NEW RELEASES

The Cheap-Eaters by Thomas Bernhard              $34
"We can get close to such a person, but if we come into contact with him we will be repelled." Long out of print, this novella from one of the best writers of the twentieth century is now available in a new translation by Douglas Robertson. The cheap-eaters have been eating at the Vienna Public Kitchen for years, and true to their name, always the cheapest meals. They become the focus of Koller's scientific attention when he deviates one day from his usual path through the park, leading him to come upon the cheap-eaters and to realize that they must be the focal piece of his years-long, unwritten study of physiognomy. The narrator, a former school friend of Koller's, tells of his relationship with Koller in a single unbroken paragraph that is both dizzying and absorbing. In Koller, the narrator observes a gradually ever-growing, utterly exclusive and ultimately destructive interest in thought. 
>>A sequence of crushings. 
>>The translator makes his case for the semi-colon (among other things). 
>>Read Thomas's reviews of others of Thomas Bernhard's works. 
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder          $35
A sharp, intelligent, playfully transgressive novel-of-ideas that explores the way power, gender and tradition shape modern motherhood. Nightbitch's protagonist, an artist-turned-fulltime-parent, is home with her two-year-old son, struggling with solitude, exhaustion and monotony, even while she feels profound love for her child. Then, over the course of the summer, she experiences a strange metamorphosis (the clue is in the title) which complicates her situation in outrageous ways, whilst also setting her free.
"Graceful, funny and unnerving as hell." —Jenny Offill
Piripai by Leila Rees             $39
Piripai is natural history as prose poetry. It is a story of place, time and a subtle coming of age on the sand dunes between the river and the sea. The book is structured around twenty-six birds that inhabited Piripai, and ordered according to the time of year, beginning in spring and ending in winter. It is suffused with observation and memory, conveyed in a stripped-back style that both evokes and abstracts. Through the eyes of the book's three characters we learn about their family, their culture, their birds and the rough, beautiful land they call home.
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley             $33
Helen Grant is a mystery to her two daughters. Growing up, Bridget and her older sister Michelle were kept at a distance by their mother's caginess and flair for the dramatic. Meanwhile, their Saturdays were spent with their father, a serial liar whose boasts and bluster were exhausting. Now Bridget is an academic in her forties. She sees her mother once a year for a shared birthday dinner, they text occasionally about Mad Men and Ferrante to feign a shared interest, and they have settled into a strained peace. But when Helen makes it clear that she wants more, it seems Bridget's childhood struggle will have to be replayed. And as it becomes clear that her mother's life might end sooner than she thinks, Bridget struggles to know what forgiveness entails, and whether it's possible to find meaning in a vanishing past and a relationship that never was.
"Astute, bitter, funny. Unforgettable." —Guardian
Falling into Rarohenga by Steph Matuku            $30
It seems like an ordinary day when Tui and Kae, sixteen-year-old twins, get home from school - until they find their mother, Maia, has disappeared and a swirling vortex has opened up in her room. They are sucked into this portal and dragged down to Rarohenga, the Maori Underworld, a shadowy place of infinite dark levels, changing landscapes and untrustworthy characters. Maia has been kidnapped by their estranged father, Tema, enchanted to forget who she really is and hidden somewhere here. Tui and Kae have to find a way through this maze, outwit the shady characters they meet, break the spell on their mother, and escape to the World of Light before the Goddess of Shadows or Tema holds them in Rarohenga forever.
Esther's Notebooks: Tales from my ten-year-old life by Riad Sattouf           $33
Every week, the comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend's daughter, Esther. She tells him about her life, about school, her friends, her hopes, dreams and fears, and then he works it up into a comic strip. This book consists of 52 of those strips, telling between them the story of a year in the life of this sharp, spirited and hilarious Parisian child. The result is a moving, insightful and addictive glimpse into the lives of children today.
>>Watch Les Cahiers d'Esther. 

The Book of Jewish Food: From Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden            $85
An exemplar of food writing, splicing recipes and stories into something somehow more valuable than both, Roden's book contains more than 800 recipes from both Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions, from ancient times to the present, and from all parts of the world. 
Butcherbird by Cassie Hart          $25
Something is drawing Jena Benedict's family to darkness. Her mother, father, brother and baby sister are killed in a barn fire, and Grandmother Rose banishes Jena from the farm. Now, twenty years on Rose is dying, and Jena returns home with her boyfriend Cade in tow. Jena wants answers about why she was sent away and about what really happened the night of the fire. Will, Rose's live-in caregiver, has similar questions. He hunts for the supernatural, and he knows something sinister lurks in the Benedict homestead. Like Rose, Will has experienced childhood tragedy. Soon, Jena and Will unearth mysteries: a skull, a pocket-watch, a tale of the Dark Man and a tiding of magpies. The duo learn Rose's secrets and confront an evil entity that has been set loose.
The Broken House: Growing up under Hitler by Horst Krüger          $37
In 1966, Krüger looked back back at his own childhood and realised that he had been "the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work."


What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad           $38
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too-many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one had made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials, but of Vanna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are complete strangers and don't speak a common language, Vanna determines to do whatever it takes to save him. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of Amir's life and of how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the duo as they make their way towards a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls, we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. 
My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long         $28
Long's poems reveal her as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarize our current moment.
The Flowering: The autobiography of Judy Chicago             $65
A revealing autobiography, illustrated with photographs of Chicago's work, as well as personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Chicago has revised and updated her earlier, classic works with previously untold stories, fresh insights, and an extensive afterword covering the last twenty years. This narrative weaves together the stories behind some of Chicago's most significant artworks and her journey as a woman artist with the chronicles of her personal relationships and her understanding, from decades of experience and extensive research, of how misogyny, racism and other prejudices intersect to erase the legacies of artists who are not white and male while dismissing the suffering of millions of creatures who share the planet. 
The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by Tove Jansson           $38
Many of the stories collected here are pure Jansson, touching on island solitude and the dangerous pull of the artistic impulse: in 'The Squirrel' the equanimity of the only inhabitant of a remote island is thrown by a visitor, in 'The Summer Child' an unlovable boy is marooned along with his lively host family, in 'The Cartoonist' an artist takes over a comic strip that has run for decades, and in 'The Doll's House' a man's hobby threatens to overwhelm his life. Others explore unexpected territory: 'Shopping' has a post-apocalyptic setting, 'The Locomotive' centers on a railway-obsessed loner with murderous fantasies, and 'The Woman Who Borrowed Memories' presents a case of disturbing transference. Unsentimental, yet always humane, Jansson's stories complement and enlarge our understanding of a singular figure in world literature.
Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661 to the early colonial days to the transformative popular works by Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, and up to Alice Waters working today. Willan offers a brief biography of each influential woman, highlighting her key contributions, seminal books, and representative dishes. The book features fifty original recipes—as well as updated versions Willan has tested and modernised for the contemporary kitchen.

Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest by Suzanne Simard               $40
Raised in the forests of British Columbia, Simard was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees— the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest. Though her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, they are now supported by the data.



Helen Kelly: Her life by Rebecca Macfie           $50
Kelly was the first woman to lead the country’s trade union movement: a visionary who believed that all workers, whether in a union or not, deserved to be given a fair go; a fighter from a deeply communist family who never gave up the struggle; a strategist and orator who invoked strong loyalty; a woman who could stir fierce emotions. Her battles with famous people were the stuff of headlines. Macfie examines not only  Kelly’s life but also a defining period in the country’s history, when old values were replaced by the individualism of neo-liberalism, and the wellbeing and livelihood of workers faced unremitting stress.

