Our Book of the Week is Making Space: A history of New Zealand women in architecture, edited by Elizabeth Cox. Diligently compiled, thoughtfully written and beautifully presented, this book presents the remarkable and remarkably diverse contributions of women to architectural practice in Aotearoa, contributions to the built environment all the more notable in the face of the social mores and professional exclusion that often opposed achievements and then caused them to be overlooked. 
>>Have a look inside!
>>We see their work but do we know their names? 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 


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Annual 3: A miscellany from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Kate De Goldi and Susan Paris  {Reviewed by STELLA}
Wrap your eyes around this! The third Annual is a treasure trove of hilarious tales, heartfelt memories, captivating comic strips, and fascinating facts. Not to mention evocations to play scrabble or knit yourself a brain hat, foraging instructions complete with recipes, and how to be a young environmentalist. So it’s still the holidays and the book stack has been depleted. The favourites have been read several times and it’s too hot outside. Maybe, you’re off to spend a few days with your grandparents — they will enjoy dipping into this with you. For me, Kate De Goldi's and Susan Price’s Annuals remind me of school holidays at my Nana and Grandad’s, sifting through the not-so-interesting Bibles to find the Girl’s Own Annuals and the old National Geographics. While these were quaint when even I was a child, they are doubly so now. Annual 3 is anything but quaint. It’s adventurous and thoughtful — a great mix of stuff from some of our best authors and illustrators. Gregory O’Brien and Eve Armstrong discuss art, Art Sang makes a comic strip of Maurice Gee’s 'The Champion', and there’s a diary entry for the campaign (ambition) to be class rep. There are doll stories of very different natures, one about belonging by Henrietta Bollinger, and the other rather more sinister from Airini Beautrais. Austin Milne introduces us to a girl, Holly, who would rather (can’t help but) draw ornate ‘plus’ signs than do equations; dotted throughout is Old Dingus — the ‘uptight’ dad (parents read this as exasperated); and if you are hanging out with friends or siblings you could try out the play, read poetry or board game away with Camp Kuku or practice your te reo with Ben Brown’s crossword puzzle. Aimed at 9—14-year-olds, there is plenty of food here for a hungry mind. If you’re lucky you might rustle up a lunch of kawakawa frittata and maybe Grisela Clarkson’s lovingly illustrated 'Big Spread'. You choose! Daily delights abound in this wonderful miscellany. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
For a long time I have wanted to write a review of Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire and yet I have not yet done so, I thought as I set off, thinking also the afternoon was really too hot to write properly, not that that was what I was doing, or not exactly, and certainly too hot to be walking home over asphalt spread in this continuous strip right to my front gate, presumably to capture and radiate and compound as much of the sun’s heat as possible. It would seem fitting if I wrote my review as I walked, though, I thought, considering that Panthers and the Museum of Fire takes place, and certainly it is on one level very oriented to place, in the head of the narrator, a narrator who has assumed not only the name but presumably selected characteristics of the book’s author, not that that matters, as she walks through Sydney to return a manuscript to the sister of the childhood friend who wrote it, a manuscript titled Panthers and the Museum of Fire, to be returned to the childhood friend's sister as the childhood friend has recently died. It was during her reading of this manuscript after the childhood friend’s sister had asked the narrator not to read it after all but to return it as soon as possible that the narrator has had the writing epiphany that she has for so long sought, though whether the writing epiphany was related to the manuscript catalytically or cannibalistically is unclear, especially to the narrator herself. “I had been so taken in by the manuscript, not so much unable to put it down as unable to leave it alone, that at the end of the reading, and all the writing that proceeded from the reading, I had — and continue to have — no sense at all of what the manuscript is about,” she writes, though how I am able to quote this so precisely when I am ostensibly walking home is unclear to me, just as how this text appears when I am ostensibly walking home is also unclear albeit somehow easier to believe, I thought. Walking in itself is a genre, I thought, as I started to climb the hill, thankful for the small amount of shade provided by the trees overhanging the footpath, though thankful to whom for this detail is uncertain. Walking is in any case a genre of action, obviously, but it seems to me that walking is also a literary genre, I thought, or possibly the Ur-genre that underlies all text. In walking as in text you set out, you move along, and you come to the end of the journey, time has passed, you have covered some ground, you have got to where you intended or you have not, you have been surprised by what you have seen or you have not, you have cast your mind backwards or forwards in time while all the time moving steadily or not-so-steadily through time, depending on the length of your stride and the grammar of your journey, perhaps writing and walking are one and the same, I thought. Should I then be writing here that I step off the curb by the Examiner Street roundabout or am I in fact stepping off the curb, is writing about walking home the same as actually walking home, I think as I walk home, these seem somehow different but for a person reading about it, if I can postulate such a person even when it is unlikely that there will ever be such a person, I thought, there really is no difference. And likewise for Jen Craig, whose looping, digressive, fugue-like and frequently hilarious thoughts cast about wherever they will as the narrator walks her steady way to meet the childhood friend’s sister at a café to return the manuscript of Panthers and the Museum of Fire. These thoughts, or the writing that stands in for these thoughts, include some of the best writing I have read on anorexia even though I cannot remember what Jen Craig had to say on anorexia so I will have to reread that part of the book, something I cannot do when ostensibly walking home on this narrative pavement without breaking the fiction that I am actually walking home on this narrative pavement, I thought. The excellent writing on the narrator’s anorexia includes the coincidence of names between the author and the Jenny Craig of the famous weight loss programme, which is very funny if that is the sort of thing that you find very funny, which I do, I thought. The tragic is not fully tragic unless it is funny too, I thought. Is that wrong? I have been, as I said, for a long time intending to write a review of Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which was perhaps my favourite of all the books I read in 2022, I thought, but time has gone by and the more I have thought about Panthers and the Museum of Fire the more my experience of reading Panthers and the Museum of Fire has been replaced by my memory of the experience of reading Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which is not the same thing but something now almost wholly mine, I thought, and really, I had been so taken in by the the book that, even at the end of the reading, I had — and continue to have — no sense at all of what the book is about. Haha. I walk but I do not write, I thought, when I don’t write there is nothing to show for my walking, not even the review of Panthers and the Museum of Fire that I have long wanted to write, I thought as I turned into Bronte Street by the college and started at last to head downhill, I could list several things that prevent my writing, several things that could be briefly categorised, much as I resist categorising things I must admit that categories are an instinctive mental function, at least for me, as the state of my body, the state of my mind, the state of my circumstances, and the state of the world, if indeed distinctions may be made between these states, these several things are antagonistic to writing, they oppose writing, I thought, at least for me. But so, I thought, does writing oppose them. Suppose wrote anyway, could I by writing oppose and overcome these several things arranged against writing, and against me more generally, could I even change the state of my body, the state of my mind, the state of my circumstances, and the state of the world, so to call them, could I overcome these several things by writing, and make the world or my life or at least something somehow better by writing? No, I thought, as I crossed a Collingwood Street unseasonally devoid of traffic, perhaps everyone’s sick, writing could not make anything better, though I am not certain that it could not make all those several things worse. No,  I will not be able to write a review of this book, I thought, I will never review Panthers and the Museum of Fire, I thought, even though I would like everyone to read Panthers and the Museum of Fire, I will be incapable of writing a review of this book or of writing anything else, perhaps because of the obstacles I categorised back there up the hill, perhaps for some still vaguer reason such as the fact that something that does not exist hardly needs a reason not to exist or to justify its nonexistence. Does it? Is the default state of the world everything or nothing, I wondered as I paused on the Bronte Street bridge and let the breeze coursing down the Brook rise and cool my face for a moment though it was not very cool, I will be home soon, I will not write my review, a review than nobody would in any case read even if I wrote it, I will open the gate and walk past the trees and unlock the door and go to the kitchen and bring this narrative at last to an end by the refrigerator, a narrative that in fact precludes, for reasons I have outlined several hundred metres ago, writing a review of Panthers and the Museum of Fire, even though I would have liked to write a review of this book, or at least to have written one. Velleity perhaps is enough. 
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

