| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka {Reviewed by STELLA} This absorbing and powerful novel draws on the pūrākau of Hatupatu and the Birdwoman. In the hands of Whiti Hereaka, the story of Kurangaituku is retold, repositioned and empowered — this is a feminist perspective — wahine strong. It’s also an appreciation of storytelling and the power of words, of language to shape us and contain or conversely to free us. Picking up this attractive Huia publication you are immediately struck by Rowan Heap’s artwork on the covers — (front and front, as this is a book you can start at either end and which overlaps in its telling in the middle) — claw and hand — beaked and unmasked. It would make little difference where you start (I happened to begin on the dark side) as Hereaka avoids linear construction or strict time constraints, and instead weaves the words and actions of Kurangaituku’s travels through time, the underworld and in the forest in moments that circle each other, intersect and mesmerise as only the best storytelling can. It feels both ancient and relevant, and in this it reminded me of the fascinating yet uncomfortable character Papa Toothwort and the world he inhabits in Max Porter’s Lanny — an entity from some hidden depths, always there, watching, listening and learning. In Rarohenga, the underworld, Hereaka creates a dreamlike poetic landscape which moves between nightmare and bliss. Kurangaituku’s travels here bring her both love (with Hinenuitepo) and the desire to be beautiful. Yet it also instils the lust for revenge. It shows her the undoing of man and her own appetite for power. It’s a compelling world to witness through Kurangaituku’s eyes, through her anger and naivety and her awareness of her otherness. In parts beautiful, in parts gruesome, yet also liberating — a place to walk towards the Void, a letting go. Yet what does this mean for Kurangaituku? A creature who is a bird, a woman, both, neither? Dead, not dead? And where can this lead but back to the beginning again? The world is new, and Kurangaituku is of and by the birds. The forest is her home and the birds are her companions. They are drawn to her and they draw her. This timeless expansive moment is interrupted only by the violent murmurings of the earth. When she comes to, the world has changed and the Song Makers have arrived. She watches them, but she can not communicate — she has no voice. Yet they grow to know of her and make her a new version of herself — the story builds, as stories do, with embellishments that become truths, creating a monstrous birdwoman. She is a story and cannot control her outcome — or can she? And in this world, she meets the young warrior, or trickster, Hatupatu for the first time. Her fascination with him, and his ultimate betrayal, is Kurangaituku’s tragedy. Whiti Hereaka’s novel sits comfortably with other feminist myth retellings (Atwood’s Penelopiad or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber) which give voice to those poorly served by their traditional tellings, with the bonus that is situated here, in Aotearoa. For a novel which is structurally and thematically complex, Kurangaituku is surprisingly agile and wonderfully alluring. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon {Reviewed by THOMAS} Could he even write a review of a book he had read about someone writing about sentences that he in turn had read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, he himself had read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which he has also read? The question mark, when it finally arrived, seemed somehow out of place, so far did it trail the part of the sentence he had just written in which the matter of the question appeared early, all those clauses shoving the question mark to an awkward distance, already the thought that the sentence described was changing direction, as thoughts do, but the sentence was still obliged to display the mark that would make the first part of the sentence, and indeed the whole sentence thereby into a question, there was a debt to be paid after all, he was lucky to get off without interest. The separation of the question mark from the quested matter was not the only reservation he had about the sentence he had just written, he had other reservations, both about its structure and its content, in other words both about its grammar and its import, if that is the right word. One reservation was that he had chosen to write the sentence in the third person, a habit he had acquired, or an affectation that he had adopted, that depersonalised his reviews and made them easier to write and, he hoped, more enjoyable to read, certainly, he thought, less embarrassing for himself to read, or should that be re-read, not that he was particularly inclined to do such a thing. These reviews were also written in the past tense, for goodness sake. Could he write in the first person and in the present tense, he wondered, or was that a mode he contrarily reserved for fiction? Can I even write a review of a book I have read, he wrote as an experiment, about someone writing about sentences that he has read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, I have read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which I have also read?, he wrote, though I must say, he thought, that question mark is more problematic than ever. Also, would it not be ludicrous, he thought, to even attempt to write a review about a book about fine sentences, or exceptional sentences, or exemplary sentences or whatever, from William Shakespeare to Anne Boyer, including sentences from several of my favourite writers, though not perhaps the sentences of theirs that I would choose if I had been choosing, he thought, when my own sentences churn on, when in my own repertoire I have only commas and full stops, a continuation mark and a stopping mark, when those two marks for him are already too much for him to handle, accustomed as he had once made himself to the austerity of the full stop alone, you could write a whole book using only full stops, he thought, or he had once thought. He had wandered, and tried to return to the task in hand, or the book in hand, or to the thought in head, so to speak. Because the book was about sentences he found himself unable to write any sentences about it. If he wrote a review, he thought, he had no doubt that at least some of the readers of that review, if not all of the readers of that review, if there were any such readers, which seemed unlikely, would find his sentences fell short of their subject, or if they did not fall short they would quaver under their scrutiny, weaken and collapse, which is another sort of falling. His sentences would rather point than be pointed at. Thinking of writing would have to suffice. I would like to write, he thought of writing, that this book, Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon, is the sort of book that anyone interested in reading better, or, indeed, in writing better, which goes without saying, as writing is a subset of reading, if that goes without saying, though not everyone’s subset, he thought, and would have said had he been saying instead of thinking and writing, or, rather thinking and thinking of writing, Brian Dillon is good company in working out how text works when it works well, but, although he thought of writing this, as he had said, see, he does say though he said he was not saying, he did not write this as, by this time, his comma-infested sentences were almost unable to move in any direction even if not in a straight line, bring on the full stops, he thought. "Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping.” —Jean-François Lyotard |
>>How to run a bookshop.
>>Pirates, pigs and sex work.
>>A life well lived.
>>There were two...
>>And now there are three!
>>Crammed with adventure.
>>Read an excerpt.
NEW RELEASES
Gnanalingam's last two novels have been short-listed for the Acorn Prize in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In his new novel, Kavita is stuck in a dead-end marriage. A parent of two small kids, she is the family’s main breadwinner. An old flame unexpectedly offers her a week away in Waiheke. If she were to go, she’s not sure when — or if — she’d come back. Gnanalingam's novels are notable for their authentic texture and insight into the lives of others.
>>Sprigs.
"A story is never an answer. A story is always a question." Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Ali Smith follows her wonderful 'Seasons' quartet, written in 'real time', with this further novel. Few writers can manage to be at the same time as angry and as playful as Ali Smith, and few can directly face the most depressing aspects of our present moment and find such hope in humanity. Lovely in hardback.
"A lockdown story of wayward genius. Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Covid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith's seasonal quartet." —The Guardian
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan $38
Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens $30
We Still Have the Telephone by Erica Van Horn $36
Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing (translated from Danish by Denise Newman) $28
Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin $36
The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw $37
The Very Last Interview by David Shields $38
Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl $38
The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the strange and startling world of the senses by Guy Leschziner $38
Quarantine by Philippa Werry $20
all about love: new visions by bell hooks $30
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) $21
The British Surrealists by Desmond Morris $55
500 Chess Questions Answered by Andrew Soltis $35
"Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now." —Observer
Seasons by William Direen $20
Bill Direen's poetry diary spans a year on a strath an hour’s drive from Dunedin. It is written with a sharp eye for landscape, and a musician’s ear for the sounds of the Strath region, as it changes dramatically from drought to flood to extreme frosts and snow-bound winter. Begun after Direen returned to New Zealand from France, the poem is in three parts. It runs from autumn to autumn, blending description with personal micronarrative. Each copy of the book has a unique download code, offering the text combined with music by six New Zealand musicians.
