>>The book is short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize.
>>The book is short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize.
NEW RELEASES
The world’s climate is in crisis and New Zealand is being divided and reshaped by privileged immigrant wealthugees. Thirty-something Alice has a near-genius IQ and lives at home with her mother with whom she communicates by Morse code. Alice’s imaginary friend, Simp, has shown up, with a running commentary on her failings. The last time Simp was here was when Alice was seven, on the night a fire burned down the family home. Now Simp seems to be plotting something. When Alice meets a wealthugee named Pablo, she thinks she’s found a way out of her dull existence. But then she meets Pablo’s teenage daughter, Erika – an actual genius full of terrifying ambition.
"A claustrophobic eco-thriller with a gloriously unreliable narrator, She’s a Killer is tense and sharp, and feels unnervingly prescient." –Brannavan Gnanalingam
"Equipped with an exhilaratingly badly-behaved protagonist, She’s a Killer builds from a slice of very strange life into a thriller by way of a succession of stunning comic set pieces. You’ll laugh—a lot. And then you’ll cry and be really surprised about it since you were laughing so much." –Elizabeth Knox
>>The first person.
>>The first person.
Through books such as The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, Sebald pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the 'true' Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind.
>>Ensnaring Sebald. >>The storyteller.
>>"You only write if you have to."
>>Did Sebald plunder Jewish lives for his fictions?
>>Read the books by Sebald.
>>"You only write if you have to."
>>Did Sebald plunder Jewish lives for his fictions?
>>Read the books by Sebald.
You are a small thing, and you must learn to fight. Swiv has taken her grandmother's advice too literally. Now she's at home, suspended from school. Her mother is pregnant and preoccupied — and so Swiv is in the older woman's charge, receiving a very different form of education from a teacher with a style all her own. Grandma likes her stories fast, troublesome and funny. She's known the very worst that life can throw at you - and has met it every time with a wild, unnamable spirit, fighting for joy and independence every step of the way. But will maths lessons based on Amish jigsaws and classes on How to Dig a Winter Grave inspire the same fire in Swiv, and ensure it never goes out? Time is running short. Grandma's health is failing, the baby is on the way, as a family of three extraordinary women prepare to face life's great changes together.
Mahmood Mattan is a father, a chancer, a petty thief. Many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn’t too worried — secure in his innocence in a country where justice is served. But as the trial nears, it starts to dawn on him that he is in a fight for his life — against conspiracy, prejudice and the ultimate punishment. In the shadow of the hangman’s noose, he realises that the truth may not be enough to save him.
Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos. What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs? What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world? The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.
On an unnamed archipelago off the east coast of Britain, women control the civic institutions, decide how the islands' money is spent, run the businesses, tend to their families, teach the children hope for a better world. They say that this gynotopia is Eva Levi's life's work, and that now she has disappeared, it will be destroyed. But they don't know about Cwen. Cwen has been here longer than the civilisation she has returned to haunt. The clouds are her children, and the waves. Her name has ancient roots, reaching down into the earth and halfway around the world. The islands she inhabits have always belonged to women. And she will do anything she can to protect them...
"A clever, strange and wonderful book, which brims with mystery. A group of women recount their past and present stories, revealing their visions of the future. Cwen is a rare book, bold and powerful." —Xiaolu Guo
"A wild, original, sure-footed feminist reimagining of the present and the past that brushes up against the mythical. It reminds us, eloquently and passionately, what is or can be possible, and in its depiction of a revolution becomes a revolutionary book itself. Beautiful work." —Neel Mukherjee
The Woman in the Purple Skirt seems to live in a world of her own. She appears to glide through crowded streets without acknowledging any reaction her presence elicits. Each afternoon, she sits on the same park bench, eating a pastry and ignoring the local children who make a game of trying to get her attention. She may not know it, but the Woman in the Purple Skirt being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes; what she eats; whom she speaks to. But this invisible observer isn't a stalker — no, it's much more complicated than that. Beautifully written and darkly comic, this novel tells the stories of two women whose lives become strangely entwined.
>>Read and extract.
The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble—The collaborative projects, 1965—1979 by Bridget Hackshaw $65
>>Read and extract.
A nicel presented book about the remarkable collaboration between the modernist architect James Hackshaw (a member, for a time, of the famous Group Architects), the painter Colin McCahon, and the then young sculptor Paul Dibble on 12 New Zealand buildings — from churches to school halls. Drawing on interviews with James Hackshaw before his death and on the McCahon archive, this book brings into the light a body of work and a collaboration that has hitherto been little known or examined. Illustrated with Hackshaw's plans, McCahon's drawings, letters and journal entries, and contemporary images of the surviving buildings and artworks, the book includes essays by Peter Simpson, Julia Gatley, Peter Shaw and Alexa Johnston.
A beautifully presented selection of over fifty short stories, from established names to new discoveries, from the nineteenth century to today.
>>Other books in this series.
>>Other books in this series.
An international anthology of poetry by trans and non-binary writers, including Nelson's Te Urukeiha Tuhua.
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms—art, sex, drugs, and climate.
>>Nelson in conversation with Hari Kunzru.
>>Nelson in conversation with Hari Kunzru.
Randy Shilts was the first openly gay journalist dealing with gay issues for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1981, the year when AIDS came to international attention, he quickly devoted himself to reporting on the developing epidemic, one which devastated his community and eventually took his life as well. Shilts interviewed over 1,000 people, weaving together extensive research in the form of personal stories and political reportage. He was perfectly placed to understand the cultural, medical and political impact of the disease on the gay community and United States society as a whole. And the Band Played On exposes why AIDS was allowed to spread while the medical and political authorities ignored and even denied the threat.
"A heroic work of journalism on what must rank as one of the foremost catastrophes of modern history." —The New York Times
"This sequel captures the essence of my novel and takes my characters on a tense and dangerous journey through the world of The Severed Land." —Maurice Gee. Picking up where The Severed Land left off, this suspense-filled novel continues the story of the brave ex-slave Fliss. Despite her idyllic life behind the safety of the wall, she can't help longing for someone special to fill the vague sense of loneliness that nags at her. That is until a young man appears, preaching peace and unity. His arrival, however, is about to send Fliss and her friend Minnie back through the wall on a hazardous mission.
This walking tour of the north of England is a celebration of the Brontës’ work and a love letter to the windy places that inspired them—and others.