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Little by Edward Carey
If you are after an absorbing, inventive, quirky and absolutely charming novel, read Edward Carey’s Little. Set predominantly in France, meet its history and its most famous Parisians, not to forget the Court of Versailles, through the wax heads cast by Doctor Curtius and the young Marie Grosholtz. Marie, nicknamed Little due to her diminutive size and the young age at which she is apprenticed to Curtius after her mother’s untimely death, is an unlikely employee at the age of six to the reclusive anatomist, but she proves to be exactly the right person for the development of his wax work. Obsessed with producing perfect heads, he needs someone who not only understands his passion but someone who has the skills to draw, assist, mix plaster, pour moulds and thread in hair — a time-consuming and precise job. Marie Grosholz is the perfect assistant. With Carey’s excellent illustrations, wonderful and crazy characters (the frightening Widow Picot, the nervous tick of a young man, her son Edmond, the pious, yet rather foolish Princess Elisabeth, a fanciful portrayal of Loius XVI, and the brutal dog-boy-man of the elaborate name, Jacques Beauvisage), and delicious writing in the voice of our plucky heroine Little, you will be delighted. It’s France, gutter and luxury, charm and chaos, from the celebrity status of Curtius’s Cabinet of Curiosities (murderers rubbing shoulders with wealthier rogues) at The Monkey House, to the macabre fascination for the royal court. From poverty to riches to revolution and disaster, Marie Grosholtz will dance a daring zigzag of ill wind, good luck and careful advantage, not to mention some chance, to survive (if sleeping in a windowless room or a largish cupboard passes for living) and eventually prosper. She will find love, and lose it; she will be a favourite and then dismissed; she will overcome only to be pushed down in the muck, imprisoned and then released. Her talent for waxwork saves her in the end. Wonderful.


VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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Essays: One by Lydia Davis  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
An essay is a literary form but a collection of essays is not a literary form, or, rather, a collection of essays, unless written specifically as a cohesive set, which is unusual for collections of essays, and in which case they are not usually considered a collection of essays but something else, only becomes a literary form, and only if we stretch our concept of what constitutes a literary form, at the point at which the essays are assembled, selected and ordered by someone, plausibly not even the author of the essays, some time, perhaps some considerable time, after they were written, at various times perhaps over a considerable period of time, during which the author may or may not have changed her approach to whatever and however she writes and may or may not have written and had published any number of other literary forms, if she happens to be an author who also writes other literary forms. ‘Selected works’ is not a literary form, and essay collections often tend to be selected works, these works often having appeared in various periodicals or other platforms over the years preceding their collection, or, generally more accurately, selection. Reviewing a collection of essays, as an instance of a literary non-form, presents certain difficulties as the reviewer is denied the various familiar analytic tools that are dependent on form, usually ending up making some generalised statements about the author, her qualities and importance, and then garnishing these comments with snippets pulled from various of the works in the collection, each work of which could be analysed as a literary form but none of which tend to be so treated, except perhaps cursorily, due to lack of space and time, space and time being a single entity in writing as they are in physics. If a reviewer does not quite know how to approach the literary non-form of a collection of essays this is because a reader, of which a reviewer is merely a pitiful example, does not know how to approach a non-form. A reader has no obligations towards the collectedness of pieces towards which, severally, he may have obligations, but also, at least, thankfully, tools dependent upon the form of the several pieces, but what obligations does a reviewer have towards the collectedness of the pieces? It is hard to review something that you do not recognise as a thing. Lydia Davis is best known for the devastating precision of the sentences that comprise some of the shortest, sharpest stories you are likely to read, and for her subtle and precise translations of Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Leiris and others. Her economy of expression astounds, whether that economy is displayed in a single-sentence fiction, indefinitely extended in a translation, or in such various essays as are collected in this book. The essays, which are of various forms, all concern the relationship between language and lucidity; they all concern writing: either writers or the practice of writing; they are all about reading (of which the practice of writing is a peculiarly freighted subset). The essays all both demonstrate and concern what we could call ‘the mechanics of form’, the way in which language, well used, creates, sharpens or transfigures meaning in literature. Davis shows us how to narrow our linguistic aperture in order to maximise our literary depth of field. She is full of good advice, suggestions for new reading, exemplary sentences and memorable observations: “If we catch only a little of the subject, or only badly, clumsily, incoherently, perhaps we have not destroyed it.” Because a collection is not a literary form, you have no obligation as a reader towards the totality of the volume, but there is much here to enjoy and discover, much that will sharpen your writing and your reading of the writing of others, much to return to and re-read. Most likely you will read it all. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas


 

