The Japanese language differs from English in having a delineated category of mimetic words—words that sound like what they mean. Barton uses a sequence of fifty of these onomatopoeia, from giro’ to uho-uho, to structure a memoir of her developing relationship with Japanese and with Japan, from teaching language on a small Japanese Island when she was twenty-one to her eventual career as a Japanese literary translator and now writer. This interesting book is also a record of Barton's exploration of freedom and identity in the interstices of language.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken.
>>Connection fever.
>>A new Japanese dictionary.
>>Connection fever.
>>A new Japanese dictionary.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Way of the Argosi by Sebastien de Castell (Reviewed by STELLA} Our favourite heroine has a book all of her own. In the 'Spellslinger' series, Kellen meets Ferius Parfax — a traveller across all the kingdoms and a smooth-talking card shark with a bit of magic and several packs of cards. One set standard representing the kingdoms of Eldrasia, the other steel-edged weaponry and the most mysterious the highly illustrated Argosi cards. How and why Ferius became an Argosi is told in this prequel and you will love it, whether you are a 'Spellslinger' fan yet or not. This is a great starting point to the series or, if you have already followed Kellen on his adventures, then this is just absolutely the best bonus. We meet our heroine as a young child of the Mahdek hiding in a cave as her family and clan are killed by mages from the Jan’Tep territories in a centuries-old blood feud. Certain she will be found, she is awaiting her death, only to be whisked away by a couple underground through a network of tunnels. Adopted by the kind and generous Lord Gervais and Lady Rosarite, noble knights, the young girl learns to duel and starts on her education in a small quiet village. But harbouring a Mahdek child is a dangerous exercise and it’s not too long until the Jan’tep mages track her down slaughtering those who protect her. The child becomes an experiment for the mages — an extension of their magic and how far they can push into another’s mind. Turned out into the world after weeks of spells and markings (controlling bindings) left on her, the girl attempts to make her way. But finding her way is no easy task and this tale, Way of the Argosi, is a trial and error journey. We start with the Way of the Knight and the influence of her nobles on her life, honour and bravery, but this can not save her nor feed her. The Way of the Thief might work better. Seemingly righteous — balancing the scales of power and inequality — yet greed is not her thing and the pull of the mage’s magic is taking its toll and turning those in whom she has found a small sense of home against her. It is not until she meets the wandering philosopher Durral Brown that her fortunes will change. He’s also known as The Way of the Wandering Thistle — a true Argosi, and here is where our story really begins. Ferius will find her name, find her maetri (teacher) and face her enemies with wit, courage and trust in Durral Brown. She will learn the arts of the Argosi — without realising she knows them — the only way. Arta Valar, Arta Eres, Arta Forteize, Arta Loquit, Arta Precis, Arta Siva and Arta Tuco. 'Spellslinger' is a great series, with wit, danger, daring and love set in the fascinating world of the Seven Kingdoms. It’s full to the brim with playful language, compelling characters and spirited incidents. In Way of the Argosi, we are introduced more deeply to this world. The mysterious Ferius Parfax’s story was just waiting to be told. And there is more to come — Fall of the Argosi follows later this year. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton {Reviewed by THOMAS} The Japanese language differs from English in having a delineated category of mimetic words which are recognisable as such due to their pattern and use. Polly Barton uses a sequence of fifty of these onomatopoeia, from giro’ to uho-uho, to structure a memoir of her developing relationship with Japanese and with Japan, from going to teach language on a small Japanese Island when she was twenty-one to her eventual career as a Japanese literary translator and now writer. Because language is inextricable from every other aspect of a person’s life in any society, the book, as well as exploring the philosophy of language, so to call it, in a thoughtful, straight-forward and practical way, covers all the other aspects of Barton’s life in this period as well, including her uncertainties, errors, embarrassments, affairs, failings, awkwardnesses, and misfortunes, with unflinching honesty and companionable insight. After all, all stories are stories of language before they are of anything else. Barton found that, as she learned to structure her thoughts in Japanese instead of English, she was undergoing a change of personality as well. “It was as if what had been watching me all the time was my language: I had clung to it as the thing that shaped me, but now I was finding that a looser relationship with the language, perhaps having a looser shape altogether, was strangely healing.” She notes that a survey of bilingual people found that over two thirds attested to feeling like a ‘different person’ when speaking different languages. Language is a social phenomenon more than it is a verbal one, language is “inextricably entwined with behavioural practices and social roles,” and we often forget that the ever-present underlying nonverbal control of exchange is more basic to language than its verbal features. “Language is performative and communal. It is a means of ‘passing’ more than it is a means of expression,” writes Barton “Understanding is not an internal switch flicked that nobody else can see: if you don’t act upon an instruction, if you don’t behave in the required way, you are not understanding. To comprehend within a particular culture means to act upon that culture’s rules for understanding. To mean something by what one says is to be participating in a community-wide game governed by rules.” As she gains proficiency in Japanese, Barton begins to feel a slippage, so to call it, in the idea of herself. “Maybe this original ‘me’ which figured in my thinking was more nebulous, more tied to English than I realised,” she writes. “For the moment, I was saved from total assimilation by the inaccuracy of my mirroring, which was why I was able to feel more or less myself. But if I continued to get better, I reasoned, there might come a time when there was no longer room for the me I recognised.” Language is learned by, and operates through, copying, and has the cultural function of inducing conformity in its members. “Although chameleonship is outwardly derided and disdained, it is implicitly not only accepted but actually demanded.” As Barton shows, language is both a tool and a threat, but more, really, the medium in which we must negotiate the parameters of our individual and collective identities. The immersion in another language can provide insights into both the complexity and the fluidity of those identities. |
NEW RELEASES
It’s 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again. Loop Tracks is written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum.
"Loop Tracks is an urgent and unexpected novel about freedom and responsibility – about a woman forced to wear her solitary and unsupported choice as a puzzling mistake, and about the very present past that she must face to help her family and herself." —Elizabeth Knox
"This fictional inter-generational story will speak to a wide readership about the choices that are important for our future." —Margaret Sparrow
"To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all." Three stories in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the gauze of fiction. 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack – to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer’s mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story: in 'The Wishing Table' the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories.