Other listening:
>>World of the Winds (2021).
>>Moderation (1983).
Imagine a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others. Such a technology would seduce multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are 'counters' who track and exploit desires and there are 'eluders', those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. The Candy House is a bold imagining of a world that is moments away.
>>Everything was fine.
>>How much sharing is too much sharing?
“Jennifer Egan’s radiant new novel explores what role the imagination can still play in a world overwhelmed by technology." —Slate
>>What the forest remembers. >>Everything was fine.
>>How much sharing is too much sharing?
Down from Upland is a kitchen sink, domestic novel that opens at the precise moment the first Millennials find themselves raising a teenager. While flirting with an open marriage, Jacqui and Scott nudge their son on a more moderate course as he begins at a new high school and makes new friends. Skewering the best and worst of Wellington’s leafy middle class, the novel features public servants with varying degrees of integrity, precocious Wellington High students and a foreign lover at the end of a working holiday visa. Stephens's writing, as always, defies gravity as the present moment really gets away on us.
>>Read Stella's review of Rat King Landlord.
>>Read Stella's review of Rat King Landlord.
"My mother and I have been writing her obituary. We have been working on it for several years now. Before we started, she had already begun the project with my older sister. She wants to get it right." Assembling fragments of past and present Erica Van Horn describes a life laid out in detail, quietly registering the fuzziness of the line between eccentricity and madness. In this mosaic portrait, a singular everywoman emerges, whose immutable rituals exist on a par with an irrepressible anarchy. This delightful book suggests that the very details that never make it into obituaries are the ones that tell us the most about the person concerned.
>>Some words for living locally.
>>Some words for living locally.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, often noted as the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Following on from Wittgenstein 100 years later, Signe Gjessing updates and reimagines the Tractatus, marrying poetry with philosophy to test the boundaries of reality. This is poetry which exacts the logical consequence of philosophy, while locating beauty and significance in the 'nonsense' of the world.
"Signe Gjessing’s highly original reconfiguration of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus unfolds at once logically and lyrically on the trembling cusp where philosophy and poetry intersect. Her witty, haunting propositions shimmer between the profound and the puzzling, and beautifully enact Wallace Stevens’s assertion that ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation'." –Mark Ford
A tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene. One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family's crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in serious ways.
>>How do we stop repeating ourselves?
>>How do we stop repeating ourselves?
>>Blame game.
Ruth Shaw didn't exactly intend to become a bookseller, but she found herself the proprietor of two tiny bookshops in the tiny settlement of Manapouri. In this charming volume, Shaw weaves together accounts of characters who visit her bookshop, musings on her favourite books, and bittersweet stories from her remarkable and varied life before she became a bookseller. She has sailed through the Pacific for years, was held up by pirates, worked at Sydney's King's Cross with drug addicts and prostitutes, campaigned on numerous environmental issues, and worked the yacht Breaksea Girl as an expedition/tourist boat with her husband, Lance.
"An extraordinary story." —Shaun Bythell
>>How to open a bookshop.
>>How to open a bookshop.
David Shields (author of Reality Hunger) decided to gather every interview he's ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent.
The Poem: Lyric, sign, metre by Don Paterson $45
New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East, AD395—700 by Paul Stephenson $55
Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in AD 476, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of a late antique empire, the glittering Constantinople: New Rome. In this magisterial work, Stephenson charts the centuries surrounding this epic shift of power. He traces the cultural, social and political forces that led to the empire being ruled from a city straddling Europe and Asia, placing all into a rich natural and environmental context informed by the latest scientific research.
“Remixing and reimagining 2,000 of the most annoying questions he’s been asked during his 40-year writing life, David Shields’s The Very Last Interview is an often hilarious, operatically tragic sojourn across American cultural life. What do we expect of our writers, of intellectual history, of fame, of celebrity? All the answers are in the questions. Shields turns inside out whatever glamour remains attached to an artistic life in this book that’s at once charming and damning.” —Chris Kraus
“The moment I started reading this book, the hair went up on my neck. I blasted through it in a night, thrilled by the energy. Shields doesn’t wear out the form; it keeps doing remarkable tricks on the reader’s brain right to the finish. Stunning.” —Jonathan Lethem
In illuminating and engaging prose, Paterson offers his treatise on the making and the philosophy of 'the poem', unpicking the process of verse composition, exploring the mechanics of how a poem works and, essentially, what a poem is. His findings take the form of three essays that make up the three sections of the book: 'Lyric' attends to the sound of the poem; 'Sign' envisages ideas of poetic meaning; while 'Metre' studies its underlying rhythms.
"Both remarkable and irresistible." —Scottish Review of Books
>>Metre readings.
>>A word in your ear.
"Both remarkable and irresistible." —Scottish Review of Books
>>Metre readings.
>>A word in your ear.
Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in AD 476, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of a late antique empire, the glittering Constantinople: New Rome. In this magisterial work, Stephenson charts the centuries surrounding this epic shift of power. He traces the cultural, social and political forces that led to the empire being ruled from a city straddling Europe and Asia, placing all into a rich natural and environmental context informed by the latest scientific research.
On Valentine’s Day, after a night of red wine and pasta and planning for their future, Natasha Sholl and her partner Rob went to bed. A few hours later, at the age of 27, his heart stopped. Found, Wanting tells the story of Natasha’s attempt to rebuild her life in the wake of Rob’s sudden death, stumbling through the grief landscape and colliding with the cultural assumptions about the ‘right way’ to grieve.
>>What not to say to someone who's grieving.
>>What not to say to someone who's grieving.
The information you receive from your senses makes up your world. But that world does not exist. What we perceive to be the absolute truth of the world around us is a complex reconstruction, a virtual reality created by the complex machinations of our minds in tandem with the wiring of our nervous systems.
But what happens if that wiring goes awry? What happens if connections falter, or new and unexpected connections are made? Tiny shifts in the microbiology of our nervous systems can cause the world around us to shift and mutate, to become alien and unfamiliar.
New Zealand in 1936–37 is facing a pandemic of infantile paralysis, or polio, and nobody knows where it will strike next. When even the adults are afraid, Tom finds refuge in his dream—to run in the Olympics like his hero, Jack Lovelock. But it's the strength of some people closer to home that provides his biggest inspiration.
At her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance.
Two girls: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend and the only one who loves her selflessly, planning to leave, but not without Eve. Two boys: Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, deeply in love with Eve; Clélio, the neighbourhood tough, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France. All are desperate to escape the cycle of fear and violence in which they are trapped. A powerful young adult novel set in Mauritius.
"The most vivid novel I’ve read in ages, magnificently translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The gorgeous, profoundly poetic writing is completely mesmerizing and viscerally affecting: it gave me goose bumps several times. The narrative slowly escalates through brilliant and memorable scenes, as well as haunting inner monologues, to its glorious conclusion. There is something so triumphant and so powerful in the structure of Eve, and something so real and touching in these characters, each consistent, unexpected, thought-provoking and wonderful. A work of profound sympathy and deep desire." —Jennifer Croft, translator of Flights, 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Fêted for their idiosyncratic and imaginative works, the surrealists marked a pivotal moment in the history of modern British art. Many banded together to form the British Surrealist Group, while others carved their own, independent paths. Here, author and surrealist artist Desmond Morris — one of the last surviving members of this art movement — draws on his memories and experiences to present the lives of this curious set of artists. From the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the 'brilliant' Ceri Richards, Morris's vivid account is profusely illustrated by images of the artists and their artworks.