Our Book of the Week correlates the lives and works of three fiercely unconventional creative women: electronic music pioneer Delia Derbeyshire, medieval mystic Margery Kempe, and the book's author, sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti. RE-SISTERS explores the wellsprings and consequences of artistic passion in a world of unforgiving conventional forces. 
>>Take three outsider women. 
>>Delia Derbyshire feature Trailer. Cosey Fanni Tutti wrote this book after being commissioned to write a soundtrack for the film about Derbeyshire's life. 
>>The Delian Mode. 
>>A nice tune by DD. 
>>Margery Kempe online. 
>>A playlist for Margery Kempe. 
>>A playlist for the book. 
>>'Cowboys in Cuba'.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens         $45
On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through through a world where not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention our novels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata. 
"The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby - so, what are you doing about it?" —Annie Hayter
>>Welcome to the new world. 
Bold Ventures: Thirteen tales of architectural tragedy by Charlotte van den Broeck         $40
In thirteen chapters, van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects — architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as van den Broeck asks- what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide — what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' — in relation to creativity and public disgrace. 
"Everyone fails every day, but an architect's failure is inescapably visible, a public humiliation, even when it doesn't occasion loss of life. That the relationship between creator and creation can become so deleterious is a source of obsession for Charlotte van den Broeck. Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence." —Olivia Laing, Guardian 
I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava            $28
An absurdist novel about fame, culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns. Margot’s on her way to Montana, with blood on her face and a jeweled cigarette case full of pills. She’s fresh from a bad break-up and fleeing the cold comforts of her famous family – legendary punk parents and an overbearing show business scion of a grandmother.  But while the eyes of the world are elsewhere for the first time in Margot's life, a graveyard encounter with a disgraced doctor and the discovery of a dozen old film reels leads to a troubling new subjecthood, as her congenital inability to feel pain puts her center stage for one man’s desire and ambition. A jarringly sensual book about the peculiarities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families, and a young woman trying to find a way forward with both.
"A sharp critical vision lurches into focus: of culture as commodity, of suffering as currency, and of the female body as this agon's generalized battleground." — Tom McCarthy
"I Fear My Pain Interests You is meticulously constructed, with each part supporting and supported by the others. Controlled self-awareness like this in novels makes me pay close attention, enriching my experience." —Tao Lin, The New York Times 
"LaCava's book animates its story with something of Patricia Highsmith's sociopathology and Clarice Lispector's macabre glamor." —JC Holburn 
Desert Soul by Isabelle Eberhardt            $28
"I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live far from the civilised world, as a free nomad." Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, converted to Islam, and survived an assassination attempt, all before dying in a flash flood at the age of 27.

The History of the World in 100 Plants by Simon Barnes         $60
But we still consume the energy of the sun in the form of food. The sun is available for consumption because of plants. Plants make food from the sun by the process of photosynthesis; nothing else in the world can do this. We eat plants, or we do so at second hand, by eating the eaters of plants.
Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn't live for a day without plants. Our past is all about plants, our present is all tied up with plants; and without plants there is no future. Nicely written and presented. 
Swamp Songs: Journeys through marsh, meadow and other wetlands by Tom Blass          $42
Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit - and only partly of this earth. For centuries, they - and their inhabitants - have been the object of our distrust. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers; of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods.A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a reappraisal and celebration of people and environments closely intertwined.
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust (translated by Lucy Raitz)          $36
A new translation of this novella extracted from In Search of Lost Time. A good place to start with Proust. When Charles Swann first lays eyes on Odette de Crécy, her beauty leaves him indifferent. Their paths continue to cross in the drawing rooms and theatres of Parisian high society, and the seeds of desire in Swann begin to flourish. What follows is a journey through self-delusion, jealousy and delirious fantasy, which will take Swann far from the sedate comfort of his society life.

The Girl Who Talked to Trees by Natasha Farrant and Lydia Correy         $23
Olive's best friend is a four-hundred-year-old oak tree, and it is in danger. As she tumbles into its magic world, she makes it a promise. From deep roots to high branches, a Persian garden to an underwater forest, from tulip trees to wild apple to vengeful box, she listens to the trees telling stories for all time. And she keeps her promise. Nicely illustrated and presented. 