As our civilisation careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science. Lent investigates humanity's age-old questions — Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? — from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom. Jeremy Lent is the author of The Patterning Instinct.
In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as 'Gabo', was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don't think we'll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother's words, Rodrigo wondered, “Is this how the end begins?” To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of García Márquez's final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father's mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity.
A ship. A garden. A library. A key. Using pictures and words, Brian Selznick presents the story of two people bound to each other through time and space, memory and dreams. At the center of their relationship is a mystery about the nature of grief and love which will look different to each reader.
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers a new way of thinking about flavour through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisi Aribisala remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food's ties to community, Nina Mingya Powles considers the various food traditions of her family.
A remarkable graphic novel,
"This brilliant debut collection explores the intensity of teenage ennui and female friendship, with a deft feel for its slights and tensions. Almost without exception, the gorgeous, clever short stories in Lizzy Stewart’s It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be are preoccupied with girlhood, as seen through the eyes of women who are now old enough and wise enough to understand all the stuff that was once beyond their comprehension. Several touch on place and the idea of escape, and at least one explores, quite brilliantly, how women are both seen, and not seen, out in the world. The very best of them, however, encompass both teenage boredom, the fretful ennui that we tend to mourn as adults even as we recall how we longed to escape it, and the special intensity of female friendships, particularly those that go all the way back to the awkward, geeky years before we reinvented ourselves." —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
Includes an interview with Moses Sumney by Jia Tolentino, and features on Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali.
When the log princess goes missing, her brother, the little wooden robot, sets out on an epic adventure to find her. He will encounter goblins, magic puddings, a mushroom queen and a very intimidating wood pile as he seeks to bring his sister home.
"Tom Gauld has created a masterful classic fairytale of a picture book that hits in all the right ways. In his inimitable style, he has squeezed royalty, robots, witches, inventors, trolls, sea-captains, forests, ghosts, and... beetles(!) into a beautiful, odd, adventurous and satisfying story. All wrapped up, of course, with the bow of sibling love. " —Oliver Jeffers
For our reviews, book news and new releases, read our latest newsletter.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner {Reviewed by STELLA} Rachel Kushner’s essays in The Hard Crowd read both like edgy youthful memories giving us a window into a life lived on the edge of danger, as well as intelligent analyses of political structures and cultural output. From the daring of her motorcycle racing days and obsessions with classic cars (it’s not surprising the opening scene in The Flamethrowers kicks such adrenaline on the page), in the opening essay 'Girl on a Motorcycle' to her conversations about literary intrigues Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Denis Johnson to mention a few, to her knowledge of Italian 1970s politics and prison reform which play a major role respectively, in The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, to her connections and interest in the New York art scene, the collected essays are varied in style. Some are self-effacing and gritty, in line with the popular 'personal essay' trend, yet Kushner’s memories remain dark, honest and absorbing without the cloyingness of the self-reflective and sometimes self-satisfied elements of this form. In her essays about writers, she is endlessly fascinating, almost finding her way through the writing — through description, analysis and the anecdotal to an understanding or a reflective essence of the writer and their work — giving us, the reader, an insight that makes us wish to seek out not more about the said author, but their output — to delve for ourselves into their words. There’s also a great essay with accompanying images (film stills, photographs and other ephemera), 'Made to Burn', which considers the influences and research for her novel The Flamethrowers. It’s filled with quirky snippets of information, as many of the essays are, which cast small surprises like flitting shadows and light bulb moments — observations that rub up against each other creating a texture that marries guns and art, writers and alcohol, and the adrenaline of competitive danger with fierce loyalty. And in pure juxtaposition to this hard-arse style are essays that will stop you in your tracks: a heartbreaking visit to a Palestinian refugee camp that is so established that it is functionally a dysfunctional town, and a conversation with an American prison abolitionist that raises some hard questions about incarceration. In The Hard Crowd, Kushner describes herself as the soft one, but these punchy essays make me think there are different kinds of softness, and Kushner's is one that has a core of steel, unafraid to look with intent. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Autoportrait by Édouard Levé {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I am inexhaustible on the subject of myself,” states Édouard Levé in this book which is nothing less than an attempt to exhaust everything that he can think of to say about himself, no matter how banal or embarrassing, with relentless objectivity. In one long string of seemingly random declarative statements without style or development or form (other than the form of the list, if a list can be said to be a form), the details accumulate with very fine grain, but the effect is disconcerting: the author comes no closer to exhausting his observations, and the idea that there is such a thing as a 'person' beyond the details seems more and more implausible. The list is not so much an accumulation as an obliteration: facts obscure that which they purport to represent. “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing.” Levé’s style is deliberately and perfectly and admirably flat throughout (all perfect things should be admired (whatever that means)), like that of a police report. “I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.” The constructions often feel aphoristic but eschew the pretension of aphorisms to refer to anything other than the particulars of which they are constructed. There is no lens formed by these sentences to ‘see through’, no insight, no intimation of personality other than the jumbled bundling of details and tendencies assembled under the author’s name, no ‘self’ that expresses itself through these details or is approachable through these details, because we are none of us persons other than what we for convenience or comfort (or, rather, out of frustration and fear) bundle conceptually, mostly haphazardly, and treat as an entity or ‘person’. The more fact is compounded (or, rather, facts are compounded), the stronger the intimation that any attempt to exhaust the description of a person will never be approach we usually think of as a person. “If I look in mirrors for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.” As well as demonstrating the impossibility of the task which it attempts, description also cancels itself by implying for each positive statement a complementary negative statement. Each statement of the self-description of Édouard Levé functions to include those of us among his readers who are similar and to exclude those who are dissimilar. We find each statement either in accord or in disagreement with a statement we could similarly (or dissimilarly) make about ourselves. The reader is charted in the text as much as the author. The reader is continually comparing themselves to the author, finding accord or otherwise, exercising the kind of judgement concealed beneath all social interaction but typically hidden by content and mutuality. In Autoportrait, the author’s self-obsession is matched by our fascination with him, with the kinds of details that may or may not come to light in social interchange. Because the author is not aware of us and is not reciprocally interested in us, or feigning reciprocal interest in us, as would be the case in ‘real life’ social interaction, we feel no shame in our fascination, our fascination is dispassionate, clinical. He is likewise unaffected by our interest or otherwise in him. But as well as bundling together an open set of details that we may conveniently think of as facts (“Everything I write is true, but so what?”) about Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’), the text also conjures an inverse Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’) who is the opposite to him in every way, the person who nullifies him (in the way that all statements call into being their simple or compound opposites, their nullifiers). Levé’s obsession with identity, facsimile and the corrosive effects of representation reappear throughout the book, and towards the end he mentions the suicide of a friend from adolescence, which would form the basis for Levé’s final book, Suicide (after which Levé himself committed suicide). Édouard Levé was born on the same day as me, but on the other side of the planet. In Autoportrait he writes, “As a child I was convinced that I had a double on this earth, he and I were born on the same day, he had the same body, the same feelings I did, but not the same parents or the same background, for he lived on the other side of the planet, I knew that there was very little chance that I would meet him, but still I believed that this miracle would occur.” We never met. Perhaps I am not that person. |
>>Have a look inside.