From learning how to train your mind with chess information to choosing the best chess opening, dip in and out of this invaluable guide to improve your chess in a minutes. Chess questions answered in this book include: Is there a best way to study chess? How do I know if I have a natural talent? How important is chess memory and how can I train mine? How long should I think before choosing a move? Is there a proper way to think? Can I think like a chess computer? How do I develop chess intuition?
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | As Needed, As Possible: Emerging conversations about art, labour and collaboration in Aotearoa edited by Sophie Davis and Simon Gennard {Reviewed by STELLA} As Needed, As Possible is a collection of writing and reflections on and discussions about art, labour and collaboration in Aotearoa. Spearheaded by Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, editors Sophie Davis and Simon Gennard, and invited contributors explore the roles of artist-run spaces, collaboration, community and dialogue between artists and curators to engage readers of this publication in thoughtful writing and ongoing discussion. As often is the case with the best writing, it is questions that lead to the best innovation. Published in conjunction with GLORIA Books, designer Katie Kerr has captured the ‘ready to go’ aesthetic of the print-ready PDF file in a perfectly bound and attractive ‘hand’book retaining the autonomy of the individual pieces while embracing the collective whole — a description that could be used in underpinning the concerns of many of the writers in this publication. As conversations weave through the challenges and rewards of running artist-spaces; balancing, or in the cases of James Tapsell- Kururangi and Zoe Thompson-Moore embracing, the domestic sphere with their art practice; reflecting on the political and economic aspects of art within the wider neoliberal construct; and the role of collaboration for artists, the art sector and the wider community, the reader is aware of a breadth of thinking and research, of reflection, in the small pieces presented in this publication. Written over a number of years, some before the pandemic, others during Lockdown, they are varied in presentation and approach. The email exchange between Sarah Hudson and Zoe Thompson-Moore, artists and mothers of young children, in “The Making of Bread”, is lively and punchy, laced with humour amid the reality of domesticity — when you never have enough time, but ideas spark nevertheless — a bit like a well-made loaf. They discuss bread as the memories it sparks, sustenance which it gives, its necessity, and the words they list to describe it — maintenance, attention, fermentation, transformation etc — are delightfully applicable to the creative process. In his photo essay and reflections, “Gains? Grandmother. Grey Street.” James Tapsell-Kururangi also approaches the domestic as he documents and explores ‘a year of living' as an art project. In the essays “Finding Time to Discuss Nothing” from the Ōtautahi Kōrerotia collective and “Risky Business” a conversation between curators Emma Budgen and Chloe Geoghegan, artist-run spaces are considered from functional and analytical viewpoints providing insight and food for thought. The conversation between Budgen and Geoghegan, reflecting on past and present, their personal experiences in artist-run spaces, alongside political and social constructs (“Funding is never neutral” - EB) and the wider arts sector is particularly engaging in the labour/value/art discussion and the consideration of otherness or the embracing of an ethos of ‘relative autonomy'. In her closing statement, Budgen reveals that the conversation which reads seamlessly has occurred over many months in the moments after everything else, in the ‘gaps’. Another example of the value afforded art practice and conversation. While this necessity to exist in spite of challenges, time constraints, financial risk and the limits of a capitalist system (deftly explored in No nSense by Public Space — so simple, so perfect and so political) can be seen as a positive (it is often a barrier) towards stimulating engaging dialogue and creativity, it is interesting to note the recent acknowledgement of the ‘value’ of art in Ireland’s new Basic Income for artists scheme. A thought-provoking collection of writing for artists and anyone engaged with making space, literally or metaphorically, for art. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec (translated by Marc Lowenthal) {Reviewed by THOMAS} You’re soaking in it, he thought, not for the first time. Could he quote David Hume, he wondered, and say, All there is is detail and anything else is conjecture, no, he could not quote Hume, at least not accurately, with that particular sequence of words, though of course he could not be certain that Hume did not say or think such a thing. The thought stands though, he thought, or the words that seemed at least to him to convey the thought, not that anyone reading the words would be in a position to judge the distance, if any distance is possible, between the thought and the words he wrote, but this is a whole other story and already he had come unfortunately quite far from that about which he purposed to write, he carefully wrote. All there is is detail, actually, he qualified deliberately, and we use these details to construct the sad narratives of our lives, or happy narratives, why not, though it would be more accurate to say that the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, neurology will back me up on this, he thought, no footnotes forthcoming, the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, he wrote, living and reading are not so different after all, the damage or whatever to the brain is the same whatever other harms may be avoided. Reality is produced by our failure to reach the actual, he wrote, but who he wondered could he pin this quote on. Anybody’s guess. A novel is more or less full of details, if there’s such a thing as more than full, in fact literature is all detail of one sort or another, supposedly all relevant and chosen by the authority, the reader has no business to think that there’s anything more, but also, he thought, no business to think that there isn’t anything more, in any case in the world of detail that we’re soaking in we assume there is more than those morsels of which we are aware, though in fact there may not be and no experiment can relieve us of this possibility, how claustrophobic, but let us assume for the sake of argument, if you want an argument, or for the sake of the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is, agoraphobia perhaps, the terrifying infinitude of possibility from which we protect ourselves with stories, to not be overwhelmed, that if we could let down our stories just for a moment we could expose ourselves to other details, unstoried or unstoried-as-yet, which could support quite other stories and all that attaches to those, or whatever. For three days in October in 1974 Georges Perec challenged himself to merely observe whatever passed before him in Saint-Sulpice, recording his observations as fast as he could write, except for when he was ordering coffee or Vichy water or Bourgueil. Observing without presupposing a story gives an equivalence to all details, the ordinary and what Perec calls the infraordinary are full participants in a thoroughly democratic ontology, every detail shines with significance even if it signifies nothing beyond its own existence. Almost it is as hard a discipline to stop a story suggesting itself as it is to suspend the stories we bring, although, I suppose, he thought, any story that suggests itself is in fact a story I have somehow brought with me even if I was unaware that I had it on board, which is interesting, he thought, in itself. No conjectures! Of course Perec cannot write fast enough, time, whatever that is, moves on or whatever it is that it does, the moment is torn away before he can catch much of it, the limits of his capacities affect his ability to observe, he is overwhelmed by his task but not destroyed so not in fact overwhelmed, so many details are suppressed by practicality, there must be some story taking place, the story of the observing I, of the capacities and the limitations that make up Georges Perec perhaps. Why these details and not other details given that we generally assume there to be a limitless amount of details out there, are we to conclude that every attempt at objectivity is autobiography, someone’s story, by necessity, at best. Subjectivity is a product of time, he thought, or produces time, whatever that is, the progression of our attention through a certain set of details, the constraining force that suppresses all but the supporting details, the readable details or at least the ones that we read, in either literature or life, the subjectivity that burdens us with personhood and other what we could call spectres of the temporal. He couldn’t get all the infraordinary down, he wrote, referring to Perec, Perec made an attempt at exhausting a place in Paris but his attempt was doomed to fail, just as it was revealing possibilities which made it a success it failed, due to time, due to the particular set of limitations that passes in this instance for Perec, he couldn’t get more of the infraordinary down without stopping time, without removing himself or at least seeming to, without taking a place, a small place, perhaps of necessity a fictional place but I’m not sure of this, without taking a place and truly exhausting it, stopping time, recording every infraordinary detail and watching them vibrate with the potential for unrealised story, without in other words sitting down and writing, soon after writing this book, his masterwork of detail, Life, A User’s Manual, he wrote. |
>>The apocalypse is always now.