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa           $35
Maria Ressa's work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the Philippines — President Duterte. How to Stand Up to a Dictator tells how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation that has netted the globe, from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes. Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work. 
"Absolutely sublime and transformational. Maria Ressa lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it." —Shoshana Zuboff
Monumental Lies: Culture wars and the truth about the past by Robert Bevan            $45
Bevan argues that monuments, architecture and cities are material evidence of history. They are the physical trace of past events, of previous ways of thinking and of politics, economics and values that percolate through to today. When our cities are reshaped as fantasies about the past, when monuments tell lies about who deserves honour or are destroyed and the struggle for justice forgotten, the historical record is being manipulated. When decisions are based on misinformed assumptions about how the built environment influences our behaviour or we are told, falsely, that certain architectural styles are alien to our cities, or when space pretends to be public but is private, or that physical separation is natural, we are being manipulated. There is a growing threat to the material evidence of the truth about history.
“Robert Bevan's passionate, timely polemic is a much-needed antidote to all the horror stories about 'woke' protesters tearing down monuments. The true threat to our built-up environment, he argues, comes not from the Left, but from governments who employ all the powers of the state to re-write history in their image. It is at times a truly terrifying read.” – Keith Lowe
“Bevan astutely argues that those who manipulate our cultural past are shaping our future, making the case that historic buildings have become battlegrounds for right-wing and nationalist political arguments.” – The Art Newspaper
“This close reading of the city is a potent response to the culture wars because it deals in precisely the historical honesty that culture warriors have no stomach for. Righteous but always nuanced, Bevan is the perfect guide to the way urban iconography distorts history and entrenches power.” – Justin McGuirk
Scenes from Prehistoric Life by Francis Pryor          $25
Archaeology is transforming our knowledge of what it would have been like to live in Britain and Ireland in the time before the Romans. By revealing how prehistoric forebears coped with both simple practical problems and more existential challenges, Francis Pryor offers remarkable insights into the long and unrecorded centuries of our early history, and a convincing, well-attested and movingly human portrait of prehistoric life as it was really lived. Pryor paints a vivid picture of British and Irish prehistory, from the Old Stone Age (about one million years ago) to the arrival of the Romans in AD 43, in a sequence of fifteen chronologically arranged profiles of specific ancient landscapes. Whether writing about the early human family who trod the estuarine muds of Happisburgh in Norfolk c.900,000 BC, the craftsmen who built a wooden trackway in the Somerset Levels early in the fourth millennium BC, or the Iron Age denizens of Britain's first towns, Pryor uses excavations and surveys to uncover the daily routines of ancient ancestors.
Glowrushes by Roberto Piumini (translated by Leah Janeczko)           $23
Madurer is the son of a great lord, with untold wealth, but he is also the victim of a mysterious disease that means he cannot be exposed to sunlight or fresh air. He is confined to three windowless rooms inside a palace, but his doting father summons a famous artist to cover the walls of the rooms with paintings showing the world his son cannot truly experience. As the painter works on his murals, his relationship with the boy begins to deepen until they forge a firm friendship. How can he show this child the beauty of the world with only his paintbrush to work with? Glowrushes is a classic of Italian children's literature, published in English for the first time.
The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi           $25
A classic Japanese murder mystery set in post-war Tokyo and steeped in the illicit subculture of Yakuza tattoos. Kinue Nomura survived World War II only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs discovered in a room locked from the inside. Gone is the part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos ever rendered. Kenzo Matsushita, a young doctor who was first to discover the crime scene, feels compelled to assist his detective brother, who is in charge of the case. But Kenzo has a secret: he was Kinue's lover, and soon his involvement in the investigation becomes as twisted and complex as the writhing snakes that once adorned Kinue's torso.

The Magic of Mushrooms: Fungi in folklore, science and traditional medicine by Sandra Lawrence          $33
Featuring images of over 100 species, this book explains the folklore, science and occult of fungi, showing that from saving lives to expanding the mind, the potential of these fascinating organisms is immense.
The Lonely Stories: 22 celebrated writers on the joys and struggles of being alone edited by Natalie Eve Garrett          $35
Includes Megan Giddings, Claire Dederer, Imani Perry, Jeffery Renard Allen, Maggie Shipstead, Emily Raboteau, Lev Grossman, Lena Dunham, Yiyun Li, Anthony Doerr, Helena Fitzgerald, Maile Meloy, Aja Gabel, Jean Kwok, Amy Shearn, Peter Ho Davies, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jesmyn Ward, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dina Nayeri, Melissa Febos.

Children of the Flying City by Jason Sheehan            $21
Brought to the flying city of Highgate when he was only five years old, orphan Milo Quick has never known another home. Now almost thirteen, Milo survives one daredevil grift at a time, relying only on his wit, speed, and best friends Jules and Dagda. A massive armada has surrounded Highgate's crumbling armaments. Because behind locked doors—in opulent parlours and pneumatic forests and a master toymaker's workshop—the once-great flying city protects a powerful secret, hidden away for centuries. A secret that's about to ignite a war. One small airship, the Halcyon, has slipped through the ominous blockade on a mission to collect Milo—and the rich bounty on his head—before the fighting begins. But the members of the Halcyon's misfit crew aren't the only ones chasing Milo Quick. An exciting new series. 


VOLUME BooksNew releases

Welcome to 2023. Whatever else the coming year may hold, we can be sure that there will be plenty of good books to help us through it. We wish you all good health, good company when you want it, solitude when you seek it, hope when you need it, and happy reading all year long.