"I love the way Anne Serre’s mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative." — Adam Mars-Jones
"Anne Serre is a remarkable and unusual writer; her pen a scalpel dissecting the human condition with painful precision. The Fool & Other Moral Tales – three novellas – are lyrical and disturbing, wonderful and terrible, arousing and devastating. Their hallucinatory, and at times nightmarish quality, is beautifully rendered by translator Mark Hutchinson." — Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast
"If the first two stories are moral firecrackers, ‘The Wishing Table ’, the third and final piece in the collection, is a hand grenade." — Tristan Foster, Music & Literature
A semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue. Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the shishōsetsu, or 'I-novel', a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalisation.
>>Autofiction's first boom.
>>Autofiction's first boom.
I hear everything. I hear for miles and miles. I can hear everything that ever happened. Some nights, the fog bell. That’s all right if the ships are safe. It’s the drummer I can’t abide. I say it in my prayers, Please not the drummer, but that makes no difference. He’s far off when I first hear him, over the stile at the sea bank, and slowly he comes closer, closer and louder, down the grass track between the cornfields, beating a drum as he comes along. One morning in 1969 Roy Watkins woke up to find words on the sheet of paper he had left in his typewriter before going to sleep: "an incoherent jumble of apparently unconnected phrases about fire, explosions, soldiers, and railway lines". The words recorded an actual event in Watkins’s life that took place just before his third birthday. Simple Annals is informed by these and other images and memories that surfaced over the following years: the sounds and songs, scrapes and surprises of childhood in an ordinary but loving family in Lancashire in the 1940s and early 50s, brought to the page with an almost pre-verbal immediacy.
"This short memoir is an absorbing masterpiece which sustains over its 127 pages the lyric intensity of the great practitioners of the short story. —Bernard O’Donoghue
"There isn’t an iota of sentiment or nostalgia in his recollection partly because the past isn’t embalmed but seen as an ecstatic and traumatic living root and presence in the writer’s being. Watkins is entirely original and this book is a masterpiece." —Nuzhat Bukhari
As climate change imposes significant challenges on the natural world we are being encouraged to plant trees. At the same time, urban intensification and expansion threatens our existing arboreal resources and leads to disputes among communities, councils and developers over the fate of mature trees. To find our way through this confusion, we need to build our respect for trees and to recognise their essential role in our environment, our heritage, our well-being and our future. We need to build a 'tree sense'. This collection of essays, art and poetry by artists, activists, ecologists and advocates discusses the many ways in which humans need trees, and how our future is laced into their roots and their branches. Includes contributions from Huhana Smith, Mels Barton, Elizabeth Smither, Philip Simpson, Anne Noble, Kennedy Warne, Meredith Robertshawe, Glyn Church, Jacky Bowring, and Colin Meurk.
>>Have a look inside the book.
>>Have a look inside the book.
A 'plumber's Mrs. Dalloway.' Back on the job after a long leave, Joseph is not at all sure he'll be able to fix his wife's best friend's water heater. Or that he'll even make it through the day. Bad thoughts keep creeping in. His son, suffering from a condition in which he believes someone close to him has been replaced by an imposter, has tried to kill Joseph's wife. He's worried that he'll try again. And that his wife is planning to leave him. A portrait of the uncertainty and awkwardness of one vulnerable man and his relationship with the world.
Tibble's eagerly awaited second collection, following 2018's Poūkahangatus.
Tiny Moons: A year of eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles $30
Civilisations by Laurent Binet $37
Selected Poems by Harry Ricketts $40
In Great Numbers: How number shape the world we live in by Beth Walrond, Daniela Olejníková and Isabel Thomas $45
"The intricate politics woven into Tibble’s poetry give her writing strength and purpose." —Winnie Siulolovao Dunn, Cordite Poetry Review
"Tibble speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality." —Hinemoana Baker
>>Two poems from the book.
>>Two poems from the book.
A collection of essays about food and belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.
>>Magnolia 木蘭 was short-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards this year. 
Party Legend by Sam Duckor-Jones $25
Endpapers: Uncovering a family story of books, war, escape, and home by Alexander Wolff $40
"Blending outrageous tales and borrowed moments with surprising results, Party Legend is the work of a poet unafraid to get a little weird to show us a good time. I am utterly bewitched by this sexy, playful and curious book." —Chris Tse
"Gorgeous and contrary." —Jenny Bornholdt
"Sex and longing, tenderness and pain, quest and invention, togetherness and solitude: if that’s not the queer experience, I don’t know what is." —Kerry Donovan Brown
"Bloody fantastic." —John Campbell
In 2017, Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Emile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis.
>>Book trailer.
An entertainingly sui generis counterfactual historical novel, in which Freydis, the Viking daughter of Erik the Red reaches Panama and disappears from history. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured by Incas, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe. What does he find? The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks. But most of all, downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power—Machiavelli's The Prince. It turns out he is very good at it. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever. 
Reawakened: Traditional navigators of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa by Jeff Evans $40
In this important book, ten navigators — the late Hec Busby, Piripi Evans and Jacko Thatcher from Aotearoa New Zealand; Peia Patai and Tua Pittman from the Cook Islands; and Kālepa Baybayan, Shorty Bertelmann, Nainoa Thompson, `Onohi Paishon and Bruce Blankenfeld from Hawai`i — share the challenges and triumphs of traditional wayfinding based on the deep knowledge of legendary navigator Mau Piailug. Their stories are intertwined with the renaissance of knowledge and traditions around open-ocean voyaging that are inspiring communities across the Pacific.
From his 1989 collection Coming Here – in which he wrote the first of his ‘Secret Life’ poems – to his 2018 collection Winter Eyes, which reviewer Tim Upperton called "unsettling, moving, both estranging and empathetic", Ricketts has written of friendship, youth, romance, loss, and the small moments that carry a lifelong weight, or light, within us.
Imagine a world without numbers. How would we ask for three scoops of ice cream? Or know whether we've got 60 minutes left to play with our friends rather than 60 seconds? Why does a -minute have 60 seconds anyway and not 100? Where does zero come from and what language do computers understand? Nicely presented for children.
Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials by Alice Roberts $50
Using the latest science and genetic research as well as new burial discoveries, Roberts paints an entirely new picture of pre-Roman Britain, of the people who lived there, and of the strong migratory and trade links connecting prehistoric Britain to Europe and beyond.
