. 

Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin, illustrated by Lia Halloran          $37

Levin takes us on an evocative exploration of black holes, provoking us to imagine the visceral experience of a black hole encounter. She reveals the influence of black holes as they populate the universe, sculpt galaxies, and even infuse the whole expanse of reality that we inhabit.

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War by Paul Betts        $55

In 1945, Europe lay in ruins - its cities and towns destroyed by conflict, its economies crippled, its societies ripped apart by war and violence. In the years that followed, Europeans tried to make sense of what had happened—and to forge a new understanding of civilisation that would bring peace and progress to a broken continent. As they wrestled with questions great and small—from the legacy of colonialism to workplace etiquette—institutions and shared ideals emerged which still shape our world today. 

Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic               $33

A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged. But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya's unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax.

"I will go wherever she takes me. A phenomenal book." —Daisy Johnson

"A brilliant, scalding novel: sharp, intricately layered, impossible to forget." —Megan Hunter

Box of Bones by Marina Cohen         $18

Twelve-year-old Kallie despises nonsense. She believes there's a rational explanation for everything, despite the good-natured prodding of her Grandpa Jess, who takes her to frivolous wastes of time like their town's local Festival of Fools. There, Kallie meets a faceless man (must be some kind of mask) who gives her an odd wooden puzzle box (must be some kind of gimmick). Intrigued, Kallie sets to work on unlocking its secrets and lets something out. From here Kallie's life begins to entangle with another world, a world where Liah, a young bone carver, journeys with her master to sell wares to a wicked Queen. The sights, sounds, and spells of Liah's world are beginning to leak into Kallie's, and if Kallie can't decipher the meaning of her own story, 'the end' might be far from happy.

Utsuwa: Japanese objects for everyday use by Kylie Johnson and Tiffany Johnson            $65

Behind the scenes in the studios of contemporary Japanese craftspeople who draw also on traditional practice. Nicely presented. 

Home Farm Cooking by Catherine Pawson and John Pawson        $70

Moving to the English countryside, and designing and building their house in bucolia, has made the Pawsons rethink and simplify their eating to match. Achieveable recipes for family eating and for entertaining, with beautiful photographs of the house. 

>>All you need to know. 

The Wilder Years: Selected poems by David Eggleton            $40

The Poet Laureate selects from his nine collections published over 35 years. A pleasing and substantial hardback, with a cover illustration by Nigel Brown. 

>>Big Yourself Up. 

The Desolations of Devil's Acre ('Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children' #6) by Ransom Riggs        $30

The last thing Jacob Portman saw before the world went dark was a terrible, familiar face. Suddenly, he and Noor are back in the place where everything began—his grandfather's house. Jacob doesn't know how they escaped from V's loop to find themselves in Florida. But he does know one thing for certain: Caul has returned. After a narrow getaway from a blood-thirsty hollow, Jacob and Noor reunite with Miss Peregrine and the peculiar children in Devil's Acre. The Acre is being plagued by desolations—weather fronts of ash and blood and bone—a terrible portent of Caul's amassing army. Risen from the Library of Souls and more powerful than ever, Caul and his apocalyptic agenda seem unstoppable. Only one hope remains—deliver Noor to the meeting place of the seven prophesied ones. If they can decipher its secret location. Jacob and his friends will face deadly enemies and race through history's most dangerous loops in the final adventure in 'Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children' series.  

Together by Luke Adam Hawker         $40

"Dark clouds were looming in the distance. We watched them gather, and we wondered… When will it come? How long will it last?" A man and his dog face uncertain times. Together we will get through this. A beautifully drawn book about vulnerability and resilience, and about the bond strengthened when facing challenges together. A message of hope in the time of the pandemic. 

>>About the book. 
>>Hawker's instagram gallery. 

 BOOKS @ VOLUME (26.3.21)

Our 222nd newsletter!

