NEW RELEASES
We will be giving away a copy of the remarkable Renters United! / Lawrence & Gibson Publishing tabloid-format! illustrated! edition of Murdoch Stephens's biting and hilarious RAT KING LANDLORD with every book order we dispatch (until supplies are exhausted). And if you order a Lawrence & Gibson book we will put in a bonus copy!
>>Read Stella's review of RKL.
>>Books from L&G.
Affinities by Brian Dillon $40
What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say affinities exist between such things? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say affinities exist between such things? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.
"This is a deeply personal enterprise but Dillon goes to great lengths to keep at a distance. The collection may amount to a sort-of autobiography but each essay is about the life of the artist or the work itself, not about him. He is careful of his subjects and scrupulous in neither over-interpreting them nor projecting his emotions on to them. Nevertheless, each means something profound to him and each is a pixel that builds into a creative work of his own: a picture of his own aesthetic and the constituent parts of its canon." —Michael Prodger, New Statesman
"The cold increases with the clarity," said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realisation that the West's last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends his bleak vision.
In 'Ungenach', the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In 'The Weatherproof Cape', a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. 'Midland in Stilfs' casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In 'At the Ortler', two middle-aged brothers—one a scientist, the other an acrobat—meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in 'At the Timberline', the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.
The characters that populate Yuri Herrera's remarkable collection of stories inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Borges's Fictions and Calvino's Cosmicomics, these very short stories signal a new dimension in the work of this significant writer. In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meagre bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition. This collection of stories, which ranges from philosophical flights of fancy to the gritty detective story continues to develop Herrera's exploration of the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms.
In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.
"Beguilingly eerie, richly textured, the pages of Owlish are drenched in strange beauty and menace. Like all the best fairy tales, it reveals the dark truths that we would rather not look at directly, and does so with a surreal and singular clarity." —Sophie Mackintosh
Women and girls walk a perilously thin line between ruin and redemption in these stories as they try-with varying degrees of success-to outmanouver the violence that threatens to define their lives.There's the physical violence of men against their bodies—and sometimes the violence they exact in revenge. While doubts about a romantic partner, an abandonment by a sister, the fallout of a parent's pornography addiction, the betrayal of a friend, even the desire to touch a stranger's fur-like body are subtler aggressions that pack their own kinds of punches. Moving between contemporary New Zealand and London, and a dreamlike landscape that isn't quite real, this debut collection shimmers with a brutal kind of hope, exploring power and its contortions, powerlessness and its depravities, and the ends to which we will go to claim back agency.
Juggling with our perception of time and reality, Still Life tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. A multitude of voices across time, place and the lines of fiction and history—from the spectre of Mary Prince to Virginia Woolf's own Sir Nicholas Green—vie for the reader's attention. Their adventures through time and space, from Victorian South Africa and London to the author's desk in Glasgow in the present day, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
"An intriguingly metatextual novel that addresses some of the silences and omissions of South African history, and the broader relationship of historiography, reputation, writing and memory to power.” —Simon Lewis, The Post and Courier
A meeting of mystics. In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. Margery Kempe has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse and have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years. She has told no one of her own visions and knows that time is running out for her to do so.The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear.
A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.
>>The author's voice.
>>The author's voice.
Inspector Gordon and Detective Buffy are back (and not just for the cake) in the final story in this fun and funny series for young readers. Night brings a horrible humming, scraping sound in the forest. Someone has wrecked the badger’s trash can. Later, three large creatures are spotted up on the mountain. Detective Buffy discovers this seemingly small case really is a dangerous mystery—she comes back from her first investigation flat as a gingerbread, rolled over by something huge and terrifying. Back at the station, retired Detective Gordon is training a new young police assistant, and the cakes have run out in the forest bakery! While all the animals cower at the police station, Buffy remembers Gordon’s stories about trolls. Is it possible they do exist? Taking Gordon’s advice about how everyone thinks differently, she finds a way to communicate with the giant creatures—perhaps not so terrifying after all. The book leaves readers with a memorable Gordon message: Everyone thinks differently, strangers are welcome, cakes for everybody!
Four years ago, investigative journalist Guyon Espiner gave up drinking alcohol. He had been a heavy yet controlled drinker since his teens — abstaining three nights a week but making up for it the other four. One morning he woke up after a big night and decided he'd had enough and he quit — no AA, no support groups. Not drinking has given Guyon a new perspective on our relationship with alcohol in Aotearoa, and a lot of it is disturbing. The Drinking Game investigates the alcohol industry: the power, politics and lobbying behind our most harmful drug. Weaving together personal experience, hard research and interviews, it examines why New Zealand has such a heavy drinking culture, the harm it causes and how our attitudes to alcohol are changing. This is a sobering look into how the way you drink is shaped not only by your individual choice, but also by government, media and big business.
>>Alcohol and identity.
>>Alcohol and identity.
