Find out about the books celebrated in the 2021 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS!
Read the judges' citations below and click through to our website to obtain your copies.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
There’s nowhere to hide with a short story. It must say a lot by saying very little. With its spiky confidence and mordant humour, short story collection Bug Week is a knockout from start to finish. Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic. Guest international co-judge Tommy Orange said, “I was consistently surprised by sentences, the beauty and singular language. If the book were a bug it would be a big one, with teeth and venom, with wings and a surprising heart, possibly several, beating on every page with life."
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book is an enthralling performance, from Pati Solomona Tyrell’s striking dried-blood and plaster-masked cover, to the titles, to the spell-binding poems within. The violence of shared and fractured histories surfaces throughout the collection like liquefaction, unsettling, displacing, disrupting. In a year of outstanding poetry publications that respond to Covid, Black Lives Matter, the Christchurch Massacre, and ongoing violence against women, Avia expresses the outrage shared by many, while maintaining faith that love helps the healing process. This is a book bursting with alofa, profound pantoums, profanity and FafSwaggering stances, garrulously funny, bleakly satirical, magnificent.
BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
The recipes in Monique Fiso’s first, extraordinary book occupy fewer than half of its pages. The rest is a tour de force of Māori knowledge, written from a Māori perspective. For many of us this will be our introduction to the indigenous cuisine of our own land, and its ingredients, practice, culture, history and knowledge. Fiso’s text is hard-won, inspiring and utterly original in scope; the book is also beautifully designed and photographed. The judges were all drawn to it, coming back to it again and again; finding a careful, kind and generous work which never lectured, but took them on a journey and left them hungry for more.
GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
When Ralph Hotere asked his old friend to write his biography, Vincent O’Sullivan hesitated. As a Pākehā, and an outsider to the art world, was he the right person for the job? Hotere saw no problem. This is a sensitive, detailed portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists, shaped around the four pou of Hotere’s identity: his Māoritanga, faith, whenua, and whānau. O'Sullivan displays masterly skill in the layering of information, observation and anecdote. He gives us a deep understanding of the forces and passions that drove one of New Zealand's greatest artists. The judges commended Vincent O’Sullivan for an extraordinary achievement in biography.
MŪRAU O TE TUHI - MĀORI LANGUAGE AWARD
Mātāmua ko te Kupu! nā Tā Tīmoti Kāretu ( Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press)
He kupu Hautoa mō Mātāmua ko te Kupu! Mātāmua ko te kupu! Koinei te kōrero a Tā Tākuta Tīmoti Kāretu, ka mutu, kāore i tua atu i a ia hei whakatauira i tēnei tauākī āna, i ōna hekenga werawera ki te reo i āna kaupapa huhua, mai, mai. Ko tana mahi hoki tērā mō te reo i ngā mahi a Tānerore, e tātai mai ana i roto i tana pukapuka nei, āna kitenga, ōna mōhiotanga, huri noa i tana takahi i roto i tērā ao hei kaihaka, hei kaitito, hei kaiako, hei kaiwhakawā, anō hoki. Tō tātou māri hoki kua kōpakina ōna whakaaro ki āna anō kupu ki te reo, i roto hoki i te wana, me te kupu horipū. / Lyric is paramount! This is the axiom of Tā Tīmoti Kāretu, and there is no other than he who best personifies this statement in all his labours for the Māori language over countless years. His efforts for te reo in traditional Māori performing arts are also recounted in this book, his views and knowledge informed by his journey in that realm as a performer, a composer, a tutor and a judge. We are fortunate that his reflections are encapsulated in his own words in the Māori language with such passion and candour.
MitoQ Best First Book Awards
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION
Five debut novels made the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2021 longlist, and the judges were particularly impressed by the big-hearted social realism of Victory Park, which follows the quiet heroics of a widowed solo mother of squeezed means. Sensitively examining the emotional and mental labour of being careful with money and the blind spots people have when they don’t need to worry about it, this quietly powerful novel is about privilege, community, compassion and care.
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY
Jackson Nieuwland’s I Am a Human Being asserts a Whitmanesque ecstasy of holistic oneness with the world. The poems’ insistent ‘I am’ refrain merges selfie and panoramic view, close-up and long shot in a whirl of words. Nieuwland’s dramatic monologues assail the reader with absurd, appealing, poignant, and humorous scenarios that are gleefully illogical, grandiose, deflating, and bulging with insight. The writing frequently overspills its lyrical open form and flows into newly imagined dimensions. It’s fun, fast, sometimes fragile, and full-on.
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Hiakai is an astounding first book. Monique Fiso shares her personal journey as a chef alongside her journey into the knowledge of her tūpuna/ancestors. Hiakai weaves understanding of our unique environment, hunting, foraging, cooking, eating and preserving into an expansive but very accessible offering. Fiso does not shy away from unusual ingredients and this makes it all the more fascinating. The images are beautiful and combined with inspiring text, they ensure this book will be a favourite for many years to come.
E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
'Think of it this way. You're a horse but you live in the Namib Desert and all your friends are oryx. You think of yourself as a deformed oryx. What else could you be? You live in a habitat that doesn't accommodate horses'. In this compulsively readable first book, Madison Hamill observes her own difference with an outsider’s detached gaze, and the ordinary people around her with tender curiosity. This is a work of a luminous new talent in New Zealand life writing.
CULTURE SALE. Some excellent books are clamouring for a spot on your shelves, and to make this easier we have reduced the prices on a selection of books on art, literature, architecture, design, cooking, music, photography, and graphic novels. >>Make your selection now (first in, first served—single copies only are available at these prices for most titles). 