La Vita è Dolce by Letitia Clark           $55
Featuring over 80 Italian desserts, this book showcases Letitia's favourite puddings inspired by her time living in Sardinia. Complete with anecdotes and location photography throughout, each recipe will be authentic in taste but with a delicious, contemporary twist. From the author of Bitter Honey. 
Worn Stories edited by Emily Spivak           $50
Everyone has a memoir in miniature in at least one piece of clothing. In Worn Stories, Emily Spivack has collected over sixty of these clothing-inspired narratives from cultural figures and talented storytellers. First-person accounts range from the everyday to the extraordinary, such as artist Marina Abramovic on the boots she wore to walk the Great Wall of China; musician Rosanne Cash on the purple shirt that belonged to her father; and fashion designer Cynthia Rowley on the Girl Scout sash that informed her business acumen. Other contributors include Greta Gerwig, Heidi Julavits, John Hodgman, Brandi Chastain, Marcus Samuelsson, Piper Kerman, Maira Kalman, Sasha Frere-Jones, Simon Doonan, Albert Maysles, Susan Orlean, Andy Spade, Paola Antonelli, David Carr, Andrew Kuo, and more.
The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on climate change edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder           $40
In 1989, one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben's work is prescient. Since then, The New Yorker has described the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face.
Johnny Cash: The last interview and other conversations        $35
Together with an introduction by music critic Peter Guralnick, the interviews here spotlight Cash's inimitable rhetorical style, and the fascinating diversity of subjects that made him as relatable as he was mysterious.
>>'Hurt.'
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The Other Jack by Charles Boyle     {Reviewed by THOMAS}
I take a seat at an outside table at this small café. I am a little early. I have bought myself a coffee to drink while I am waiting for Charles Boyle, whose book The Other Jack I have just finished reading. The book takes place, if that is the right way to put it, almost entirely at or in a series of cafés, where Charles meets, in the present tense, a young woman, Robyn, who may or may not exist and may or may not be called Robyn, to discuss all manner of things to do with books, in particular the relationship between a reader, such as Robyn (who insists she is not a writer), and an author, such as Charles (who, as with all good writers, is really more of a reader). Planning to meet Charles in a café seems to me therefore quite appropriate, as does the lingering uncertainty about how much of what I am writing is fiction and how much is true, wherever we might mean by that. This sort of uncertainty is very playfully handled in The Other Jack, both with regard to the narrative, so to call it, of the book itself and with regard to the more general, indeed universal, ‘problem’, so to call it, of all literature’s relationship to ‘reality’, a relationship that is always reciprocal, if often rather one-sided, and therefore always changing, even if a text itself does not change. Charles doesn’t make this ‘problem’, or any of the other ‘problems’ of literature any less insoluble, but rather reassures us that these so-called ‘problems’ are rather the reason for literature, literature’s motive force, if you like. In the book, which is largely about why books are written and otherwise about why they are read, Charles tells Robyn that he is thinking of writing a book about the conversations they are having. “When I say it’s a book about what we talk about when we talk about books, and then list a random number of subjects, some more obviously book-related than others, I mean that it’s about the talking as much as about what’s being talked about, so about misunderstandings, silences, evasions, forgetfulness, differences that we hope will be reconcilable ones but may not be and sudden unaccountable enthusiasms. Even if much of the time I am talking to myself.” The book presents as a wash of short wide-ranging passages on books, writing, publishing and reading, lightly written and deeply thoughtful, with a wonderful index of literary concerns. At the beginning of the book, Robyn has somehow identified Charles as the author, under his pseudonym Jack Robinson, of some of her favourite books, books that I incidentally also have enjoyed, and Charles’s relationship to this Jack, and his long history as a writer and as the germ and motor of CB Editions, one of the smallest and best publishers currently operating in Britain, is seamlessly conjoined both with his history as a reader and lover of books and with what we could call, for want of a better term, his social conscience. Charles seems to have an authenticity, despite or because of his duplicities, that I fear I will never attain, I think as I wait for him to arrive. All I have ever done is imitate and appropriate — perhaps all that all writers ever do is imitate and appropriate whether they know this or not — and anything that may have been mistaken by anyone for originality on my part has merely been the measure of the failures and shortcomings in my imitation and appropriation. It is little wonder then, as I have got better at writing — if indeed I have got better at writing — that I have appeared less and less original, and appearances, after all, are the measure of originality, I suppose. Perhaps originality isn’t the thing. On the basis of the conversations between Charles and Robyn in The Other Jack, I was looking forward to talking with Charles Boyle, but there is, I suppose, an unspoken limit on how long I can sit at this café waiting for him to turn up and it is hard to know how long I should continue to do so after it has become nothing less than certain that he isn’t going to appear. The mistake, I’m sure, must be mine. Also, it is beginning to rain, the tables inside are all full, and as I failed to mention arriving with an umbrella it would be inappropriate to produce one now when I need it (Chekhov’s gun ought to work backwards, too). I am half way home when I realise I have left my copy of The Other Jack on the café table. No-one came running after me with it as at the start of the book Robyn came running after Charles with the book he had left on his table. To continue writing would involve making stuff up.   
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.


































Loop Tracks by Sue Orr   {Reviewed by STELLA}
What happens if your future is defined by a mistake? In Sue Orr’s Loop Tracks, Charlie is a young misty-eyed teenager wanting to fit in like anyone else. Relegated to the ranks of uninteresting and naive by her peer group, she sees an opportunity to lose her virginity as a step towards being grown-up. It’s 1978, and much to her surprise and the disbelief of her parents, Charlie is sixteen and pregnant. And the abortion clinic is temporarily closed due to protests and restrictive new laws. This is New Zealand of the '70s with its 'high moral ground' clashing with the progressive feminist politics for change, in this case open access to abortion. It’s a hot day, and a plane is on the tarmac waiting to take off for Sydney. Several women, including Charlie, on the plane, have scraped the money together and with the help of Sisters Overseas Service are heading to Australian clinics. Protests at the airport are holding up the flight and it is in this moment of waiting that Charlie decides to ‘keep the baby’ and heads home. Yet keeping the baby was never going to be an option: her parents aren’t progressive and there is no happy ending for them or Charlie, who is packed off to small-town New Zealand for her confinement, only to be further bewildered by the process of adoption, which leaves her empty-handed and without even a glance at her child. The novel swings between these crucial moments and 2020. Now living in Wellington, Charlie, a primary school teacher, lives with her almost grown-up grandson (who moved in when he was four), Tommy, and is negotiating his quirks, her middle age, as well as the year of lockdown. When her son, Jim, turns up unexpectedly to re-establish a relationship with Tommy, it’s more than a knock on the door — it’s a window (through which is blowing a gale) opened into the past and has repercussions. Charlie has kept the window firmly closed, and like us all has squashed down uncomfortable events and situations in which she has felt out of control. Yet to be free of the past, and to give Tommy the future he deserves and needs, she’s going to have to open it a crack. Orr’s evocative writing, particularly of the young Charlie, captures family dynamics, the impact of politics and social mores, and the concept of choice, in all its contradictions and strengths. She cleverly weaves a tale of intergenerational impact, layering the political and social expectations of both periods (the 70s and now) over each other while also touching on difficult subjects (drugs, suicide, consent and sexual behaviour). Here we have loops in various modes: the loops of music devised by Tommy’s girlfriend’s sister (which also highlights its own loop — the interconnectedness of a Wellington social scene with links to Jim); the loops of walking the block during Lockdown; the loops of the rabbit holes known as conspiracy theories; and the loops of time which repeat and can become knots — knots which need untying. 



VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 NEW RELEASES

Real Estate by Deborah Levy            $26
The final volume of Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is a meditation on home, the spectres that haunt it and the possibilities it offers. Reconfiguring her life after her children leave home, how can Levy create a balance between her creative, political and personal lives and the demands of the world she lives in?
>>Read an extract.
>>Things I Don't Want to Know.
>>The Cost of Living. 

The Commercial Hotel by John Summers         $30
When John Summers moved to a small town in the Wairarapa and began to look closely at the less-celebrated aspects of local life - our club rooms, freezing works, night trains, hotel pubs, landfills - he saw something deeper. It was a story about his own life, but mostly about a place and its people. The story was about life and death in New Zealand. Combining reportage and memoir, The Commercial Hotel is a sharp-eyed, poignant yet often hilarious tour of Aotearoa: a place in which Arcoroc mugs and dog-eared political biographies are as much a part of the scenery as the hills we tramp through ill-equipped. We encounter Elvis impersonators, the eccentric French horn player and adventurer Bernard Shapiro, Norman Kirk balancing timber on his handlebars while cycling to his building site, and Summers's grandmother: the only woman imprisoned in New Zealand for protesting World War Two. And we meet the ghosts who haunt our loneliest spaces. As he follows each of his preoccupations, Summers reveals to us a place we have never quite seen before.
"A beautiful, robust collection of work. Every once in a while a book comes along that you read, reread, and treasure. This is one of those books." —Laurence Fearnley
"This book is an achievement of much clarity and grace, but more importantly it is a work of promise." —Landfall Review Online
Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki            $25
The first English-language publication of a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon. In a future where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted. The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate twentieth- century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviours lies an atavistic appetite for destruction. Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottles and baggies too hard. And in the title story, the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanisation of labour foster a cold-hearted and ultimately tragic disaffection among the youth of Tokyo. Nonchalantly hip and full of deranged prescience, Suzuki’s singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Neuromancer to The Handmaid’s Tale. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini             $38
Adelmo Farandola doesn’t like people. In summer he roams the valleys, his only company a talkative, cantankerous old dog and a young mountain ranger who, Adelmo Farandola suspects, is spying on him. When winter comes, man and dog are snowed in. With stocks of wine and bread depleted, they pass the time squabbling over scraps, debating who will eat the other first. Spring brings a more sinister discovery that threatens to break Adelmo Farandola’s already faltering grip on reality: a man’s foot poking out of the receding snow.
it was both, and by Sasha da Silva             $30
"This text seeks to be a helpful addition to the growing argument for the architectonic validity of what it is to commune with the other. It takes its starting point of investigation to be changes and dynamics of our shared metaphysical landscape. The aim is to demonstrate that meaning matters, and too, always remains plural as it is caught in its own becoming. The concepts of relationality, speculativity, embodiment, low theory, and poetics are introduced and explored, as a poetry of the moment is put forward in all its messy reality. Perhaps things remain unfinished. The format is interdisciplinary and playful, and it seeks to remain attentive to the serendipity of the spontaneous patterns unfolding all around us. With the greatest of care, form is followed only sometimes." 
For more than four weeks in the autumn of 1962 the world teetered. The consequences of a misplaced step during the Cuban Missile Crisis could not have been more grave. Ash and cinder, famine and fallout; nuclear war between the two most-powerful nations on Earth. In Nuclear Folly, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy tells the riveting story of those weeks, tracing the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and of their advisors and commanders on the ground. More often than not, Plokhy argues, the Americans and Soviets simply misread each other, operating under mutual distrust, second-guesses and false information.
Theatre of Ocean: Stories of performance between us by Alexa Wilson         $15
Theatre of Ocean is a memoir of outtakes from a performance artist moving backwards and forwards in space and time in a world recently past. Alexa Wilson offers us the interwoven remains of performance, love, art, culture, gender and politics. Juxtaposing real stories with art works and musings performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for social-political change in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand.
>>Dancing through the pandemic. 
Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra              $40
In Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra outlines his own particular theory of reading that also offers a kind of blurry self-portrait, or literary autobiography. Whether writing about Natalia Ginzburg, typewriters and computers, Paul Léautaud, or how to be silent in German, his essays function as a laboratory for his novels, a testing ground for ideas, readings and style. Not to Read also presents an alternative pantheon of Latin American literature – Zambra would rather talk about Nicanor Parra than Pablo Neruda, Mario Levrero than Gabriel García Márquez. His voice is that of a trusted friend telling you about a book or an author he’s excited about, how he reads, and why he writes. A standard-bearer of his generation in Chile, with Not to Read Alejandro Zambra confirms he is one of the most engaging writers of our time.
"When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head. His prose is as compact as a grain of gunpowder, but its allusions and ramifications branch out and illuminate even the most remote corners of our minds." —Valeria Luiselli
"There is no writer like Alejandro Zambra, no one as bold, as subtle, as funny." —Daniel Alarcón
>>Read Thomas's review. 
Who Invented This? by Becky Thorns and Anne Ameri-Siemens         $48
Who invented the car, different types of vaccinations, the light bulb or the microwave? The things we are surrounded by didn't just appear out of nowhere, they were conceived by talented inventors, scientists, and engineers. While some inventions were the result of teamwork and a long time in the lab, some inventions just happened to be made by accident or by looking for something else. Unravel how classic inventions and creators paved the way for the modern tools and technology we have today.

Enough Horizon: The life and work of Blanche Baughan by Carol Markwell           $40
One of the first writers to speak with an authentic New Zealand voice, Blanche Edith Baughan (1870-1958) was known as a poet and local travel writer. Enough Horizon tells of Baughan's troubled upbringing with a mentally ill mother in London, and her emigration to New Zealand in 1900, where she embraced the freedom it gave her to write and think and enjoy the wilderness she grew to love. It was here, particularly in her beloved Akaroa, that Blanche's writing and interests in the environment and her advocacy for the vulnerable in society flourished. She was a botanist, conservationist, humanitarian and prison reformer, who strove for the effective and humane treatment of prisoners. Blanche met and corresponded with leading writers, thinkers and scientists of her day, including John Ruskin, and poets Jessie Mackay and Ursula Bethell.
Assembly by Natasha Brown            $22
Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going. The narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend's family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can't escape the question: is it time to take it all apart? Assembly is a story about the stories we live within - those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers. And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. 
"Stunning." —Bernardine Evaristo
Chomsky exposes the problems of our world today, as we stand in this period of monumental change, preparing for a more hopeful tomorrow. 'For the left, elections are a brief interlude in a life of real politics, a moment to ask whether it's worth taking time off to vote . . . Then back to work. The work will be to move forward to construct the better world that is within reach.' He sheds light into the phenomenon of right-wing populism, and exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of authoritarian policies on people, the environment and the planet as a whole. He captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society. And he celebrates the recent unprecedented mobilisations of millions of people internationally against neoliberal capitalism, racism and police violence.
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy             $38
“Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction. We need fewer road maps toward a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos on how to destroy it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto.” —Mona Eltahawy
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls identifies seven ‘sins’ women and girls are socialised to avoid – anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Mona Eltahawy creates a stunning manifesto encouraging women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy. The book draws on her own life and the work of intersectional activists from around the world, #MeToo and the Arab Spring.
‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls exhorts and advocates for more confidence, more clarity, more of a sense of value and rights, more pleasure and joy for women. With its gloriously energetic, rampaging prose, it also inspires those things." —Rebecca Solnit
An Historical Overview of Lambton Harbour by D.J. Pyle          $20
A brief history of Wellington's harbour written aboard The Sealion, a floating community space in the waters of Lambton Harbour.