Read our first NEWSLETTER of the new year: BOOKS @ VOLUME #311 (6.1.23)


VOLUME BooksNewsletter

 


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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell  {Reviewed by STELLA}

Based on a poem, based on a portrait of a young woman forced into a courtly marriage, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel The Marriage Portrait is arresting, terrifying, and lush. It’s an amalgam of historical fact, layered analysis, playful imaginings, and rich observations. Like her earlier novel Hamnet, she breathes life into things we may already know, but from an angle we don’t expect. The young woman in question is Lucrezia de Medici, who married the Duke of Ferrara in 1558. She died in 1560, and it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by her husband. Hamnet took the reader hook, line, and sinker. It was vivid and compelling from start to finish. The Marriage Portrait is just as inventive, and convincing, but asks us to delve close to Lucrezia’s experience, which is at times grueling (yet we love her for her passion, quick intelligence, ability to dream and comprehend beauty in both the ordinary and extraordinary), and we, as the reader, ‘see’ the machinations of the court as well as the Duke’s subterfuge all too clearly, while the girl/young woman which Lucrezia is cannot ever hope to understand. Despite her experience as a daughter of a powerful count and alive to the necessities of the arranged political marriage, her naivety is wrapped in her desire to avoid such manipulations and to see the world as a place of beauty and surprise. O’Farrell’s Lucrezia is a free spirit (one that will be broken) — as a child in the Medici household her eccentricities are tolerated and her love for art is allowed to flourish. She is in a privileged position and only the sudden death of her elder sister turns the tables on her fortunes. The Duke is beguiled by her beauty, and possibly her simmering wildness — something that a powerful man may be drawn to as well as wish to control. For this is a novel about control — control of a woman; the need for a legacy (for to have no issue is a problem for the Duke with plots all about him); control of his own desires with his loyal and cruel Leonello; and control of his temper, which fluctuates between stifling admiration and a dangerously quiet force. O’Farrell introduces us to Lucrezia as she is suffering and in fever. She has ridden with Alfonso, the Duke, to a lonely and remote fortress. She is sick and distressed, but awake to her death. Yet she rages against it all, summoning up the strength to meet the painter who has ridden furiously after them in demand of his coin and a portrait under his arm. We will not meet this scene of a beaten-down Lucrezia looking upon her former more robust self until the closing chapters. From these devastating opening pages, O’Farrell takes us back to the home of her childhood, slipping unnoticed in back passages, lost in drawing and painting, tutored alongside her brothers, and fascinated by her father’s animal menagerie. A child who did not fear the tiger, who walked the ramparts, and was always where maybe she shouldn’t be — yet loved in all her oddity and admired for her skill. Married life changes this — expectations grow, and while Alfonso pours attention on her, there is a tension bristling not far from the surface. Using lush language and rich descriptions of cloth and jewels, of gardens and forests, of the courts with their dance and song, O’Farrell paints us her own canvas of both beauty and its flipside, an ugliness that even an innocent young woman can not be impervious to. As the bonds tighten and strangulation through illness or at the hands of the handsome Alfonso seems certain, nothing is certain and yet a fevered Lucrezia may find a way out of her dilemma — an escape that releases her from her contract, that makes the marriage portrait a distant memory.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella

 


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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.
VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas

 

In a world in which we are blown from place to place like dandelion seeds, what does it mean to belong? Where or what is home? Where are we from? Are these things up to us to decide, or are they dictated to us by culture and politics? In DANDELIONS, this week's Book of the Week, Thea Lenarduzzi pieces together four generations of her family's migrations between Italy and England, and finds that seemingly unremarkable lives are full of information that provides deep insight into our endless struggle to reconcile our individual and collective lives. 
>>Where do we come from? What ae we? Where are we going? 
>>Migration, cooking, living. 
VOLUME BooksBook of the week

