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Te Wehenga: The separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku by Mat Tait $37
Before the world as we know it could come into being, space had to be made between the Sky and the Earth; their children had somehow to force them apart. Tait's stunning dark illustrations and seamlessly bilingual, typographically exciting text bring this foundation myth alive for a new generation.
>>Just look at these illustrations!
>>Visit Mat Tait's website.
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso $45
"Every single person has something unique to them which is impossible to re-create, without exception." —John Smith, acting coach
Nick Drnaso's graphic novel Acting Class creates a tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation. Ten strangers are brought together under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: they are out of step with their surroundings and desperate for change. A husband and wife, four years into their marriage and simmering in boredom. A single mother, her young son showing disturbing signs of mental instability. A peculiar woman with few if any friends and only her menial job keeping her grounded. A figure model, comfortable in his body and ready for a creative challenge. A worried grandmother and her adult granddaughter; a hulking laborer and gym nut; a physical therapist; an ex-con. With thrumming unease, the class sinks deeper into their lessons as the process demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group's deepest fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters' masks and takes us through an unsettling journey. From the author of Sabrina.
>>Look inside!
Demon Copperhead is born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon takes us along on his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labour, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses, in a contemporary rural America riddled with poverty and opioids. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Inspired by the unflinching truth-telling of David Copperfield, Kingsolver enlists Dickens's anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of story.
>>Dickens has always been Kingsolver's ancestor.
With little boxes of liquorice, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, Rafa arrives at the remote Alpine town of Strega to work at the grand Olympic Hotel. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff uniforms of seasonal workers and are taught to iron, cook, and make the beds by austere matrons. In spare moments between tasks, the girls start to enjoy each other’s company as they pick herbs in the garden, read in the library, and take in the scenery. But when the hotel suddenly fills with people for a raucous party, one of the girls disappears. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths young women are told, what they are raised to expect from the world, the violence they are made to endure, and, ultimately, the question of whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.
"A work of mythic reinvention about the power of girls coming of age in a world hellbent on containing their passions and imaginations. Strega left me breathless, angry, and then thrilled by the dare it leaves in the reader's lap. —Lidia Yuknavitch
"If Fleur Jaeggy and Shirley Jackson had ever spent the night together in The Shining Hotel, their love child might have been Strega. As it was, this Strega came into the world through a different yet equally miraculous union: that of a writer and a translator of extraordinary talent. Its hypnotic, off-kilter prose dances the reader into a state of gloried frenzy, pressing the sometimes-nightmarish buttons of imagined memory as it probes the essence of being young, searching, and exploited." —Polly Barton
"As uncompromising and brilliant as it is disturbing." —Olga Ravn
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers. This fierce debut from indigenous Bundjalung writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled Australian nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.
Bernhard began his writing career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly obsessive, filled with an undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry—one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience, with the leitmotif of success-failure, that makes his fiction such a pleasure. For all of these reasons, Bernhard's Collected Poems, translated into English for the first time by James Reidel, is a key to understanding the irascible black comedy found in virtually all of Bernhard's writings.
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa. She had long been fascinated by the indigenous group called the /Xam, who were brutally forced from their ancestral lands by European settlers in the nineteenth century. Facing extinction and the death of their language, several of the /Xam people related their stories to a European philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his English sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd. In 12,000 pages of notebooks, Lloyd and Bleek meticulously recorded their words - their dreams, memories, hopes, history and beliefs - creating an extraordinary archive of this now extinct people.
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. As the world is plunged into a bewildering new state, she immerses herself in the stories of the /Xam. The /Xam saw themselves as just one small part of the complexity of nature. Their belief system gave voice and dignity to everything that surrounded them, the dead and the living, birds and animals, the wind and the rain, the moon and the stars. All things were once people, they said - everything was speaking to you, if you only knew how to listen. This is a haunting book about loss, colonialism, nature, and about how we live in the world and what we leave behind.
"An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction."—Olivia Laing
"When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology..." It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.