>>Foster and Price talk about their collaboration.
>>"Uplifted from the mind of a dreamer."
>>"Watching my climate nightmare come true."
>>Bruce Foster's 'Postcards from New Zealand.'
>>Books by Chris Price.
>>Your copy of The Lobster's Tale.
>>Other books in the Kōrero series:
High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod
Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima.
NEW RELEASES
Another wonderfully inventive lift-the-flap book from the creator of Inside the Villains and The House of Madam M. Once upon a time, in a little house behind the hills, a boy packs his suitcase for a long journey. Lift the flaps to see what he takes, and travel with him over oceans and mountains, under water and into the forest. With every step on this voyage of obstacles, the boy faces a decision that will lead to a new adventure and help him get home. Delve deeper into each page and always remember what's in the suitcase.
>>Peek inside the suitcase.
>>Peek inside the suitcase.
"Nelson in 1843 was a violent place." In 1843 the New Zealand Company settlement of Nelson was rocked by the revolt of its immigrant labourers. Over 70 gang-men and their wives collectively resisted their poor working conditions through petitions, strikes and, ultimately, violence. Yet this pivotal struggle went on to be obscured by stories of pioneering men and women 'made good'. The History of a Riot uncovers those at the heart of the revolt for the first time. Who were they? Where were they from? And how did their experience of protest before arriving in Nelson influence their struggle? By putting violence and class conflict at the centre, this fascinating microhistory upends the familiar image of colonial New Zealand.
Herrera's powerful trilogy Kingdom Cons, The Transmigration of Bodies and Signs Preceding the End of the World gives a contemporary Mexico of drug lords, violence and illegal emigration to the US an almost mythological depth. Beautifully written, and now in this lovely hardback edition.
"What's the lobster's tune when he is boiling?" Exploring the lobster's biology and its history in language, literature and gastronomy, The Lobster's Tale navigates the perils of a life driven by overreaching ambition and the appetite for knowledge, conquest and commerce. In conversation with Chris Price's text, Bruce Foster's photographs navigate a parallel course of shadows and light, in which the extraordinary textures and colours of the natural world tell a darker story. The Lobster's Tale is a meditation on the quest for immortality on which both artists and scientists have embarked, and the unhappy consequences of the attempt to both conquer nature and create masterpieces. Meanwhile, below the waterline of text and images, a modest voice can be overheard whispering an alternative to these narratives of heroic and doomed exploration.
>>Look inside the book.
>>10 questions for Foster and Price.
>>Other books in the Kōrero series: High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod; Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde by Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima.
Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalisation. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment? A brief and powerful novel from this outstanding Danish writer.
"The fact that Ditlevsen was herself one of insanity's intimates does much to explain this book's harrowing authenticity. But The Faces - in Tiina Nunnally's very deliberate, close-to-the-nerve translation - rises above a case study because, working from the inside, Ditlevsen is able to explore the surprising contours of Lise's experience: from her point of view, madness can be funny, soft and secure, and far more enlightening than the 'reality' it struggles to evade." —The New York Times
Hannah Arendt dedicated her life to thinking through the most fundamental and difficult of human problems: totalitarianism, exile, the nature of love and the moral problem of evil. But these were not only philosophical concerns for Arendt — they were also personal.
Having spent her life in city environments, Vanessa Berry’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters with urban creatures, representations of animals in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch. The essays suggest that these mediated encounters, rather than being mundane or removed from nature, provide meaningful connections with the animal world, at a time in which it is threatened by climate change and environmental destruction.
The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: "I shot him between the eyes." As the tale — a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and revenge — proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?
Short stories set in an England simultaneously domestic and wild, familiar and strange, real and imagined. The stories couple the past and the present, merging the surreal and the mundane.
>>'The Clinic'.
>>'Oh Whistle and'.
>>'The Clinic'.
>>'Oh Whistle and'.
To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the invention of printing. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. This book follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity—the word Hyphen is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning 'to tie together'—to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role it plays in creating identities. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. Hyphen is ultimately a compelling story about the powerful ways that language and identity intertwine. Mahdavi—herself a hyphenated Iranian-American—weaves in her own experiences struggling to find a sense of self amidst feelings of betwixt and between. Through stories of the author and three other individuals, Hyphen collectively considers how to navigate, articulate, and empower new identities.
>>New-York's hyphenated history.
>>New-York's hyphenated history.
1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father, and is forever changed by the experience. 2011: Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy American named Winnie disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands.
"Hugely impressive." —Guardian
>>Read an excerpt.
"Hugely impressive." —Guardian
>>Read an excerpt.
From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.
>>Refreshing ways to talk about buildings.
>>Refreshing ways to talk about buildings.
Dick Frizzell fills his spaceship with his artist friends (including John Pule, Greg O'Brien, John Reynolds, Judy Darragh, Reuben Patterson, Grahame Sydney, Karl Maughan, Ani O'Neill, Reg Mombassa and Wayne Youle) and sets off into Space to explain the wonders of the universe.
The Suitcase: Six attempts to cross a border by Frances Stonor Saunders $48
Making Nice by Ferdinand Mount $33
Paint Your Town Red: How Preston took back control and your town can too by Matthew Brown and Rhian E. Jones $30
Pony by R.J. Palacio $30
The highly anticipated and entirely fulfilling new story from the author of Wonder. When Silas Bird wakes in the dead of night, he watches powerlessly as three strangers take his father away. Silas is left shaken, scared and alone, except for the presence of his companion, Mittenwool (who happens to be a ghost). But then a mysterious pony shows up at his door, and Silas knows what he has to do. So begins a perilous journey to find his father — a journey that will connect him with his past, his future, and the unknowable world around him.