>>Stepping into her own multiverse.
>>Marquee moon.
>>The autofiction element.
>>Sars Twelve.
>>A moment of beauty.
>>Some essays by E.St.J.M.
>>Read Station Eleven.
>>Station Eleven on TV.
>>Read Stella's review of The Glass Hotel.
>>Your copy of Sea of Tranquility.
>>Read Stella's review of The Glass Hotel.
>>Your copy of Sea of Tranquility.
NEW RELEASES
Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit (translated by Daniel Hahn) $36
Never Did the Fire unfolds in the humdrum of everyday working class existence, making the afterlife of an agitator that of anyone living next door. For one old couple, brought together years ago in an underground cell, the revolution has ended in a small apartment, a grinding job caring for the bodies of the unwell well-to-do, and all the aches and pains that go with a long life and a long marriage. Untethered from the political action that defined them, and mourning the loss of their child, their bonds dissolve, but the consequences of their former life, and their dependence on each other, won't let them go. A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit is at the height of her powers in this novel of breakdowns. Never Did the Fire evokes the charged air of Chile's violent past, and the burdens it carries into the present-day. What happens, when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation?
In Catching Fire, the translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire unfolds in real time as a conversation between works of art, illuminating both in the process. The problems and pleasures of conveying literature into another language — what happens when you meet a pun? a double entendre? — are met by translator Daniel Hahn's humour, deftness, a deep appreciation for what sets Eltit's work apart, and his evolving understanding of what this particular novel is trying to do. The book offers superb insight into the process of translation.
Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, and the new book is said to be even better. Set in an area of 1990s Glasgow knocked hard by unemployment, alcohol, Margaret Thatcher and violence, Young Mungo is a story of a family under stress but also of love and of romantic and sexual awakening.
>>"Stuart is a genius."
The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics firmly rooted in the reality of our current moment.
“One of Mandel’s finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
"What a nation or society chooses to remember and forget speaks to its contemporary priorities and sense of identity. Understanding how that process works enables us to better imagine a future with a different, or wider, set of priorities." History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how and what they choose to remember and forget. In this BWB Text addressing ‘difficult histories’, a team of five researchers, several from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, reflect on these questions of memory and loss locally.
>>Remembering and forgetting difficult histories.
>>Remembering and forgetting difficult histories.
In northern India, an 80-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease of life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma then insists on travelling to Pakistan, confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition.
"Despite its serious themes, Geetanjali Shree’s light touch and exuberant wordplay ensures that Tomb of Sand remains constantly playful — and utterly original." —Judges' commendation on short-listing the book for the 2022 International Booker Prize
A visual essay, a poem, a study of Princess Diana, image, celebrity and identity. Leanne Shapton has painted Princess Diana from the hundreds of photographs of her getting out of cars, examining her iconography and meaning in gesture and form. In Cars: On Diana is about photography, celebrity, identity, facsimile, and where to hold the beheld. It is also an obsessive and loving collection of studies, abstracted and haunting.
"Leanne Shapton is one of the most broadly creative and gifted people at work today; a true artist, both visual and verbal." —David Rakoff
"Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity ruefulness intelligence and grace.' —Sheila Heti
"A strange and evocative poem, nesting in a sequence of paintings, both the art and the words examining Diana having her photograph taken getting out of cars — each path taking us inevitably to the final car ride. Like a gentler, kinder, J. G. Ballard, Leanne takes us on a journey into cars and iconography and the spirit of ecstasy." — Neil Gaiman
>>"We're on a definite warped thing."
>>The desire to always go bigger.
Cain's Jawbone by 'Torquemada' [Edward Powys Mathers] $23
>>The desire to always go bigger.
Six murders. One hundred pages. Millions of possible combinations... but only one is correct. Can you solve Torquemada's murder mystery? In 1934, the Observer's cryptic crossword compiler, Edward Powys Mathers (a.k.a. Torquemada), released a novel that was simultaneously a murder mystery and the most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written. The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order, but it is possible — through logic and intelligent reading — to sort the pages into the only correct order, revealing six murder victims and their respective murderers. Only three puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain's Jawbone: do you have what it takes to join their ranks?
Warning: This puzzle is extremely difficult and not for the faint-hearted.
It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another—one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they've drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, "as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards." They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes.
>>"I will probably live to see the end of the world."
>>"I will probably live to see the end of the world."
With its diverse cuisine and intriguing culinary history, Portugal is a focus for food lovers worldwide. Portugal: The Cookbook gathers together over 550 recipes from every region of the country, including fish and shellfish dishes from the Algarve coast, hearty stews from the Douro Valley, and the famous pastries of Lisbon.
>>Delicious.
Unorthodox devotions have seen Prince Philip deified on a small island in the South Pacific, while a National Geographic article elevated Haille Selassie from Emperor toMessiah. Unlikely Gods blossomed in India, where British officers and bureaucrats found themselves at the centre of new religions. When Spanish explorers landed in the New World they spoke with the natives and heard the word 'God' on their lips. These transformations have attended on moments of emancipation and rebellion; they have excused enslavement and fuelled revolution. Spanning the globe and five centuries, Accidental Gods is a revelatory history of the unwanted divine, which tells the stories of the men and women who have profited and suffered from these curious apotheoses. In its bravura final part, Subin traces the colonial desire for deification through to the creation of 'race' and the white power movement today, and argues that it is time we rid ourselves of the 'White Gods' among us.
From 1927 to 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and presented more than eighty broadcasts over the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers, for the first time in English, the surviving transcripts. This eclectic collection shows the range of Benjamin's thinking and includes stories for young and old, plays, readings, book reviews, a novella, and discussions of topics ranging from finding a job to the architecture of Berlin to an account of the railway disaster at the Firth of Tay. Now in paperback.
Nistisima: The secret to delicious vegan cooking from the Mediterranean and beyond by Georgina Hayden $55
Nistisima means 'fasting food' — food traditionally eaten during lent and other times of fasting observed by those of Orthodox faith. Mostly this involves giving up meat and dairy and instead using vegetables, pulses and grains to create easy, delicious dishes that all just happen to be vegan. In this book, Hayden draws on the history and culture around nistisimo cooking in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to share the simple, nutritious and flavour-packed recipes at the heart of the practice.
It is a little over a decade since Fiona Kidman wrote her last volume of memoir. But her story did not end on its last page; instead her life since has been busier than ever, filled with significant changes, new writing and fascinating journeys. From being a grandmother to becoming a widow, from the suitcase-existence of book festivals to researching the lives and deaths of Jean Batten and Albert Black, she has found herself in new territory and viewed the familiar with fresh eyes. She takes us with her to Paris and Pike River, to Banff, Belfast and Bangkok, searching for houses in Hanoi and Hawera, reliving her past in Waipu and experiencing a stint in Otago.
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books — selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude — have been described as virtuoso performances, and small masterpieces. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? is an interrogation of universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated — and mordantly funny. With an afterword by her daughter, Chloe Diski, this is a must-have for essay lovers everywhere. Now in paperback. Recommended.