A large-format book of stunning photography and expert geological and natural history information. "Karstified landscapes are among the most bizarre on our planet – both above and below ground. New Zealand Karst takes you on a visual journey across sublime karst scenery and into the subterranean wilderness of New Zealand caves. Accompanied by popular scientific texts, stunning images lead you from the sculptured limestone pavements of the alpine marble karst to the grassland and jungle karst of the foothills, onwards into the twilight zone and deeper into the caves. It explores the diversity of peculiar features and creatures of the underground, ventures back into the light of cave ruins, and concludes with karst-related Māori rock art. Learn about the life cycle of the endemic glowworm and the critically endangered Nelson cave spider. Explore the majesty of cave minerals forming speleothems of all types. Discover the many roles water plays in shaping karst and understand the vulnerability of these geotopes and biotopes. New Zealand Karst reveals how you can appreciate karst as a phenomenon where geological, biological, and archaeological beauty all come together in harmony."
Daughters of Kobani: The women who took on the Islamic State by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon           $37
In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swathes of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. 

Brontë by Manuela Santoni              $29
A graphic novel of the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.
The Survival of Māori as a People by Whatarangi Winiata and Daphne Luke            $65
This collection of twenty-five papers by Professor Whatarangi Winiata and co-authors given over the last forty years, comment on Māori spirituality, social development, education and political affairs. They cover Winiata’s experiences of and thinking about reengineering the working of the Hahi Mihinare; driving the iwi development programme Whakatupuranga Rua Mano, which led to the foundation of the first contemporary whare wānanga; galvanising the New Zealand Māori Council to hold the Crown accountable over fisheries, forestry, language and broadcasting; and co-founding the Māori Party with Dame Tariana Turia and Sir Pita Sharples. The papers are organised into themes of iwi Māori, mātauranga Māori, tino rangatiratanga, and the survival and wellbeing of Māori people.
>>Read a sample. 


VOLUME BooksNew releases


 Book of the Week: AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS  BLACK by David Diop (translated by Anna Moschovakis)
The winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize is a breathtaking novel dealing with two Senegalese soldiers fighting for France in World War One. When one of the pair is killed, the surviving one devotes himself to war, to violence and death, and his descent into madness frightens even his own comrades. Hypnotically written, At Night All Blood is Black explores both the roots and consequences of trauma, and its ties to colonialism, race, and conceptions of masculinity. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Hear an extract. 
>>The 2021 International Booker Prize virtual event. 
>>Nothing to reconcile. 
>>"More than a brother."
>>"A very physical book."
>>An authorial and translatorial chat. 
>>Your copy. 

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.


































At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop   {Reviewed by STELLA}
Mesmerising from the opening lines, At Night All Blood is Black will take hold in its repetitive, rhythmic structure, creating a landscape of madness and violence that is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, and viscerally rich. This is trench warfare pared back to the lives of two Senegalese soldiers fighting for the French. Spurred on by mistaken loyalty to the mother country and by the false cultural narrative (encouraged by their Captain) of the fearsome savage — the brave, rising into no-man’s land on the shrill whistle — the attack signalled for all, both friend and foe, these two men run side-by-side screaming into the void. Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are more-than-brothers, raised in the same village, in the same family, with a shared life that binds them to each other and their destiny. The opening paragraphs of Alfa’s confession to a crime lead us quickly to the death of Mademba. In looping sequences, David Diop carves out the story through Alfa’s guilt and his jarring memories in line with the young man’s descent into madness. Guilty for denying his more-than-brother’s dying request, not once but three times, Alfa sets out to avenge his enemy as well as his conscience in an increasingly gruesome manner. An activity, at first applauded and then reviled by his brothers in arms, as well as his superiors — who eventually send him away from the front — unnerves his companions. With a brevity of action and repetitive narrative, Diop (with the excellent translation of Anna Moschovakis) invades us with the rawness, violence and fear of the front, with the absurdity of the actions of war, and the disturbing hollowing of emotion only to be replaced with superstition and mistrust. As Alfa wreaks havoc in a situation overwhelmingly chaotic, he becomes further separated from reality, and increasingly isolated, living to his own strange rationale, and becomes a symbol of bad luck, and feared by his fellow soldiers. In the second half of the book, reassigned to the Rear and a psychiatric ward, Alfa’s grip on reality tips further. Here, as his memories of village life, the disappearance of his mother, the social politics of his age sect, and the friendly rivalry, as well as enduring bond, with Mademba, come to the fore as the intensity of the Front is pushed aside, we sense why his madness descended so intensely. Here, we have myth and story. Here, we see that Alfa, without his French-speaking more-than-brother Mademba, is at sea on the battlefield and in his ability to communicate beyond gesture and drawing. Diop cleverly keeps us in Alfa’s head, our mad and unreliable narrator, but gives us enough clues to set the alarm ringing as we dip into a dream-like sequence that will take us somewhere unexpected. So unexpected that you will loop back to the start to read this slim, but unforgettable novel with fresh eyes. Stunning, unrelenting and beautifully executed. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 























































The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard  {Reviewed by THOMAS}

The room in which he had sat, according to L, had been the quietest room in the house, the house being similarly quiet except for the few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of houses, the noise of the refrigerator impressing itself most prominently upon him, though to hear the refrigerator from the room in which he sat would only be possible, according to L, if the house was indeed very quiet, quiet both inside and outside, the entire valley being quiet, which it was, he told L, excepting of course those few noises apparently inescapable in even the quietest of valleys, the occasional distant car being most prominent among them, or, when no cars could be heard, the sound of the river, not quite so distant. He had apparently told L. that his obsession with finding quiet had made his hearing remarkably sensitive to the least noise, and at the greatest distance, for it is a property of hearing that it strains to find whatever it wishes most to avoid. If there is even the slightest noise, he said, according to L, I cannot write my review, so I must withdraw from all noise in order to write, I must have quiet. The extreme outward quiet of the house, though, to the extent that it was quiet and to the extent that he was not troubled by the noise of the refrigerator or the occasional distant car or the river, as he had mentioned to L. before, did not bring him the quiet needed to complete, or even to commence, his work, as he had hoped, for the extreme outward quiet revealed to him the extent of his inward disquiet, or whatever is the opposite of quiet, and this he found infinitely more depressing than the lack of external quiet. It is to avoid recognising this inward disquiet that we place ourselves continually in far-from-perfect circumstances, situations of noise, he said to L, for we would do everything to avoid the realisation that the disquiet that prevents our doing what we claim we want to do is an internal disquiet, and not something external that we can use as an excuse for not doing what we claim we want to do but really would rather not do. There is no length to which we will not go, he told L, to avoid what could pass as fulfilment. The very steps he took, according to L, in order to write the review, were the very steps that made it impossible to write the review, he told L. The review cannot be written but the review still demands to be written, demands that I write it, that I put myself in the best possible circumstances for writing, but the fact that this writing is impossible, that the review cannot be written, even in the best possible circumstances, does not reduce the demand to write, in fact it makes the demand ever more urgent, he told L. This impossibility and this urgency, he told L, are probed to the point of exhaustion, if probing can lead to exhaustion, in The Lime Works, the most nihilistic of Bernhard’s many nihilistic and somewhat nihilistic books. Konrad withdraws to the limeworks, though he would, he told L, write limeworks as one word, he said, though the translator made it two, two English words of Bernhard’s one German word, he observed, though he attached no significance to this observation, to write his great work on the sense of hearing, his life’s work that presses ever more urgently upon him and becomes more impossible to write, if impossibility can come in degrees, he thought not, the work becomes ever less possible to write though it was never possible to write, no better. Konrad experiments ever more strenuously upon his invalid wife, upon her hearing, during their years in the limeworks, according to the informants, mainly Weiser and Fro, who tell the narrator what Konrad and others had told them about Konrad and his wife and the experiments on hearing and the book and the complete hopelessness of their life at the limeworks, the whole book being a complex of hearsay at two to five removes, Konrad’s and his wife’s life at the limeworks that began there as hopeless and had that hopelessness increased, if a lack can be increased, with the worst outcome possible. “Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something,” he told L. that Bernhard had written that his narrator, an insurance salesman, had recorded that Konrad had told Fro, or possibly Weiser, he couldn’t remember and had not noted this down, at least according to L. “Words were made to demean human thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought. Depression derives from words, nothing else.” He could not write the review, he told L, but neither could he not write the review. The lime sets as concrete. It is as Bernhard wrote, he told L, “No head can be saved.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