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Egg & Spoon by Alexandra Tylee and Giselle Clarkson    {Reviewed by STELLA} What more could you want than a new cookbook for Easter? That long weekend break, filled with time and lie-ins, is the perfect opportunity to get your children into the kitchen cooking for you, themselves, friends and family. Another excellent book from Gecko Press is Egg & Spoon. From the wizardly whisk of Pipi Café’s Alexandra Tylee, it’s good and it's fun—and beautifully illustrated by Giselle Clarkson. So many cookbooks aimed at children fall flat—they are either too easy or too difficult, or they over-explain which leads to confusion rather than clarity or leave a little bit too much to the imagination. Tylee has the pitch just right. Real food recipes ranging from the simple making of Strawberry Chocolate Toasted Muesli, Fish Cooked in Paper, and Walnut Thumbprint Biscuits, to ‘a few more steps to produce’ nosh of  Chocolate Eclairs, Avocado & Corn Tacos and Sticky Pork Meatballs and Rice. There are gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian and vegan options with an extra few pages at the back for alternative ingredients for allergies and food preferences. The recipes, in most cases, would be easy to convert with a small amount of assistance from a more experienced cook. For example, the Risotto can be vegetarian by changing the stock type, ditto the pumpkin pasta dish by eliminating the bacon. There’s a quick fix for egg replacement for vegans—chia balls, which could come in handy for converting some of your favourite cake recipes. Tylee uses a minimum of processed sugar, preferring honey, bananas, dates and maple syrup for sweetness. My favourite pages are the extra information ones—How to Boil An Egg (making the perfect egg is a skill worth acquiring), How To Tell When a Cake is Done (useful), and the beautifully drawn foraging pages with recommendations for use (Oxalis—a wanted salad ingredient! Picking nettles—don’t forget your gloves). Recipes cover breakfast—check out Breakfast Popsicles, baking—Secret Ingredient Brownies (while avocados are still plentiful), in-between meals—Quick After-School Pasta or Noodles with Marmite(!), and meals from the small—Corn Fritters or Lemon, Thyme and Garlic Pasta; to the more substantial Pipi Pizza, Roast Chook, and Sweet Potato & Pea Curry. There are delicious drinks and plenty of chocolatey delights, all with a twist of humour and good health. Great for the young budding chef and a good go-to cookbook to have on your shelves for the less experienced cooks in your household.