"Diski expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be." —New Yorker
When first published in 1970, The Uses of Disorder was a call to arms against the deadening hand of urban planning upon the thriving chaotic city. Written in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprising in the US and Europe, it demands a reimagination of the city and how class, city life and identity combine. Too often, this leads to divisions, such as the middle class flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities in desperate straits. In response, Sennett offers an alternative image of a dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities that allow for change and the development of community. Fifty years later this book is as essential as it was when it first came out, and remains an inspiration to architects, planners and urban thinkers everywhere.
There is a world hidden underneath this great city... The London Silver Vaults — for well over a century, the largest collection of silver for sale in the world. It has more locks than the Bank of England and more cameras than a celebrity punch-up. Not somewhere you can murder someone and vanish without a trace — only that's what happened. The disappearing act, the reports of a blinding flash of light and memory loss amongst the witnesses all make this a case for Detective Constable Peter Grant and the Special Assessment Unit. Alongside their boss DCI Thomas Nightingale, the SAU find themselves embroiled in a mystery that encompasses London's tangled history, foreign lands and, most terrifying of all, the North! And Peter must solve this case soon because back home his partner Beverley is expecting twins any day now. But what he doesn't know is that he's about to encounter something -—and somebody — that nobody ever expects.
Dementia, heart failure and cancer are now the leading causes of death in industrialised nations, where life expectancy is mostly above 80. A century ago, life expectancy was about 50 and people died mainly from infectious diseases. In the Middle Ages, death was mostly caused by famine, plague, childbirth and war. In the Palaeolithic period, where our species spent 95% of its time, we frequently died from violence and accidents. Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where in many countries excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why is this? Why don't we die from scurvy or smallpox any more? And why are heart attacks, Alzheimer's and cancer so prevalent today? This Mortal Coil explains why we died in the past, the reasons we die now and how causes of death are about to profoundly change.
Explores the idea that all of us have different perspectives and opinions in life. This Aotearoa picture book for young children explores the wonder of nature and shows the importance of listening and respecting other opinions, even when we see things differently.
Welcome to the Witherward, and to a London that is not quite like the one we know. Here, it's summertime in February, the Underground is a cavern of wonders and magic fills the streets. But this London is a city divided, split between six rival magical factions, each with their own extraordinary talents – and the alpha of the Changelings, Gedeon Ravenswood, has gone rogue, threatening the fragile accords that have held London together for decades. Ilsa is a shapeshifting Changeling who has spent the first 17 years of her life marooned in the wrong London, where real magic is reviled as the devil's work. Abandoned at birth, she has scratched out a living first as a pickpocket and then as a stage magician's assistant, dazzling audiences by secretly using her Changeling talents to perform impossible illusions. When she's dragged through a portal into the Witherward, Ilsa finally feels like she belongs. But her new home is on the brink of civil war, and Ilsa is pulled into the fray. The only way to save London is to track down Gedeon, and he just so happens to be Ilsa's long-lost brother, one of the last surviving members of the family who stranded her in the wrong world. Beset by enemies on all sides, surrounded by supposed Changeling allies wearing faces that may not be their own, Ilsa must use all the tricks up her sleeve simply to stay alive.
Ways of Looking at Art: 50 cards to shift your perspective by Martin Jackson and George Wylesol $30
Transform your relationship to art with fifty illustrated prompts. Rethink how you see. Each card offers a different way of looking at anything from graffiti to sculpture, painting to tapestry. Have a fresh encounter with whatever artwork comes your way.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
  | Eating {Two cookbook reviews by STELLA} This is the season to discover new cuisines or expand your baking repertoire. Here are two very very different cookbooks that I have been dipping into this year: Having a themed Japanese birthday for a family member encouraged me to expand on my limited, predominantly sushi-focused, recipes. Maori Murota's Tokyo Cult Recipes was just the right level, expanding my pantry and knowledge of Japanese cooking. I like the 'Cult Recipes' series of cookbooks for their liveliness, not-too-complicated recipes, and interesting cultural outtakes. The bonuses are the street photography and the clear instructions, sometimes illustrated by photographs. A Japanese omelette was a simple joy to make, rolling the thin crepe-like layers around itself, and the photographic instructions made it perfectly comprehensible. There’s detailed information about ingredients, like different types of miso; and recipes for pantry staples, e.g. dashi. The feast meant many bowls of small dishes and all the elements on the go, but it was worth it! On the menu from this cookbook, Edamame, Agedashi-Dofu, Ebi No Kousai Ae (Prawns with Coriander — delicious!) and some pickles. And an occasion isn’t complete without baking — a cake, of course, and a breakfast treat. The Nordic Baking Book is a standard in our household, and I had looked at this and been a bit overwhelmed by its breadth, thinking the recipes were beyond my baking skill. Mistake! The recipes are wonderful, with many variations on a theme, so you can choose a lesser or more complex style to suit your circumstances or, in many cases, your regional preference. Magnus Nilsson’s knowledge of Nordic baking draws on his professional skills as well as his family knowledge. His lively writing and sometimes very amusing opinions make for fine reading. The recipes, so many of them, are well explained and the results excellent. There’s bread, crackers, pancakes and waffles, sweet pastries, kringles, sweets and cakes, to name just a few of the sections! There are recipes from the whole region, including Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark, highlighting similarities as well as differences in approach and ingredients. Breakfast’s choice was Solbullar (Sun Buns), a moreish wheaty bun filled with vanilla custard cream with sugared coating — straightforward to make, impressive to behold, and easy to eat.  The cake, Ambrosiakaka (Glazed Orange Sponge Cake) — light and delicious — was perfect for the occasion. I added a little extra decoration to give it that birthday lift. Other recipes that I enjoyed making and consuming include the many types of waffles and pancakes, especially the delicate sugared pancakes, which are like an upmarket pikelet but light as air and perfect for a weekend breakfast or snack! |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
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>>A project by wāhine, for wāhine.
>>100 podcasts!
>>An interview with Qiane Matata-Sipu.
>>"This is exactly what I need right now."
>>Your copy is waiting for you (or we can send one to a friend).
>>Other books short-listed for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Vote for the book on the VOLUME Ockhameter.
NEW RELEASES
"A powerful blend of science fiction, absurdism and alternative-historical realism that aims to destabilise the heteronormative world and expose its underlying rot." Inspired by Simone Weil’s concept of ‘decreation’ and drawing on Batak and Christian cultural elements, in Happy Stories, Mostly Pasaribu puts queer characters in situations and plots conventionally filled by hetero characters. In one story, a staff member is introduced to their new workplace - a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers. In another, a woman’s attempt to vacation in Vietnam after her gay son commits suicide turns into a nightmarish failed escape. And in a speculative-historical third, a young man finds himself haunted by the tale of a giant living in colonial-era Sumatra.
Long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
Long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
A surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. Piketty guides us through the movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty believes, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality.
In this inventive, enjoyable and audacious novel — at once science fiction, myth, eco-horror, parable, and a shout for gender liberation and creative freedom — divers characters in diverse times and places undergo diverse personal eruptions (mostly metaphorical). On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, it is nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano. As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.