 NEW RELEASES

Complete Poems by James K. Baxter, edited and with an introduction by John Weir            $200
Stunning and unsurpassable, this monumental 4-volume slip-cased edition contains over 3000 poems, half of which have not been previously published. Weir, a poet, friend and confidant of Baxter, has achieved the Herculean task of sorting these into a coherent order, noting where poems have been reworked or repurposed, their possible inspirations and influences, and Baxter’s own thoughts about his work. Baxter’s poetry is rich with imagery and mythology, with themes of nature, religion, social commentary and human frailty. It ranges from the spiritual to the obscene, from simple children’s rhymes and witty epigrams to epic ballads and sophisticated modernist works. He claimed the purpose of art was ‘to provide a healthy and permanent element of rebellion’, and that ‘poetry should contain moral truth’. Especially in his later years, many of his poems railed against injustice and oppression, and gave voice to the destitute and downtrodden. He was well aware of his many human failings, and explored these within his poems as well.
The Longcut by Emily Hall            $30
The narrator is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it when she sees it. Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a 'completed' column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions—what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue—that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.
"Emily Hall's The Longcut has produced its own inimitable effect. I think of a mayor I read about who advocated digging a hole so big there's no alternative to filling it. Emily Hall's digging (for art) is bedraggled and ecstatic. It makes its mark and I am helplessly subsumed in it still. Her Longcut is like an Artist's Way for bad kids." —Eileen Myles
Remainders of the Day: More diaries from The Bookshop, Wigtown by Shaun Bythell            $33
The third of Bythell's hilarious and almost-too-incisive volumes of the diaries he compiles from behind the counter in his now-famous second-hand bookshop. Every entry rings true, from unforgettable customers and their unforgettable comments, to unusual volumes, to the difficulties and joys of running your own bookshop in an increasingly corporatised and impersonal world. 
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches)           $33
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the opportunity pass her by. Boulder is less enthused, but doesn't know how to say no—and so finds herself dragged along on a journey that feels as thankless as it is alien. With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.
"Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure." —Fernanda Melchor
Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey)          $35
Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, occupied by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gastón makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who's in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max's son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support. Gastón begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonization . . . and those aliens might intend to make a return visit.
"This is a book about xenophobia and racism and the conflicted tug between isolation and community. It makes a fine - and deliciously strange - addition to Villalobos's already grand personal canon. Wrought with tenderness, wit, and a wonderful sense of absurdity, Villalobos' latest novel is a triumph." —Kirkus
Take a Bite! Eat your way around the world by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski         $50
"Food glorious food! Eat your way around the world in this tasty, giant-sized book which explores the food, recipes and cultural traditions from twenty-six different countries. Take a Bite is the work of talented graphic artists Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski, the creative married couple behind the bestselling Maps, and its 116 pages of food of every taste and description are guaranteed to make mouths water and tummies rumble. Packed full of fascinating facts, recipes and cultural traditions, this cornucopia of deliciousness takes youngsters (and their parents!) on an entertaining and feast-filled adventure full of delectable food and cookery marvels. Where do corn, wheat and potatoes come from? What have people in Turkey been eating for centuries? Learn how to make Polish pancakes, Vietnamese pancakes, Brazilian pralines and Hungarian lecso. Be a guest at a Moroccan feast, sail along a Vietnamese floating market and indulge in the haute cuisine of France's master chefs. As well as discovering a host of new delicacies, readers will also learn about their remarkable history and cultural roots along the way. Lavishly and colourfully illustrated throughout, designed in an easy-to-read format, and with a text translated by Agnes Monod-Gayraud, this beautiful bonanza book will capture children's imaginations and is the perfect gift for food lovers of any age." —Lancaster Guardian 
From Dinaz Aunty's incredible tamarind and coconut fish curry, lamb stewed with cinnamon and Hunza apricots, to baked custards infused with saffron and cardamom, Parsi cuisine is a rich fusion of Persian and Indian influences: unique and utterly delicious. Farokh Talati gathers together a selection of classic Parsi recipes from his travels through India and time spent in the kitchen with family, revealing them here for you to discover and enjoy at home. Recipes include: Parsi omelette Charred sweetcorn and paneer salad Persian scorched rice Parsi kheema Kedgeree - a Parsi version Prawn Patio Mango poached in jaggery and saffron Cardamom doughnuts.
Jackdaw by Tade Thompson           $33
In this shocking and at times darkly comic novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him. As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures. This short novel explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.
"By turns disturbing and hilarious, Jackdaw gets closer to Bacon's appalling truths about humanity and the treacherous flesh that embodies it than any non-fictional work could do ... Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading." —Will Maclean
Exposed: The Greek and Roman body by Caroline Vout          $55
The popular conception of the perfection of Classical bodies eptomised in white marble is entirely a modern myth. Not only were Classical sculptures highly coloured, this remarkable book shows that Greek and Roman bodies were ailing, imperfect, diverse, and responsible for a legacy as lasting as their statues. Vout taps into the questions that those in the Greek and Roman worlds asked about their bodies: Where do we come from? What makes us different from gods and animals? What happens to our bodies, and the forces that govern them, when we die? She also reveals the surprising actions people often took to transform their bodies — from sophisticated surgery and contraception to body oils, cosmetics and early gym memberships.
"An extraordinary book that stopped me in my tracks again and again. Filled with insights, surprises and asides that draw on a breath-taking array of sources from the distant past to the present day. A triumph from start to finish." —Peter Frankopan
Capitalism has come, in the twenty-first century, to dominate nearly every sphere of life, from ecology and race to the organisation of care and the practice of politics. In this urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, and from the devaluing of care work to racial injustice. These crisis points all come to a head in the perfect storm of Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the kind of resistance we must build to stop capital from cannibalising our whole world. What we need, she argues, is a broad and wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognise capital’s appetite—and starve it to death.
"Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age - capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis - and, we shall hope, of reckoning." —Andreas Malm
The Foghorn's Lament: The vanishing music of the coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan           $30
What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn's colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman's intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.
"A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea." —Brian Eno
"Now that so many things can be - and are - recorded, I had forgotten that sound could also become extinct. The massive melancholic sound of the foghorn - the sound of safety and loss - is one of these and this colorful and detailed requiem tells the many interlocking stories of people who love it and try to preserve it. This has become one of my favorite books." —Laurie Anderson
"A wonderful way to get up close and very personal with the foghorn - a perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music." —Cosey FanniTutti
Chathams Resurgent: How the Islanders overcame 150 years of misrule by Hugh Rennie             $60
In 1990 those living on Chatham Islands/ Rekohu/ Wharekauri faced crisis. Annexed to New Zealand by a London proclamation, the Islands had experienced 150 years of New Zealand control. Years of muddlement, some good intentions, financial waste, exploitation and theft, and failure to deliver democratic rights and basic infrastructure. The after-effects of Rogernomics had produced a government decision to 'walk away'. Such infrastructure as existed would be abandoned, with the Islanders left to save themselves, or fail and leave. How could it have come to this? The first part of this book details the improbable constitutional history of the Islands to 1990. It includes gunship visits to enforce rule; support of Maori for Tohu, Te Whiti, and Parihaka pacifism; a revolt where the magistrate’s authority crumbled to nothing; and many more remarkable events. In 1990, Islanders rose to the challenge of their new independence from Wellington. Their independent community co-operative, the Chatham Islands Enterprise Trust, soon flourished. Today it operates electricity, ports, shipping, and other companies; uses a portfolio of fishing quota to support on-Island fishers, and supports private Island businesses.
Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A—Z of literary persuasion by Louise Willder         $33
It's good to judge a book by its cover. Drawing on her 25 years writing blurbs for Penguin books, Louise Willder explores the art, anecdote and history of the words that only take a few seconds to read but can determine a book's fate. This illuminating and joyful compendium is about blurbs at their very best and worst. It is also about cover design, movie taglines, adverts, quotes, puns, the creative process, writers from Austen to Orwell and much more. It answers questions such as: Why should adjectives generally be murdered? Which author hated blurbs? Is it ever okay to give away the ending? Why should you never start a blurb with 'When'? Can blurbs be sexist? The story of blurbs is the story of our needs and desires as readers; about who we are and want to be.
The Museum of the Wood Age by Max Adams           $65
Beginning with an investigation of the material properties of various species of wood, The Museum of the Wood Age investigates the influence of six basic devices - wedge, inclined plane, screw, lever, wheel, axle and pulley - and in so doing reveals the myriad ways in which wood has been worked throughout human history. From the simple bivouacs of hunter-gatherers to sophisticated wooden buildings such as stave churches; from the decorative arts to the humble woodworking of rustic furniture; Max Adams fashions a lattice of interconnected stories and objects that trace a path of human ingenuity across half a million years of history.