Resistance by Val McDermid and Kathryn Briggs $40
AUP New Poets 8 featuring Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha and Modi Deng $30
Invisible: New Zealand's history of excluding Kiwi-Indians by Jacqueline Leckie $40
12 Bytes: How we got here, Where we might go next by Jeanette Winterson $35
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. 'If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again,' warned her mother. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she finds herself with the dilemma of two competing urges: wanting to know what's in the suitcase, and wanting not to know. So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father's and his family's past. Is it possible to bring her father back, to summon once more someone who was distant and elusive when alive? The past is always the history of loss, of black holes, of things gone missing.
Mount's stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife Jane, and their daughters Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy. The whole family find themselves entangled in an ever more alarming series of events revolving around the elusive Ethel (full name Ethelbert), dynamic founder of the soaring public relations agency Making Nice.
Preston City Council's efforts to generate and democratise wealth at a local level have earned Preston the title of Most Improved City.
The highly anticipated and entirely fulfilling new story from the author of Wonder. When Silas Bird wakes in the dead of night, he watches powerlessly as three strangers take his father away. Silas is left shaken, scared and alone, except for the presence of his companion, Mittenwool (who happens to be a ghost). But then a mysterious pony shows up at his door, and Silas knows what he has to do. So begins a perilous journey to find his father — a journey that will connect him with his past, his future, and the unknowable world around him.
150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun — until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic? A thrilling graphic novel.
Three new and compelling voices.
Tools for Food: The stories behind the objects that influence how and what we eat by Corinne Mynatt $35
The Big Book of Belonging by Yuval Zommer $35
To what extent to our implements express our culinary habits, and to what extent do they enforce it? 250 tools show us that how we cook has changed over the centuries and around the world.
A celebration of all the ways that humans are connected to life on planet Earth. With children at the heart of every beautifully illustrated spread, this book draws parallels between the way humans, plants, and animals live and behave. We all breathe the same air and take warmth from the same sun, we grow, we adapt to the seasons, and we live together in family groups.
Despite the myth of benign race relations, New Zealand has experienced a very long history of underlying prejudice and racism. Little has been written about the experiences of Indian migrants, either historically or today, and most writing has focussed on celebration and integration. Invisible speaks of survival and the real impacts racism has on the lives of Indian New Zealanders. It uncovers a story of exclusion that has rendered Kiwi-Indians invisible in the historical narratives of the country.
In these twelve essays Winterson traces the history of the AI revolution. She talks to some of the boldest and most imaginative thinkers in the field and looks to religion, myth and literature to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are just around the corner. When we create non-human life-forms, will we do so in our image? Or will we accept the once-in-a-species opportunity to remake ourselves in their image? What do love, caring and attachment look like with a non-biological life form? And what happens to the gender binary? What will happen when our destiny is not contained by physical bodies, and our destination is not planet Earth? 
No-One Is Angry Today by Toon Tellegen and Marc Boutavant $35
Ten thoughtful, philosophical, absurd tales about forest animals—from squirrel to scarab beetle—spending their days as friends do, with birthday parties, writing letters, visiting, dancing, or sometimes all alone. Each day brings emotions that are always worth exploring, although not always easy...
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
  | Egg Marks the Spot ('Skunk and Badger' #2) by Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen {Reviewed by STELLA} Welcome Badger and Skunk back in another brilliant adventure filled with just as much charm and even more daring than the introductory volume. In Egg Marks the Spot, Badger has moved his rock work (‘focus, focus, focus') to the attic where he can not be interrupted (although Skunk does find a way to distract him, often a ploy involving food) and hens are absent. As he studies with concentration over his desk, the question 'Rock or mineral?' reverberating in the rafters, he takes in his rock collection, beautifully laid out in their cabinet — a shelf for each, lit by its very own lamp (and as Skunk observes in alphabetical order), steadfastly avoiding the empty spot at ‘A’. Rather than his prized possession, the Spider Eye Agate, there is just an absence. The absence triggers memories of his cousin, Fisher (the weasel)'s thievery and his bullying ways. But Skunk has his own problems. Sunday happiness for Skunk is the delivery of the New Yak Times, especially the book section. As he’s cooking up a storm for a lunch (did you know he is something of a foodie…), a letter arrives from Mr G. Hedgehog, who has got wind of Skunk’s new residence at North Twist and intends to resume their previous arrangement in regards to the Books Section of the New Yak Times — an arrangement that Skunk has never agreed to and plunges him into despair about the impending Sunday, bereft of the fabulous reviews in his beloved newspaper. Somehow Mr G. Hedgehog thinks he has first dibs on this section. To remedy his woes Skunk comes up with the great idea to head to the woods on a rock hunting expedition. So starts a hilarious scene where the friends’ personalities come to the fore. Badger is carefully weighing up the multipurpose values of each item to be packed and the actual weight to be carried, while Skunk has acquired a very large pack (for a Skunk) and is intent on fitting in all the needed cooking items (and a few extras for good measure), including a cast-iron pan and bellows (for the fire) as well as several hard-to-pack utensils and yes, apparently, 5kg of flour is essential. And depart they do, even as Skunk trudge, trudge, trudges, head down, bearing the weight of his very full pack to No.5 camping spot at Endless Lake. All that food does make for delicious picnics, and Skunk and Badger are happily rock-hunting in their very own ways. When Skunk goes off to meet a friend, Badger is curious and follows. And yes, Skunk is up to something! And it does involve a very small orange-feathered hen (one we have met before), but also lurking in the woods is Badger’s unappealing cousin, Fisher. Let’s just say, expect to be as surprised as Badger. What follows is a dangerous and important mission for a small hen, a brave Skunk and an even more loyal Badger, involving gleaming treasure, a large creature (who may be related to hens), worker rats, and a weasel in name and nature! Wonderful! |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff) {Reviewed by THOMAS} They were suffering from reality fatigue, he thought, in fact we are all suffering from reality fatigue, it is tiring resisting the inclinations of an emergency, especially for an extended time, he thought, even though we know fairly well how to do it. Nobody likes resisting an emergency, but what nobody likes, really, is the emergency itself to which the resistance is a sensible response. Perhaps, he thought, it is even an indication of the effectiveness of the response that there are some who feel eventually that they are more tired of the response than of the emergency itself—after all, the more effective something is the less necessary it may appear—and there are some who even seemed to think that not resisting the emergency in every way we know how to resist it will somehow make the emergency less real or less of emergency or more tolerable or something, he couldn’t quite work out what they wanted—but it was probably actually just reality fatigue, reality