Poet Jan Kemp's memoir of her first 25 years is a vivid and frank account of growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s, and of university life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tracks from an innocent Waikato childhood to the seedy flats of Auckland, where anarchic student life, drugs, sexual experimentation and a failing marriage could not keep her away from poetry. Kemp became one of the few young women poets of her era to be allowed into then-male poet circles. Raiment shines a clear-eyed light on the heady, hedonistic hothouse of the New Zealand literary community in the 1970s.
An Argentinian art critic recalls how she was drawn into the world of forgery, and becomes increasingly fascinated by three women who challenge the fundamentals of art discourse and other cultural norms.
"Gainza’s novel becomes a puzzle as we question the most improbable biographical details. How much has been fabricated by the narrator? Does authenticity really matter? And exactly whose life story is she really interested in: artist, forger or authenticator? This is a novel with many beautiful, confounding moments. Maria Gainza is sharp, modern and playful, a writer who multiplies the possibilities for fiction." —Guardian
Rolling easily between kōrero Māori and the canonical traditions of English-language poetry, through karakia and pōwhiri, treaty training and decolonisation wiki entries, Robert Sullivan takes readers on a marvellous poetic hīkoi. Guided by Māui and Tāwhirimātea, Moana Jackson and Freddie Mercury, we walk from K’Rd council flats to Kaka Point, finding ourselves and our ancestors along the way.
Spend the day with Crane Guy and see how many things you can spy from up high in his crane. Crane Guy, up so high, Building towers in the sky, Tell me, tell me what you spy. Something beginning with . . . Join Crane Guy for a game of I Spy up high in a crane - how many things can you see that begin with the letter B? Or S? Or P? This superb rhyming picture book by acclaimed author Sally Sutton and illustrator Sarah Wilkins makes a very fun game of learning letters and their sounds. Readers will love exploring the gorgeously detailed city scenes over and over again. Bustling with people, construction machines and vehicles of all kinds, this is an exciting book.
In the much-anticipated sequel to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, James continues his powerful fantasy, drawing from roots in African mythology and history. In the first book, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared. In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It's also the story of a century-long feud — seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch — that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi's power is considerable — and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own.
"In the second book of his 'Dark Star' trilogy, James coaxes beauty from dark thoughts, leaving readers with a concaved, mystical and African-inspired world that begins in free-fall. In a world as thoroughly imagined as J.R.R. Tolkien's, no detail seems spared. Full-figured and richly drawn, Moon Witch, Spider King is the bridge of a trilogy and also a creation that, like James's talent, stands alone." —Los Angeles Times
Out on the pleasure pier on that benign afternoon,
the air heavy with the blossom of vinegar and old tyres,
you asked what was the closest I had come to death.
Another Beautiful Day Indoors is more likely to end with a dark flood than a beautiful sundown. As these poems grapple with climate catastrophe, precarious labour, and love, they draw on the full, rich weirdness of the human-made world, with its self-driving cars, official geese and open-plan offices modelled on heaven. A sequence of magical realist short fictions explore ‘essential work’; elsewhere Erik Kennedy wonders what it is like to work in the satellite insurance sector. Somehow he gets away with rhyming ‘guesses’ with ‘yeses’. And somehow, even as this book comes up against the most ominous aspects of our future, it uplifts.
This entertaining selection of over 100 photos of New Zealand dogs reveals some of the more curious ways in which they have appeared in photographic collections from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dogs named Terror, Betsey Jane, Floss and Erebus appear alongside canines whose names are longer known. The photos range from carefully staged studio portraits to New Zealand landscapes. Many of the photographs are from Nelson's Tyree Collection.
In Mishra's long-awaited new novel, Arun knows there is only way out of this small railway town. He is about to enrol in the prestigious Indian Institute of technology, determined to make something of himself. But once there, he meets two friends who are prepared to go to unimaginable lengths to succeed. In just a few years, Arun's friends become the success stories of their generation. In private planes and expensive cars, from New York to Tuscany, they play out their Gatsby-style fantasies. In reality, these men are about to pay for their transgressions, but who exactly will pay the price? Will it be Arun? Will it be Alia, a female writer and influencer, who is piecing together the story of a big global financial scandal?
"A spectacular, illuminating work of fiction." —Jennifer Egan
"Elegantly written, incisively observed, and deeply satisfying to read." —Kamila Shamsie
Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. They slip quietly into low- to middle-income jobs and appear to want nothing more than to be left alone. For Cara Gray, they are first a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then the inscrutable target of her police surveillance work. When a bomb goes off at a school, a nebulous group of lambda extremists claims responsibility for the attack-but how could a vulnerable community of tiny aquatic humans, barely visible in society and seemingly indifferent to their own exploitation, be capable of something so horrific? In Cara's world a toothbrush can be legally alive, a quantum computer has the power to decide who dies, and a government employee made of slime mould protein needs help to relieve his neuroses. As Cara's relationship with the lambdas deepens, she must decide whether to accept her place in a pattern of technology, violence and deceit, or to take action of her own.
"Literary SF at its best." —Guardian
An extraordinary assemblage of moving and revelatory documents and testimony from the Nazi forced labor camps. An Ostarbeiter was an 'Eastern Worker', rounded up by Nazi Germany from the captured territories in Central and Eastern Europe. By the end of the war, it is estimated that approximately 3 million to 5.5 million Ostarbeiter were forced to work in guarded work camps, many of them younger than 16 years old — at which age they would be conscripted for military service. Ostarbeiter worked 12 hours a day on starvation on rations; as ethnic Slavs, they were treated with extraordinary brutality by Nazi guards who considered them 'sub-human' by the standards of the Aryan master race. They were distinguished by the label 'OST' sewn onto their uniforms. OST is based on over two hundred personal accounts, hundreds of hours of interviews, and over 350,000 letters.
A gull chick running across Muriwai Beach. Cabbage trees at Lake Wainamu. Tyre tracks, tugs of war and tramping trips. Olaf Petersen produced an unrivalled photographic account of the people and natural world of Auckland's wild west coast, from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Although Jim Jarmusch is best known for his storied career in independent cinema, over the years he has produced hundreds of pieces of collage art, the majority of which has been rarely seen by the public. Drawing inspiration from the largest medium of cultural documentation—newspapers—Jarmusch crafts each work by layering newsprints on cardstock.
An ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic living quietly in Somerset, Stephen Rose has just begun to form a bond with the daughter he barely knows when he receives a summons — to an inquiry into an incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is the return of what Stephen hoped he had outdistanced. Above all, to testify would jeopardise the fragile relationship with his daughter. And if he loses her, he loses everything. Instead, he decides to write her an account of his life; a confession, a defence, a love letter. Also a means of buying time. But time is running out, and the day comes when he must face again what happened in that faraway summer of 1982.
Twenty-four economists discuss how they promote egalitarianism, democracy and ecological sanity through research, activism, and policy engagement. A combustible brew of ideas and reflections on major historical events, including the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the global economy. Interviewed are: Michael Ash, Nelson Henrique Barbosa Filho, James K. Boyce, Ha-Joon Chang, Jane D'Arista, Diane Elson, Gerald Epstein, Nancy Folbre, James K. Galbraith, Teresa Ghilarducci, Jayati Ghosh, Ilene Grabel, Costas Lapavitsas, Zhongjin Li, William Milberg, Léonce Ndikumana, Ozlem Onaran, Robert Pollin, Malcolm Sawyer, Juliet Schor, Anwar Shaikh, William Spriggs, Fiona Tregenna and Thomas Weisskopf.