Hothouse Earth: An inhabitant's guide by Bill McGuire            $25
Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards, explains the science behind the climate crisis, painting a blunt but authentic picture of the sort of world our children will grow old in, and our grandchildren grow up in; a world that we catch only glimpses of in today's blistering heatwaves, calamitous wildfires and ruinous floods and droughts. Bleak though it is, the picture is one we must all face up to, if only to spur genuine action- even at this late stage - to stop a harrowing future becoming a truly cataclysmic one.

The Po: An elegy for Italy's longest river by Tobias Jones             $43
Jones travels the length of the river gathering its stories: its battles, crimes, characters, cuisines, histories, industries and inventions. He visits towns made famous for their sporting legacy, birthplaces of the greatest Italian writers and composers and rediscovers Italy's unusual industries and agricultures; from the marble mines of Paesana that provided the raw materials for the Renaissance to the paddy fields of risotto rice at Chivasso. At the Po's delta is an astonishing nature reserve: a wetland swamp of 380 square kilometres and 450 different lakes.

Clouds Over Paris: The wartime notebooks of Felix Hartlaub, 1940—41 by Felix Hartlaub (translated by Simon Beattie)             $33
The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters. Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafes, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Appearing in English for the first time, Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.



VOLUME BooksNew releases

We wish you a relaxing and enjoyable holiday period, good health and good books. 

Read our latest newsletter: BOOKS @ VOLUME #310 (23.12.22)

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