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

little scratch by Rebecca Watson   {Reviewed by THOMAS} His outfit was a clown outfit, he realised, he was standing there in a clown outfit, a vintage double-breasted tailored herringbone woollen clown outfit but a clown outfit all the same, he realised, basically a joke outfit, tailored but not for him, the jacket too tight and too short for one thing, or two things, the trousers too narrow above the knees for another, at least to his way of thinking, the kind of outfit that he would laugh at upon anyone else but had, it seemed, somehow tricked himself into wearing, presumably it was a trick, suddenly, it seemed, he now found himself wearing a clown outfit, he found himself wearing it suddenly although he had in fact been wearing it for months without realising that he was wearing what basically amounted to a clown outfit, or suppressing that realisation for some reason, all the better, perhaps, to trick himself into wearing it. But why? Why had he for months been wearing what amounted to nothing short of a parody of his own dress sense, even perhaps a parodic attack on what might otherwise have passed for his own dress sense, if he could be said to have such a thing, a self-ridiculing impulse directed perhaps at his own vanity, everybody’s got their own vanity, he thought a simple test not requiring too much imagination can prove this, though he was not certain that in this instance he was in fact testing for or reproving his own vanity, he could perhaps have been trying instead to cure his own shyness, if shyness is the correct term for his discomfort in being caught in the attention of others, shyness is not perhaps the word, in any case a therapy, so to call it, gone in this instance a step too far into parody, or could it be that he had found in his brown double-breasted clown outfit the perfect refuge from being caught in the attention of others, nobody sees beyond the surface of a clown outfit after all, a clown outfit is an impenetrable defence, he thought, I am no-one or anyone in my clown outfit, let them find ridiculous that which I also find ridiculous, he thought, they cannot see me, they cannot ridicule me, they cannot catch me in their attention, their ridicule stops at the ridiculousness of my clown outfit, which I also find ridiculous, I know that whatever they think of me is wrong. The book I have been reading, he thought, is also concerned with the surface that divides a person from the world of other persons, the surface that both attracts and stops the gaze of other persons, the surface that both protects and makes vulnerable the person it both covers and defines. The little scratch in little scratch is the scratching the narrator performs upon her own skin, the scratching she attempts to resist but cannot always resist, “and now I’m scratching because I’m annoyed that I’m scratching,” she says, the scratching that ritualises her frustration with her own bodily existence for a reason that becomes apparent in the course of the book but which the narrator attempts to prevent surfacing in her thoughts, she needs to get through her day at work after all, she wants to enjoy her evening with her boyfriend if she can, very much, she wants to undo the effect of the historic violation that has been performed upon her, she wants to be once again gatekeeper to her own skin. The spoiler came more quickly than I had thought it would, he thought, I had tried to hold back the spoiler, he thought, could I have written this paragraph without the spoiler at all, he wondered, it is too late now, whatever the spoiler spoils or has spoiled, I’ll carry on. From the moment she wakes up the narrator is both hyperaware of her body and dissociated from it, well, more dissociated than aware, I’d say, he thought, can she scratch her skin and find herself in there, perhaps she wonders, who is there? she wonders, “me, completely separate from my body, but still in it,” from the moment she wakes up, the narrator is stuck in her head, her thoughts move down the page in all their parallel paths, confluences, bifurcations, trifurcations, and diversions, the book attempts a record of ALL HER THOUGHTS during the course of one day, even the most mundane thoughts, but also those thoughts not mundane at all. The effect is remarkably effective, he thought, though he could have chosen better words to express this thought, the effect is that of being stuck in yourself, of being stuck in time moving either too slowly or too fast, of being aware to the point of desperation of all your thoughts as you have them, how does the narrator and how did the author stay sane, he wondered, if they do stay sane, and likewise the reader, the effect is claustrophobic. Just like his thoughts, he thought, her thoughts, though mostly mundane, occasionally allow that mundanity to think itself a little less mundane. Whe she sees some young men at the railway station on her way to work, she imagines “them seeing me, me seeing my own face, body, legs etc, assessing the me which I cannot see but see them seeing, forgetting to assess them because I am too busy assessing what they’re assessing, which I can’t actually assess because there is no full length mirror balanced against nothing in the middle of the platform for me to use to assess my assessment of their assessment to see if it is accurate, although, come to think of it, if I don’t have time to assess them, because I’m assessing me who they’re assessing, then who’s to say they’re not doing the same—assessing what I’m assessing, or, indeed, what they assume I’m assessing, so we’re all just assessing what we assume they’re assessing, i.e. ourselves, which we cannot see,” which, he thought, reveals the mundane as a sort of matrix for gauging the nature of one’s relationships with those with whom one shares that matrix, intimately or less intimately or not intimately at all, if awareness can ever be anything but intimate. The matrix is a linguistic matrix, he thought, the book is a linguistic matrix upon which the narrator’s awareness is arranged, I do not think linguistic matrix is the right term though, he thought. How could experience be any clearer than this, he wondered, but he does not have much time to wonder because “morning! morning! simultaneous, a little awkward, the call and response conjoined so now we don’t know who is the caller and who is the responder, and, in the place where the second morning! would actually fall, silence!” The narrator is desperate to suppress a thought with thought, she thinks to the brink of the thought and turns away so many times, but the thought she does not want to think draws her towards it, “I cannot get through the day, if everything brings up something else,” she thinks, the thought she does not want to think is underneath her other thoughts, pulling at them always, sabotaging her at inopportune moments, pulling her even from her own body. Such is the harm.

"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.” Our Book of the Week, Noémi Lefebvre's new novel Poetics of Work, explores the cultural crises of late capitalism against the backdrop of increasing bigotry, nationalism and police brutality during the state of emergency that followed the 2015 terrorist attacks in France. What possibility is there for poetry in a language deformed by authoritarianism and the description of assault weaponry? 
>>Read Thomas's review.  
>>Read an extract. 
>>Poétique de l'emploi.

>>Translating emergencies. 
>>Translator Sophie Lewis's notes on craft. 
>>"Translator of the week."
>>On gender and translation. 
>>The Transit Books edition (on the left).
>>The Les Fugitives edition (on the right). 
>>Read Thomas's reviews of Blue Self-Portrait (one of his favourite books). 
>>Read an extract from Blue Self-Portrait. 
>>A space to breathe. 

 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.

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BOOKS @ VOLUME # 221 (19.3.21)

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 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?

>> 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.”