In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Rasolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appall and entice us today.
"You know how to count, right? GREAT! There are LOADS of fun things to count in this book. Whales, baboons, rainbows, pyramids...There's just ONE rule. You must ONLY ever count to ONE. So don't even about THINK bigger numbers. OK?!" A lot of fun!
Wellington poet and Canterbury farm-girl Rebecca Hawkes takes a generous bite from the excesses of earthly flesh — first 'Meat', then 'Lovers'. 'Meat' is a coming of age in which pony clubs, orphaned lambs and dairy-shed delirium are infused with playful menace and queer longings. Between bottle-fed care and killing-shed floors, the farm is a heady setting for love and death.In 'Lovers', the poet casts a wry eye over romance, from youthful sapphic infatuation to seething beastliness. Sentimental intensity is anchored by an introspective comic streak. This collection of queasy hungers offers a feast of explosive mince & cheese pies, accusatory crackling, lab-grown meat and beetroot tempeh burger patties, all washed down with bloody milk or apple-mush moonshine. It teems with sensuous life, from domesticated beasts to the undulating mysteries of eels, as Hawkes explores uneasy relationships with our animals and with each other. Tender and brutal, seductive and repulsive, Meat Lovers introduces a compelling new mode of hardcore pastoral.
Meet the Hanrahan family, gathering for a momentous weekend as famous artist and notorious egoist Ray Hanrahan prepares for a new exhibition of his art — the first in many decades — and one he is sure will burnish his reputation for good. His three children will be there: beautiful Leah, always her father's biggest champion; sensitive Patrick, who has finally decided to strike out on his own; and insecure Jess, the youngest, who has her own momentous decision to make. And what of Lucia, Ray's steadfast and selfless wife? She is an artist, too, but has always had to put her roles as wife and mother first. What will happen if she decides to change? For Lucia is hiding secrets of her own, and as the weekend unfolds and the exhibition approaches, she must finally make a choice.
Long-listed for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction.
"It takes the most ferocious intelligence, skill, and a deep reservoir of sadness to write a novel as funny as this." —Meg Mason
This book is a highly topical look at how our decisions about what is right and wrong play out on an individual, local, national and global scale. It examines topics that are strongly connected to the values people hold and their ideas of right and wrong, such as democracy, justice, fairness, prejudice and discrimination, education, climate change and war. A very good resource to help children learn to think for themselves.
Match 25 of the most iconic books with one of their famed characters. Featuring books such as Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Little Women, The Lord of the Rings, American Psycho, A Game of Thrones, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, IT, Great Expectations, Beloved, Frankenstein, Where the Wild Things Are, Midnight's Children, The Outsiders, The Hate U Give, The Book Thief, High Fidelity, White Teeth and The Joy Luck Club.
An original and entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library.
Tokyo Up Late: Iconic recipes from the city that never sleeps by Brendan Liew $60
From noisy izakayas, ramen joints and tempura bars, to gyoza pit-stops, curry restaurants and the iconic convenience stores that stitch the city together, Tokyo after dark generates a vast array of interesting food. This book immerses you in that excitement without having to leave your own kitchen.
BOOKS@VOLUME #272 (1.4.22)
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In A Good Winter, Gigi Fenster takes us inside the head of the obsessive and judgmental Olga, whose helpfulness towards her neighbour, her neighbour's daughter and her child leads them all down a path to tragedy. Highly accomplished, the book is both sympathetic and cutting, both bleak and darkly funny, both insightful and unnerving. Olga's voice is pitch-perfect and unforgettable.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood {Reviewed by STELLA} If you need good company, look no further than Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions. Like a popular guest at a dinner party, Atwood’s collected essays (and occasional pieces) 2004-2021 are articulate, forthright (but never overbearing), thoughtful, and of course, witty — some wryly so. The essays are a collection of reviews, forewords to other authors’ books, speeches, and reflections on her own writing. The topics are diverse, but always topical: feminism, ecology — in particular climate change, democracy, the role of literature and art. This third collection of essays begins in the aftermath of the Twin Towers and ranges over the financial crash of 2008, the Obama years, the advent of Trump, the #metoo movement, and the pandemic. Atwood’s published work of these years includes the 'MaddAddam' trilogy, Payback and The Testaments (on the back of the hugely popular TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale). Also during this time, her partner, Graeme Gibson, was diagnosed with dementia. The foreword she wrote for his Bedside Book of Birds is particularly beautiful and heartfelt (Gibson died in 2019). There are other forewords (such as for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) as well as highly observant pieces on authors such as Alice Munro, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Ursula Le Guin. In the area of literature and language, she touches on translation, the roles and responsibilities of the author, the power of language, and the relationship between writer and reader. The essays about her own writing are intriguing, and offer insights into her thinking in retrospect on genre and thematic choices. If, like me, you have read most of her novels, you will find these enlightening. The title Burning Questions reflects the urgency Atwood senses in responding to climate change — we are burning; the need to change the power imbalance towards a more equal society — burn the house down; and her own curiosity — a burning inquisitiveness — as a lover of language and words, people and places. No one essay stands out. As with all collections, some are better or will interest you more than others. This is a collection to wander through and be surprised by a clever turn of phrase, a witty remark, an insightful observation or a forthright call to arms. And you get to be in very good company. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Alastair McEwan) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. The heart, incorruptible crystal.” Fleur Jaeggy’s unforgettable short novel, named after the ship upon which the narrator, aged fifteen, and her estranged father (unreachable, “aloof from himself”) spend an unprecedented and unrepeated fourteen day cruise in the Greek Islands with members of the Swiss guild to which the father belongs, is a catalogue of mental retreat, relinquishment, estrangement, loss, and turning away: enervations towards a non-existence either hurried or postponed but inevitable to all. Jaeggy’s short sentences each have the precision of a stiletto: each stabs and surprises, making tiny wounds, each with a drop of glistening blood. When the narrator looks at her father Johannes’s diary, “written by a man precise in his absence,” her description of it could be of her own narration: “It is proof. It is the confirmation of an existence. Brief phrases. Without comment. Like answers to a questionnaire. There are no impressions, feelings. Life is simplified, almost as if it were not there.” Jaeggy writes with absolute, clinical precision but narrow focus, as if viewing the world down a tube, to great effect. Johannes, for example, is described as having “Pale, gelid eyes. Unnatural. Like a fairy tale about ice. Wintry eyes. With a glimmer of romantic caprice. The irises of such a clear, faded green that they made you feel uneasy. It is almost as if they lack the consistency of a gaze. As if they were an anomaly, generations old.” The account of the Greek cruise forms the core of the novel, but it is preceded, intercut and followed by memories of childhood and of subsequent events (mostly the deaths of almost everyone mentioned), all related closely in the present tense, but non-sequential, resulting in a sense of time not dissimilar to that experienced when repeatedly tripping over an unseen obstacle. Most of the book is narrated in the first person but the narrator achieves a degree of detachment from incidents that threaten “the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation” by relating them in the third person, referring to herself as “Johannes’s daughter”: the death of Orsola (the maternal grandmother with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce, her mother’s effective disappearance, her father’s sudden poverty and his effective exile from her life) and the violent sexual experiences to which she opens herself with two of the sailors: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. But she does it all the same. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes’s daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again.” The narrator writes her memories not so much to remember as to forget, to relinquish. Words turn experience into story, which interposes itself between experience and whoever is oppressed by it. As Jaeggy writes, “people imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it.” |
NEW RELEASES
Joanna Paul was intensely responsive to the world around her, she depicted her surroundings, constantly reworking the conventions of drawing and watercolour painting to capture something of inward experience. Paul also documented her environment in photographs and experimental short films, and published poetry, criticism and non-fiction. Her impulse was towards complexity in honouring the mystery she perceived in her subject, whether it was a domestic still life, the view from her kitchen window, or one of her children. She brought an innovative interdisciplinary approach to her practice, often blurring the boundaries between media. This beautiful book illuminates the whole of Paul's career.