BOOKS @ VOLUME #228 (7.5.21)
Read our NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne by Jonathan Stroud {Reviewed by STELLA} Wanted for audacious crimes across England: a sassy young woman adept at robbing banks, outwitting the law, dealing with the Faith and keeping the Tainted at arm's length, not to mention the beasts in the Wildness and the other hustlers in the Surviving Towns. This is the wild west of a dystopian and flooded England. London is covered by water — and at the centre of this lagoon are the Free Isles, while the rest of the country has reverted to wildness and walled towns with strict codes of conduct. The unusual and challenging are not wanted: others are cast into slavery and the Council of the Faith is all-powerful in rhetoric and financial dealings. We meet Scarlett McCain just after she has pulled off a bank robbery and is escaping by taking a route through the wild lands. The trick is to get through and out before darkness falls, evading her pursuers who won’t dare follow under the stars. The problem is she is sidetracked by a bus that has crashed into the woods and the sole survivor, a hapless teen boy, Albert Browne. Help the boy (get him back to the road) and still have time to make it through the trees. This plan doesn’t pan out. The boy is even more mysterious than the evasive Scarlett and some things about the crash and where Albert comes from don’t add up, and now they have pursuers on their tail that aren’t so scared of the beasts coming out to hunt. Scarlett now has a seemingly useless companion with her as she travels cross-country, trying to outrun an enemy she doesn’t know. Let's just say there will be gunshots, wounds, jumping off a cliff, and almost drowning in a river. And, most oddly, pursuers in jackets and bowler hats (sinister!) are after Albert. But why? As they travel together, despite Scarlett’s threats to ditch him (trouble follows Albert and maybe Albert makes trouble), a frightening spectre is rising, and a woman who won’t give up on her desire to recapture Albert enters the picture. While Scarlett puzzles Albert’s abilities, strange as they are, and questions her sanity in sticking with him, she’s also drawn to this unusual young man trying to find a place to belong in this strange, and often uninviting, new world. Putting their faith in a grizzled and grumpy old seafarer (travelling the waterways with his mute granddaughter), his ‘trusty’ boat and his knowledge of the rivers and byways they head in search of the Free Isles where Albert hopes to find a new home. It won’t be plain sailing, at all. There are plenty of twists and turns, daring adventuring and an exciting plot to entice you into this new intriguing world and keep you hooked, wanting more. The first in a new series from the author of 'Lockwood & Co.' (and if you haven’t read these you have been missing out), The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne is mesmerisingly good, their world is fascinating, and Stroud doesn’t miss a beat in laying down some great challenges: climate change, species mutation, psychological manipulation, and power struggles as well as more endearing qualities of humanity in bravery, loyalty and friendship — for his characters as well as the reader. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is very tiring to get everything done properly, he said, it is exhausting and, really, a waste of time to get everything done properly, but it is just as exhausting and just as much a waste of time to get everything done not properly, to do a mediocre job, so to speak, he said. As not doing anything at all does not seem to be an option available to me, despite its attractions, he said, as doing nothing is fraught with its own existential dangers, so to call them, I may as well do everything properly, he said. This is a terrible trap. I will exhaust myself and waste my time whether I do things properly or not, nobody will notice whether I do things properly or not, I am uncertain if I can tell whether I am doing things properly or not myself, but they would notice if I do nothing at all. Perhaps what I call properly is in fact mediocre, I aspire to the mediocre but fall short, or I aspire to excellence and fall short, it makes no difference, I fall to the same point, somewhere below the mediocre, far below excellence, I fall to my place in the order of things whether I aspire to the mediocre or to the excellent, I may as well aspire to excellence, whatever that means, and fail more grandly, he said, though he was unsure if this failure was more grand or more pathetic. He had, he said, entertained the intention, at least briefly, of writing a proper review of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, he had been rereading Old Masters not merely but at least partly for the purposes of writing this review, and he had even, while researching this review or this book, discovered what seemed to him to be a video game in which he could move around the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, although there were some galleries he could not enter for some reason, perhaps he had to advance to another level or perhaps he was just clumsy, avoiding the gallery attendants, searching for the location in which almost the entire book is set: the bench facing the painting White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto. Using the navigation arrows provided for the purpose by Google, he found, the player of the game can become well acquainted with the endless parquet flooring of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the marble staircases and gilded cornices and door-frames of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and with much of what Reger, the dominant voice if not the narrator of Bernard’s book, dismisses as its collection of “Habsburg-Catholic state art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is entirely in line with the artistic taste of the Habsburgs, who, at least where painting is concerned, had a revolting, totally brainless Catholic artistic taste,” writes Bernhard as Atzbacher quoting Reger, Atzbacher being the book’s narrator, even though pretty much all he does is quote what Reger has at some time said. He must concentrate on his review, he thought, I am determined to write a proper review, he said aloud, forgetting that he had already reviewed the book with a proper review, or in any case something slightly closer to a proper review than what he felt himself now capable of, not that that is saying much, some years before. Old Masters is an entirely musical book, he wrote, starting at last in a sensible way, despite being set in a painting gallery it is entirely musical both in its phrasing and in its structure, if there is a difference between the two, he thought, drifting from the task, the musical form of the book is what matters, he wondered if he could say the form is all that matters, that form is all that ever matters. Old Masters is narrated in one unbroken paragraph by Atzbacher, about whom we learn little, he wrote, but the voice that reaches us is the voice of Reger, an elderly music reviewer, who has arranged to meet Atzbacher on their regular bench in front of the White-Bearded Man but on an irregular day, they normally meet there on alternate days only. Atzbacher arrives early in order to watch Reger waiting for him from the next room, and the first half of the book consists of Atzbacher telling us what Reger has previously told him, of Reger speaking through Atzbacher, so it seems, just as Reger also speaks, as Atzbacher notes, through the museum attendant Irrsigler: “Irrsigler has, over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, or Reger’s sentences. Irrsigler is Reger’s mouthpiece, nearly everything that Irrsigler says has been said by Reger, for over thirty years Irrsigler has been saying what Reger has said. If I listen attentively I can hear Reger speak through Irrsigler.” As with Irrsigler so with Atzbacher, he thinks, Atzbacher seemingly unaware of the irony. Old Masters is a very funny book, he thinks, Reger’s reported opinions amount to a stream of invective against pretty much everything held in esteem in the society in which Reger lives, and in which Bernhard lived, separated as they are only be tense, admiration, after all, being for Bernhard a form of mental weakness. “There has virtually been no culture in Vienna for a long time, and one day there will really be no culture of any kind left in Vienna, but it will nevertheless be a cultural concept even then. Vienna will always be a cultural concept, it will more stubbornly be a cultural concept the less culture there is in it,” writes Benhard as Atzbacher as Reger and perhaps again as Bernhard. Well, he thought, as with Vienna so with Nelson, though I will not write that down, he thought. Heidegger, Stifter, Bruckner, Vienna’s public lavatories, restaurants, politicians, all are derided in the most amusing fashion and at length, he wrote, in this first section, in the words of Reger as remembered by Atzbacher as he watches Reger waiting for him to arrive. This might even be Bernhard’s funniest book, he thought, the way Reger’s ridicule surges through it, builds and collapses. When Atzbacher keeps his appointment with Reger, Reger’s rants continue via Atzbacher, but at one step less remove, the rants continue but the tone changes, subtly, Old Masters might be Bernhard’s both least and most subtle book, he thought, the least subtle because of Reger’s ranting but the most subtle because of the modulation in that ranting, all in this one paragraph, the rant no longer filtered by Atzbacher’s memory is more extreme, nastier, less enjoyable, clumsier, is the