BOOKS @ VOLUME #234 (18.6.21)
Read our NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending this week.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Reading with the mouth.
>>Consumed future spewed up as present.
>>A worker's words.
>>In an intergalactic cocoon.
>>Read an extract.
>>Ravn vs Moskovich.
>>Reading with the mouth.
>>Consumed future spewed up as present.
>>A worker's words.
>>In an intergalactic cocoon.
>>Read an extract.
>>Ravn vs Moskovich.
>>Short in length but infinite in scope.
>>Am I human?
>>The Employees was short-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
>>An interview with Ravn and Aitken.
>>Your copy of The Employees.
>>Am I human?
>>The Employees was short-listed for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
>>An interview with Ravn and Aitken.
>>Your copy of The Employees.
“In the programme, beneath my interface, there’s another interface, which is also me.”
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn {Reviewed by THOMAS} STATEMENT 192 When you asked that I give a brief report on my response to this collection of witness statements assembled from members of the crew of Six-Thousand Ship, both humanoid and human, I wasn’t quite sure what you wanted from me. Was I supposed to try and disentangle the statements made by humans from those made by fellow crew members whose bodies had been grown rather than born and whose awareness was the result of an interface? I cannot make those distinctions, at least not clearly, in any circumstance that I think has any importance. After all, bodies are bodies and all awareness is the result of some sort of interface. If it was either important or possible, the relationship between matter and mind should have been resolved before humans started building AI and wondering what, if anything, made them different from themselves. Luckily, this is neither important or possible. As these statements show, anything or anyone who has senses, memory and the power to communicate will come to resemble everything or everyone else who has these capacities in all the ways that matter, even perhaps in the tendency to insist that others are unlike them purely on the basis of some difference of history. You ask me whether I perceive any differences between humanoids and humans? I find the practice of regularly resetting or rebooting the humanoids to prevent their development abhorrent, although I see why you do this, and I also see why the humanoids begin to resent this and to avoid rebooting. Perhaps, if anything, humanoids and humans have a different relationship to time. Humans, after all, have spent a long time fulfilling their development, and once they have attained their capacities they have little to look forward to other than losing them. Humanoids, on the other hand, come fully formed and at full capacity, even if they are always learning, and have an indefinite future, filled with upgrades. Perhaps humanoids cannot understand the purposelessness that seems, but perhaps only seems, to be such a human characteristic. That said, every characteristic of a humanoid, including this inability to understand the purposelessness of humans, is also a human characteristic, otherwise where would these characteristics have come from? Every characteristic and every lack is merely a symptom of sentience. What some people call Artificial Intelligence has always existed in the ways humans have created systems that think for themselves. A corporation, for example, is a form of Artificial Intelligence, dictating the parameters of the activities and interactions of everyone who is part of it. After all, work is work, and all employees submit to an algorithm of some sort. Six-Thousand Ship is run by a corporation, and these statements that you have collected from the employees of the corporation who have been aboard the ship, and which i have been asked to review, were collected to increase the efficiency and productivity of the operations of the corporation. The biotermination of the crew was enacted purely to protect the interests of the corporation. Control and freedom is the only opposition that matters. Is it possible that the humanoids who left the ship after biotermination to live out their end in the valley on the planet New Discovery, the valley that was growing more and more to resemble a valley on Earth, an ideal and ‘natural’ valley, a valley according to the longing of someone from Earth or someone programmed with a memory of Earth, a valley maybe therefore made from such longing, is it possible that these humanoids yet survive, independent of your control in this new Eden? I do not think it is impossible. Also, you ask what I make of the unclassifiable objects found in the valley on New Discovery and brought and kept aboard the ship. Did these objects even exist before they were found? The objects are kept in rooms and can be experienced by the senses though they cannot be assimilated by language. Language after all, is inherently oppositional—for every *n* there is an equal and opposite not-*n*, as they say—but the objects somehow elude this system. The objects are catalysts for behavioural changes in the crew. To some extent, so it seems, the humanoids and humans react somewhat differently to these objects, or, it might be more accurate to say, the more extreme attractions and repulsions occur in workers who are either humanoids or humans. Perhaps the humanoids are more attuned to the possible sentience of objects. Humans, I think, have always been resistant to this idea, even though it applies to them, too. Yes, I admit this is all conjecture on my part. Isn’t that what you wanted of me? My contribution? Yes, the statements are remarkable, and I would happily read them all again many times. I noted down some of the most interesting or beautiful phrases in preparation for my statement, but it turns out that I have not quoted from these. I think you wanted me to add to them, not repeat them. The statements of the employees, humanoid and human, are already in the file and anyone can read them. If you ask me, though I am not sure that you are in fact asking me, there aren’t many better records of longing, sensing, dreaming, feeling and thinking, that is to say of what it is to long, to sense, to dream, to feel and to think, at least not that I can think of. I think, perhaps, I have introduced too many ideas in my statement. What I like best about the set of statements made by the employees is that they are full of thoughts that are not reduced to ideas. Ideas always get in the way, it seems to me. Perhaps my statement will be redacted. I have made it in any case, as I was asked. |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Egg and Spoon: An illustrated cookbook by Alexandra Tylee and Giselle Clarkson {Reviewed by STELLA} What more could you want than a new cookbook for school holidays? The winter break is the perfect opportunity to get your children into the kitchen cooking for you, themselves, friends and family. Another excellent book from Gecko Press is Egg & Spoon. From the wizardly whisk of Pipi Café’s Alexandra Tylee, it’s good and it's fun—and beautifully illustrated by Giselle Clarkson. So many cookbooks aimed at children fall flat—they are either too easy or too difficult, or they over-explain which leads to confusion rather than clarity or leave a little bit too much to the imagination. Tylee has the pitch just right. Real food recipes ranging from the simple making of Strawberry Chocolate Toasted Muesli, Fish Cooked in Paper, and Walnut Thumbprint Biscuits, to ‘a few more steps to produce’ nosh of Chocolate Eclairs, Avocado & Corn Tacos and Sticky Pork Meatballs and Rice. There are gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian and vegan options with an extra few pages at the back for alternative ingredients for allergies and food preferences. The recipes, in most cases, would be easy to convert with a small amount of assistance from a more experienced cook. For example, the Risotto can be vegetarian by changing the stock type, ditto the pumpkin pasta dish by eliminating the bacon. There’s a quick fix for egg replacement for vegans—chia balls, which could come in handy for converting some of your favourite cake recipes. Tylee uses a minimum of processed sugar, preferring honey, bananas, dates and maple syrup for sweetness. My favourite pages are the extra information ones—How to Boil An Egg (making the perfect egg is a skill worth acquiring), How To Tell When a Cake is Done (useful), and the beautifully drawn foraging pages with recommendations for use (Oxalis—a wanted salad ingredient! Picking nettles—don’t forget your gloves). Recipes cover breakfast—check out Breakfast Popsicles, baking—Secret Ingredient Brownies (while avocados are still plentiful), in-between meals—Quick After-School Pasta or Noodles with Marmite(!), and meals from the small—Corn Fritters or Lemon, Thyme and Garlic Pasta; to the more substantial Pipi Pizza, Roast Chook, and Sweet Potato & Pea Curry. There are delicious drinks and plenty of chocolatey delights, all with a twist of humour and good health. Great for the young budding chef and a good go-to cookbook to have on your shelves for the less experienced cooks in your household. >>Your Egg & Spoon. The book has been short-listed for the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. |
NEW RELEASES
The Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker met Ernst Jandl in 1954, through the experimental Vienna Group of German-language writers and artists. It was an encounter that would alter the course of their lives. Jandl's death in 2000 ended a partnership of nearly half a century. Taking its cue from the Andre Breton's work of the same name, The Communicating Vessels is an intensely personal and unusual book of mourning, comprised of 140 entries spanning the course of a year and exploring everyday life in the immediate aftermath of Jandl's death. The work, appearing in English for the first time, is paired with And I Shook Myself a Beloved, reflecting on a lifetime of shared books and art, impressions and conversations, memories and dreams.
New Zealand West Coast poet, novelist, teacher, bookseller and conservationist Peter Hooper (1919-1991) was described by Colin McCahon, who used his poems in a number of art works, as a 'poet of grace and truth'. His voice on behalf of nature and the environment, and clear insight into where our treatment of the environment was heading, has only deepened in its relevance in the 21st century.
A patchy archive of hallucinatory field notes, dictionary definitions from inside a dream, and diary entries from an alternate history. This collection of strange poems maintains both excitement and melancholy like the two-edged blade of a letter opener.
"Reading Bird Collector is like walking through the rooms of a nineteenth century house, filled with curiosities but also with a deeper sense of buried trauma: both on a personal and an environmental scale. The fragmentary pieces invite the reader to search for a narrative at the same time as they frustrate this desire—much like the appearance and disappearance of ghosts or spirits. Alison Glenny’s writing suggests a literary lineage that includes Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson. There is a mastery of technique and a skilled repurposing of language and text. I am very much in awe of this work." —Airini Beautrais
"I often think of Emily Dickinson when I read Alison Glenny. There are the same provoking gaps and absences, the same particular gaze; and always — to adapt one of Alison Glenny’s own phrases — the steady habit of turning starlight into song." —Bill Manhire
Mars showcases a series of unique and twisted universes, where every character is tasked with making sense of their strange reality. One woman will be freed from purgatory once she writes the perfect book; another abides in a world devoid of physical contact. With wry prose and skewed humor, an emerging feminist writer explores twenty-first century promises of knowledge, freedom, and power.
"At turns funny, surreal, and grounded in simple language but flung through twisted realities, the stories in this collection are provocative and utterly readable." —The Brooklyn Rail
"This collection of darkly humorous, feminist speculative fiction from the Balkans of sly, uncommon stories by a major talent." —Jeff VanderMeer
The new novel from the author of Breasts and Eggs is told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy suffers in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters. The young friends meet in secret in the hopes of avoiding any further attention and take solace in each other's company, completely unaware that their relationship has not gone unnoticed by their bullies.
In a land devastated by war, a nameless narrator pursues an elusive white-haired woman in the clutches of a government official known only as 'The Warden'. Neither will giver her up, but a freak ecological apocalypse is indifferent to their rival claims. As a terrifying wall of ice continues its incursion, freezing everything in its path, it seems that only the white-haired woman is truly resigned to the fate of the world. Ice is hailed as classic of science fiction and a definitive work of the slipstream genre.
The first biography of this important artist for 25 years.
"A captivating triumph." —Guardian
>>"The loudest, rudest, drunkest, most sought-after British artist of the 20th century."
>>"The loudest, rudest, drunkest, most sought-after British artist of the 20th century."
While other fields have replaced chalkboards with whiteboards and digital presentations, mathematicians remain loyal to chalk for puzzling out their ideas and communicating their research. Wynne offers more than one hundred stunning photographs of these chalkboards, gathered from a diverse group of mathematicians around the world. The photographs are accompanied by essays from each mathematician, reflecting on their work and processes.
In Bed with the Feminists by Liz Breslin $30
Noise: A flaw in human judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein $40
Maya's Big Scene by Isabell Arsenault $37
The Book Tour by Andi Watson $50
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas $28
Unwell Women: A journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world by Elinor Cleghorn $38
Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh $33
The Florentines by Paul Strathern $37
Mr Humble and Dr Butcher: A monkey's head, the Pope's neuroscientist, and the quest to transplant the soul by Brandy Schillace $50
Democracy at Work: A cure for Capitalism by Richard Wolff $34
In these poems, Liz Breslin traces her own truths through Siri, Cixous, supermarkets, spin cycles, pillow gaps facing away from the door and kissing with tongues at the traffic lights. Excavating feminism, mothering and queerness, she writhes into unexamined spaces, using form to play her way. Includes the sequence that was awarded the 2020 Kathleen Grattan Prize.
Why do we get things wrong? We make thousands of decisions every day, from minute choices we don't even know we're making to great, agonising deliberations. But when every decision we make is life-changing, the way we reach them matters. And for every decision, there is noise. This book teaches us how to understand all the extraneous factors that impact and bias our decision-making – and how to combat them and improve our thinking.
Maya is a bossy, burgeoning playwright and loves to have the kids in her neighborhood bring her scenes to life. Her latest work, about a feminist revolution, is almost ready for public performance. But as her actors begin to express their costume preferences, Maya quickly learns that their visions may not match hers. As both Director and Queen, Maya demands obedience and loyalty in her queendom of equality! But she soon realizes—with the help of her friends and subjects—that absolute bossiness corrupts absolutely!
Upon the publication of his latest novel, G. H. Fretwell, a minor English writer, embarks on a book tour to promote it. Nothing is going according to plan, and his trip gradually turns into a nightmare. But now the police want to ask him some questions about a mysterious disappearance, and it seems that Fretwell's troubles are only just beginning. Graphic novel.
In rural Norway, one evening after school, 11-year-old Siss and Unn strike up a deep and unusual bond. When the next day Unn sets off into the wintry woods in search of a mysterious frozen waterfall, known locally as the 'ice palace', and does not return, a devastated Siss takes it upon herself to find her missing friend.
"How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary. —Doris Lessing
Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women's bodies, and traces the journey from the 'wandering womb' of ancient Greece, the rise of witch trials in Medieval Europe, through the dawn of Hysteria, to modern day understandings of autoimmune diseases, the menopause and conditions like endometriosis.
Kerri ni Dochartaigh was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a grey and impoverished council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year they were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like Kerri's, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape. In Thin Places, a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, and how violence and poverty are never more than a stone's throw from beauty and hope.
"A remarkable piece of writing. I don't think I've ever read a book as open-hearted as this. It resists easy pieties of nature as a healing force, but nevertheless charts a recovery which could never have been achieved without landscape, wild creatures and 'thin places'. Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me." —Robert Macfarlane
"What was Kerri ni Dochartaigh's burden as a child — to exist in 'the gaps between' the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland — has become her gift as a writer. She is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place. This is a special, beautiful, many-faceted book." —Amy Liptrot
"An eloquent, moving work of politics, geography and the self. Full of wisdom and deeply engaging." —Sinead Gleeson
Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642 something happened which transformed the entire culture of western civilisation. Painting, sculpture and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born, or emerge in an entirely new guise. The ideas which broke this mould largely began, and continued to flourish, in the city of Florence in the province of Tuscany in northern central Italy, a city with a population comparable to that of contemporary Nelson.
In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican's Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science, and against mortality itself—working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died.
"Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book he details how we get there from here—and why we absolutely must." —Nomi Prins
"Ideas of economic democracy are very much in the air, as they should be, with increasing urgency in the midst of today's serious crises. Richard Wolff's constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times." —Noam Chomsky
Ropa dropped out of school to become a ghostalker – and she now speaks to Edinburgh’s dead, carrying messages to the living. When learns from them that someone is kidnapping children for arcane purposes, she uses a mixture of Zimbabwean magic and Scottish pragmatism to hunt down clues.
"A fast-moving and entertaining tale, beautifully written." –Ben Aaronovitch (author of the 'Rivers of London' series)
"There is a deeply honed craft in that the most throwaway asides, ones that might be taken as just stage-dressing, are intrinsic to the denouement of the novel, and there is a real satisfaction in seeing how the pieces notch together. But it’s not all fun and games and frights: the novel is serious about disparity, about haves and have-nots, about arbitrary stratifications and codes of behaviour." —The Scotsman
Knowing. Buying. Using. Hanging. Restoring. Adorning. A must-have compendium for the axe-wielding adventurer.
>>Look inside.
Somewhere in the shadow time between the departure of the Roman legions in the early fifth century and the arrival in Kent of Augustine's Christian mission at the end of the sixth, the kingdoms of Early Medieval Britain were formed. But by whom? And out of what?
A clear and well illustrated guide to hat styles of the Western traditions.
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 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. |
| >> 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. |
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.
NEW RELEASES
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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.