A collection of vital New Zealand short stories for young adults exploring ideas about identity, activism awareness, coming-of-age, society, and family. Stories by Gina Cole, Lani Wendt Young, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Witi Ihimaera, Anahera Gildea, Elsie Locke, Owen Marshall, David Hill, Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace, Frank Sargeson, J.P. Pomare, Tracey Slaughter, Russell Boey, Nithya Narayanan, and Ting J. Yiu.
Well-observed and precisely delineated, McCracken's short stories provide insight into the (mis)functioning of families and are frequently very funny.
William's beloved sister was his muse, champion, and most valued reader. She is mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as 'all fire and ardour'. Dorothy sacrificed a conventional life to share in her brother's world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between siblings, culminating in Dorothy's collapse on William's wedding day — after which the woman who once strode the hills in all weathers retreated inside the house for the last three decades of her life.
Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni $19
Pablo by Rascal $25
Little Blue and Little Yellow are best friends, but one day they can’t find each other. When they finally do, they give each other such a big hug that they turn green! With very few words and the power of a few scraps of coloured paper, this is a story of acceptance and friendship - and an introduction to colour-blending abstract art.
Pablo is asleep. This is his last night inside the shell. Tomorrow he'll come out. But he's a little shy so will start with just very small hole. Tap tap tap... With the little chick Pablo, we discover up and down, forward and back, shapes, the noises and smells of the outside, and take a first flight. It's not scary at all (especially not if you keep a little piece of home with you, in case you need it later).
BOOKS @ VOLUME #232 (4.6.21)
For new books and book news, and to find out what we've been reading and recommending, see our NEWSLETTER.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison {Reviewed by STELLA} Water, water, everywhere: the river — the Thames — the ponds, the rain and the damp. M.John Harrison's award-winning novel throws you into the chaos of Shaw, recently recovered from a midlife breakdown, and his sometime girlfriend Victoria's seemingly mundane worlds. It's Brexit London and the Midlands. The damp is rising, as are conspiracy theories, small green humanoid creatures, shonky business dealings and the residue of times past. We open with Shaw. He’s living in a bedsit, has scored a job of sorts from a man (Tim, who may or may not be his neighbour) he met down at the pub, and is slowly adjusting to being in the world again. If you can call it that. Tim sends him on strange missions delivering parcels of second rate (probably fourth rate) merchandise, as well as attending and reporting back on seances conducted by Tim’s either sister or lover. Tim keeps office on a barge where he has a beguiling reverse map of England where the water is land and the land water, and has a blog called The Water House — a mysterious and convoluted conspiracy theory that involves sightings of green humanoid creatures rising from the depths (who turn up by the river, washed out of the bath-water, down the toilet bowl, and lurking in the ponds all over England). Shaw also has to contend with his demented mother in the nursing home, who gets pleasure from calling him by the names of his many half-siblings or absent step-fathers and by insisting on ‘having the photographs’ before tearing these memories to shreds. Meanwhile, Victoria has decided it’s time to depart London and claim her inheritance — a house in need of repair in a small town. That her mother has died in mysterious circumstances doesn’t seem to bother her too much as she paints, gets the roof fixed and has a succession of tradies through the house — each odder than the next and all obsessed with the book (as are most of the locals) The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. Kicking around with Pearl, the cafe waitress who knew her mother and with whom she has struck up a kind of friendship, and firing off pithy emails to Shaw (which he reads but never responds to) allows her to keep her rose-tinted glasses on as she endeavours to tackle the house. Yet, something is bothering her. Why are the locals so odd, and are they driving her mad with their cryptic comments and obsession with The Water-Babies? Why is Pearl’s father, Wee Ossie, the sometimes taxi driver so unsavoury, and what did happen to her mother? When Pearl disappears (literally!) into a pond on the edge of the woods, Victoria is further rattled, and as the winter rain and damp set in, she thinks it might be time to sell up and return to London, where things have reached a surreal level for Shaw amid the shenanigans of Tim and his cronies. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was awarded the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize. What starts as a pedestrian plot-dominated novel soon reveals its layers and complexity. It doesn’t sit easily in any particular genre: it is a psychological, speculative, absurdist, social commentary, a cultural parody, and an overwhelming political novel. The residue of Thatcherite Britain hangs there in the damp undercurrent, while Brexit raises its head to subsume the next generation. Conspiracy theories run to rack and ruin, while consumerism and neo-liberalism look just as foolhardy. As the facade falls away, the chaos that crisis triggers — a rising tide of recognition — swamps both Victoria and Shaw, each in its own way. Damp and mysterious — unexpectedly delicious prose with endless subaqueous thoughts to engage you beyond the page. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | Speedboat by Renata Adler {Reviewed by THOMAS}
>>We have your Speedboat. |
>>Read Stella's review.
NEW RELEASES
Hede's intriguing novel is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B's brain. When B's father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it's finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld. In Hede's porous world, which is our world, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal.
"Adorable pulls us between wanting to live and having to die, between child found and parent lost, feeling from inside Hede's brain-womb all that hide and seek within the concaves of living rooms, telephone calls, and other skins. An urgent, brutally tactile novel that grows boundless in the mind, Adorable achieves life." —Mara Coson
>>Read an extract.
Library of Exile by Edmund de Waal $35
Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange $35
>>Read an extract.
De Waal's powerful installation and accompanying book appreciate the cultural importance of books—both individually and collected into libraries—and remembers books and libraries that have been lost or destroyed—and writers who have suffered or been exiled—by war and authoritarian powers. The library de Waal assembled contains 2,000 books written by authors in exile in numerous languages from antiquity to the present day. The exterior walls, washed with porcelain over sheets of gold are inscribed with the names of lost or destroyed libraries from history — from Nineveh and Alexandria to those lost more recently including Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Displayed inside the structure are vitrines of porcelain vessels inspired by Daniel Bomberg's Renaissance printing of the Talmud. Visitors are invited to contemplate and respond to the books by writing notes on the ex libris bookplate inserted into each edition.