fact that I can go along with Reger’s rants in the first half a mark against me, he wondered, and if so am I redeemed by being put off when we meet Reger himself in the second, so to speak, when we meet Reger in the raw, so to speak, he wondered, and Atzbacher intercuts what Reger says to him at this time in the gallery with recollections of what Reger has said to him previously at the Ambassador cafe, and the depth of Reger’s unhappiness since the death of his wife is expressed in sequences of sentences, each ending “...Reger said at the Ambassador then,” repeated like sobs, and the unhappiness flows through and gives depth to the rest of the book, which principally concerns the difficulties of carrying on living is a world devoid of value, Old Masters is perhaps Bernhard’s funniest book and his saddest. “Oh yes, Reger said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said.” Reger’s vitriol is a survival mechanism, he wrote, to despise is to survive, that is clumsily put, he thought, too clumsily put to write down. “One’s mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity, Reger said. A good mind is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind that finds the mistakes of humanity, and a genius’s mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes.” Reger despises nothing more than old masters, so Reger says, and this is why he has sat on his bench at the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day for thirty years. “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. … All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. … All these so-called old masters are really failures, without exception they were all doomed to failure.” Our obsession with art, he thought, if we have an obsession with art, or with celebrity, if we have that, or with sport performers, so to call them, or with wealthy people, or actors, or singers, is not with how these apogees of achievement are more successful than us, more skilled, more wonderful, more spiritual even, whatever we mean by that, but with the flaws, the weaknesses, vices and misfortunes that make them like us after all, failures, and we are reassured that not even great success, however that is measured, not even great skill, not even great fame would stop us from being failures, and so we need not therefore even strive for these things, they would not in any case save us, so to speak. When the worst happens, though, we are devastated but it is not true to say that we do not also feel relief, and this is the saddest thing of all, he thought. “Reger was looking at the White Bearded Man and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say free I mean entirely free, wholly free, completely free, if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free. I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it, Reger Said.” Atzbacher accepts the ticket Reger offers him to attend a performance of Kleist’s The Broken Jug, a work also mocking human faillings, at the Bergtheater that evening, but, Atzbacher says, “The performance was terrible,” ending the book with the first opinion he has expressed that might be his own, though, given the formative influence of Reger upon him, can any opinion be his own, can anyone’s opinion anyway be considered their own, he wondered. I will give up on this review, he decided, I cannot write the review properly he realised, whatever could constitute properly, perhaps I could have done so once but I can do so no longer, at least not today, the only day I have to write it, he thought, my mind no longer performs in that way. He had spent a long time playing the Kunsthistorische Museum game but he could not find the painting of the White Bearded Man. |
Patricia Lockwood's remarkable novel is both clever and moving, both painfully funny and deeply sad, it is both about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears—and the possibilities language offers—connecting all these. '
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Pure moods.
>>Patricia Lockwood talks with Kim Hill.
>>A virtual craft chat.
>>Beatifying Patricia Lockwood.
>>Unstoppable / unpostable.
>>The daughter of a priest and the son of a nun.
>>Did Coronavirus make Lockwood insane?
>>Playing with the blood of the alphabet.
>>Too online.
>>"I've never read a novel before."
>>A spirit in the void.
>>Priestdaddy.
>>Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
>>Your copy of No-One is Talking About This.
>>A virtual craft chat.
>>Beatifying Patricia Lockwood.
>>Unstoppable / unpostable.
>>The daughter of a priest and the son of a nun.
>>Did Coronavirus make Lockwood insane?
>>Playing with the blood of the alphabet.
>>Too online.
>>"I've never read a novel before."
>>A spirit in the void.
>>Priestdaddy.
>>Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
>>Your copy of No-One is Talking About This.
NEW RELEASES
Lockwood's remarkable novel is both clever and moving, both painfully funny and deeply sad, it is about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears connecting all these. One of the most anticipated books of the year.
>>Pure moods.
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
The 1960s was a period of radical conflict, when the desire for a new, socially defiant freedom affected every aspect of NZ culture: theatre, the visual arts, Maori activism, rock 'n roll, literature, feminism, NZ film, direct action, culminating in a series of bombings that rocked Auckland at the end of the decade. Featuring figures such as Janet Frame, Tim Shadbolt, Barry Crump, Jean Watson, Hone Tuwhare, Carmen, Bob Lowry, Molly Macalister, Ronald Barker, Anna Hoffmann and the Bower Brothers, Time to Make a Song and Dance captures a spirit of revolt that swept over Auckland and Aotearoa, creating lasting changes to the boundaries of what was permissible. Murray Edmond has written a richly detailed history of the volatile events and personalities at the heart of the time.
>>Auckland was revolting.
>>Auckland was revolting.
Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Samuel Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride's three short, intense rather Beckettsian texts each convey a fragment of what could be called 'female experience'. In 'The Adminicle Exists', we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; in 'An Act of Violence', a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man's death; in 'The Eye Machine', the character 'Eye' tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes.
>>Eimear McBride's writing method.
>>Where to begin?
>>McBride on Beckett.
>>Eimear McBride's writing method.
>>Where to begin?
>>McBride on Beckett.
The beautifully written new novel from the author of The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. Teenage Eulabee and her alluring best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy, oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know the ins and outs of the homes and beaches, Sea Cliff's hidden corners and eccentric characters-as well as the swanky all-girls' school they attend. Their lives move along uneventfully, with afternoon walks by the ocean and weekend sleepovers. Then everything changes. Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a disagreement about what they did or didn't witness on the way to school one morning, and this creates a schism in their friendship. The rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.
Harvey's latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories. It begins in a contemporary inner-city suburb where a poet starts to chart the regeneration she witnesses, its difficulties and opportunities. Along the way, the collection moves across time-zones, oceans and continents, breaking down personal and political walls, and unleashing ghosts everywhere. Ultimately, Ghosts is a work concerned with dislocation, rejection, homelessness, family trauma and how we can give voice to the lost souls inside us all.
>>If Befriending Ghosts.
>>If Befriending Ghosts.
Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: "rokuro-kubi," whose heads separate from their bodies at night; "jikininki," or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless "mujina" who haunt lonely neighborhoods. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create the chilling tales in Japanese Ghost Stories. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.
Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.
An exploration of female friendship and women in music, from the singer-songwriter and author of Another Planet and Bedsit Disco Queen. In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey's music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock 'n' roll love affairs. Morrison — a headstrong heroine blazing her way through a male-dominated industry — came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn. They shared the joy and the struggle of being women in a band, trying to outwit and face down a chauvinist music media. In My Rock 'n' Roll Friend Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other.
>>Tracey Thorn and Everything But the Girl.
>>Tracey Thorn and Everything But the Girl.
From his early life in Czechoslovakia, his journey fleeing Nazi Germany across continental Europe, and his formative years in the UK as a penniless Jewish immigrant; through to his ascent to the top of the design tree, becoming the 'man who designed the 1970s' (he designed the Chopper bike!), and his later years as a creative polymath and design mentor. In Toymaker Tom Karen presents some of the most cherished items that tell a story of not just an extraordinary life, but show the importance of nurturing one's own imagination.
Pain is part of human existence but we understand very little of the mechanics of it. We damage ourselves, we feel pain, we seek help from a professional or learn not to do that bad thing again. But the story of what goes on in our body is not this simple. Even medical practitioners themselves often fail to grasp the complexities of our minds and bodies and how they interact when dealing with pain stimulus. Throughout history we've tried to prevent it and mediate its affects, resulting in the current situation we find ourselves; highly medicated with a booming opiates industry. Common conception still equates pain with tissue damage but that is only a very small part of the story. pain is a complex mix of nerve endings, psychological state, social preconceptions and situational awareness.
A novel. It's 1981 and New Zealand is about to host the Springboks from apartheid South Africa for a national rugby tour. The well-supported protest movement pitches against a nation of die-hard rugby supporters. Despite growing public protest, the Government and Rugby Union are adamant the tour will proceed. Beth returns from London. Her World War 2 veteran father is a rugby fanatic, her brother becomes a protestor embroiled in street violence. She studies law and meets Viktor who, unknown to her, is a member of the notorious Police Red Squad. What will happen to their polarised relationship in a country where the very survival of civil order is at risk?
Walking in the Woods by Yoshifumi Miyazaki $28
"It is clear that our bodies still recognize nature as our home." —Yoshifumi Miyazaki. 'Forest bathing' or Shinrin-yoku is a way of walking in the woods that was developed in Japan in the 1980s. It brings together ancient traditions with cutting edge environmental health science.
A lush tapestry of magic, romance, and revolución, drawing inspiration from Bolivian politics and history. Ximena is the decoy Condesa, a stand-in for the last remaining Illustrian royal. Her people lost everything when the usurper, Atoc, used an ancient relic to summon ghosts and drive the Illustrians from La Ciudad. Now Ximena's motivated by her insatiable thirst for revenge, and her rare ability to spin thread from moonlight. Senior fiction.
"Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Everything depends on the actions that people take into their own hands." How does politics shape our world, our lives and our perceptions? How much of 'common sense' is actually driven by the ruling classes' needs and interests? And how are we to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet?
'Zero Day' — a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world's computer networks invisibly until discovered. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to tap into any iPhone, dismantle safety controls at a chemical plant and shut down the power in an entire nation. Zero days are the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation states, defense contractors, cybercriminals, and security defenders alike. In this market, governments aren't regulators; they are clients paying huge sums to hackers willing to turn over gaps in the Internet, and stay silent about them. Do you want to know this?
“War marches on under cover of euphemism.” Naïma has always known that her family came from Algeria — but up until now, that meant very little to her. Born and raised in France, her knowledge of that foreign country is limited to what she's learned from her grandparents' tiny flat in a crumbling French sink estate. When she starts to find out more about her family's involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, new dimensions to her family history start to reveal themselves.
For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about 'evolutionary fitness', the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
"Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time." —Cass R. Sunstein
Evolution clearly explained for younger readers—and well illustrated.
Profiles 65 of the country's most exciting and innovative producers and explores the wine regions and various grapes we've made our own, and looks at the strengths and struggles of the New Zealand wine industry and a discusses some of the challenges it will face in years to come.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot {Reviewed by THOMAS} “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” The Writing of the Disaster concerns the effect upon language, upon literature, so to call it, of what Blanchot, thinking particularly of the Holocaust, calls the Disaster: something beyond the reach of language yet sucking language towards it to the ultimate nullification of the meaning that language is usually thought to bear. The disaster does not concern itself with content, the disaster possesses the writing and is not and cannot be the subject of the writing. The writing of the disaster is not so much writing about the disaster as writing in the force-field of the disaster: The Writing of the Disaster concerns itself with the ways in which trauma takes ownership of writing. The ‘of’ in the title signals possession in the same way, perhaps, that all objects possess their subjects and by this relationship contend with them for agency. The disaster is a grammatical phenomenon, a loss of agency through grammar, a relation between elements rather than an element itself. Blanchot is remarkable for identifying the shifts of agency that result from grammatical alteration. It is in grammar, perhaps, that our problems lie, and it is in grammar, perhaps, that we must agitate for their solution. But it is in the nature of the disaster to protect itself with our passivity. “We are passive with respect to the disaster, but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” The disaster robs the writer of agency, cauterises meaning, averts all gazes and renders the usual useless. As Blanchot demonstrates, writing in the ambit of the disaster can only proceed in fragments. Failure and incompletion are both results of and assaults upon the impossible. “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” When writing of the reading of the writing of the disaster, the semantic degeneration of the disaster exercises itself even through the intervening writer, rendering them transparent. To re-read a passage of Blanchot is to read without recognition, to entertain thoughts quite different from, and rightly quite different from, those entertained on the first reading, or prior readings, of that passage. Thinking about reading about Blanchot writing about how the disaster affects everything but cannot be perceived, I write, “The disaster is that no distinction can be made between disaster and the absence of disaster,” but I cannot determine where this sentence comes from. I cannot find it in Blanchot's text. Whose thoughts are those thoughts thought when reading? If the thoughts cannot be located in the text, are they then the thoughts of the reader? If the thoughts would not have been thought by the reader without the text, to what extent are they the writer’s thoughts? (Do not ask if these thoughts are in fact thoughts. Let us call thought that which does the work of thought, regardless.) Blanchot proceeds around, or towards, the disaster in a fragmentary style, aphoristic but without the sense of completion aphorisms provide, he writes koans, or antikoans, that do not prepare the mind for enlightenment so much as relieve the mind of the possibility of, and even the concept of, enlightenment. Taken in small doses Blanchot is full of meaning but as the dose increases the meaning becomes less, until at the point of his complete oeuvre, we can extrapolate, Blanchot means nothing at all. This liberation from semantic burden is entirely in accord with Blanchot’s project, so to call it. |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
  | Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu {Reviewed by STELLA} “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” —William Shakespeare (As You Like It) While Shakespeare went on to describe the seven stages of man, Charles Yu takes a slightly different trajectory. The stage is America, more specifically Chinatown. The players are the actors in a typical cop show (ironically titled Black and White) and the residents of the SRO (Single Room Occupancy) housing apartment. And our main man is Willis Wu, son of Taiwanese immigrants, working his way up the ladder. Seven stages — a countdown from five to one (Background Oriental Male, Dead Asian Man, Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy, Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter, Generic Asian Man Number One), and then, if you are lucky, very lucky — Very Special Guest Star, and for the few, the ultimate role — Kung Fu Guy. Interior Chinatown, Yu’s fourth book, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, uses a television series script as the structural device to look into the real lives of Asian Americans and the stereotypes that ring-fence them as ‘other’. As in Yu’s early books (his short story collection from 2006, Third Class Superhero, is endlessly memorable), he uses clever set-ups and sardonic wit to take you on an entertaining journey that is actually filled with frustration, sadness and, in the case of Interior Chinatown, a searing elucidation of racism. Willis Wu is an actor, hoping for the big time — a chance to become Kung Fu Guy. He’s the ‘Asian’ in the GTV series Black and White (featuring Turner — the tough smart Black cop, and Green — the sassy sharpshooting (from the lip as much as the hip) White female cop) — starting as Background Guy but also next up a corpse. After being a corpse, he has to take a "rest time". No-one will notice when he comes back as a new guy — after all, he is Generic Asian Man. He gets his real breakthrough when his character becomes integral to solving a crime in Chinatown. “It’s a cultural thing,” Green lets Black know. Yet as Willis moves up the ranks he finds himself disenchanted by his (and everyone else who lives in the SRO) obsession, from childhood (all that practice!), with becoming Kung Fu Guy. This could have been just a silly and entertaining story about a TV script, but this is where Yu does something very clever — he moves us between reality and fiction, mingling Willis’s life on the screen with his life (and those of his family and community) as an Asian man in America. The backstories of his parents and their arrival in America alongside the acting careers (are they workers in the Chinese restaurant downstairs or actors in the TV series working in the Golden Palace — or a bit of both?), the lives of the residents of the SRO, sometimes they are suffering the heat, the bad piping and cramped quarters while at other times they a bit part actors on the screen, the story of Willis meeting his wife-to-be through their acting roles, art imitating life and vice versa. Plenty of meta-narrative playfully executed and effectively used to grapple with the issues Charles Yu is exploring, along with his own personal histories. What does it take to be seen as American? Why are the stereotypes so entrenched? And how can Willis Wu find out who he really is in a society with rigid expectations of “Generic Asian Man”? Immensely enjoyable, unflinching in its assessment of racism and endlessly memorable. |
>>Read Stella's review.
>>"Wills is a background Asian."
>>Yu reads from the novel.
>>Satire, metafiction, and anti-racist critique.
>>The multiple dimensions of Charles Yu.
>>Taking on Hollywood's Asian tropes.
>>Weird fiction as a political tool.
>>On form and research.
>>Not just black and white.
>>Roles vs identities.
>>Readers' questions.
>>Explore the author's website.
>>Conversations from the shadow lands.
>>Therapy and storytelling.
>>Order your copy now.
>>Books by Charles Yu.
NEW RELEASES
Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections — from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of 'deliciousness' — alongside insights into the transformative powers of language-learning.
>>Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken.
>>Connection fever.
>>Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken.
>>Connection fever.
Permafrost's no-bullshit lesbian narrator is an uninhibited lover and a wickedly funny observer of modern life. Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, 'because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like'; as an au pair in Scotland, she develops a hatred of the color green. And everywhere she goes, she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society, chasing escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.
"Permafrost is a discomfiting book about a sensual intoxication with life that just barely contains the desire for it to be over and done with forever. Like a perfect song, Eva Baltasar's words, as translated by Julia Sanches, have a sheen and inevitability that I won't soon forget. It held me in a trance." —Catherine Lacey
"Reading Eva Baltasar's Permafrost is like having a rug continuously pulled out from under you until finally the rug disappears. How can a novel that orbits suicide be so surprising, so intensely liberating and funny, and at the same time, so full of grief? That is its genius." —Amina Cain
Childhood does not last long in the Argentine mountains of Córdoba, and adult lives fall apart quickly. In disarming, darkly humorous stories, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing.
"His stories shimmer like revelations - the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They're exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read." —Deborah Eisenberg
>>Read the title story.
>>Landscapes, hermits and storytelling.
>>Read the title story.
>>Landscapes, hermits and storytelling.
If the dead could speak, what would they say to the living? From their graves in Paulstadt's cemetery, the town's late inhabitants tell stories. Some recall just a moment — perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize shaped their life forever. Some remember all the people they've been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices — young, old, rich, poor — builds a picture of a community, as viewed from below ground. The streets of the small provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there. From the author of A Whole Life.
An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars Room. In Rachel Kushner's novella an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne—where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig—where she encounters live 'adult entertainment' in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author.
Mania descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to upgrade every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete. Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.
“Garréta and Ramadan continue to redefine the limits of language—these are not words to read but words to bite, chew, choke on. Consuming In Concrete, with all its pleasures and surprises, feels like learning a new game, ruled by Garréta's definitive and mystifying blend of folklore and testimony.” — Kyle Alderdice
Alzayat captures luminously how it feels to be ‘other’: as a Syrian, as an Arab, as an immigrant, as a woman. Each one of the nine stories collected here is a snapshot of those moments when unusual circumstances suddenly distinguish us from our neighbours, when our difference is thrown into relief. Here are ‘dangerous’ women transgressing, missing children in 1970s New York, a family who were once Syrian but have now lost their name, and a young woman about to discover the hollowness of the American dream. At its centre lies ‘Alligator’: a remarkable compilation of real and invented sources, which rescues from history the story of a Syrian American couple who were murdered at the hands of the state.
The definitive work on chessboard problems. It is not simply about chess but the chessboard itself. And, more importantly, the fascinating mathematics behind it. From the Knight's Tour Problem and Queens Domination to their many variations, John Watkins surveys all the well-known problems in this surprisingly fertile area of recreational mathematics. Can a knight follow a path that covers every square once, ending on the starting square? How many queens are needed so that every square is targeted or occupied by one of the queens? Each main topic is treated in depth from its historical conception through to its status today.
In his follow-up to the equally fascinating and beautiful Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish 'moss' of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilisations to flourish.
In the Line the dead still have a say, and their say counts for double. It’s a necrocracy and so everyone left alive walks into tomorrow facing backwards. Willard, his mother, and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless procession, where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willard’s mother dies and he finds a book hidden among her few belongings.
"An enthralling work of high imagination and storytelling flair." —Donal Ryan
"Line is an extraordinary novel – gripping, unsettling, brilliant." —Roddy Doyle
"A powerful, discomfiting fable of uncertainty and failure, poetically crafted, politically pointed. From the brass tacks of language we construct to make ourselves feel stable, to the artifice of routine built from obligation, Line is a Ballardian take on the near-now that shows us how fleeting our idea of absoluteness really is." —June Caldwell
"A powerful, discomfiting fable of uncertainty and failure, poetically crafted, politically pointed. From the brass tacks of language we construct to make ourselves feel stable, to the artifice of routine built from obligation, Line is a Ballardian take on the near-now that shows us how fleeting our idea of absoluteness really is." —June Caldwell
"Line is a modern parable of the most ambitious kind. A Grapes of Wrath for the age of digital capitalism. Niall Bourke writes with passionate urgency and skilful clarity." —Rónán Hession
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions — Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
The "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey and home cooking, and shot and killed them. They helped the sick and taught the kids, they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna's water supply.
What does the future hold? This question can be daunting—or delightfully promising. Shinsuke Yoshitake's picture books are a delightful introduction to philosophy, perfectly pitched to young children.
In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and - more crucially - to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology.
An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Manhattan office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor. After enduring a "hell week" of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as 'Buck', a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he's hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America's sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.
"Askaripour closes the deal on the first page of this mesmerizing novel, executing a high wire act full of verve and dark, comic energy." —Colson Whitehead
A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a ghost estate, with blood on her hands; a young woman is tormented by visions of the man murdered by her brother during the Troubles; a pregnant mother fears the worst as her husband grows illegal cannabis with the help of a vulnerable teenage girl; a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. Ireland's folklore and politics loom large in these short stories.
A beautifully illustrated surbey of the cultural history of bees and beekeeping. In her travels Möller encounters a trigger-happy Californian beekeeper raging against both killer bees and bee politics, warring beekeepers on the Danish island of Læso, and Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey, breeder of the Buckfast queen now popular throughout Europe and beyond, as well a host of others as passionate as she about the complex world of apiculture both past and present.
It is the summer of 2013 and Abigail Kamara has been left to her own devices. This might, by those who know her, be considered a mistake. While her cousin, police constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant, is off in the sticks, chasing unicorns, Abigail is chasing her own mystery. Teenagers around Hampstead Heath have been going missing but before the police can get fully engaged, the teens return home—unharmed but vague about where they've been. Aided only by her new friend, Simon, her knowledge that magic is real and a posse of talking foxes that think they're spies, Abigail must venture into the wilds of Hampstead to discover who is luring the teenagers and more importantly—why?
Turtle really likes standing in his favourite spot. He likes it so much that he asks his friend Armadillo to come over and stand in it, too. But now that Armadillo is standing in that spot, he has a bad feeling about it... A hilarious meditation on the workings of friendship, fate, shared futuristic visions, and that funny feeling you get that there’s something off somewhere, but you just can’t put your finger on it.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #226 (23.4.21)
Whether you're interested in new books or book news, you'll find both in our latest newsletter.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami {Reviewed by STELLA} Where does a writer go and where do they want to take us? In Murakami’s new collection of short stories, First Person Singular, the writer is teasing at the edges, walking us into situations that at first glance seem banal, then become unsettling, sometimes a little bizarre. This will be nothing new for Murakami readers—the pace of the unfolding tale and the direct, simple style with its surprising outcome and underlying pathos are all familiar tropes. In this collection Murakami is also talking to himself, reminiscing and sharing his passions. Music, jazz and classical, comes to the fore in several. 'Cream', the opening story, has a young man on the way to a piano recital by a young woman he barely knows (an ex-fellow student who he had let down by being a tardy musician), only to find himself sitting alone in a small park having a conversation with an elderly man. He has either been duped in an act of revenge or mistaken by date and time. Either way, he is somewhat flustered by the whole experience, left clutching a cheap bouquet of red flowers with little idea of why he went in the first place. In classic Murakami style, the book opens with this deceptively dull story. Later, thinking about it, your focus comes back to the elderly man—is this a future self giving advice or a chance encounter that will change the young man’s trajectory? Or maybe encounters like this don’t encompass as much as we would like them to? In 'Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova', Murakami is at his most playful, enjoying his obsession with jazz and playfully imaging and reimaging a role for The Bird beyond the grave. When Charlie Parker visits the narrator in a dream sequence Murakami segues into his style of magical realism which leaves the reader in no doubt that the character is playing out an internal conversation, while at the same time being convincingly ‘realistic' or believable. If you delve a little under this story, and others in the collection, it is obvious that Murakami is also thinking about the process of creativity, of writing. There are raw edges here too, especially those stories that deal with relationships. 'With the Beatles' relays a teen relationship—starting from an oblique point and sharpening into an uneasy story about depression and suicide. It has a lightness of touch that could be seen as almost trivial but underpinning this is the tragedy of being misunderstood or trapped within a moment. Many of the stories have this outwardly simple trajectory and try to relieve themselves of a complex plot cutting to the uneasy situations that arise between people, but more essentially within one’s own psyche. Touted as partly memoir—the narrator is an ageing writer, living in Japan, who loves baseball and music—it easily can be read as autofiction. Yet the inclusion of a talking monkey, the ‘ugliest’ woman and a surreal conversation with a dead musician, makes you wonder how much Murakami is inviting his past work and his readers into the world beyond the wall, into the well, and, as he says, into the ‘under basement’. Memoir-ish pieces maybe, but more another realm to explore writing, where it takes us and how far, and how it happens. Simple and complex in equal measure. |
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Love's labours should be lost.
>>The altar of oblivion.
>>Sex and the Dead.
>>Telling the story of people who didn't want to be noticed.
>>Maria Stepanova and translator Sasha Dugdale discuss and read from the book.
>>Everything rhymes.
>>A writer shakes her family tree.
>>Poetry as resistance?
>>On Russia's current obsession with the past.
>>"Mad Russia hurt me into poetry."
>>Stepanova founded Colta.
>>Find out more about the translator, the poet Sasha Dugdale.
>>The book has just been shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
>>Your copy.
>>War of the Beasts and the Animals.
>>The Voice Over.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova {Reviewed by THOMAS} The past gets bigger every day, he realised, every day the past gets a day bigger, but the present never gets any bigger, if it has a size at all it stays the same size, every day the present is more overwhelmed by the past, every moment in fact the present more overwhelmed by the past. Perhaps that should be longer rather than bigger, he thought, same difference, he thought, not making sense but you know what I mean, he thought, the present has no duration but the duration of the past swells with every moment, pushing at us, pushing us forward. Anything that exists is opposed by the fact of its existing to anything that might take its existence away, he wrote, the past is determined to go on existing but it can only do this by hijacking the present, he wrote, by casting itself forward and co-opting the present, or trying to, by clutching at us with objects or images or associations or impressions or with what we could call stories, wordstuff, whatever, harpooning us who live only in the present with what we might call memory, the desperation, so to call it, of that which no longer exists except to whatever degree it attaches itself to us now, the desperation to be remembered, to persist, even long after it has gone. Memory is not something we achieve, he wrote, memory is something that is achieved upon us by the past, by something desperate to exist and go on existing, by something carrying us onwards, if there is such a thing as onwards, something long gone, dead moments, ghosts preserving their agency through objects, images, words, impressions, associations, all that, he wrote, coming to the end of his thought. This book, he thought, Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, is not really about memory at all in the way we usually understand it, it is not about the way an author might go around recalling experiences she had at some previous point in her life, this book is about the way the past forces itself upon us, the way the past forces itself upon us particularly along the channels of family, of ancestry, of blood, so to call it, pushing us before it in such as way that we cannot say if our participation in this process is in accordance with our will or against it, the distinction in any case makes no sense, he thought, there is only the imperative of all particulars not so much to go on existing, despite what I said earlier, though this is certainly the effect, as to oppose, by the very fact of their particularity, any circumstance that would take that existence away. Everything opposes its own extinction, he thought, even me. That again. But the past is vulnerable, too, which is why memory is desperate, a clutching, the past depends upon us to bear its particularity, and we have become adept at fending it off, at replacing it with the stories we tell ourselves about it. The stories we tell about the past are the way we keep the past at bay, the way we keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by this swelling urgent unrelenting past. “There is too much past, and everyone knows it,” writes Stepanova, “The excess oppresses, the force of the surge crashes against the bulwark of any amount of consciousness, it is beyond control and beyond description. So it is driven between banks, simplified, straightened out, chased still-living into the channels of narrative.” When Stepanova’s aunt dies she inherits an apartment full of objects, photographs, letters, journals, documents, and she sets about defusing the awkwardness of this archive’s demands upon her through the application of the tool with which she has proficiency, her writing. Although she writes the stories of her various ancestors and of her various ancestors’ various descendants, she is aware that “this book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova’s family is unremarkable from a historical point of view, Russian Jews to whom nothing particularly traumatic happened, notwithstanding the possibilities during the twentieth century for all manner of traumatic things to happen to those such as them, and they were not marked out for fame or glory, either, whatever that means, in any case they had no wish to be noticed. History is composed mainly of ordinariness, the non-dramatic predominates, he thought, although there may be notable crises pressing on these particular people, Stepanova’s family for example but the same is true for most people, these notable crises do not actually happen to these particular people. Do not equals did not. The past, as the present, he wrote, was undoubtedly mundane for most people most of the time, and yet they still went on existing, at least resisting their extinction in the most banal of fashions. Is this conveyed in history, though, family or otherwise, he wondered, how does the repetitive uneventfulness of everyday life in the past press upon the present, if at all? Can we appreciate any particularity in the mundanity of the past, he wondered, are we not like the tiny porcelain dolls, the ‘Frozen Charlottes’ that Stepanova collects, produced in vast numbers, flushed out into the world, identical and unremarkable except where the damage caused by their individual histories imbues them with particularity, with character? “Trauma makes us individuals—singly and unambiguously—from the mass product,” Stepanova writes. Who would we be without hardship, if indeed we could be said to be? No idea, not that this was anyway a question for which he had anticipated an answer, he thought. “Memory works on behalf of separation,” Stepanova writes. “It prepares for the break without which the self cannot emerge.” Memory is an exercise of edges, he thought, and all we have are edges, the centre has no shape, there is only empty space. He thought of Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark, and thought how it too piled detail upon detail to reduce the transmission—or to prevent the formation—of ideas about the past, the past piles more and more information upon us in the present, occluding itself in detail, veiling itself, reducing both our understanding and our ability to understand. Stepanova’s words pile up, her metaphors pile up, her sentences pile up, her words ostensibly offer meaning but actually withhold it, or ration it. Although In Memory of Memory is in most ways nothing like Russian Ark, he thought, why did he start this comparison, as with Russian Ark, In Memory of Memory is—entirely appropriately—both fascinating and boring, both too long and never quite reaching a point of satisfaction, the characters both recognisable and uncertain but in any case torn away, at least from us, the actions both deliberate and without any clear rationale or consequence—just like history itself. No residue. No thoughts. No realisations. No salient facts. No wisdom. The past drives us onward, pushes us outward as it inflates. |
NEW RELEASES
"Salena Godden breathes new life into the well-worn subject of death. Using an antique desk as a conduit, harried East London writer Wolf Willeford communicates with Death herself, who appears in his flat, not as the foreboding and heavy-hooded reaper, but as an elderly, working-class black woman eager to talk about her work. Together they travel across time and space, swapping stories and mapping her memoirs in this unexpectedly comforting page-turner. It can be difficult to write about a subject like death without invoking platitudes that end up flattening a book. Godden’s writing bypasses tired adages, zooming in on specifics that become loaded and devastating, be it an abandoned pile of clothes on the shore, or the way in which “the most ordinary objects have value: a hair clip in an old make-up bag will take you back twenty years, you didn’t even wear it much, but once you did and there you are again”. Godden’s background as a poet and performer enriches this debut as she alternates between poetry and prose in telling Mrs Death’s stories. She has elegantly wrangled the energy of her work into a new medium. Where her prose is often frank and conversational, her poetry is sparse and raw. —Irish Times
"A modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit." —Guardian
"I am writing this account, in another man's book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish. I have been eaten. I have been eaten, yet I am living still." Drawing upon the Pinocchio story while creating something entirely his own, Carey tells an unforgettable tale of fatherly love and loss, pride and regret, and of the sustaining power of art and imagination, told from the point of view of Geppetto during the years he spent within the belly of a sea beast.
"Art objects live in the belly of this marvellous novel, images swallowed by text, sustained by a sublime and loving imagination. Like all Edward Carey's work The Swallowed Man is profound and delightful. It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions; parenting and art-making." —Max Porter
"A beautiful and dark meditation on fatherhood, mercy, redemption and the alchemy of isolation. Strange, moving and musical, it's a delight." —A. L. Kennedy
Contributions from a range of climate scientists and commentators Rob Bell, Jason Boberg, Adelia Hallett, Sophie Handford, Rhys Jones, Haylee Koroi, Matt McGlone, Jamie Morton, Rod Oram, Jim Salinger, Kera Sherwood-O'Regan, Simon Thrush and Andrew Jeffs. Climate Aotearoa outlines the climate situation as it is now, and as it will be in the years to come. It describes the likely impact on the environment and on our day-to-day living situation. It suggests the changes you can make for maximum impact, what we should be asking of our government and what we should be asking of our business community. In doing so, this is a hopeful book—actions can make a difference.
>>"Time for action."
>>"Time for action."
When German artist Charlotte Salomon (1917 1943) handed her vast gouache series Life? or Theater? over to a friend, she beseeched him to "take good care of it, it is my entire life". A few months later, the five months pregnant Charlotte was picked up by a Gestapo truck, deported to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz, where she died upon arrival at the age 26. Born of a family plagued by depression, the work is a cycle of nearly 1,300 autobiographical gouaches, combining creative force with pioneering personal narrative into one shattering graphic document of self expression unlike anything else.
>>The most remarkable graphic memoir.
>>The most remarkable graphic memoir.
The fight for equality begins in the streets. The history of inequality is a long and terrible one. The War of the Poor tells the story of a brutal episode from sixteenth-century Europe: the Protestant Reformation takes on the powerful and the privileged. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth? There follows a violent struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer: a complex and controversial figure, who sided with neither Martin Luther, nor the Roman Catholic Church. Müntzer addressed the poor directly, encouraging them to ask why a God who apparently loved the poor seemed to be on the side of the rich.
>>Short-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
>>Short-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
In 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photos of the far side of the moon. Even in their poor resolution, the images stunned scientists: the far side is an enormous mountainous expanse, not the vast lava-plains seen from Earth. Subsequent missions have confirmed this in much greater detail. How could this be, and what might it tell us about our own place in the universe? As it turns out, quite a lot. Fourteen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being, creating galaxies and stars. Planets formed out of the leftover dust and gas that coalesced into larger and larger bodies orbiting around each star. In a sort of heavenly survival of the fittest, planetary bodies smashed into each other until solar systems emerged. Curiously, instead of being relatively similar in terms of composition, the planets in our solar system, and the comets, asteroids, satellites and rings, are bewitchingly distinct. So, too, the halves of our moon. Planetary geologist Erik Asphaug takes us on an exhilarating tour through the farthest reaches of time and our galaxy to find out why.
The photographs Rodriguez took in the decade he worked as a taxi driver in New York record the lesser-seen but deeply human aspects of the city, especially the life of the working class and the marginalised in all boroughs.
New from the author of the wonderful 'Lockwood & Co' and 'Bartimaeus' series. England has been radically changed by a series of catastrophes – large cities have disappeared and London has been replaced by a lagoon. The surviving population exists in fortified towns where they cling to traditional ways, while strangely evolved beasts prowl the wilderness beyond. Conformity is rigidly enforced and those who fall foul of the rules are persecuted: some are killed, others are driven out into the wilds. Only a few fight back – and two of these outlaws, Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, display an audacity and talent that makes them legends.
Sam van Zweden offers a millennial response to classic food writers, revelling in body positivity on Instagram, remembering how Tupperware piled high with sweets can be a symptom of spiralling mental health, dissecting wellness culture and all its flaws, sharing the joys of living in a family of chefs and seeing a history of migration on her dinner plate.
The construction of a cathedral in the 12th and 13th centuries in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town's Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the slow rise of Hagenburg's Cathedral, which in no way enforces morality or charity. Around this narrative center, Hopkins has constructed a novel that is rich with the vicissitudes of mercantilism, politics, religion, and human enterprise.
From the authors of Why Nations Fail, a big-picture framework that looks at how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others—and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.
A novel about complex grief: a woman attempts to rebuild her life after her boyfriend leaves her for another women then dies hours later. Navigating the unsettled nature of her grief, obsessing over Mauro's infidelity and pursuing fraught affairs with a new colleague and a charismatic stranger, she struggles to make sense of her world anew.
1215 is chiefly remembered for King John attaching his seal to Magna Carta in a quiet Thames-side water-meadow. But it was also a year of crusading and church reform, of foreign wars and dramatic sieges—a year in which London was stormed by angry barons and England invaded by a French army. As well as describing these upheavals, Jones introduces us to the ordinary people of thirteenth-century England—how and where they worked, what they wore, what they ate, and what role the church played in their lives.
Poems from the realm of the felt: couples in last-chance therapy, friends unfriending, racist trolls trawling the comments section for game. Poems on teaching, animals and how emotions and “the things that have hit me hard over the past decade” are felt in the body
Stanford Solomon's shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead. These Ghosts are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel's decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem.
Traveling by boat and land through Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, Yasmin Khan traces recipes that have spread from the time of Ottoman rule, to the influence of recent refugee communities. At the kitchen table, she explores what borders and identity mean in an interconnected world. Featuring more than 80 recipes that put vegetables centre stage and unite around thickets of dill and bunches of oregano, zesty citrus and sour pomegranates, sweet dates and soothing tahini.
"Food writing at its best, a moving and beautiful book." —Nigella Lawson
Illustrated biographies for the edification of the young. Includes Adam Rippon, Alan L. Hart, Alan Turing, Albert Cashier, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Alexander the Great, Al-Hakam II, Alvin Ailey, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Banneker, Billie Jean King, Chevalier d'Éon, Christina of Sweden, Christine Jorgensen, Cleve Jones, Ellen DeGeneres, Francisco Manicongo, Frida Kahlo, Frieda Belinfante, Georgina Beyer, Gilbert Baker, Glenn Burke, Greta Garbo, Harvey Milk, James Baldwin, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, José Sarria, Josephine Baker, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Julie d'Aubigny, Lili Elbe, Ma Rainey, Magnus Hirschfeld, Manvendra Singh Gohil, Marsha P. Johnson, Martine Rothblatt, Maryam Khatoon Molkara, Natalie Clifford Barney, Navtej Johar, Nzinga, Pauli Murray, Renée Richards, Rudolf Nureyev, Sally Ride, Simon Nkoli, Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera, Tshepo Ricki Kgositau, Wen of Han, We'Wha.
Clara Evans is horrified when she discovers her principal's "prohibited media" hit list. The iconic books on the list have been pulled from the library and aren't allowed anywhere on the school's premises. Students caught with the contraband will be sternly punished. Many of these stories have changed Clara's life, so she's not going to sit back and watch—she's going to strike back. So Clara starts an underground library in her locker, doing a shady trade in titles like Speak and The Chocolate War. But when one of the books she loves most is connected to a tragedy she never saw coming, Clara's forced to face her role in it. YA.
100 delicious family recipes transforming favourite ingredients into superlative Italian delicatessen dishes.
13-year-old Brian lives in a trailer on a forgotten patch of land with his divorced and uncaring father. His older brother Lucien, physically and mentally disabled, has been institutionalised for years. While Lucien’s home is undergoing renovations, he is sent to live with his father and younger brother for the summer. Their detached father leaves Brian to care for Lucien’s special needs. But how do you look after someone when you don’t know what they need? How do you make the right choices when you still have so much to discover?
Starting on the front cover of this board book, the line zigs and zags across scenes both urban and pastoral, playfully spiraling into the shapes of animals, faces, buildings, vehicles and more, all without breaking its stride.
>>Eight ways of looking at Murakami.
>>All sorts of experiences.
>>Five Japanese authors share their favourite Murakami stories.
>>Underground worlds.
>>Who you're reading when you're reading Murakami.
>>"You have to go through darkness before you get to the light."
>>On following Murakami's writing and running regime for a week.
>>Your copy.
>>Other books by Murakami.