"He brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary—an original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms." —Colm Toibin
Preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions, a group of friends look back on their childhood. Their dreams circle their old classmate Estrella Gonzlez Jepsen. They catch glimpses of her braids, hear echoes of her voice, read old letters. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances and a trip to the beach. It soon transpires that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in Chile's Pinochet regime and after she simply disappeared, question of what became of her haunts her former friends. Growing up, they were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them but powerless to resist or confront it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the 'ghostly green bullets' they fired in their favourite video game. Fernndez summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
"A small jewel of a book. Fernndez's picturesque language and dream-like atmosphere is well worth being invaded by. A book to slip in the pocket to read and reread." —Patti Smith
McCarthy's first novel in over a decade shows his prose even sharper and his late style even tauter. In 1980 Bobby Western dives to a sunken jet near Mississippi, only to find no black box and the bodies of only nine of the ten passengers. A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister. As he is drawn across, or rather through, the American South, Western confronts the ethical harms of the United States, and of the human predicament more generally.
"What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic. McCarthy started out as the laureate of American manifest destiny, spinning his hard-bitten accounts of rapacious white men. He ends his journey, perhaps, as the era’s jaundiced undertaker." —Guardian
COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognises that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of author, activist (and founder of human rights organisation Al-Haq) Raja. In this memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resisted under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja failed to recognise his father's courage and, in turn, his father did not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz was murdered in 1985, it changed Raja irrevocably.
"Raja Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness." —Rachel Kushner
The world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We urgently need to avert war between the United States and China, catastrophic climate change, and other global public harms. We must do so, however, in a world in which sovereign states remain in command. The opportunity for self-interested cooperation among nations is immense. Unger shows how different types of coalitions among states can seize on this opportunity and avoid the greatest dangers that we face.
Are they paying you extra for this? You'd better be getting something. We'd better be getting something. For the inconvenience I mean. The machine's here for the whole weekend is what they said. What if we had guests? They never asked. And in any case what are the dangers? Being tested like lab-rats we are. Did they even try to provide any assurance it was all perfectly safe? This is the prototype. The first step to a new future. A future that will be easy and abundant. A future in which distance is no longer a barrier to human contact. And all it takes is a simple transport unit, in every home, every street, every town. Quick. Clean. Easy. A future driven by data, not emotion. And so begins the journey of a new technology that will soon change the world and everyone in it - the sceptics and the converts, the innocents and the evangelists. A scientific wonder that quickly becomes an everyday aspect of life. But what of our inherent messiness? In a world preoccupied with progress, what will happen to the things that make us human - the memories, the fears, the loves, the contradictions, the mortality? As we push for a sense of perfection, what do we stand to lose? Questioning, innovative and shot through with a rich humanity, Appliance is a novel that examines our faith in technology, our constant hunger for new things and the rapid changes affecting all our lives. It challenges us to stop and reflect on the future we want, the systems we trust... and what really matters to us.
Red Valkyries: Feminist lessons from five revolutionary women by Kristen Ghodsee $29
Short-listed for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Through a series of lively biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism by examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Alexandra Kollontai, the aristocratic Bolshevik
- Nadezhda Krupskaya, the radical pedagogue
- Inessa Armand, the polyamorous firebrand
- Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadly sniper
- Elena Lagadinova, the partisan turned scientist turned global women's rights activist
None of these women were 'perfect' leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. In brief conversational chapters Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women and renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of left feminist movements around the globe.
My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body just like the water in the walls of the house…
Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.
"Tremendous; the transition from pity to fear, as we warily circle Aoileann’s brutalised psyche, is brilliantly done." —Guardian
"This is a truly different Irish novel. One that entwines Irish myth, the reality of human bodies, life and death, and traditional gothic horror in a macabrely beautiful and, in the end, redemptive dance." —Irish Independent
Everyone has something that makes them feel self-conscious. It might be the smell of your breath, the size of your nose, or the way your shirt sleeves bunch up under your jumper. At the centre of this story is a little boy who has a small but embarrassing problem: every time he pees, a few drops dribble on to his underpants. Curious, he asks other children if they have the same issue. He soon discovers a simple life lesson: everyone is battling some kind of irritation.
Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity.
>>Other interesting books in the 'Object Lessons' series.
>>Other interesting books in the 'Object Lessons' series.