fatigue mixed with nostalgia for a time when there was no emergency, a retrospective fantasy, a longing for not-now. Fatigue, though, may at times resemble weakness. Nostalgia is always a lie, he thought, nostalgia is always set against the facts, but it would be weak-minded to believe that just because the facts might be frightening, as they are in an emergency, therefore the facts somehow aren’t facts but rather something being used by someone just to frighten us (who knows why); it would be fatal to move from reality fatigue to reality denial, to think it would be better to ‘live with’ an emergency than respond to it in all the ways we know how to respond, or even to deny that the emergency is an emergency at all (which would be in effect the same thing). Is there something in us, he wondered, that would even somehow find relief in giving in to an emergency, in not responding, in absolving ourselves from the burden of response? The death drive, says Freud, will always find someone else to blame. “It feels as if all that is yet to happen is already in the past,” writes Fleur Jaeggy in her novella The Water Statues, first published in 1980 and at last beautifully translated by Gini Alhadeff into English, a work in which grief and loss are inescapable properties of time, both resisted and enshrined by memory, in which the past is an unstable and unresponsive fantasy that is shedding its certainty grain by grain. Dedicated to Jaeggy’s then recently dead friend Ingeborg Bachmann, this is a book, he thought, in which the inevitability of loss through death or parting suffuses every meeting, both enriching it and reinforcing its evanescence. Relationships are snags to the tendencies of time, he thought, snags inevitably torn away, and longing and memory—especially the retrospective longing of nostalgia—make it unclear whether our lives are populated with statues or with living beings. If I said, he thought, that Beeklam, the protagonist, if that is the right word, is “born into a house filled with boulders”, loses his mother, suffers from the distance of his father, goes to live in a decaying mansion in Amsterdam, fills the flooded basement with a collection of statues which both represent and replace the living, disposes of his collection, and sets out into the world, I would be misrepresenting the book by literalising its tendencies into a plot. It’s not like that. All instants are inanimate, he thought, and memory is, after all, a flooded basement filled with statues (just like a book). This was getting closer. In Jaeggy’s world, the animate and the inanimate have no clear demarcation, they are interchangeable, they cannot be distinguished from each other. Beeklam is both child and adult, an old man even, somehow all at once. Beeklam and his servant at the same time both are Beeklam’s father Reginald and his servant, and their complement or inverse. Friendship is described as “mutual slavery”: the condition of master and servant makes them both an single entity and beings separated by an unbridgeable gap. The contents of this world lack sufficient differentiation to enable points of true contact, and the longing for friendship connects people but the passage of moments, the ceaseless suck of the past, means that true connection is not possible. In a text that is presented in a variety of different forms and registers (as is Bachmann’s Malina), Beeklam speaks of himself sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, as does the most elusive of his narrators. “BEEKLAM: A little boy used to live here, he said he wanted to live as someone who’d drowned.” Who speaks and who is spoken of only sometimes coalesce, he thought, nothing is fixed; everything is undercut, the novella is elusive, but full of the most delightful, troublesome and surprising sentences, sentences that each becomes more remarkable when more deeply considered or reread. “By his calm devoid of sweetness he had bypassed every disorder,” writes Jaeggy, as if to illustrate this point, or, “On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion.” Jaeggy’s style is at once both austere and excessive, both direct and elusive, both parsimonious and fantastically indulgent. Can I end my review, he wondered, in some way that connects it to how it began before it became a review, to when it was perhaps just a cry, or a rant, or an irritation? What is the quality of time that assails us when we tire of the resistance necessary for life, when the perpetual emergency exhausts us? What are the alternatives? "Aside from rotting, there’s little flowers can do, and in this they are not unlike human beings,” writes Jaeggy. |
NEW RELEASES
Awake by Harald Voetmann (translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) $36
In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There's no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life's work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.
"Awake is original, piercing, and richly exhilarating. Voetmann’s text is a sharp reminder of how powerfully and succinctly well-chosen words can create a world, render experiences, and express thoughts—in short, transport us, to places and in ways we could not have imagined." —Claire Messud
With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shape her life; from crushes on teachers to navigating relationships in a fast-paced world; from overhearing her grandmothers' peculiar stories to nurturing her own personal freedom and a boundless love of literature.
>>"Most people were being sold a bit of a lie."
>>"If there was a revoltion, I'd be there."
>>'The Russian Man'.
>>Read Thomas's review of Pond.
Behind the wonderful cookbooks and the iconic restaurant that has made Ottolenghi a household name stands the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, a team of quirky gifted gastronomes who devise, tweak and perfect the recipes you love. In this new book, the team turn their attentions to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards, showing you how to transform humble ingredients into delicious food. The approach is flexible and relaxed, but imbued with that mix of inventiveness and tradition that we have come to expect from anything Ottolenghi. Visit the kitchen that is Ottolenghi's creative hub and enrich your own.
>>Visit the OTK.
>>Visit the OTK.
Stjepan and Elizabeta are siblings in Kotoriba, a small village between two rivers in Yugoslavia. They want to know everything about the world. From their tiny corner of communist Europe, small cracks are starting to appear in their adoration of their national leader, Tito. The peoms in All Tito's Children are shadowed by the story of Grgec's own grandparents, who fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and came to New Zealand as refugees. The collection is a multilayered portrait of personal and political disillusionment, deception, escape and loss.
After Dark: Walking into the nights of Aotearoa by Annette Lees $45
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster $37
On the Origin of Species, And other stories by Bo-Young Kim $39
Egg Marks the Spot ('Skunk and Badger' #2) by Amy Timberlake and Jon Klassen $25
Odd companions Skunk and Badger became firm favourites for many (young and old) with their first book, and now they're back, setting off on a rock-finding expedition that is just bound to be very different from what they were expecting!
Long Players: Writers on the albums that shaped them edited by Tom Gatti $37
Kia Kaha: A storybook of Māori who changed the world by Jeremy Sherlock and Stacey Morrison $45
Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies $40
When I Am Bigger: Counting numbers big and small by Maria Dek $40
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive $35
I Laugh Me Broken by Bridget van der Zijpp $30
A Queer Existence: The lives of young gay men in Aotearoa New Zealand by Mark Beehre $45
Conversātiō: In the company of bees by Anne Noble $60
"To fear the sting of a bee and know the sweetness of honey." Renowned New Zealand photographer Anne Noble has become increasingly fascinated with bees: their social complexity, their otherness, their long importance to humans, and the clarity with which they raise the alarm over environmental stress and degradation. This beautifully presented and idiosyncratic book displays Noble's bee photographs, at once sensitive and stunning, and helps us to think in new ways about the bees with which we share our world.
>>Look inside.
>>Noble talks about the book.
In the company of bats, owls, moths and seabirds, Annette Lees guides us from dusk to dawn with fascinating night stories: tales of war stealth and ghosts; nights lit by candles and lighthouses; night surfing, fishing, diving and skiing; mountain walking and night navigation on ocean voyaging waka. From the author of Swim.
When Olga's friend Lara becomes a grandmother, Olga helps out whenever she can. After all, it's a big imposition on Lara, looking after her bereaved daughter and the baby. And the new mother is not exactly considerate. But smoldering beneath Olga's sensible support and loving generosity is a deep jealous need to be the centre of Lara's attention and affection-a need that soon becomes a consuming, dangerous and ultimately tragic obsession. Winner of the 2020 Michael Gifkins Prize.
Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea. This title makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution.
Odd companions Skunk and Badger became firm favourites for many (young and old) with their first book, and now they're back, setting off on a rock-finding expedition that is just bound to be very different from what they were expecting!
Skinny Dip: Poetry edited by Susan Price and Kate De Goldi $30
Thirty-six poems for young readers from Sam Duckor-Jones, essa may ranapiri, Bill Manhire, Anahera Gildea, Amy McDaid, Kōtuku Nuttall, Ben Brown, Ashleigh Young, Rata Gordon, Dinah Hawken, Oscar Upperton, James Brown, Victor Rodger, Tim Upperton, Lynley Edmeades, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Nina Mingya Powles, Renee Liang and Nick Ascroft. Illustrations by Amy van Luijk.
"Bold and timely. A magnificent range of form from some of our best contemporary voices." —Hera Lindsay Bird
Our favorite albums are our most faithful companions: we listen to them hundreds of times over decades, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don't just soundtrack our lives but work their way deep inside us, shaping our outlook and identity, forging our friendships and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story. In Long Players, fifty authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock. Part meditation on the album form and part candid self-portrait, each of these miniature essays reveals music's power to transport the listener to a particular time and place. REM's Automatic for the People sends Olivia Laing back to first love and heartbreak, Bjork's Post resolves a crisis of faith and sexuality for a young Marlon James, while Fragile by Yes instils in George Saunders the confidence to take his own creative path. This often surprising book both shed new light on authors and on the music.
>>Lavinia Greenlaw nails White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground. >>Dont you think?
>>Lavinia Greenlaw nails White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground. >>Dont you think?
Featuring people and groups both historic and contemporary, who have achieved great things from land marches and language revival to hip hop and contemporary Maori fashion design, this book will fill readers of all ages, and from all walks of life, with aroha, whanaungatanga and hope for our future. Illustrations by Akoni Pakinga, Haylee Ngaroma, Isobel Joy Te Aho-White, Jess Thompson aka Maori Mermaid, Josh Morgan, Kurawaka Productions, Miriama Grace-Smith, Ngaumutane Jones aka Ms Meemo, Reweti Arapete, Taupuruariki Whakataka-Brightwell, Xoe Hall, and Zak Waipara.
The human mind can grapple with the future, visualising and calculating solutions to complex problems, giving us advantages over other species throughout our evolutionary history. However, this capability comes with a curse. By five to ten years of age, all humans know where they are ultimately heading: to the grave. Rachel and Ross Menzies examine the major human responses to death across history, from the development of religious systems denying the finality of death to 'immortality projects' involving enduring art, architecture and literature. While some of these have been glorious, like the construction of the pyramids, others have been destructive, leading to global conflicts and genocide. The authors hypothesise that worse is to come — our unconscious dread of death has led to the rampant consumerism and overpopulation of the 20th century, which has driven the global warming and pandemic crises that now threaten our very existence. In a terribly irony, Homo sapiens may ultimately be destroyed by our knowledge of our own mortality.
A completely delightful and stimulating book about how numbers are often central to the wildness of our imaginations.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak $37
"The Island of Missing Trees is an even-handed portrayal of tragedy in Cyprus 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. 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 choose a better path." —Stella
>>Read Stella's review
"The Island of Missing Trees is an even-handed portrayal of tragedy in Cyprus 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. 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 choose a better path." —Stella
>>Read Stella's review
"Daive's memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death." —The New Yorker
"Jean Daive's memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confr re of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century." —J.M. Coetzee
Ginny is feeling lighter and heavier at the same time. She’s just learned from her cousin about a devastating genetic inheritance – but the revelation has brought a new logic to her mother’s death many years before, and to her mother’s love. Leaving her fiancé in the dark, Ginny flees to Germany to research a novel about the maverick sea captain Count von Luckner, who was lauded for his courage. ‘What was courage anyway?’ she wonders. ‘Did it rise up out of some kind of counter-pressure?’ Navigating transient, hedonistic Berlin on her own, she absorbs the city’s tangle of stories as she tries to gather the strength to face her future.
A Queer Existence is a major documentary project that uses photographic portraiture and oral history to record the life experiences of a group of 27 gay men born since the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. In New Zealand, discrimination in work was outlawed in 1993, same-sex relationships were granted legal recognition in 2005, and marriage equality followed in 2013. In 2018 Parliament apologised to those whose lives had been blighted by criminal prosecution for expressing their sexuality.
Tales from the Folly: A 'Rivers of London' short story collection by Ben Aaronovitch $36
Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman $38
A gathering of previously published stories and brand new tales. Discover what's haunting a lonely motorway service station, who still wanders the shelves of a popular London bookshop, and what exactly happened to the River Lugg...
In 1970, activist Abbie Hoffman sat in Cook County jail, awaiting what would become known as the Trial of the Chicago Seven. Hoffman and six conspirators were prosecuted by the US government for their part in anti-Vietnam War and counterculture protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. While in jail Hoffman began to write Steal This Book. Labelled by publishers as a book that would "end free speech" and causing scandals with its advice on how to get free food, housing, transportation, medical care, and more, as well as how to run a guerrilla movement, Steal This Book is a revolutionary's manual to "survival in the prison that is Amerika." 50th anniversary edition. [BTW Please don't!]
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | What Can a Body Do? How we meet the built world by Sara Hendren {Reviewed by STELLA} A book about how we physically meet the world, but so much more. A book about designing for disability and adjustments that we can make, simple as well as complicated, to interact with our built environment. And how the world could change to meet us in new ways. This is an articulate and illuminating exploration filled with intriguing examples of models of designed engagement, with historical precedents and thought-provoking conversations and ideas. Sara Hendren, designer and researcher, takes us across America, to India and The Netherlands in her study of people and innovation. From her classroom of engineering students grappling with a design problem for an art curator to a volunteering programme for community service administered and enacted by disabled teenagers in Boston, to a workshop in Manhattan that makes innovative low-cost cardboard chairs designed for one—specific to that individual’s need, to the experiences of two men — one who uses home-made solutions for his limblessness and the other with a highly technical ‘smart’ arm — in meeting their daily world with ease, and into her own story of having a son with Down’s Syndrome. Hendren travels to India to introduce us to the simple success of a prosthetics industry that uses bicycle parts (replaceable and mendable) to resolve the needs of its inhabitants and the environment they live in. In The Netherlands, she visits a village for dementia residents — a village that has all the hallmarks of freedom with the security required to reassure and to enhance the experiences of the adults who live there. These examples and others build into her discussion of design and its role in contemporary society to give meaning and agency to those that don’t fit in the ‘normative’ structure which statistics and the bell curve have exacerbated in our modern world. Hendren’s thoughtful deliberations about the fallacy of the ‘average’, about what ‘independence’ is, and why the structure of economic capital with its focus on work-as-worth and the constructs of ‘time’ as a measure are drawbacks to all of us, not just the disabled. She underscores her research with disability activism of the past, and she does not shy away from the complexities of the present with its many-faceted arguments and different approaches, including opposing design theories. The case studies are various, and within these we encounter multiple approaches and responses to the body and its abilities and, more importantly, the vagaries, often unnecessarily so, of the built world. Enlivening and insightful, What Can A Body Do? is a study in awareness and a challenge to our ethical commitment, as well as our practical ability, to make a better world for every body. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian commute by Lauren Elkin {Reviewed by THOMAS} Well, he thought, I am not travelling on a bus in Paris, and, who knows, I may never travel on a bus in Paris, but, in the company of Lauren Elkin, even though I have not met Lauren Elkin, and, who knows, I will probably never meet Laren Elkin, I have no particular wish or need to meet Lauren Elkin, at least not in the conventional sense, and, almost certainly, Lauren Elkin will never meet me in any sense whatsoever, and she will be missing nothing thereby, nonetheless, in a sense, in her company I have been riding in my thoughts, or, rather, her thoughts, it is hard to tell which, as she has been travelling on the No.91 and No.92 buses in Paris over a few months in 2014/2015, when she was commuting to and from some teaching position she then held, evidently teaching literature, possibly writing, who knows, and wrote the notes which have become this book on her cellphone, as an attempt to use her phone to connect herself to the moments and in the locations in which she was holding it, rather than as a way of absenting herself from those locations and those moments, which is usually the way with cellphones, so she observes, they are a technology of absence, after all. Unlike in the bus, where who will sit and who will stand is constantly negotiated on the basis of a generally unspoken hierarchy of need, and the passengers are crammed together in each other’s odours and in each other’s breaths in a way that, in the light of the current pandemic, now seems horrific, there is plenty of fresh air in Elkin’s thoughts, there is room both for her fellow passengers, for all the details Elkin notices about them or speculates about them, for all her observations, so to call them, about what she notices and about what she notices about herself in the act of noticing, and for writers such as Georges Perec and Virginia Woolf, who, in their ways, are along for the ride, using Elkin and her cellphone to speak to us through Paris, though whether this makes Paris a medium or a subject is hard to say, using Elkin’s bus pass, too, and, I suppose, he thought, all these thoughts are waiting there, both outside and already aboard Elkin’s mind, constantly negotiating which will be next to take a seat in Elkin’s text on the basis of a generally unspoken hierarchy of need, if it is need. Elkin attempts in the practice of these notes a written appreciation of the ordinary, even the infraordinary, aspects of her journeys as a discipline of noticing, guided by Perec (read my review of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces here), a turning outward that clears her thoughts or clears her of her thoughts, he cannot decide if there is a difference, he thinks not, leaving the shape of the observer clearly outlined in their surroundings by their careful lack of intrusion upon them (in the way that Perec is always writing about something that he does not mention), but this exercise in finding worth in the ordinary, the sensate, the unsenational, against, he speculates, the general inclinations of our cellphones, is, in the two semesters in which Elkin made these notes, sometimes intruded upon by occurrences antagonistic to such appreciation, occurrences both within Elkin’s body: an ectopic pregnancy and the resulting operations; and in the collective body of the city: terror attacks that change the texture of communal life. “In an instant, the everyday can become an Event,” writes Elkin. Are Events inherently antagonistic to the worth of ordinary life, he wonders, or could rethinking the ordinary help us to resist the impact of such Events? Most Events are instants, he thinks, but some, such as pandemics or climate change, go on and on, exhausting our conceptual resistance as they strive to become the new ordinary, to normalise themselves. Conceptual resistance is useless, he almost shouts, conceptual resistance is worse than useless, we must adapt to survive, reality deniers display the worst sorts of mental weakness, pay attention, your nostalgia is an existential threat. He checks his mouth for froth, but there is none. But, he wonders, can we use an attention to and appreciation of the infraordinary to reconstruct the ordinary and thereby survive the extraordinary? Actually, the infraordinary is all we’ve got, he thinks, so we had better get to work and make of it what we can. |
>>Heavenly Pop Hits.
>>Anything could happen.
>>In Love With These Times.
>>Time Flowing Backwards.
>>Nowadays.
>>Fancy an Axemen tea towel?
What do you remember? >>Pin Group. >>Look Blue Go Purple. >>Scorched Earth Policy. >>The Builders. >>Skeptics. >>The Clean. >>Tall Dwarfs. >>25 Cents. >>The Gordons. >>All Fall Down. >>The Victor Dimisich Band. >>Snapper. >>Doublehappys. >>The Verlaines. >>The Bats. >>Sneaky Feelings. >>They Were Expendable. >>The Renderers. >>A history in songs.
NEW RELEASES
The tiny woman makes a coat of leaves with the help of friends in this vibrant, rhyming tale. The trees, geese, porcupine, horse, and plants all share something so the tiny woman can snip, snip, snip and stitch, stitch, stitch a coat to keep herself warm. An instant favourite.
On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili, along with the entire community, is celebrating the 90th birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. Onto the scene enters Nina—the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates a crisis in which mother, daughter and grandmother are forced to confront the past head-on. The three women embark on an epic journey to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, that permanently altered the course of their lives.
"This novel is about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. This is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year." —Guardian
"This novel is about the way that the personal can never be wholly separated from the political, about the lingering wounds of history, about how violence seeps into all the dark corners of a life. This is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year." —Guardian
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.
Dulcinea in the Forbidden Forest by Ole Könnecke $25
Seahorses Are Sold Out by Constanze Spengler and Katja Gehrmann $30
Dulcinea has been forbidden since she was small to enter the dangerous magic forest where the witch has her castle. But her father hasn't come home from collecting blueberries for her birthday pancakes. Did the witch cast a spell on him? Dulcinea must brave the dark forest and sneak into the witch's castle to steal the spell book and free him. Her father would hardly have named her after the brave Dulcinea if she couldn't break a witch's spell to celebrate her birthday with him, after all.
Mika's father works from home and he's very busy. He can never find time for the swimming trip he promised. So Dad allows Mika to choose a pet from the store while he finishes the project—something quiet like a mouse. And so begins a wonderfully turbulent story in which Mika brings home one animal after another. The mouse gets lost so they need a dog to find it. The dog is followed by a seal, then a penguin. How many animals can come to stay before Dad notices?
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookshop he inherited from his beloved grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different labyrinths to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who locks up his books, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publisher who only wants to sell books like disposable products. Then, finally, there is a mission that Rintaro must complete alone...
The medieval friar William of Occam first articulated the principle that the best answer to any problem is the simplest. This theory, known as Occam's razor, cut through the thickets of medieval metaphysics to clear a path for modern science. We follow the razor in the hands of the giants of science, from Copernicus, to Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Rubin and Higgs. Its success suggests that we live in the simplest possible habitable universe and supports the revolutionary theory that our cosmos has evolved.
Marae—TeTatau Pounamu: A journey around New Zealand's meeting houses by Muru Walters, Sam Walters and Robin Walters $65
A new edition of this superb book. The authors spent three years visiting some of this country's major wharenui as well as many of the more humble ones — houses that serve smaller hapu and iwi. They are intensively photographed, with detailed shots of their carvings, kowhaiwhai panels, tukutuku panels, and events.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, land took shape. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs lived on Earth. Thousands of years ago, people built towering pyramids. Ten years ago, the landscape looked different. A month ago, it was still winter. A minute ago, the light was turned off. Now! Make a wish! What will you be doing in a week? How will you celebrate your birthday next year? What will you discover when you are older? What will hold you in awe forever? An inventively constructed picture book about time.
Palmer is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work. Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, Flann O'Brien, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Richard Yates, Elizabeth Bishop.
The stories of twenty young New Zealanders who have faced depression and learned what helps them to stay well. Full of useful insights.
When trauma cleaner Essie Pound makes a gruesome discovery in the derelict Edinburgh boarding house she is sent to clean, it brings her into contact with a young policewoman, Emily Noble, who has her own reasons to solve the case. As the two women embark on a journey into the heart of a forgotten family, the investigation prompts fragmented memories of their own traumatic histories — something Emily has spent a lifetime attempting to bury, and Essie a lifetime trying to lay bare.
'
Soviet Visuals by Varia Bortsova $27
Welcome to the USSR. Marvel at the wonders of the space race. Delight in the many fine delicacies of food and drink. Revel in the fine opportunities for work and play. SOVIET VISUALS invites you back in time into the strangely captivating world of the Soviet Union, through a unique collection of photography, architecture, propaganda art, advertising, design, and culture from behind the Iron Curtain.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Switch by A.S. King {Reviewed by STELLA} Imagine that time stands still — the clocks stop. In A.S.King’s latest young adult’s novel, Switch, that’s precisely what happens on the 23rd June 2020. Truda is sixteen and is navigating the wilds of teenage-hood, high school and family trauma. The students at her school are tasked with finding a solution to the ‘time problem’. While N3WCLOCK is useful at reinventing a time system, it doesn’t offer any reason why. Truda and her friends are the Psych Team believing that the human mind may be able to help with escaping the time/space fold they find themselves in. Here they bat around ideas of emotions and psychological paradigms to search for a solution or at the least an understanding of the time dilemma. Truda has also discovered she is good at something — very good, in fact. Javelin throwing. Is this a result of the rift in time? A phenomenon created by the fold? A talent that may be erased if she is able to restart time? Truda, as our narrator, appears to know more than she is letting on. As a reader, you have a sense that truth sits just below her conscious self, a mystery that she is shielded from, but if she was to turn towards it she would be keenly aware of it. The novel opens with a curious description of boxes. She tells us that she lives in box #7, her brother Richard box #11, box #2 is the living room and other boxes in her house are either sealed off (in reference to her older sister’s room) or unoccupied (her mother has recently walked out) or built around the Switch — which must not be touched. The Switch is encased in a multitude of boxes continuously built by her father, who can’t help but build more and more panelled rooms, making their home into a warren of almost impassable passages. This is A.S.King stretching us to the maximum with a surreal-meets-super-real scenario. On the one hand, you have a strange world stopped in its tracks with participants who may have more control over time than others, while on the other hand the very real and hard realities of dealing with anxiety (teen and adult), resolving family trauma impacted by aberrant behaviour (in this story a sibling is the family member who has wreaked havoc and created a chasm into which the family has fallen), and looking with clarity at one’s own behaviour and trying to make a change for the better. While the subject matter isn’t easy, A.S. King’s quirky approach gives the novel levity where it would otherwise sink into the maudlin and a positive outcome for our protagonist in the strong headwinds of her awareness of her own capabilities and the vulnerabilities of others close to her, is constructive. A.S. King has dedicated Switch to the class of 2020 in light, I imagine, of the isolation and in many cases the anxiety that many have felt — especially in the US where she resides — over the previous year. As always, intriguing, timely and taut writing (the writing in itself is a time/shift/fragmented experience) from this author, winner of the Michael. L. Printz Award in 2020 for her previous YA title, Dig. |