NEW RELEASES

Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann          $32
Bold, angry, despairing and very funny, these essays cover everything from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie to Agatha Christie. Ellmann calls for a moratorium on air travel, rails against bras, and pleads for sanity in a world that hardly recognises sanity when it (occasionally) appears.
"Joyously electric." —Guardian
>>Read Thomas's review of Ducks, Newburyport. 

The Other Jack by Charles Boyle           $32
A book about books, mostly, and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas. Writer and reader meet in cafés to talk about books – that’s the plot. There are arguments, spilt coffee, deaths both in life and in fiction, and rain and laughter. Wonderful. 
>>Read Thomas's reviews of books by Boyle writing as Jack Robinson. 
Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (translated by Frances Riddle)           $34
After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her ailing mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.
"Short and stylish. A piercing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, the indignity of bureaucracy, the burdens of caregiving and the impositions of religious dogma on women." —New York Times
"Piñeiro is AWESOME. Her books are dark, have buckets of atmosphere, and they all feel entirely different even though she revisits some of the same issues again and again. She deals with the culture and social structure within gated communities; shows how walling ourselves in seems safer, but actually promotes fear and claustrophobia; she deals with gender roles and prejudice and economic class and long-held secrets that fester." —Book Riot
Parenting in the Anthropocene edited by Emma Johnson          $30
Humans are changing the world in extremely complex ways, creating a new geological age called the Anthropocene. How do we – as parents, caregivers and as a society – raise our children and dependents in this new world? This book explores ways to ensure the health and wellbeing of the next generations, with a view to encouraging inclusivity and critical discourse at a time of climate crisis, inequality and polarisation. From tikanga Māori and collective care in child-rearing through to new family forms, futures literacy, and shifting economic paradigms and societal structures, Parenting in the Anthropocene is a reflection of both the world we live in and the one we aspire to. Contents: 'Bountiful' — Emily Writes (writer & mother): 'Parenting in the first 1000 days: Moving towards equity' — Amanda Malu (CEO of Whānau Awhina Plunket); 'Stories for the children of the Anthropocene' — Jess Berentson-Shaw (researcher & advocate): 'The future is ours to design and build' — Dr David Galler (intensive care specialist): 'Inheriting climate disruption' — Mia Sutherland (youth climate-change activist); 'When do we talk about childlessness?' — Briohny Doyle (writer & lecturer); 'Reproductive and familial futures in Aotearoa New Zealand' — Nicola Surtees, PhD (academic & former ECE teacher); 'Poipoia te kākano: Nuturing tamariki Māori' — Leonie Pihama (Te tiawa, Waikato, Ngā Māhanga a Tairi); 'Be kind' — Brannavan Gnanalingam (writer & lawyer); 'Futures literacy and youth resilience: Educating for the future' — Amy L. Fletcher, PhD (academic & futurist); 'Are our children capitalism’s succession plan?' — Sacha McMeeking (researcher & commentator); 'Books for challenging times: Children and youngsters' — Terrisa Goldsmith (librarian); 'Books for challenging times: Caregivers' — Jane Keenan (librarian)
Eat the Mouth that Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza               $30
Fragoza's collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an axe to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family's beloved lime tree.
"Fragoza's prose, a switchblade of a magical glow, cauterizes as it cuts. In a setting of barren citrus trees, poison-filled balloons, and stuccos haunted by the menace of the past, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You reinvents the sunny noir." —Salvador Plascencia
Fossils from Lost Worlds by Benjamin Laverdunt and Helene Rajcak           $40
Clues to prehistoric life lie hidden under the ground, and paleontologists are forever modifying our ideas of the deep past on the basis of new evidence. This lively, gloriously illustrated large-format volume for children is a wonderful introduction not only to the sheer variety and strangeness of creatures that preceded us, but also to the ways in which science is always improving the model it builds of reality and of the past. 
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov           $38
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a 'frenemy' from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under ever-present threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines: loyalists, separatists, Russian occupiers and Crimean Tatars. Wherever he goes, Sergeyich's childlike simplicity and strong moral compass disarm everyone he meets. But could these qualities be manipulated to serve an unworthy cause, spelling disaster for him, his bees and his country?
"A latter-day Bulgakov. A Ukrainian Murakami" —Guardian
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez          $33
Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighbourhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. 
"The stories walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror, but with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear and in limbo. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken - fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history - with bracing urgency." —Judges' citation on the book's short-listing for the 2021 International Booker Prize
>>Read Stella's review of Things We Lost in the Fire. 
I Remember by Joe Brainard        $30
First published in the 1970s, Brainard's rigorous list of memories both banal and formative provide not only a nuanced picture of the time and place in which he grew up, but also an intimation of how any idea we have is in fact little more than the bundling of memory statements. Influential and entertaining. 
>>I remember watching this. 
My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman         $37
Laura Lippman's first job in journalism was a rookie reporter in Waco, Texas. Two decades later she left her first husband, quit the newspaper business, and became a full time novelist. "I had been creating villains on the page for about seven years when I finally became one." Her fiction has always centered on complicated women, paying unique attention to the intricacies of their flaws, their vulnerability, and their empowerment. Now, finally, Lippman has turned her gimlet eye on a new subject: herself.
Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina            $33
Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers. Decades later, Elizabeth came to recognise the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempted a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. 
Wild Sweetness: Recipes inspired by nature by Thalia Ho           $45
Baking, desserts and sweets, moving through sic seasons of flowers, berries and fruit. 95 mouth-watering recipes. 

Strong Words #2: The best of the Landfall Essay Competition edited by Emma Neale           $35
Including well-known names and promising newcomers, the contents roam far and wide over a number of subjects, such as Sarah Harpur's irreverent, laugh-aloud essay about death; Siobhan Harvey's potent essay about the memories of an abusive childhood stirred up by current house renovations; and Tan Tuck Ming's essay about technology and how it mediates, enables and impacts intimate relationships. Strong Words #2 also includes the joint winners of the 2019 essay prize: Tobias Buck's 'Exit. Stage Left', which explores issues of prejudice and bias through the experience of someone 'the colour of cotton candy or pink marshmallows', and Nina Mingya Powles' work 'Tender Gardens', exploring Chinese cultural and poetic heritage and how to maintain a sense of home in a foreign land.
>>Strong Words #1. 
This Rare Spirit: A life of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus           $55
The British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers, including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again, all the more since her 150th anniversary in 2019. This is the first comprehensive biography.


Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers           $37
“Why must there always be ideas? Why is nothing too much to ask for?” demands the narrator of this stomach-turning attack on a world caught in the pincers of capitalism and social media. When a homeless woman is incarcerated and then given a path to 'self-improvement' with the proviso  that this is documented on instagram, the corporation involved finds that it has unleashed a faecal maelstrom  that threatens to expose the roots of contemporary consumer culture. 
"Disturbingly exceptional. A disturbing read, but absolutely convincing." —Guardian
Had I Known by Barbara Ehrenreich           $25
Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades — some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books — from her award-winning article 'Welcome to Cancerland', published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking investigative journalism in 'Nickel and Dimed', which explored living in America on the minimum wage. Issues she identified as far back as the 80s and 90s such as work poverty, rising inequality, the gender divide and medicalised health care, are top of the social and political agenda today. Written with tenderness, humour and incisiveness, Ehrenreich's describes an America of struggle, inequality, racial bias and injustice. 
Princes of the Renaissance by Mary Hollingsworth        $70
From the late Middle Ages, the independent Italian city-states were taken over by powerful families who installed themselves as dynastic rulers. Inspired by the humanists, the princes of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy immersed themselves in the culture of antiquity, commissioning palaces, villas and churches inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome, and offering patronage to artists and writers. Many of these princes were related by blood or marriage, creating a web of alliances that held society together but whose tensions sometimes threatened to tear it apart. Thus were their lives defined as much by the waging of war as the nurturing of artistic talent. Mary Hollingsworth charts these developments in a sequence of chronological chapters, each centred on two or three main characters with a cast of minor ones - from Ludovico Sforza of Milan to Isabella d'Este of Mantua, from Pope Paul III to Emperor Charles V, and from the painters Mantegna and Titian to the architect Sansovino and the polymath Leonardo da Vinci.
Becoming Animal: An earthly cosmology by David Abram         $38
An urgent call to go beyond anthropocentric conceptions of our world, which Abrams identifies as a recipe for the disaster we are fact approaching, and to recognise out commonality with other species as vital to any sustaining conception of existence. 
"I cannot imagine another book that so gently and so persuasively alters how we look at ourselves." —Richard Louv
>>The tumult of vision. 
Tūtira Mai: Making change in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by David Belgrave and Giles Dodson      $55
This book is intended to help readers to generate realistic and effective ways to make change, with first-hand accounts of success and failure through real-world case studies. Part of a series exploring and promoting citizenship in Aotearoa, Tutira Mai combines ways to identify and analyse issues with information on how to actively engage with them. It also discusses the ethical risks inherent in active citizenship within a New Zealand context. Topics include justice reform, gender in the classroom, environmental care and management, sport and positive social change, taking action on mental health, digital democracy, social entrepreneurship, and direct action, among others.
Leilong the Library Bus by Julia Liu and Bei Lynn        $20
The children are late for storytime at the library. Ever helpful, Lei the enthusiastic dinosaur can get them there one time! Lei's small head is the only part of him that fits so he must listen through the window. But he gets so excited by the story, he starts to shake the building. Lei's love of stories risks destroying the library until the children decide to take the books outdoors. This library-loving picture book reminds us how it feels to be transported by story.





VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

Is it actually possible to be original? The narrator of our Book of the Week—Dead Souls by Sam Riviere—meets a poet in a bar who has been cast out of poetry circles (twice) for plagiarism, and who presents the narrator (and us) with a wonderful seven-hour monologue full of bitterness, inventiveness, and devastating humour. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
<<Read an excerpt. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 




































Dead Souls by Sam Riviere    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“Poets are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of writers, and writers are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of people, the old poet said,” writes poet Sam Riviere in Dead Souls, a novel that is a satire, that is not the word, an evisceration of the poetry scene, so to call it, under late capitalism. The creative industries, as they have the misfortune too often to be called, in our time as in the very-near-to-our-time world of the novel, are, of course, focussed on industrial production, their cultural products, so to call them, quantified and qualified, if that is the right way to put it, on scales of popularity and originality, vacuous measures, the whole writing enterprise is futile, really, other than as a means of pointing out how futile it is, which Riviere does, incidentally, rather well. Dead Souls is narrated by the editor of a poetry journal or some such but, after the first pages, the book is entirely given over to the narrator’s verbatim reporting of the seven-hour monologue of renegade poet Solomon Wiese, delivered to the narrator in the poet-infested Travelodge Bar over one night during London’s so-called Festival of Culture. Riviere not only emulates Thomas Bernhard in nesting the narrative, so to call it, in often several layers of reported speech, keeping his protagonist, so to call him, at a filtered remove from the reader, but also in the employment of long, looping, comma-rich sentences that take any thought to the point at which that thought, not to mention frequently sanity itself, is entirely exhausted. Riviere has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a keen sense of how closely the ridiculous lies to the ordinary, a keen sense that in fact the ridiculous is only the ordinary logically extended, as you will affirm from your own experience. Having fallen foul of the algorithm QACS that measures a poem’s originality and therefore what we could call its market value, Wiese, branded a plagiarist (is it possible to be anything else?), withdraws to a provincial town, the population of which seems interested only in virtual buggy-racing, and amasses the output of several overlooked provincial poets, whose work he spontaneously regurgitates on his wildly popular return to the London scene (so to call it). For Wiese, it seems, poetic production is the releasing of unoriginal and mediocre material back into the nothingness where it belongs, the opposite or complement of inspiration, not that there is such a thing as inspiration, really, a relinquishment of thought. “It was this nothingness that had attracted him to poetry … the literal nothingness on the page, invading from the right margin, threatening to wipe out meaning entirely. Rather than making something, Solomon Wiese said, the writing of poetry was far more like deleting something, it was like pointing at something to make it disappear. … Poetry was the gradual replacement of things in the world with their absence.” Ultimately, Wiese falls again into disgrace, notwithstanding the ‘dead souls’ he has bought in the form of fake follower accounts on the poetry social media platform Locket—in much the same way that Chichikov purchases for his intended advancement the identities of serfs who have died since the last census in Gogol’s novel of the same name (does this make Gogol an anticipatory plagiarist of Riviere?). Riviere’s book is full of bitter invention, of devastating humour, of the skewering of anything and anyone skewerable, of exquisite panic. It will amuse you to the point of despair. Although, of course, everything that is wrong with the poetry world, so to call it, is wrong also with the wider world of other concerns, Riviere does have a special affinity for the poetic calling: “Detach yourself from this terrible pastime that will lead only to ruin. It will never please you or anyone you care about, it will never make you happy, it will simply become the basis and means of recording your own unhappiness, the old poet said.” 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 


>> Read all Stella's reviews.


























Liberté by Gita Trelease   {Reviewed by STELLA}
The French Revolution meets magic in the sequel to Enchantée. Gita Trelease’s Liberté pitches us back into the world of the compelling heroine Camille Durbonne. Living in relative safety with her sister Sophie in Paris, she has gambled and won against the court of Versailles and a sinister powerful magician. From the streets of poverty, Camille almost sacrificed her sanity with the murderous dress and the power it gave her, the sisters have survived and risen in the ranks inheriting a beautiful (if enchanted) home and independence. A career as a milliner for Sophie and a writer (following in the footsteps of her printing press father) for Camille. Yet Paris is unsettled and the people are rising. What should be the end of heartache and danger for the two sisters is anything but! Magic has a role to play despite Camille’s desire to keep it at bay. When she witnesses a flower girl’s harassment at the hands of a gentleman, she gets involved with a group of streetsmart girls who live by their wits and skills. When the girls are threatened with eviction from the makeshift home they have built under the bridge by the Seine, Camille uses her writing skills and her printing press to woo the people to the girls’ cause and pressure the authorities to halt the destruction of their home. Surprisingly her ploy begins to work, but at the edges of this success is a question nagging at her and doubt about her abilities gnaws at her. Can she repress her magic, even if she wishes to? It doesn’t help that her house seems to have a mind of its own, opening and closing off parts of itself, calling to her with whispers and bangs to get her attention. Yet the real threat lies outside —  in the words of the King, desperate to hold onto power, and in the actions of the people, hungrier and increasingly determined to seek change. But who do they turn on in their hour of despair? The magicians! Camille and her friends are in dire straits. France is no longer safe and the magicians and those that love magic must think on their feet, and quickly, if they want to save their necks (literally). Meeting in magical spaces (enchantments built over centuries to hide magicians and ward away enemies), they make a plan to escape. The only problem is they need a book, and that book is hidden, along with several vials of tears — sorrow is the necessary ingredient to become momentarily invisible. In Enchantée, Camille is burdened by her magic. Her sister is wary of it and her lover, Lazare, is troubled by its power. Yet in Liberté, to be truly free, she needs to embrace it. Is it possible to survive and keep those she loves close to her? Can Camille retain herself as she slips back into the dark edges of enchantment, and will words make her safe or put her in mortal danger? An excellent sequel to Enchantée — just as much adventure, romance and daring.
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 NEW RELEASES

From the Centre, A writer's life by Patricia Grace             $40
Patricia Grace begins her remarkable memoir beside Hongoeka Bay. It is the place she has returned to throughout her life, and fought for, one of many battles she has faced. This book provides special insight into the life of this important author. "It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl. I found that being different meant that I could be blamed." 

The Mysterious Correspondent: New stories by Marcel Proust        $37
Throughout Proust's life, nine of his short stories remained unseen-the writer never spoke of them. Why did he choose not to publish them along with the others? One possible answer is that he was developing his themes in preparation for In Search of Lost Time; another is that the stories were too audacious—too near to life—for the censorious society of the time. 
Taking a Long Look: Essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time by Vivian Gornick           $43
For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one’s self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
“We all talk the talk about public intellectuals nowadays. Vivian Gornick walks the walk. The essays in Taking a Long Look could not be more direct, more authoritative, more alive with the pleasures of discovery or alert to the ambiguities of argument. Whether writing literary or political criticism, memoir, or feminist polemic, her mastery is assured.” —George Scialabba
>>An interview with Gornick. 
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimora            $37
How can you save your friend's life if she doesn't want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, watchful portraits and twinkling chandeliers. In this new sanctuary, they are confronted with a set of clues leading to a hidden room where one of them will be granted a wish. But there's a catch—if they don't leave the castle by five o'clock, they will be punished. As time passes, a devastating truth emerges—only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved.

The Little Ache: A German notebook by Ian Wedde           $30
In Berlin and the north of Germany around Kiel, Wedde's nineteenth-century ancestors whisper to him amid the clamour of history and the pleasures of daily life. Wedde wrote these poems while researching his novel The Reed Warbler. 
>>Find out about The Reed Warbler. 

I am an Island by Tamsin Calidas           $37
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of renewal. 

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand's best writers edited by Bill Manhire         $40
Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall. First published in 1989, this is a new edition of what remains an excellent introduction to New Zealand short story practice in the twentieth century. 


The Benjamin Files by Frederic Jameson         $43
Jameson offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Walter Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination.  

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga            $23
Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens, and to escape the dangers of the outside world. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycee into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.

Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering and mathematics have shaped our understanding of the brain by Grace Lindsay        $37
The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For more than a century, a diverse array of researchers has been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it. In Models of the Mind, computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed scientists to understand and describe many of the brain's processes, including decision-making, sensory processing, quantifying memory, and more.
Empireland: How imperialism has shaped modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera           $50
 "Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy. Moving effortlessly back and forth between history and journalism, Sanghera connects the racial violence and discrimination of his childhood in 1970s and 80s Wolverhampton with the attitudes and methods previously used to impose empire and white supremacy across the world – and still perpetuated in British fantasies of global leadership. Both deliberately and unconsciously, the empire was “one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity”, and it still corrupts British society in countless ways. Sanghera’s unflinching attempt to understand this process, and to counter the cognitive dissonance and denial of Britain’s modern imperial amnesia, makes for a moving and stimulating book that deserves to be widely read." —Guardian
Talking Heads by Alan Bennett           $37
Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of twelve groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television. At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic. This new edition, which contains the original complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, contains some of Bennett's finest work.
>>Two Besides adds two more monologues to the series. 

The Island Child by Molly Aitken           $23
Twenty years ago, Oona left the Irish island of Inis for the very first time. A wind-blasted rock of fishing boats and turf fires, where girls stayed in their homes until they became mothers themselves, the island was a gift for some, a prison for others. Oona was barely more than a girl, but promised herself she would leave the tall tales behind and never return. The Island Child tells two stories: of the girl who grew up watching births and betrayals, storms and secrets, and of the adult Oona, desperate to find a second chance, only to discover she can never completely escape. As the strands of Oona's life come together, in blood and marriage and motherhood, she must accept the price we pay when we love what is never truly ours.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose          $33
Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence? On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.
The Bilingual Brain, And what it tells us about the science of language by Albert Costa         $26
Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet few of us understand how this extraordinary, complex ability really works. How do two languages co-exist in the same brain? What are the advantages and challenges of being bilingual? How do we learn - and forget - a language?

Watermarks: Life, death and swimming by Lenka Janiurek          $28
Lenka Janiurek's story really begins after the death of her mother when she was a small child, and speaks of the men who came to define her life; she is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father, the sister of five brothers, the wife of one husband, the lover of several men, and the mother of two more. Her memoir speaks of identity and trying to find your place in a country that isn't your own, within a family that doesn't feel like your own. This remarkable book traces Janiurek's journey from the UK to Eastern Europe, from the 1960s to the present day. However, across the years, she remains haunted by the rage, addiction and despair of the men she is closest to. Alongside these challenges, she develops a powerful connection with the natural world, particularly water, which provides her with strength and joy.
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu           $26
A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the underbelly of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn — with unexpected consequences. 
"Gripping, impassioned, unexpected." —Los Angeles Times
Words Fail Us: In defence of disfluency by Jonty Claypole            $37
What if hyper-fluency is not only unachievable but undesirable? Jonty Claypole spent fifteen years of his life in and out of extreme speech therapy. From sessions with child psychologists to lengthy stuttering boot camps and exposure therapies, he tried everything until finally being told the words he'd always feared: 'We can't cure your stutter.' Those words started him on a journey towards not only making peace with his stammer but learning to use it to his advantage. Here, Claypole argues that our obsession with fluency could be hindering, rather than helping, our creativity, authenticity and persuasiveness. Exploring other speech conditions, such as aphasia and Tourette's, and telling the stories of the 'creatively disfluent' — from Lewis Carroll to Kendrick Lamar — Claypole explains why it's time for us to stop making sense, get tongue tied and embrace the life-changing power of inarticulacy.
"Jonty Claypole's book is timely, thoughtful, rich in fact and personal anecdote, and looks to a more enlightened, speech-diverse future." —David Mitchell
Ceramic: Art and civilisation by Paul Greenhalgh        $66
The story of ceramics is the story of human civilisation. This book traces both the utilitarian and the ornamental developments in the use of clay, from the most ancient examples to those of the present. 








VOLUME BooksNew releases

 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.






