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio. In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas. What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.
“In the middle ages, human skin was seen as a blanket stretched to cover a secret, inner life, writes Ayşegül Savaş. Reading White on White for me is like an outer skin which you open layer by layer as you read; gentle, mysterious and profound.” —Marina Abramović
“Ayşegül Savaş’s White on White is marvellous, as elegant as an opaque sheet of ice that belies the swift and turbulent waters beneath.” —Lauren Groff
“The story at the heart of Ayşegül Savaş’s White on White is— like the title— subtly camouflaged. Savaş’s characters watch each other as they avoid themselves, in a slow, acute and obliterating double portrait." —Leanne Shapton
A boy witnesses a violent confrontation in a remote part of town in the state of Cauca, Colombia. Minutes later, someone arrives at the scene to clear up all trace of the incident. No one in town claims to have heard or seen anything, and yet an anonymous accusation launches a dangerous investigation that unfolds within the corrupt world of the Christian churches of Latin America. The story reveals the inequality and violence that seem to govern an entire country,
Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story. Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.
"Impressive. I ended Learwife feeling utterly involved: moved and exhausted." —Guardian
From Catholic Ireland in the '70s, '80s and '90s to sparkling Auckland in the first years of the new millennium, Grand is a story of the invisible ties that bind us, of bitter legacies handed down through the generations, and of the leap of faith it takes to change them.
"Never satisfied to simply tell a story, Wideman continues to push form, with stories within stories, sentences that rise like a jazz solo with every connecting clause, voices that reflect who he is and where he's from, and an exploration of time that entangles past and present. Whether historical or contemporary, intimate or expansive, the stories here represent a pioneering American writer whose innovation and imagination know no bounds. Undoubtedly the foremost chronicler of the urban African-American experience. A master storyteller, Wideman is both a witness and a prophet." —Caryl Phillips
"Wideman's stories have a wary, brooding spirit, a lonely intelligence. They carry a real but atrophied affection for America. He airs the problems of consciousness, including the fragile contingency of our existence." —Dwight Garner
Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs. A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace. The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten writers. Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death.
A tender Greek modern classic of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a ramshackle old house with their divorced mother are flirtatious, hot-headed Maria, beautiful but distant Infanta, and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to understand the strange ways of adults and decide what kind of adults they hope to become.
Magritte: A life by Alex Danchev $65
I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke $25
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield $38
Night Race to Kawau by Tessa Duder $20
The Illustrated Etymologicon: A circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language by Mark Forsyth $45
Making Numbers Count: The art and science of communicating numbers by Karla Starr and Chip Heath $37
How to Read a Dress: A guide to changing fashion from the 16th to the 21st century by Lydia Edwards $55
On Democracy by Robert A. Dahl $36
The Islands by Emily Brugman $33
Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith $25
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei $55
Gale's seventeenth novel is his first fully historical one since A Place Called Winter. It is based around the known facts of the boyhood and youth of the great Cornish poet, Charles Causley and the life of the mother who raised him singlehandedly. Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius. As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work. Mother's Boy is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.
>>Charles Causley, poet.
>>Charles Causley, poet.
Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte's surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape.
The Poet Laurate of Punk's autobiography suitably displays his acerbic wit, encyclopedic knowledge of both the subtleties and unsubtleties of twentieth cenutry popular culture, and his agile writing style. Enjoyable and insightful, and now in paperback.
>>The hardback is still available, too.
Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland $33
Esther's Notebooks: Tales from my twelve-year-old life by Riad Satouf (translated by Sam Taylor) $28
Speculative short stories set in an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Robots used as human proxies in a war become driven by all-too-human desires; Kill Parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on inter-breeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity. Through transfigured bodies and impossible encounters, Newland brings a sharp, fresh eye to age-old themes of the human capacity for greed, ambition and self-destruction, strength and resilience.
A fun and accessible look at numbers, filled with great facts and fascinating insights into numbers, their history and the mathematicians who made key breakthroughs in their fields. From how long it would take to count to a billion, to why bubbles are always round, to what the ham sandwich theorem is, this book answers all these questions and many many more.
Every week, the Parisian 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 child. The result is a moving, insightful and utterly addictive glimpse into the real lives of children growing up in today's world.
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. To have the woman she loves back should mean a return to normal life, but Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realise that the life that they had might be gone.
What started as an exciting challenge turns into a nightmare when a gale unexpectedly blows up during the night race to Kawau Island. Sam and her mother suddenly find themselves in charge of their yacht with a dangerous task ahead of them. Will Sam be able to save her family? A new edition of this classic story.
A good overview of Noam Chomsky's political thought. In sixteen extended talks with Alternative Radio's David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky explains why the 'war on drugs' is really a war on poor people; how attacks on political correctness are attacks on independent thought; how historical revisionism has recast the United States as the victim in the Vietnam War.
The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? Nice illustrated hardback 10th anniversary edition.
"Witty and erudite. Stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless." —Independent
Until recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five. While the numbers in our world have become increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. Yet the ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more. So how can we effectively translate numbers and statistics so that the data comes alive?
With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is a useful guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history - as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This new edition includes additional styles to illustrate and explain the journey between one style and another; larger images to allow closer investigation of details of dress; examples of lower and working-class, as well as middle-class, clothing; and a completely new chapter covering the 1980s to 2020.
Arising from his studies of decision-making structures in institutions, cities and nations, Dahl delineates what constitutes a democracy and details the mechanisms by which competing interests may approach this ideal.
There are few places wilder than Little Rat, a small island in an archipelago off the coast of Western Australia. Beautiful, harsh and lonely, the landscape is still haunted by the many ships that have wrecked on its reefs across the centuries. Yet it is here that the Saari family try to build their future, thousands of miles from the cold lowlands of Finland. A crayfishing family, Onni and his wife Alva work hard. Against this spectacular and brutal backdrop, small tragedies and immense joys are shared by the fishing families of Little Rat: Alva makes a perilous journey across rough seas with a tiny newborn baby, where, against all odds, she feels safe; their young daughter Hilda watches as a small boy tumbles from a jetty and very nearly drowns; an old story of shipwreck and mutiny intrigues two adolescent boys; a mysterious and tortured fisherman rows into the eye of a storm; and Hilda, on the brink of womanhood, comes to know the cruelty and the ecstasy of desire, while distances expand between her and her migrant parents.
A memoir in poems. Formica begins in 1950s Richmond with the author’s family struggling in the aftermath of a war that took her father to Crete to fight and then Poland as a prisoner of war. At the Formica kitchen table, Maggie’s mother is reciting poems while chopping the veggies for tea. Maggie listens while tying her boots for marching practice. Poems follow her as she makes her way in the world – working as a typist, doing her OE, becoming a wife, a mother and grandmother.
The artist's memoir both presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years and illuminates his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as 'Little Siberia', where poet Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labour cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol.