NEW RELEASES

Nervous System by Lina Meruane              $33
A young woman struggles to finish her PhD on stars and galaxies. Instead, she obsessively tracks the experience of her own body, listening to its functions and rhythms, finally locating in its patterns the beginning of illness and instability. As she discovers the precarity of her self, she begins to turn her attention to the distant orbits of her family members, each moving away from the familial system and each so different in their experiences, but somehow made similar in their shared history of illness and trauma, both political and personal.
"Meruane is one of the one or two greats in the new generation of Chilean writers who promise to have it all." —Roberto Bolaño
"Nervous System is fast, uncompromising and shimmering with intelligence." —Sarah Moss
"Meruane is an immensely gifted writer... Nervous System burns in the mind long after one has read it." —The New York Times 
Rogomelec by Leonor Fini              $32
All the qualities of the paintings for which Fini is famed can be found in this novella (first published in 1979 but here in its first English translation): an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear. This novella's ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec—where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers—and moves through a waking dream of strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the "the celebration of the king" is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec's Gothic ruins. Includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella's original publication.
>>A gallery of paintings. 
Hattie and Olaf by Frida Nilsson and Stina Wirsén             $20
Hattie wants a horse more than anything. Her friend Ellen has three ponies. When Hattie’s father finally comes home with a horse float, Hattie is ecstatic. But instead of a horse, out stomps Olaf—a donkey. Now Hattie not only has horse fever, she suddenly catches lying sickness as well... The audacious and captivating Hattie and her best friend Linda navigate the social politics of their first school years in this funny illustrated chapter book.
This is Your Mind on Plants: Opium, coffee, mescaline by Michael Pollan           $40
Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness—to stimulate, calm, or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine, and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos. Why are some drugs encouraged by governments and others restricted?
>>Ego, death, and the healing power of plants. 
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne           $37
The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter-skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. 
The Boy Who Made Things Up by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Lily Emo            $25
"Shall we just walk along, Dad, or shall we make some of it up?"  Join Michael and his over-worked father as they journey home one fun-filled afternoon. Nelson illustrator won the Margaret Mahy Illustration Award for this book. 
"Voila: an actual Mahy, republished with wildly beautiful artwork by Nelson illustrator Lily Emo. The press release about this one called Emo’s work 'breathtaking' and usually that’s hyperbole but in this case my breath actually did catch, more than a few times, as I turned to a fresh page. The seascapes are dreamy, they’re what you notice first, but after many re-reads my very favourite thing about the art here is Emo’s gentle skewering of adults’ terrible awful screen-induced posture." —Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff
Underground: Marsupial outlaws and other rebels of Australia's war in Vietnam by Mirranda Burton             $33
A superbly drawn graphic novel recalibrating the history of the entwined Australian and New Zealand involvement in the Vietnam War. Led by an unconscientiously objecting wombat registered for military service during Australia's war in Vietnam, Underground digs tunnels through a chapter of Australian history that many have attempted to bury. Why would a wombat be registered for war? It's 1965, and an old Tattersalls barrel starts rolling marbles to randomly conscript young Australian men to fight in the war in Vietnam. Melbourne housewife Jean McLean is outraged, as are her artist friends Clif and Marlene Pugh, who live in the country with their wombat, Hooper. Determined to wreck the system, Jean forms the Save Our Sons movement's Victorian branch, and she and her supporters take to the streets to protest. Meanwhile, in the small country town of Katunga, Bill Cantwell joins the Australian Army, and in Saigon, young Mai Ho is writing letters to South Vietnamese soldiers from her school desk. And when Hooper's call-up papers arrive, he mysteriously goes underground... As these stories intersect in unexpected ways and destinies entwine, a new world gradually emerges - a world in which bridges of understanding make more sense than war.
>>Born to dig. 
The Subversive Simone Weil: A life in five ideas by Robert Zearetsky         $38
Known as the 'patron saint of all outsiders', Simone Weil (1909-43) was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance.


Anni and Josef Albers: Equal and unequal by Nicholas Fox Weber           $210
A beautifully presented and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design. Josef Albers - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut.
The Shut-Ins by Katherine Brabon            $33
"Not only is The Shut Ins a compelling story about hikikomori, those who seek absolute isolation from society, and those who orbit them in their reclusion, it is also a profound exploration of loneliness, solitude, and that peculiar, ineffable yearning for inner or unconscious worlds; the chimeric 'other side'. Katherine Brabon is a precise and contemplative writer, her prose capable of intense, almost-heady evocation. I will read everything she writes." —Hannah Kent
Nonstop by Tomi Ungerer                $30
The legendary children's book author's last picture book sends a powerful message in trying times. Earth is devastated and empty. Everyone has escaped to the moon—except Vasco. Luckily, Vasco has his shadow to guide him, and he finds little green Poco—someone to care for and bring to safety. Nonstop dangers await Vasco and baby Poco at every corner, but Vasco's shadow rescues and guides them through destroyed cities and apocalyptic landscapes to safety. 
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris            $33
Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and the micro-aggressions, she's thrilled when Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. However, when a string of uncomfortable events cause Nella to become Public Enemy Number One and Hazel, the Office Darling.
"Part office satire, part thriller with a twist, this is a fresh and original take on race and class in the publishing industry." —Guardian
Forming in 1971, the Polynesian Panthers sought to raise consciousness and took action in response to the racism and discrimination Pacific peoples faced in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s. The Panthers organised prison visit programmes and sporting and debating teams for inmates; provided a halfway-house service for young men released from prison; ran homework centres, and offered `people's loans', legal aid and food banks that catered for 600 families at their height. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, poetry, newspaper articles and critical analysis, Polynesian Panthers is a thought-provoking account of this period in New Zealand. Particularly interesting in light of the government's formal apology for the 'dawn raids' of the 1970s. 
She is Haunted by Paige Clark            $33
"I know lots of things now that I'm dead. Peter from Apartment Two has a spastic bladder. My former boss Morgan keeps her toenails in a gold jewellery box. My brother and his wife are trying for a baby. I always excuse myself before things get too heated. I don't know much about my mother yet. I am waiting for grief to catch her, but she mostly seems ashamed-of her body, of what it made." A mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse; another undergoes brain surgery to try to live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. In She Is Haunted, these renditions of the author search for recognition and connection, and, more than anything else, small moments of empathy. But in what world will she move beyond her haunted past and find compassion for herself?
James Courage Diaries edited by Chris Brickell            $45
New Zealand author James Courage was born in Christchurch in 1903, and he became aware of his homosexuality during his adolescent years. He moved to London in 1927 and began writing novels, plays, poems and short stories. He was much more sexually open than most of his homosexual writer contemporaries Frank Sargeson, Eric McCormick, Charles Brasch and Bill Pearson. A Way of Love, published in 1959, was the first gay novel written by a New Zealander, and some of his other seven novels (including Fires in the Distance and The Call Home) contain queer characters. The NZSA's Courage Day, to recognise the plight of imprisoned and oppressed writers, is named after James Courage. 
"What a wealth of contemporary detail is here about the shadow world (to many readers) of covert sexual engagement, and the sharp and engaging portrait of a middle-class privileged life, with its travel and its civilian experience of war. I also found of great interest his gradual change from an almost copy-book privileged aesthete, to a late in the day socialist." —Vincent O’Sullivan
Whether you start your day with something sweet, finish it with something sweet, or make sure sweets are within reach all day long, you'll find serious inspiration in the pages of Salma Hage's latest cookbook for home cooks. The Middle East's wide range of cultures, ingredients, and influences informs the array of dishes she includes.
Granta 155: The best of young Spanish language novelists edited by Valerie Miles          $28
A selection of the brightest rising stars now writing in Spanish, here translated into English. 
>>Contents. 




Things Remembered and Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima            $23
"If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination—imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes." Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are—by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.
"These impressive stories bridge past and present, the familiar and the otherworldly, the lost and the found." —David Mitchell
"A perfect introduction to the quiet, subtle brilliance of Kyoko Nakajima." —David Peace
Radical Architecture of the Future by Beatrice Galilee           $90
Architectural practice today goes far beyond the design and construction of buildings — the most exciting, forward-thinking architecture is also found in digital landscapes, art, apps, films, installations, and virtual reality. This remarkable book features projects — surprising, beautiful, outrageous, and sometimes even frightening — that break rules and shatter boundaries. The book includes work of architects, designers, artists, photographers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers — all of whom synthesize and reflect spatial environments. 
Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-aesthetics and the ugly in Postmodern architecture edited by Wouter van Acker and Thomas Mical          $55
Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics - alternately vilified and appropriated, either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents eighteen new essays which rethink ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions - and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century, addressing the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts such as brutalism, kitsch, the formless, ad hoc-ism, the monstrous, or the grotesque. 
August by Callan Wink             $23
August is an average twelve year old - he likes dogs and fishing, and doesn't even mind early morning chores on his family's farm. When his parents' marriage falls apart and he has to start over in a new town, he tries hard to be an average teen - playing football and doing his homework - but he struggles to form friendships, and when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course once more, he flees to rural Montana. There, as he throws himself into work on a ranch, he comes to learn that even the smallest of communities have secrets and even the most broken of families have a bond.
"Wink has a precise, clear prose style. The landscape is a character in itself — well-known, but changeable. Wink skilfully imbues his writing with a subtle sense of foreboding that never leaves. In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same." —Guardian
Tim Te Maro and the Subterranean Heartsick Blues by H.S. Valley            $23
Tim Te Maro and Elliott Parker – classmates at Fox Glacier High School for the Magically Adept – have never got along. But when they both get dumped the day before the big egg-baby assignment, they reluctantly decide to ditch their exes and work together. When the two boys start to bond over their magically enchanted egg-baby, they realise that beneath their animosity is something like friendship … or something more. A queer YA romantic comedy and winner of the 2020Ampersand Prize. 

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth by Daniel Mason           $25
On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.
Pulitzer Prize fiction finalist, 2021. 
The Heap by Sean Adams            $30
Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Vertical s once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building's mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land. Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Vertical s, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show. The brothers' conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station's parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as "he" converses with Bernard.
The Keeper of Miracles by Phillip Maisel           $38
Phillip Maisel was born in 1922, in Vilna, Lithuania. When the Germans arrived in Vilna in 1941, Phillip's life changed dramatically. He survived two years in a squalid, overcrowded Jewish ghetto, before enduring multiple Nazi labour and concentration camps. Maisel was liberated in 1945 while on a Death March. He moved to Australia in 1949. For over thirty years, Maisel has worked at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre, recording over a thousand testimonies of other survivors and their descendants — each story of survival a miracle in its own right — earning Maisel the nickname 'The Keeper of Miracles'. This memoir is published as Maisel turns 99.
How Old Am I? Faces from around the world, 1—100 by J.R.            $35
For young children, the concept of age is abstract when they don't have a relatable context... until now This book showcases the faces and life stories of 100 people from around the world in numerical order, from a one-year-old to a centenarian, giving children a reference point for each age. Striking close-up black-and-white portraits are paired with read-aloud text that shares personal experiences, wishes, memories, and emotions, leaving readers with an appreciation and understanding of the ageing process. Just as fascinating for adults. 





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The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak    {Reviewed by STELLA}
A man is burying a tree to protect it from the winter months in a north London backyard. A sixteen-year-old stands up and opens her mouth to express herself in history class only to let out a scream of grief and frustration. A woman is flying to a cold country to help her niece and find solace after her sister’s death. An olive tree. A girl of Turkish and Greek descent who has never stepped on the soil of her parent's homeland. An aunt who is the door to family and history, a link to the past and secrets. When two young people meet in Cyprus, one Greek, the other Turkish, the troubles that will arise in 1974, and the chasm it will cause between them, are far from their minds. Intent on meeting and spending time together, Kostas and Defne, finding a place away from the prying eyes of their families is their only concern. A taverna away from the village is the perfect place. Here, in the courtyard, is a witness to their love: an olive tree. Elif Shafak never cringes away from hard subjects. In her novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, she portrayed the lives of women in Turkey, particularly the poor and the underprivileged, in a novel about the murder of a prostitute taking a deep dive into her life through the clever mechanism of the last minutes of her life, taking us back to her childhood and her path to where she ended. The Island of Missing Trees is an evenhanded portrayal of tragedy in this island nation through the eyes of a bereaved man and his daughter, Ada, surrounded by secrets, and an olive tree. The use of the olive tree as a witness may sound fanciful, but in the hands of Shafak, it works by connecting the natural world with the human history of this place, and this olive tree is a beautiful storyteller of love, longing and redemption. Like the tree, Kostas has been transplanted. After his brother is killed, his mother sends him away to England for safety. Little does Kostas know it will be years before he can return and reunite with Defne. In the time he is away, the island changes, his friends at the Taverna have disappeared, it's harder than he imagined to pick up where he left off. His love of nature inspires him to take a cutting from the olive tree at the Taverna, now sick and uncared for, hoping he can bring a little something of his past to life again. Defne finally agrees to join him in England, but her road of new beginnings is rockier and she is unable to let go of the past and a secret that haunts her. After her death, her sister comes to London to connect with Ada and broker a peace with Kostas. Bringing her Turkish culture and island history with her, she opens doors to the past. A past which Kostas will have to face — one of personal, as well as historical, tragedy. A past that will help Ada connect with her own complex heritage and find a sense of belonging. The Island of Missing Trees is a love story, an ode to the power of nature and the memory of trees, an unwavering look at a confrontation (which continues to flare up) and the ways in which land absorbs tragedy, a warning about the power of untold secrets and the ability to survive them, and a reminder to take the best of who you are, culturally, emotionally and politically, to enable you to walk forward and chose a better path. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that,” wrote Clarice Lispector, quoted by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra in one of the essays in this highly enjoyable collection of literary observations on, ostensibly, some of the more interesting largely (but not exclusively) Latin American literature of the last quarter century, literature that distrusts, as Zambra dismisses, the clichéed fluidity of the ‘Magic Realists’ most readily (and lazily) associated with Latin American literature by Western readers. Zambra instead values literature that is hesitant, inventive, always aware of new possibilities, mentally and linguistically supple, striving always towards new forms. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” wrote Walter Benjamin (not quoted by Alejandro Zambra (at least not in this book)). Because the reviews collected here are often of books the reader of Not to Read has not read and by authors with whom the reader (at least this reader) is unfamiliar, the reader at the outset may think they might skip quite a bit of the book, to make reading faster, but Zambra’s book is too interesting, too nicely written, and too enjoyable. There are indeed considerations of many authors the reader has not heard of, but the essays deliver the same fascination as reading Borges’s studies of nonexistent books (Borges thought it more worthwhile, and faster, to write about books that do not exist than to write the books themselves), with the added benefit that, just possibly, works by these authors may already be, or may one day be, available in English. At the very least, one reads to read about the writing and reading of texts, which is, after all, the most interesting thing to read about. The reader might have thought that skipping might save time, but the text runs so lightly and so sprightlyly that the reader is in any case carried forward more rapidly by following the text than they would have proceeded had it been possible to skip. The essays and reviews included in Not to Read also function as a sort of literary autobiography of Zambra himself, his concerns, approaches, influences and motivations, and provide a greater appreciation of his other work, direct yet subtle, playful yet poignant, personal yet politically and socially acute, compact yet wonderfully expansive. Zambra recommends books we are sure that we will like, even though we may never get to read them, but, more importantly, the reasons for his recommendations, his observations on and his responses to these books, provide a portrait of a reader we come quickly to admire, and who we as readers may well wish to be more like, as well as of a writer alert to the possibilities of writing. Zambra is frequently very funny, as he is in the title essay ‘Not to Read’, which starts out as a review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read, which Zambra has himself not read, and carries on to become a deliciously prickly lampoon of opinions formed of books without reading them, intercut with seemingly very valid reasons not to read some writers’ books. Zambra’s concision and lightness (Zambra is an exemplar of the literary qualities Italo Calvino thought most important in his Six Memos for a New Millennium) can produce beautiful sentences, such as this one on Santiago, quivering with a sensitivity that undercuts ease and fluidity and leaves us utterly aware: “It’s the city that we know, the city that would follow us if we wanted to flee from it (from ourselves), with its permanent architectural eclecticism, with the dirty river, almost always a mere trickle, cutting the landscape in half, with the most beautiful sky imaginable in those few days of autumn or winter after it rains, when we rediscover the mountains.” 


VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


 Our Book of the Week considers the social, economic and political frameworks arts practitioners and organisations occupy in contemporary Aotearoa, and posits the kinds of spaces and culture we might wish to be working in, and how we might arrive there. AS NEEDED, AS POSSIBLE has contributions from Emma Bugden and Chloe Geoghegan, Sophie Davis, Simon Gennard, Sarah Hudson and Zoe Thompson-Moore, Ella Grace McPherson-Newton, Ōtautahi Kōrerotia, Public Share, James Tapsell-Kururangi and Ema Tavola. It is a beautifully designed and fascinating book. 
>>More about the book. 
>>The Making of Bread. 
>>Risky Business. 
>>An Antidote to Individualism. 
>>Gains?
>>Finding time to discuss nothing. 
>>Bounce. 
>>A lyrical essay about shapeshifting. 
>>Visit the wonderful Gloria Books. 
>>The book is produced in association with Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.
>>Your copy. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein               $23
After leaving the man with whom she'd been living, an unnamed protagonist in an unnamed university city is working unspectacularly on the poet Paul Celan. The abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia; the weather has been deteriorating and outside her office window she can hear police helicopters circling, looking for the women who have been disappearing. She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. But when she meets Clara — a woman who is exactly her opposite — her plans begin to unravel.
"Bernstein’s pessimism evokes the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Bernhard, chiming all too well with the current discourse around issues of male privilege." –Spectator
>>"A study in unknowability."
>>Why is she so lonely? 
Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle        $25
An unnamed woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Her activities are banal — applying for jobs, looking up horoscopes, managing depression, going on Tinder dates. ‘I want to tell someone I love them but there is no one to tell,’ she says. ‘Except my sister maybe. I want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die.’ She observes the ambiguities of social interactions, the absurd intimacies of sex and the indignity of everyday events, with a skepticism about the possibility of genuine emotion, or enlightenment. Like life, things are just unfolding, and sometimes, like life, they don’t actually get better.
>>Nostalgia has instagrammed my life.
>>Something interesting. 
As Needed, As Possible: Emerging discussions on art, labour and collaboration in Aotearoa edited by Sophie Davis and Simon Gennard            $30
Considers the social, economic and political frameworks arts practitioners and organisations occupy in contemporary Aotearoa, and makes a contribution to a wider field of discussion thinking through the kind of spaces and culture we wish to be working in, and how we might arrive there. Contributions by Emma Bugden and Chloe Geoghegan, Sophie Davis, Simon Gennard, Sarah Hudson and Zoe Thompson-Moore, Ella Grace McPherson-Newton, Ōtautahi Kōrerotia, Public Share, James Tapsell-Kururangi and Ema Tavola.
>>More about the book. 

Tokyo Redux by David Peace            $33
Tokyo, July 1949, President Shimoyama, Head of the National Railways of Japan, goes missing just a day after serving notice of 30,000 job losses. In the midst of the US Occupation, against the backdrop of widespread social, political and economic reforms - as tensions and confusion reign - American Detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing person's investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ. Fifteen years later and Tokyo is booming. As the city prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight, Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the Occupation period, and now a private investigator, is given a case which forces him to go back to confront a time, a place and a crime he's been hiding from for the past fifteen years. Over twenty years later, in the autumn and winter of 1988, as the Emperor Showa is dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American, eking out a living teaching and translating, sits drinking by the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, knowing the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the Showa Era is down to him.
"David Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation." —New York Times
>>And Peace's 'comfort read'?
Birds: An anthology edited by Jacqueline Mitchell, illustrated by Eric Fitch Daglish          $40
Arranged by bird, these literary excerpts and poems from classic and modern writers are accompanied by striking woodcuts. A very attractive hardback volume. 
To Write As If Already Dead by Kate Zambreno              $34
To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault. The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature. Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, 'What is an author?' Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and 'the facts of the body': illness, pregnancy, and death.
>>Chronology of a body. 
Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg            $23
In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. Elsa hopes to live a life different to the one she's always known and when she meets Tommasino, it seems possible. Tommasino belongs to the De Francisci family, who owns the cloth factory where Elsa's father works, and whose lives and stories Elsa has known all her life. In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa and Tommasino begin to imagine another future for themselves, free from the constraints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed.
>>Eternal return. 
Activism, Feminism, Politics and Parliament by Margaret Wilson           $40
This is the story of one of New Zealand’s eminent political actors. A policy-focused campaigner, reluctant to join a political tribe and uncomfortable with the combative attitudes and personal jockeying that politics seemed to entail, Wilson nevertheless rose to become the president of the Labour Party during the turbulent mid-1980s. Going on to become a central and occasionally controversial minister in the Clark government, Wilson held roles as Attorney-General and Speaker of the House.


Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich           $38
A college freshman, flying home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the airplane. A long-lost stepbrother's visit to New York prompts a reckoning with a family's old taboos. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into the gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. A wife, looking at her husband's passwords neatly posted on the wall, realizes there are no secrets left in their marriage. In these eleven short stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives — from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse.
 "Sestanovich's elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life." —Raven Leilani
"Astonishing. One of the best story collections I've read in a long time." —Brandon Taylor
The Musical Human: A history of life on earth by Michael Spitzer          $33
165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago was the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on a journey across the ages, from Bach to BTS and back, to explore the relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, looking at music in our everyday lives; music in world history; and music in evolution, from insects to apes, humans to AI.
"Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible - a Guns, Germs and Steel for music." —Daniel Levitin
The Ghost in the Garden: In search of Darwin's lost garden by Jude Piesse        $40
Darwin never stopped thinking about the garden at his childhood home, The Mount, in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. It was here, under the tutelage of his green-fingered mother and sisters, that he first examined the reproductive life of flowers, collected birds' eggs, and began the experiments that would lead to his theory of evolution. A century and a half later, with one small child in tow and another on the way, Jude Piesse finds herself living next door to this secret garden. Two acres of the original site remain, now resplendent with overgrown ashes, sycamores, and hollies. The carefully tended beds and circular flower garden are buried under suburban housing; the hothouses where the Darwins and their gardeners grew pineapples are long gone. Walking the pathways with her new baby, Piesse starts to discover what impact the garden and the people who tended it had on Darwin's work.
Recipe for a Kinder Life by Annie Smithers             $38
Founder of the du Fermier restaurant in rural Victoria, Smithers's quest for a way of living more gently and more sustainably with the land comes through in this recipe-rich memoir. 
"The anti-celebrity chef Annie Smithers brings a cook's palate, a grower's heart and a poet's soul to bear in this moving, practical, inspiring story of her life." —Matthew Evans
Tunnelling to the Centre of the Earth by Kevin Wilson           $26A collection of 'Southern Gothic' stories from the author of Nothing to See Here. Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. 'Grand Stand-In' is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies 'stand-ins' for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. In 'Blowing Up On the Spot,' a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.
The Grande Odalisque by  Jérôme Mulot, Florent Ruppert and Bastien Vivès      $48
A remarkable graphic novel from three French comics stars. Alex and Carole, friends since childhood, are now (literal) partners in crime. But the heist — to steal the Ingres painting The Grande Odalisque from the Louvre in Paris — is too much for the duo to handle, so they bring in Clarence, a bureaucrat's son with a price on his head by a Mexican drug cartel and, more importantly, an arms dealer. Next is Sam, a stunt motorcyclist and boxer by trade, who proves trigger happy with tranquilizer darts. Using soda can smoke bombs, rocket launchers, and hang gliders, Alex, Carole, and Sam set off a set of circumstances that results in a battle with the French Special Forces — and their partnership, which was on the rocks, will never be the same again.
>>"Serious, escapist fun."
Pie for Breakfast: Simple baking recipes for kids by Cynthia Cliff               $35
The children at Hazel's school are baking a wonderful range of delicious things to raise money for the library. The clearly presented recipes are a good introduction to baking from around the world. Nicely illustrated, too!


History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera           $22
"You're still alive in alternate universes, Theo, but I live in the real world where this morning you're having an open casket funeral. I know you're out there, listening. And you should know I'm really pissed because you swore you would never die and yet here we are. It hurts even more because this isn't the first promise you've broken." OCD-afflicted seventeen-year-old, Griffin, has just lost his first love - his best friend, ex-boyfriend and the boy he believed to be his ultimate life partner - in a drowning accident. In a desperate attempt to hold onto every last piece of the past, a broken Griffin forges a friendship with Theo's new college boyfriend, Jackson. And Griffin will stop at nothing to learn every detail of Theo's new college life, and ultimate death. But as the grieving pair grows closer, readers will question Griffin's own version of the truth - both in terms of what he's willing to hide, and what true love ultimately means.
"History Is All You Left Me overflows with tenderness and heartache. Even when its hero is screwing up royally, maybe especially then, Silvera's humanity and compassion carve out a space where it's not the falling that's important, it's how you pick yourself back up. There isn't a teenager alive who won't find their heart described perfectly on these pages." —Patrick Ness 
"Adam Silvera is a master at capturing the infinite small heartbreaks of love and loss and grief. History Is All You Left Me is a beautiful meditation on what it means to survive devastating loss. This book will make you cry, think, and then cry some more." —Nicola Yoon
See/Saw: Looking at photographs by Geoff Dyer         $55
See/Saw is a history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by significant photographers — from Eugene Atget to Alex Webb — Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising.

How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the destruction of the Liberal-Islamic Alliance by Elizabeth F. Thompson         $25
When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs' military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente powers plotted to protect their colonial interests. Under threat of European occupation, the Syrian-Arab Congress declared independence on March 8, 1920 and crowned Faisal king of a 'civil representative monarchy.' Sheikh Rashid Rida, the most prominent Islamic thinker of the day, became Congress president and supervised the drafting of a constitution that established the world's first Arab democracy and guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including non-Muslims. But France and Britain refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system of mandates on the pretext that Arabs were not yet ready for self-government. In July 1920, the French invaded and crushed the Syrian state. The fragile coalition of secular modernisers and Islamic reformers that had established democracy was destroyed, with profound consequences that reverberate still.
Dálvi: Six years in the Artic tundra by Laura Galloway            $33
A DNA test suggesting she shared some genetics with the Sami people, the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic tundra, tapped into Laura Galloway's wanderlust. An affair with a Sami reindeer herder led her to abandon her high-flying New York life for a fresh start in the tiny town of Kautokeino. When her new boyfriend left her unexpectedly after six months, it would have been easy, and perhaps prudent, to return home. But she stayed for six years. Dalvi is the story of Laura's time in a reindeer-herding village in Arctic Norway, forging a solitary existence as one of the few Westerners living among one of the most remote cultures on earth.
>>Home is in my heart. 
Play and the City: How to create places and spaces to help us thrive by Alex Bonham            $38
Cities have always been sites of play for both adults and children, bringing people together and pushing the boundaries of what is humanly possible. And now we need our cities to encourage and facilitate play of all kinds more than ever.
Khumbu: Gateway to Mount Everest, Pathways to peace by Peter Laurenson         $70
For over three decades, photographer Peter Laurenson has repeatedly visited Khumbu, the Nepalese gateway to Mount Everest and home to the Sherpa people. On his second visit, a chance meeting with a Sherpa family sparked a friendship that grew stronger as Laurenson brought his three sons, each in turn, to trek through this enchanted region. Accompanying this unfolding story of kinship are Laurenson's insights into Sherpa culture, the explosion of activity on Everest, and the changing nature of Khumbu as the area's popularity grew. Throughout, his striking photographs convey the essence of this remarkable land and its people.



VOLUME BooksNew releases



 BOOKS @ VOLUME #240 (30.7.21)

Read our latest newsletter. Find out what we've been reading, and about our events, new books, and amusements. 




VOLUME BooksNewsletter

Our Book of the Week is Rachel Cusk's new novel, Second Place. Clever and unsettling, and critical of the limiting structures of gender and privilege, the book is narrated by a woman who invites a long-admired artist to stay and work in her marsh-side cottage, only to suffer immensely from the chasm between reality and her expectations. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 

 >> Read all Thomas's reviews. 
















































































































































Second Place by Rachel Cusk      {Reviewed by THOMAS}
How do you feel, Jeffers, about having Rachel Cusk’s new novel Second Place addressed entirely to you by its narrator? I hope you don’t mind, Jeffers, that we are reading this book, too, as I’m not sure that you have done anything to warrant all this possibly unwanted attention. Perhaps Cusk’s narrator, M, has transferred to you the unreciprocated obsession she in the summer of the novel directed towards L, an evidently talented but aging painter somewhat off the boil, who she has persuaded to come and work in the so-called ‘Second Place’, a small house constructed by her husband Tony and a group of ‘men’, across from their own house above the marshes, to which M, after hanging curtains over the windows—the key metaphor of the book, perhaps—serially entices artists and writers who she wants to encourage to work there. I suppose you know, Jeffers, that M is some sort of writer, though she herself never seems to do any work of this sort, except, I suppose, for the novel she has written to you some time after the visit from L, and I suppose that’s not nothing, entirely. M claims to have had a strong connection with L from the time she saw an exhibition of his paintings some fifteen years before the summer of the novel, and do you find, Jeffers, that it is sometimes easy to forget, as M seems entirely to forget, that she means nothing to L, that he has never even heard of M until she offers him the ‘Second Place’, that her deep connection, so to call it, with him is entirely one-sided. And what is the nature of this deep connection that M feels, do you think, Jeffers? Is it in some way sexual, even if not sexualised, M is far too repressed for that, sublimated into the artistic mode perhaps? “When I looked at the marsh, which seemed to obey so many of [L’s] rules of light and perception that it often resembled a painted work by him, I was in a sense looking at works by L that he had not created, and was therefore — I suppose — creating them myself,” she writes, oddly. Certainly, Jeffers, M feels entitled for some reason to some undefined sort of meaningful attention from L, attention that, unsurprisingly, he has no inclination and plausibly no ability to provide. M is entirely taken aback that L arrives with a younger woman, Brett, and it is no surprise, Jeffers, that M’s emotional outbursts when it is evident, at least to us, that L does not at all reciprocate the special relationship to which M feels she is entitled, merely serve to motivate L to avoid M as much as he can. He is frightened off by her neediness, if he even notices it. “I had had this ugliness inside me for as long as I could remember, and, by offering it to L, I was perhaps labouring under the belief that he could take it from me.” Hmm. Perhaps, Jeffers, M has written to you in an attempt to insert herself into the biography of a famous painter to whom she had in fact not the slightest importance, her relationship with L, so to call it, being always entirely one-sided. This would be sad, Jeffers, if M was herself not so entirely unpleasant, a fact that ought to make it sadder, really, but our sympathies, Jeffers, even your seemingly great patience with M, can only extend so far before irritation sets in. This is a very uncomfortable novel, Jeffers, and the more familiar we become with the suffocating workings of M’s mind, the more uncomfortable we become. The way M writes rings wrong line by line, Jeffers, every simile, every over-contrived metaphor, every feeble profundity rings wrong and makes the reader stop and remember that they’re reading, that this is a constructed text, an artificiality, I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, and not an experience that they themselves are having. When M, or Cusk as M, writes, “the sky was like a blue sail overhead,” I cannot picture this, can you, Jeffers? Or when, on the following page, she writes, “life rarely offers sufficient time or opportunity to be free in more than one way,” does this make sense to you? Much of the claustrophobic isolation of M’s mind is ring-fenced and protected by dichotomous rules that she has adopted or constructed, perhaps in order to survive some previous time of trauma that she alludes to but does not reveal, and, although she may be drawn unconsciously towards transgression of these ‘rules’, she cannot relinquish her commitment to compliance and control. “But it is not Tony’s business to change places with me, nor I with him,” she writes. “We are separate people, and we each have our separate part to play, and no matter how much I yearned for an occasion for that law to be broken, I have always known that the very basis of my life rested on it.” Do you think, Jeffers, that M’s insistence on seeing all problems—existential, artistic, personal, or practical—purely in terms of reductionist and frankly quite regressive gender generalisations, and indeed her compulsion to explain every particular in her life in terms of a generalisation of some sort, blinds her to her own contribution to any particular situation and in effect alienates her from and disempowers her in these situations, even when, or even particularly when, her generalisation may be right? This contrary pull between the particular and the general has been a constant source of tension and risk in Cusk’s works generally, Jeffers. No-one can isolate and describe better than Cusk a particular or a telling detail that embeds itself in a reader’s mind and changes the way they see both the fictive and the actual world. Cusk’s ‘Outline’ trilogy is full of such wonderful splinters of hobgoblin’s mirror, so to call it, Jeffers. But can we be certain that it is Cusk’s intention that we regard M with the mixture of contempt and pity that we undoubtedly feel, or feel with perhaps a modicum of doubt, when M merely demonstrates or exaggerates the tendency to reductive gerneralising that Cusk has previously shown us of herself in her less convincing moments? Especially in certain of her non-fiction, Cusk has not infrequently moved from potent particularities to increasingly dubious generalities that reduce the insight inherent in the particulars. I wonder, Jeffers, could this book be a satire on or evisceration of Cusk herself? If not, and I think probably not, it is unclear, at least to me, Jeffers, to what extent Cusk and her narrator align. “Why do we live so painfully in our fictions?” asks M. And what, Jeffers, are we to make of the constant and presumably deliberate infelicity of description in the novel, the twee and old-fashioned turns of phrase, for example that the shelves are “higglety-pigglety” and the houses are “plonked down” somewhere or other? Cusk has created a narrator who is in many instances convincingly bad at writing, but this project, if it is her project, and I hope that it is for I hold Cusk in great esteem as a writer, comes at considerable risk to the author. Is Cusk intent on resisting our expectations of her? Perhaps, Jeffers, Cusk is trying to write in a way opposite to that of the ‘Outline’ trilogy, to react against the way of writing fiction that she developed there (if you are interested, Jeffers, you can read my ‘autofictional’ reviews of those books >here<), but it is hard to know, Jeffers, just what this opposite might be. One of the empowering strengths of the ‘Outline’ trilogy was the suspension of interpretation by their narrator, Faye, but in Second Place, all we have access to is the narrator M’s interpretation, and so much interpretation that we barely see through it, if at all. What are we to make of this, Jeffers? Perhaps the cleverness of Second Place is to suppress the unstated to a level within the narrator to which she does not allow herself to have access, leaving M superficial in the extreme and complicit in her own repression. Perhaps Second Place, Jeffers, sees the final relinquishment of M’s impulse to rebel, awakened perhaps by the devil-in-the-train episode with which the book opens, if that episode prefigures anything at all, and the ultimate victory of her already dominant impulse to comply. After all, the protagonist, so to call her, is caught in the past tense and unable to learn from her experiences. The book is written looking back from a time beyond the book’s occurrences, and she has evidently not been transformed by them, Jeffers. She has become a stagnant narrator, or one now utterly resigned to the compromise she had wrought before the book began. “L and Brett had imported a new standard, a new way of seeing, in which the old things could no longer hold their shape,” observes M, but, although she recognises that “this loss of control held new possibilities for me … as though it were itself a kind of freedom,” ultimately she affirms the rigidity of shape that she has constructed, just as — ‘Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room’ and all that — Cusk affirms a more traditional approach to the novel, but not without complicating it in interesting ways. Chekhov’s guns, with which the book bristles, are never fired: the devil on the train, M’s fainting event, the gunshots of the bird-cannons, and you, Jeffers. When Brett says of the Second Place, “It’s a cabin in the woods straight out of a horror story,” is this meant to heighten or deflate all that comes after? Do you think, Jeffers, that M is toying with you? Cusk, I think, is certainly toying with us. “It is important that I only tell you about what I can personally verify, despite the temptation to enlist other kinds of proof, or to invent or enhance things in the hope of giving you a better picture of them, or worst of all making you identify with my feelings and the way I saw it,” writes M. Yet this is exactly what she does to you, Jeffers, and also does to her readers, these Jeffereses-by-extension. Who, though, is she deceiving or trying to deceive? Perhaps only herself. M’s ultimately conservative impulses are confirmed by her encounter with L, who has been caught by the tide: “‘I was trying to find the edge,’ he said … ‘but there is no edge. You just get worn down by the slow curvature. I wanted to see what here looks like from there … but there is no there.’” And, excuse me for asking this directly, just who are you, Jeffers? M speaks to you in a tone that suggests you might be, variously, a friend, a servant, a psychotherapist, God, a dog, or a teddy bear, none of which you seem to be, nor do you seem to be someone in the field between these poles. She repeats your name hundreds of times, Jeffers, as if to remind you or the reader or herself that she is addressing you, you in particular, though you make no more than a passive contribution, the contribution of your absence. Perhaps, Jeffers, you are M’s imaginary friend, or you might as well be, even if you do exist. A note at the end of Second Place says the book “owes its debt” to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 epistolary memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico but, even though the amount of debt the book owes is not specified, I do not think this adds anything to our reading of Second Place, other than providing a source for the names: Brett, Jeffers, M [= Mabel], and L [=Lawrence (much admired by Cusk)], not that I can say as I have never read that book. Perhaps you can help us there, Jeffers. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.































The Employees by Olga Ravn       {Reviewed by STELLA}
Written as a series of worker statements, The Employees is one of the most intriguing novels I have read in a while. My interest was piqued by its format: a novel written in short statements based on a series of interviews to gauge worker contentment and their response to the cargo on board. Yes, it’s the future: the 22nd century to be exact and the crew of The Six-Thousand Ship are docked on planet New Discovery collecting specimens. These specimens, Objects, are having a profound effect on the crew, both the human and humanoid workers and the bureaucrats have been sent to record their statements and to gauge how the Objects are impacting the workflow and productivity of the crew—a typical corporate-world strategy: get the workers to explain themselves so a solution, probably not favourable to said workers, can be implemented. What unfolds in the 179 Statements is surprising. The Objects of New Discovery are both feared and loved; there are antagonisms, as well as attraction, between the humans and the humanoids; some of the humans are living in a nostalgic past lost in images — holographs of their children to dwell on —  and craving experiences of a long-lost Earth; and the humanoids are various, and their different upgrades have made some indistinguishable from the humans and increasingly independent, causing friction in their role, in particular, towards the Objects. Each interview and recorded statement reveals a little more to the reader, building a sense of this world. The ship has a mission and the crew set roles, yet somehow the Objects have upset this carefully tuned equilibrium. What these Objects are is never fully explained and I imagine for each reader they will present differently. Some are smooth, others colourful, yet others fine-haired, some produce eggs and are full of seeds. Are they large or small? They seem carry-able, and one of the workers describes sitting with one in his lap. The crew assume vastly different relationships with the Objects. It may be that the humanoids respond more positively, sensing some similarities in their ‘objectness’, while the humans find them more confusing, and some are repulsed by them. It is not always clear whether a statement is from a human or humanoid, adding to the obliqueness of the text. With Ravn’s choice of structure, you could imagine a staccato-like form, and while ‘business’ language and systems are apparent and the environment of the sterile ship evokes a science laboratory, the writing is in fact wonderfully compelling. She cleverly brings these recorded conversations into the realm of lyricism, with the workers' feelings and longings exposed, along with their pleasure and anger of their purpose. From the laundry staff to the captain to the doctor, each expresses their perspective. While some refuse to speak, rebelling against the Committee, others are relieved to unburden themselves. The Employees is a fascinating look at what constitutes a human, and what might be an object — where does sentience begin? — and are we ever really autonomous? An exquisite novel with depths of thought to lose, and find, yourself in.


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 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

 

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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

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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

 


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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