 

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida     {Reviewed by STELLA}
Eulabee lives in Sea Cliff, a coastal neighbourhood of San Fransisco with an enviable view of the Golden Gate. She attends a private all-girls school and is part of a group of teenage girls with her best friend, the enchanting Maria Fabiola, at its centre. All is perfect and desirable, on the surface. Yet the fog that rolls in, literally, over the bay, and metaphorically over the teens, obscuring and confusing the landscape, of the neighbourhood and the girls' behaviour, is quietly threatening. In We Run the Tides, the girls own the streets: they know who lives where and why, who the strange ones are, and what goes on behind closed doors in the skimpiest sense. What it hides, as the girls come to discover as they move through that time between child and adulthood, is both blindingly obvious and indeterminately deceptive: a vagueness that can’t be resolved with the lifting of the murk. Life is golden for Eulabee: her mother, a nurse and her father, an antique dealer, who scored their home through hard work and good fortune — theirs was the doer-upper in the street, a warm, culturally rich home; she has the best friend with a ‘laugh that sounded like a reward’, and is free to enjoy her privileged life. As adolescence raises her head and the gang of girls shift around each other in different patterns, the blinkers slowly lift. Shifts overlaid by the landscape, the tides that rise and fall, creating beauty as well as danger. An incident on the way to school will change her relationship with Maria Fabiola in a way she could never have imagined. Perception is everything, and what one sees and another does not escalates a situation from the trivial to the dramatic, not helped by the enchanting Maria Fabiola and her penchant for attention and excitement. Under this coming-of-age story are deeper issues of coming womanhood, body image and sexual awakening, deception, pretension and power. A missing girl and a body on the beach shake the neighbourhood at its core. Against this backdrop, Eulabee, now isolated and confused after being ousted from the group, edges towards a new understanding of herself and a realisation that her best friend is not the girl she thought she was — and even meeting years later will reveal further truths that the teenage girl had failed to see. Vendela Vida’s compulsively attractive writing and vivid portrayal of growing up in 1980s San Francisco make We Run the Tides captivating and subtly played. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 








































































 
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler   {Reviewed by THOMAS}

He wanted the review to be a non-review. He wanted his reading of the work to be part of the work, but he wasn’t sure how this could be so. Maybe, though, his reading of the work is always the whole of the work, whatever the work, at least for him, how could it not be so, he thought. If he wrote about the work, is that, too, a part of the work, or is it another work, he wondered. He wanted everything to be about the work, in other words part of the work, but he had no idea, or only very little idea, about the limits of the work, so he didn’t know how to tell if this was so. He didn’t know how to proceed. Circumstances, he thought, are, as far as thinking about those circumstances goes at least, a set of information, he hoped this term was generous enough and without unwanted implication, circumstances are a set of information, but, in order to think about this information, or to make it available to thought, or, possibly, as a consequence of this process of thought, and, he thought, thought processes information, the information undergoes processing by thought just as animals undergo processing at the Alliance meat processing plant on the way the Richmond, a journey he seldom makes, but, anyway, in order to think about a set of information it is necessary to array it on a grammatical rack, for, he thought, it is grammar that determines how we think and not the content of the thoughts, and it is for this reason that he is more interested in novels for their punctuation than for their subjects, what novels are ‘about’ are seldom really what novels are about, or only superficially so at best. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler describes itself, or is described by her in it, or, rather, is described by the text’s putative author Kate Ennis in the text she has putatively written, the text which comprises the novel, as “a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language,” the language of the novel seemingly a means of access to a set of information that lies behind it, or before it, depending upon whether you are thinking spatially or temporally, spatially being presumably a metaphor in this case, though it is interesting that we tend to think that we are facing the future while referring to the past as what happened before, when what is before us is what we face, suggesting that really we are moving backwards into the future, facing the past, as in most novels, writer and reader both advancing with their backs towards the end of the book, sharing experiences in the past tense, always looking backwards though their backs are to the fore. The novel, this novel, Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, is, among other things, about how to write a novel about the set of information that comprises it. The book is about the telling of the story, not about the story as such. “Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves somebody else.” The novel concerns, if that is the right word, the attempts of its protagonist, if that is the right word, to leave her lover of some years, or, possibly, also concerns her fear that her lover of some years will leave her, though, considering the fact that her lover has a marriage, home and life of his own, none of which depend upon her, the word ‘leave’ may be the wrong word. “But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life,” she says. She has little else. The text is unravelled, threads leave off, snap, loop back, extraneous strands are caught in and peter out, really this is too much a metaphor and he is against metaphors, there is an extended section in which the protagonist, who has fled to Ireland flees Ireland, seemingly the only actions she takes or is capable of taking in the entire book, finding Ireland populated by characters who could well be minor characters from a Flann O’Brien novel caught off-guard between their appearances in that novel, caught unprepared at times when they have no role, resentful and perplexed at being so found, and by obnoxious ex-pats from America. She is more comfortable with her dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui than she is in taking action when such action is little more than exchanging a familiar dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui for one without the comfort of familiarity. Her identity is no more than the sum of her situation, the set of information that she attempts to make her way out of, or into, with her punctuation. Voices break off, or break in. “Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.” Sometimes she is ‘she’ and sometimes ‘I’, she is uncertain of the degree of intimacy she has with us, or with her lover, her text is full of tentative commas, ambivalence, and a lack of direction or obvious goal, if, that is, something can be full of a lack. What could be more life-like, or like life, than that? The novel wonders how a novel treats the same set of information differently from any other way in which that set of information could be treated. Is the evidence, and are the proceedings, so to call them, of a novel anything like the proceedings of a court of law? What is the value of whose evidence in these proceedings, the proceedings either of a novel or the court? “The only ones permitted to bring the story to the court’s attention, the only storytellers, are the ones to whom the story happened, whom the facts befell. … The story is a dispositive for all stories that cannot be proven to be unlike it,” she writes, but all she has is a set of information that is an incomplete set, uncertain evidence, no context or statute, no precedent, no culpability that can be felt without sharing. “I look at you for signs of leaving me and find to my despair that one of us has already left. Maybe it’s me.” The ‘you’ addressed throughout, we realise, is the lover who she does not want to leave, in both senses in which that phrase can be read, the lover she wants at last to leave, or fears that she has lost, the lover whose attention she also wants to keep upon her. This ‘you’, though, also is the reader, who, like the lover, has a complete and separate life to which she is not essential, to which she is an aspirant rival. The lover and the reader spend some time, perhaps each evening, with her, intimately, she tries to hold them both with the text, but ultimately, she knows, both the door and the book will close as such things always close. “I understand that there must be others who are and always have been alone. In this way. They were never, how can I put this, going to be part of life. It is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite make it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.”

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

Britta Teckentrup's beautiful and thoughtful book My Little Book of Big Questions is our Book of the Week this week. Do flowers, when they grow, feel the same as I do when I grow? Why am I afraid of what I don't know? What if winter never ends? How do birds see the world? Why do we always have to argue? Is the world inside or outside of me? Is it possible to understand the whole universe? Is it good to step out of line? Will we be enchanted and carried off into another world? Why do some people turn nasty when they are in a large group? Are dreams as true as reality? What exactly is the future? If I think long and hard, will I discover the meaning of life? Why are my thoughts going around in circles? Is it possible to think of nothing? Is it possible to be too happy? Does everyone ask the same questions? There are no answers in this book (just as well!), so it is the perfect launch-pad for the imagination or for discussion. Teckentrup's prints are exquisite and dream-like. 
>>Look through the book quickly here. 
>>Visit Britta Teckentrup's website. 
>>Living in two languages.
>>Buy a copy of My Little Book of Big Questions (we can gift-wrap and send anywhere).
>>Some other books by Britta Teckentrup. 




VOLUME BooksBook of the week