The rediscovered Argentinian writer makes a laboratory of domesticity in this series of vignettes based on her own childhood in the early twentieth century. Lange's notes tell intimate, half-understood stories from the seemingly peaceful realm of childhood, a realm inhabited by an eccentric narrator searching for clues on womanhood and her own identity. She watches: her pubescent older sister, bathing naked in the moonlight; the death of a horse; and herself, a changeable and untimely girl. How she cried, when lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and how she laughed, climbing onto the kitchen roof in men's clothing and throwing bricks to announce her performance.
>>Thomas reviews People in the Room.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the post-human landscape by Cal Flyn $33
This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands – and what nature does when we're not there to see it. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.
"There is nothing more personal than doing your job." So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends — each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) — she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother.
“Temporary is a demented, de-tuned love song for the working life. Hilary Leichter possesses the brute force of language and imagination to create ultra-vivid worlds, suffused with an eerie weirdo beauty. It is Leichter’s brilliance that these invented worlds reflect so directly, blindingly, on the secret, mythical workings of our own.” —Ben Marcus
"Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror." —The New York Times
>>Odd jobs.
Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover.
Meijer avoids cliches and explores the meaning of depression and its philosophical implications. How can life be distorted by depression over time, and can this distortion be realigned to some sort of shared world?
Liars: Falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception by Cass R. Sunstein $45
This is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist writers on turning crisis into change edited by The Feminist Book Society $45
Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zarate $25
Undreamed Shores: The hidden heroines of British anthropology by Frances Larson $45
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin $25
Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson $45
The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg $35
Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown $33
We Will Not Cease by Archibald Baxter $30
Elegy for Mary Turner: An illustrated account of a lynching by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams $33
An examination of why lies and falsehoods spread so rapidly these days, and how we can reform our laws and policies regarding speech to allow democracy to function without it being undermined.
The pandemic has highlighted many inequalities around the world. This book gives a taste of the intersectional feminist resurgence, and of the urgency with which these issues must be faced. Includes Akasha Hull, Amelia Abraham, Catherine Cho, Dorothy Koomson, Fatima Bhutto, Fox Fisher, Francesca Martinez, Gina Miller, Helen Lederer, Jenny Sealey, Jess Phillips, Jessica Moor, Jude Kelly, Juli Delgado Lopera, Juliet Jacques, Kate Mosse, Kerry Hudson, Kuchenga, Laura Bates, Lauren Bravo, Layla F. Saad, Lindsey Dryden, Lisa Taddeo, Melissa Cummings-Quarry and Natalie A. Carter, Michelle Tea, Mireille Cassandra Harper, Molly Case, Radhika Sanghani, Rosanna Amaka, Sara Collins, Sarah Eagle Heart, Shaz, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sophie Williams, Stella Duffy, Virgie Tovar, and Yomi Adegoke.
>>'2020: The Failurey, Non-Chrononormative Year That I Can Finally Relate To.'
>>The Feminist Book Society.
>>The Feminist Book Society.
There is a war raging in the heartlands of Peru, waged on the land by the global industries plundering the Amazon and the Andes. In Saweto, charismatic activist Edwin Chota returns to his ashaninka roots, only to find that his people can't hunt for food because the animals have fled the rainforest to escape the chainsaw cacophony of illegal logging. Farmer Maxima Acuna is trying to grow potatoes and catch fish on the land she bought from her uncle — but she's sitting on top of a gold mine, and the miners will do anything to prove she's occupying her home illegally. The awajun community of the northern Amazon drink water contaminated with oil; child labourer Osman Cunachi's becomes internationally famous when a photo of him drenched in petrol as part of the clean-up efforts makes it way around the world. Joseph Zarate's work of documentary takes three of Peru's most precious resources — gold, wood and oil — and exposes the tragedy, violence and corruption tangled up in their extraction. He also draws us in to the rich, surprising world of Peru's indigenous communities, of local heroes and singular activists, of ancient customs and passionate young environmentalists. Wars of the Interior is an insight into the cultures alive in the vanishing Amazon, and a forceful, shocking expose of the industries destroying this land.
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters diploma in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all five were intent on travelling to the furthest corners of the globe and studying remote communities whose lives were a world away from their own. In the wastelands of Siberia; in the pueblos and villages of the Nile and New Mexico; in the midst of a rebellion on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interiors of New Guinea, they documented customs now long since forgotten, and bore witness to now-vanished worlds. Through their work they overturned some of the most pernicious myths that dogged their gender, and proved that women could be explorers and scientists, too. Yet when they returned to England they found loss, madness, and regret waiting for them.
"A deeply poignant account of five women who defied convention to pioneer female scholarship at immense personal cost. If you want to understand why there is so little historical evidence of women's intellectual achievement, read this. A devastating indictment of prejudice and how it held women back from achieving their potential." —Madeleine Bunting
"A vivid and moving history of a pioneering group of women, sensitively told and rigorously researched. Undreamed Shores is a compelling and memorable work." —Sarah Moss
"My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours." (from Patti Smith's introduction). At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. The book was Astragal, by Albertine Sarrazin. Sarrazin was an enigmatic outsider who had spent time in jail and who wrote only two novels and a book of poems in her short life—she died the year before Patti found her book, at the age of twenty-nine. Astragal tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she's picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who's also on the run. As they travel through nights and days together, they fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, living their lives always on the edge of danger.
>>Patron saint of delinquent writers.
>>Patron saint of delinquent writers.
Born into an age when women could neither vote nor own property once married, Barrett Browning seized control of her private income, overcame long term illness and disability, eloped to revolutionary Italy with Robert Browning—and achieved lasting fame as a poet. Feminist icon, political activist and international literary superstar, she inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf.
A father throws one of his twin children from the train taking them to Auschwitz and returns years later to find her cared for by a Polish peasant who had longed for a child. What is the relationship between fairy tales and the most difficult aspects of real history?
"The book implores readers to consider the relationships between storytelling and history, between myth and truth. The question is not whether this unlikely story is true, but rather what we talk about when we talk about true stories. The epilogue not only acknowledges that it is difficult to suspend disbelief when confronted with a fairy tale, but also asks us to consider the implications of suspending disbelief in the first place." —Los Angeles Review of Books
The Book of Trees: Visualising branches of knowledge by Manuel Lima $65
Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of professional practices. This book exposes our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.
'The Rebecca Solnit of the body', Brown's essays grapple with subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, Eugenics, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
"Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveller, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world." —Claire Dederer
"To oppose the military machine means to accept the possibility that one may be destroyed by it." We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter's brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I. A new edition of this pacificist classic.
In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, USA, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives and their mourning matter. Includes an introduction by historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching's terror in American history.
Long Peace Street: A walk in modern China by Jonathan Chatwin $35
Through the centre of China's historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China's recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital's streets. At the same time, it takes the reader on a journey through the city's recent history.
Veggie Power by Olaf Hajek $45
Olaf Hajek's wondrously imaginative and detailed illustrations of vegetables are paired with engaging texts. Organised by season, the book tells how each vegetable is grown, how it can be enjoyed on our plates, its health benefits, historical tidbits, and botanical fun facts.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing {Reviewed by STELLA} A collection of essays about art and emergency couldn’t be more fitting for the times we live in. Funny Weather is a collection of pieces written by Olivia Laing between 2015—2019 for various art magazines and newspapers. Laing is intrigued by the idea, and adamant that it is so, that art is a vehicle for resistance and repair in a world where crises pit us against systems, both capitalist and governmental, and where unexpected emergencies create social and cultural upheaval. While these writings predate the Covid crisis, the ideas and analysis can easily be applied to our present scenario. Laing discusses artists, writers, and their work related to the political and social upheavals that prefigure and inform their practice. Whether it’s documenting the AIDS crisis, as in the work of David Wojnarowicz, or exploring our place in nature — Derek Jarman — or creating a place of least distraction — Georgia O’Keefe — or using language to counter political expediency — Ali Smith — or countering expectations — Jean-Michel Basquiat — Laing introduces us to artists who push against the rigidity of conformity, question authority and suggest alternatives. While the best works are in a biographical essay style, the longer pieces being more satisfying, the variety of work ensures fresh views on artists you may know, as well as introductions to some you don’t. Split into loosely thematic sections, the essays intersect across each other in ideas and study, with all drawing down to Laing’s insistence that art is important in the face of an emergency. This concept underlies her conversations about or with the artists, and her critique of their work in the context of political, social and cultural phenomena. Where Laing succeeds and keeps the reader engaged (compared with the stilted or pretentious nature of much art writing) is in her ability to write with insight, compassion and verve, by putting her own experiences into the dialogue and teasing at the edges, looking afresh (much in the same way that John Berger makes us look at art) to give the reader informative and complex, yet unwaveringly accessible, conversation. Laing avoids easy conclusions and gives us plenty to chew on, as we seek art to save us in an emergency. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Mouthpieces by Eimear McBride {Reviewed by THOMAS} To remove from language the ornamental aspects of that language, to undercut the words until the uncuttable is all that’s left, to remove from a text all rationale, to leave all bare, is a path of negation, of austere interrogation, he wrote. “There is no occurrence upon which doubt cannot be thrown,” she wrote. The space cleared by Samuel Beckett surely is or could be an enterable space, not a fenced space, if there are any who would enter and could enter, some few perhaps, but some, he wrote. Space for a voice, a voice tied with the breath, or by the breath, whatever, to the body, to the mind, to the mouth and to the ear, if there is not no such thing as a body or a mind, or a mouth and an ear, he wrote. The most is nearest the least. Three pieces by McBride, I’m ear, call them pieces, call them texts, nothing else to call them, three voices, women’s voices, attrited by all that surrounds them and attrites, by all that expects, by all that intrudes upon them and demands, by all that surrounds them and occludes, but voices made more clear by all attempts, at all times and from all quarters, to stifle and occlude, he wrote. Kick away the crutch and see what walks. There is more threat or rage in the uneraseable than in that which has yet to be erased, though the impulse to erase remains, an impulse no longer able to be expressed, from which expression is exhausted, or denied, or is itself erased, he wrote. Some breath remains unsmothered, some unsmotherable breath or some breath not quite yet smothered, some voice will name, or if not name resist, with irresistable resistance or with what must pass for resistance, the smotherers whose smothering is not quite yet done, whose smothering will never now be done or whose smothering is at least postponed by the voice, the voice that therefore must not cease, he wrote. Three brief texts made powerful by their briefness. I read, I unread and reread, he wrote. I write this adminicle, this text as evidence of another text, the text I view and review, the text the reader of this adminicle would do well to read and reread rather than this rushed adminicle, this clumsiness, this crutchlessness, he wrote. How to go on? “She cannot find a way out because there is no way,” she wrote. “Because there is no out. Because there is no because. Just is.” |
>>The problems of inhabiting a body.
>>William Reich and the 'sexual revolution'.
>>An interrogation of bodies.
>>The book came out of a moment of despair.
>>Laing discusses the book with Maggie Nelson.
>>On writing the global story of liberation.
>>Finding renewal in a precision haircut.
>>Of course the book has a playlist!
>>Laing's reading piles are far from organised...
>>Your copy of Everybody.
>>Other books by Olivia Laing.
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A glorious and hilarious rant against the pretensions of the 'poetry scene', so to call it, and against pretty much everything else that falls under the author's notice, Dead Souls is also a metaphysical mystery and an exploration of the dual pitfalls of plagiarism and invention — a novel with a similar palette of barbs and pleasures to those of Thomas Bernhard.
>>Read an extract.
>>Read an extract.
In nineteen razor-sharp essays Kushner explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones. The book also details how, in her twenties, Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love — motorbikes — to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000, and how, following a crash at 200km/h, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.
This collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing. A Clear Dawn presents a new wave of creative talent. With roots stretching from Indonesia to Japan, from China to the Philippines to the Indian subcontinent, the authors in this anthology range from high school students to retirees, from recent immigrants to writers whose families have lived in New Zealand for generations. Some of the writers – including Gregory Kan, Sharon Lam, Rose Lu and Chris Tse – have published books; some, like Mustaq Missouri, Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, are better known for their work in theatre and performance. The introduction outlines New Zealand's long yet under-recognised history of immigration from Asia.
"Breathtaking in its parts and as a whole. Even if you know a part of Asia well, even if you feel in touch with present-day Aotearoa, this anthology will surprise you again and again, as, voice by unique voice, truth by particular truth, its artists build a mosaic you have never seen before." —Rajorshi Chakraborti
Olga immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
"Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind A Door reminded me, as I was speeding through it, for there was no other way to read a work of such momentum and force, that novels are made of sentences, and who else writes sentences like this, does anyone else, I thought, as if in a fever dream, opening up each portal and falling through it, write sentences like this juxtaposing despair and lust, tragedy and farce." —Kate Zambreno
The devil's daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910 and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century. Over nine decades, No. 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a spy, a famous Beat poet, a coal miner who fears daylight, a psychic: these are some of the residents whose lives are plagued by the building's troubled history in disparate, sometimes chilling ways. The curse creeps up the nine floors and an enraged spirit world swells to the surface, desperate for the true horror of the building's longest kept secret to be heard.
"One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years. Luckenbooth, sprawling the decades with its themes of repression and revenge, brings back something that has long been lacking in the British novel: ambition. If Alasdair Gray's Lanark was a masterly imagining of Glasgow, then this is the quintessential novel of Edinburgh at its darkest." —Irvine Welsh
"A deeply powerful, compellingly vivid novel. Luckenbooth is a major work of Scottish fiction — possibly one of the most significant novels of the last ten years. —Alan Warner
"Brilliantly strange, this haunted panorama is a dazzling outsider history." —M. John Harrison, Guardian
"Radical, daring, and beautifully written." —The Scotsman
A fascinating series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless: the internet.
>>In search of lost time (with a little help from Google).
>>In search of lost time (with a little help from Google).
An exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. When Hugh Raffles’s two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. The Book of Unconformities is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan’s Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they’ve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity, as capricious indifferent and willful as time itself.
“In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Mr. Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss. The Book of Unconformities is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated.” —The Wall Street Journal
“What intuition the book requires, what detective work—and what magic tricks it performs. Raffles is serenely indifferent to the imperatives and ordinary satisfactions of conventional storytelling. Character, coherence, a legible and meaningful structure—these are not his concerns. There are no attempts to suture together the various stories, no attempts to enact something 'learned' by the author. The photographs accompanying the text are dim and blotchy, and Raffles favors slabs of prose unbroken by punctuation. I intend all this as praise.” —The New York Times
“A spellbinding time travelogue. Raffles’s dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in metamorphic rock.” —Harper’s Magazine
>>Svalbard.
When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting-and occasionally celebrating-her suspected role in her husband's disappearance. Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. The stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, his first in eight years.
Niva and Yotam Kay of Pakaraka Permaculture on the Coromandel Peninsula share their long experience of organic gardening in this comprehensive book on how to create and maintain a productive and regenerative vegetable garden. Taking care of the soil life and fertility provides plants with what they need to thrive. The book reflects in the latest scientific research on soil health, ecological and regenerative practices.
Every language in the world shares a few common features: we can ask a question, say something belongs to us, and tell someone what to do. But beyond that, our languages are richly and almost infinitely varied: a French speaker can't conceive of a world that isn't split into un and une, male and female, while Estonians have only one word for both men and women: tema. In Dyirbal, an Australian language, things might be masculine, feminine, neuter — or edible vegetable.
A beautifully illustrated picture books gently encouraging an appreciation of nature, animals, seasons, and intergenerational friendship. Includes a glossary of Cree words for the various animals that appear in the book.
Results from the 2021 Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition as well as new writing from established and new voices — work ranging from the wry, ludic and lyrical, to gripping body horror as social commentary — reviews of New Zealand books, and art by Claire Beynon, Ewan McDougall, and Bridget Reweti.
Pay a photographic visit to a variety of new, second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, mostly in the US, the UK and Europe, in this sumptuous book.
Schopenhauer's later writings mark a shift towards a philosophy of aphorisms, fragments, anecdotes and observations, written in a literary style that is by turns antagonistic, resigned, confessional, and filled with all the fragile contours of an intellectual memoir. Here Schopenhauer allows himself to pose challenging questions regarding the fate of the human species, the role of suffering in the world, and the rift between self and world that increasingly has come to define human existence, to this day. It is these writings of Schopenhauer that later generations of artists, poets, musicians, and philosophers would identify as exemplifying the pessimism of their era, and perhaps of our own as well. On the Suffering of the World is presented with an introduction that places Schopenhauer's thought in its intellectual context, while also connecting it to contemporary concerns over climate change, the anthropocene, and the spectre of human extinction.
>>A few cheerful words by Thomas. 
The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo $38
The first picture book from the Nobel Prize-winning writer is a quiet meditation on happiness following the life of a busy man who loses his soul, beautifully illustrated by Concejo.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Bread is Gold: Extraordinary meals with ordinary ingredients by Massimo Bottura and friends {Reviewed by STELLA} A surfeit of stale bread and bruised bananas? Bread is Gold is the perfect cookbook for these dilemmas. Spearheaded by Italian chef Massimo Bottura (of Osteria Francescana fame), the Refettorio Ambrosiano was a project designed alongside the Food Expo in Milan in 2015. Its purpose was to use the waste ingredients (the leftovers) to produce free meals for the community — a soup kitchen with world-class chefs at the stovetops. With Bottura’s personal connections and chefs coming to cook for the Expo, there was a steady stream of willing cooks in town. Bread is Gold records some of the recipes they created, insights into their experience of inventive cooking using an array of seemingly unexceptional (or abandoned) ingredients to make food that was extraordinary for the community — dinner for the homeless, the poor and the hungry, as well lunches for school children — not just to feed, but to create a sense of community through sharing good food together. The fifty-odd chefs include Daniel Humm (3 Michelin star restaurant Eleven Madison Park), Rene Redzepi (Noma), Alain Ducasse (21 Michelin stars to his name), Ana Ros (Hisa Franko), Ferran Adria (elBulli), Cristina Bowerman (Glass Hostaria), and so many more — all willing to turn up on the day, walk into the chiller and make something out of nothing. Each chef is profiled, citing their daily experience: what they find in the cupboards and how they transform the ingredients into something not just edible, but delicious. Massimo Bottura's conversational style works well as he records his conversations in the kitchen with the chefs — conversations about food waste and their reaction to cooking for people who would rarely know how famous they were; the challenge of making do, and their eagerness to make a special meal. Following the insightful text pieces, are photographs of the trays of foodstuffs for the day — sometimes treasures, but often battered or nearly past-the-use-by-date ingredients — and the cooks working in the kitchen, the hard work and the camaraderie. Then the recipes and, yes, there are multiple ways to use day-old bread and battered bananas — ice cream variations feature highly. Yet each chef brings something from their own cultural background and culinary experience, along with inventiveness and sophistication — popcorn pesto, burnt lime soup, banana peel chutney, fennel and grapefruit salad with anchovy paste, caramelised bananas with crescenza cheese, cream of mixed grains with puffed rice and goat milk royale. Some recipes are hearty, others delicate, but all have that same sensibility of looking in the cupboard when it’s almost bare, when ingredients don’t seem to be a natural match, and coming up with something that will satisfy (or surprise) the taste buds and fill the stomach — and along the way reduce waste. Learn how to experiment in your kitchen — use the wilted herbs, the stale bread and very ripe bananas — and maybe pick up some new tips from world-class chefs and reduce your food waste footprint. Refettorio Ambrosiano went on beyond its six months and continues under the wider Food for Soul international project. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood {Reviewed by THOMAS} Is there such a thing as claustrophobia in your own skin, he wondered. He thought about the possibility of a collective mind, a species mind, but why stop at species, a global mind, trapped and compartmentalised into individuals. No wonder we all feel trapped in ourselves, he thought. No wonder we do everything we can, even the most stupid things, to join ourselves back up. The most inane things. And yet, and yet, we are all the time assailed by this collective mind, he thought, how do we protect ourselves from it, and from everyone else that comprises it, how do we hold back even a little space within ourselves to be just ourselves, if there is such a thing? Do we have, or have we ever had, anything that could pass for authenticity, anyway, he wondered, and would we know whether we had it or had lost it, or not? In the age of internet hyperconnectivity, so to call it, should we fear or celebrate that so much of our thinking is done for us outside our head, how liberating, how useful, how frightening, but has this not anyway always been the case, even for our ancestors’ ancestors, is this not where the collective mind came from, after all? Too many question marks, too many superfluous words, he thought. Let’s get on. Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This straddles these and other polarities, he wrote. It is both clever and moving, both piercingly funny and reassuringly 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 or attempting to connect all these. Now he seemed to have written some sort of blurb instead of a review, he observed, not that what he had been writing or what he usually wrote could have passed as a review anyway, the blurb was closer. The first half of the book is probably the best encapsulation of the internet experience in fiction that he had read, he thought, if encapsulation is the word, though he had not read many fictions that attempted to capture the internet experience, so to call it. Actually there are very few novels that attempt this, he thought, which is surprising considering the way we all use the internet to do our thinking nowadays. Because we are all but a synapse away from everyone else on the planet, the speed of thought really is the speed of thought, he thought, by the time anyone responds to our thought, the world we thought it in has already changed, the collective mind has mutated and normalised the mutation. No One Is Talking About This is written in short paragraphs or sections of a postable size, the length of an internet thought, he thought, separated by blanks, just as thoughts seem to be. “Why were we all writing like this now?” wonders Lockwood’s narrator (that is to say Lockwood herself in the third person, past tense (he knew, he thought, why she wrote like that)). “Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote. ::: These disconnections were what kept the pages turning, these blank spaces were what moved the plot forward. The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair, willing herself to stand up.” Is this book a celebration or a satire of the internet—the portal—he wondered, who can tell the difference these days, the membrane between irony and sincerity is pretty well transparent, he wrote, avoiding a question mark where one had seemed to be called for. The portal had “once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other,” Lockwood wrote. All the time, though, as he had said in his blurb, call that the precis of his review, perhaps, the book is really about language and the ways it bears, releases, lets slip, distorts, mocks, grapples with and fails to grapple with whatever it is that language bears, releases, lets slip, etcetera, he wasn’t quite sure what, but language did it anyway, what was always protean was only more protean in the portal. The second half of the book concerns the brief six-month life of Lockwood’s niece, born with Proteus Syndrome, a growth disorder that eventually kills its subject under the chaotic asymmetric growth of their own body. He had forgotten the name of the syndrome and had to look it up in the novel later, only to find that he had used it adjectivally in his previous sentence, which was a bit awkward and unintentional, but there was no going back now. The Lockwood character is stricken (“If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did this leave her?”), goes to support her sister, and the rest of the novel about language revolves around the niece who would never attain language of her own. The narrator’s love for the doomed niece is the least meme-able thing you could imagine, he thought, and yet the voice continues, the thought length continues, the writing style spun by the portal proves, in Lockwood’s hands (hands? mind? fingers? keyboard?) at least, capable of authenticity and feeling. Perhaps we have always thought like this, or experienced like this, he thought, perhaps the world and we ourselves are comprised of instances, snippets, bundled together by language, and the portal has only helped us to see that this is so. If I feel claustrophobic in my own skin, he thought, imagine how the parts and sub-parts of me feel. Imagine how my thoughts feel, and how badly they want to get out. |
There can be no doubt that cats long ago domesticated humans for their own ends, and since then have both shown and withheld from us the secrets of living well. At once our close companions and completely inaccessible, what do cats know that we don't? They show little interest in philosophy and yet they can help us think about what it means to exist—and how we can do so better. With his wide-ranging knowledge of philosophy and his radical empathy for the experiences of animals in human association, there can be no better guide to feline philosophy than John Gray.
>>What can we learn from cats?
>>Cats, humans, and the good life.
>>Contentment is the default condition for cats.
>>We cannot know what it is like to be a cat.
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From the author of the 'Outline' trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships. A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Second Place is both deeply affirming and deeply scathing of humanity.
A woman moves through the city, her city, on her own. She moves along its bright pavements; she passes over its bridges, through its shops and pools and bars. She slows her pace to watch a couple fighting, to take in the sight of an old woman in a waiting room; pauses to drink her coffee in a shaded square. Sometimes her steps take her to her grieving mother, sealed off in her own solitude. Sometimes they take her to the station, where the trains can spirit her away for a short while. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change forever. Written in Lahiri's adopted language, Italian, and translated by her into English, Whereabouts is spare and evocative, demonstrating the shift in the author's literary sensibilities.
>>Lost, at sea, at odds.
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones $35
>>Lost, at sea, at odds.
Short-listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, this well written multi-generational novel coils its way through issues of race, class and gender in a Barbados where poverty and misogyny lurk under the surface and where a cautionary folk tale takes on multiple meanings for three very different women.
Short-listed for 2021 International Booker Prize for In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova is one of the most distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. As Russia's political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country's past and present. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova's poetry and essays, showcasing her range and creative evolution.
Hans Falk, born in 1790 in Copenhagen, took to the sea as a lad, changed his name to Phillip Tapsell, and after many adventures settled at Maketu in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty. There he became the key trader for Bay of Plenty iwi and married into the highest levels of Te Arawa, while helping other tribes to defend themselves against invasion from northern tribes. He was one of the original Pakeha-Maori. Yet Tapsell's life of daring is not well known today, and the memoirs he dictated to Edward Little shortly before his death were only ever published in newspaper form. Adams's research has given Tapsell's account a context in which to appreciate his importance.
Using a bioarchaeological approach, Jarman follows evidence that suggests a Viking-dominated trade and slave route from Northern Europe to the Middle East, India and beyond, and reconfigures our thinking about the Vikings themselves.
For centuries, the port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family's correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.
Heartbroken after a long, painful love affair, a man drives a haulage lorry from England to France. Travelling with him is a secret passenger—his daughter. Twenty-something, unkempt, off the rails. With a week on the road together, father and daughter must restore themselves and each other, and repair a relationship that is at once fiercely loving and deeply scarred.
"Haunting, mesmerising, and so deeply intelligent about the interwoven strengths and frailties of the human heart." —Kamila Shamsie
"Wonderful, wrenching, full of enormous feelings very precisely rendered." —Sara Baume
Includes essays on Dostoevsky, Kafka, A.S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Cees Nooteboom, Borges, and Mahfouz.
"For all the sharpness and sorrow of Coetzee's writing, there is something grandly calming about his style: his sentences seem to give off light, and not in a hard dazzle, but in the glow of a child's night-light." —The Age
The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala $38
Dark Archives: A librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin by Megan Rosenbloom $50
Oddity by Eli Brown $22
The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. Told by a chorus of narrators—including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer—who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another's stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.
There are books out there, some shelved unwittingly next to ordinary texts, that are bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom, a medical librarian and a cofounder of the Death Salon, seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind this anthropodermic bibliopegy. Dozens of these books still sit on the shelves of the world's most famous libraries and museums. What are their stories? Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, mental patients, beautiful women, and indigents whose lives are bound together in this rare, scattered, and disquieting collection. It also tells the story of the scientists, curators, and librarians like Rosenbloom—interested in the full complicated histories behind these dark artifacts of nineteenth-century medicine—are developing tests to discover these books and sorting through the ethics of custodianship. 
Faking It: My life in transition by Kyle Mewburn $39
The Power of Geography: Ten maps that reveal the future of the world by Tim Marshall $38
Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño $25
The Rise and Fall of Patriarchal Systems by Nancy Folbre $35
Kyle Mewburn grew up in the sunburnt, unsophisticated Brisbane suburbs of the 1960s and '70s in a household with little love and no books, with a lifelong feeling of being somehow wrong — like 'strawberry jam in a spinach can'. In this book, Kyle describes this early life and her journey to becoming her own person — a celebrated children's book author, a husband and, finally, a woman.
Marshall's global bestseller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation's choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn't changed, but the world has. In this new book, Marshall takes us into ten regions that are set to shape global politics and power. Find out why the Earth's atmosphere is the world's next battleground; why the fight for the Pacific is just beginning; and why Europe's next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks. Chapters cover Australia, The Sahel, Greece, Turkey, the UK, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Space.
Three novellas. In 'Cowboy Graves', Arturo Belano—Bolano's alter ego—returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. 'French Comedy of Horrors' takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen-year-old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in 'Fatherland', a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.
Why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, says Folbre, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has improved living standards and increased the scope for individual choice for women; on the other, increased inequality and the weakening of families and communities have reconfigured gender inequalities, leaving caregivers particularly vulnerable. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems examines why care work is generally unrewarded in a market economy, calling attention to the non-market processes of childbearing, childrearing and the care of other dependents, the inheritance of assets, and the use of force and violence to appropriate both physical and human resources. Exploring intersecting inequalities based on class, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and citizenship, and their implications for political coalitions, it sets a new feminist agenda for the twenty-first century.
When her physician father is murdered, thirteen-year-old Clover Elkin embarks on a perilous mission through warring frontier territories to protect the one secret Oddity he left behind. And as she uncovers the truth about her parents and her past, Clover herself emerges as a powerful agent of history.
Hume's radical rethinking of human nature and of our relationship with the world is presented by Baggini as a complete approach to life (and we learn quite a bit about Hume's life, too).
For Charles Darwin – who estimated every acre of land contained 53,000 earthworms – the humble earthworm was the most important creature on the planet. We take them for granted but, without the earthworm, the world's soil would be barren, and our gardens, fields and farms wouldn't be able to grow the food and support the animals we need to survive.
His research was urgent fifty years ago. Now, it’s critical. In the early 1970s, budding Kiwi scientist Dave Lowe was posted at an atmospheric monitoring station on the wind-blasted southern coast of New Zealand’s North Island. On a shoestring salary he measured carbon in the atmosphere, collecting vital data towards what became one of the most important discoveries in modern science. What followed was a lifetime’s career marked by hope and despair. As realisation dawned of what his measurements meant for the future of the planet, Dave travelled the world to understand more about atmospheric gases, along the way programming some of the earliest computers, designing cutting-edge equipment and conducting experiments both dangerous and mind-numbingly dull. From the sandy beaches of California to the stark winters of West Germany, the mesas of the Rocky Mountains and an Atlantic voyage across the equator, Dave has faced down climate deniers, foot-dragging bureaucracy and widespread complacency to open people’s eyes to the effects of increasing fossil fuel emissions on our atmosphere. In equal parts adventure and a warning, and with the wisdom and frustration of half a century behind him, The Alarmist is the autobiography of a pioneering scientist who has dedicated his life to sounding the alarm on climate change.