Sora hates the catfish whose rolling caused an earthquake so powerful it cracked time itself. It destroyed her home and took her mother. Now Sora and her scientist father live close to the zones the wild and abandoned places where time runs faster or slower than normal. Sora is sensitive to these shifts, and her father recruits her help in exploring these liminal spaces.But it's dangerous there and as she strays further inside in search of her mother, she finds that time distorts, memories fracture and shadows, a glimmer of things not entirely human, linger.
After Sora's father goes missing, she has no choice but to venture into uncharted spaces within the time zones to find him, her mother and perhaps even the catfish itself.
Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a white Victorian Castle in Dalkey overlooking the sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, but his peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask questions about a decades-old case. A traumatic case which Tom never quite came to terms with. His peace is further disturbed by a young mother and family who move in next door, a woman on the run from her own troubles. And what of Tom's family, his wife June and their two children?
"Sebastian Barry faces down the most challenging of subjects with an unflinching pen, using blood for ink. Yet at its heart, Old God's Time is also a love story, of two souls bonded by trauma. Narrated by a retired guard who begins to lose control of his fragile senses as his past clashes with the present, it is shocking, stunning and extraordinarily brave. Barry has once again written a character for the ages." —Liz Nugent
Enjoy browsing our annual VISUAL CULTURE SALE. This is your opportunity to pile up a selection of superb books on art, architecture, photography, design, theory, illustration, film, textiles, craft, and graphic novels, from both Aotearoa and overseas — all at satisfyingly reduced prices. Judging from previous years, our advice is: be quick — there are single copies only of most titles and many of them cannot be reordered (even at full price). >>Click through to start choosing.
>>It's not me who's seeing.
>>The mystical realist.
>>A search for peace.
>>Pure prose.
>>Frames and levels.
>>Revisions and the ear.
>>A new name.
>>Thomas reviews The Other Name.
>>Septology (also available as The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name).
>>Trilogy.
>>Aliss at the Fire.
>>Scenes from a Childhood.
>>Melancholy 1—2.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
  | The Other Name (Septology I—II) by Jon Fosse (translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls) {Reviewed by THOMAS} and I see myself sitting and reading the thick blue book of two parts, not that thick, actually, and I have reached that point in the book, though it is not in fact a point in the book for there is nothing in the book that would mark such a point, but rather a point in my reading of the book, which just happens to be around page seventy-five, that I came to realise that the book is written entirely in one sentence, one slow, patient, uninterrupted flow of words, no, I think, that is not correct, the book is written in two parts, though each begins with the word And, but neither part ends, each rather just leaves off, so it would not be correct that the book is written in one sentence, or in two sentences, one for each part, but rather in no sentences, one, or two, slow, patient, uninterrupted flow, or flows, of words, that much at least I got right, I think, just the kind of thing I like, but done with such virtuosity and with such little display of virtuosity that I had not realised until page seventy-five or thereabouts that there are no full stops to be found in this book, or no full stop, I am uncertain if this absence should be singular or plural, possibly both, this Jon Fosse and his translator Damion Searles having built these words without one misstep, or missomething, the metaphor seems mixed and I has not even realised that it was a metaphor, I must be more careful, capturing the flow of thought, so to call it, and speech, realistically, seemingly of the narrator, a middle-aged painter named Asle, living, I am almost tempted to put, as such people do, in a small town in western Norway, driving in the snow to and from a city on the western coast of Norway, the city of the gallery which shows, which is a euphemism of sorts for sells, his paintings, but also the city in which lives a middle-aged painter named Asle, resembling both in looks and clothing, if clothing is not part of looks, the narrator, the narrator narrating in the first person and this other Asle, the alter-Asle if you like, this alter-Asle to the thoughts and memories of whom the narrator-Asle has extraordinary access, though there is no evidence of any reciprocal mechanism, we are, I am sure, never given an instance of the alter-Asle even being aware of the existence of such a person as the narrator, this alter-Asle, being confined to the third person, and, I wonder, what sort of trauma confines a person to an existence only in the third person? presumably a trauma, I think, this alter-Asle being also an alcoholic and a person who “most of the time, doesn’t want to live any more, he’s always thinking that he should go out into the sea, disappear into the waves,” but not doing so because of his love for his dog, there is, I think as I am reading, some relationship between the two Asles, well, obviously there is, my thought, or the thought I have, being that the alter-Asle is the actual Asle and the narrator-Asle is the Asle that the alter-Asle-who-is-actually-the-actual-Alse would have been if he was not the Asle he became, which, I think, I have made sound a bit confusing, and the opposite of an explanation, not that that matters, on account of whatever trauma, or whatever it is that I speculate is a trauma, that confined him to a third-person existence, the characters being one character, all characters being one character as they are in all books, I speculate, though in this book The Other Name, almost all the characters have, if not the same name, almost the same name, which tightens the knot somewhat, if I can be forgiven another metaphor, though I will not forgive myself for it at least, I will try to avoid, I think, thinking of the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, or, in any rate, describing the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, in any way other than a literary way, whatever that means, nothing, I think, the person that Asle could have been sees the Asle that Asle became, though Alse cannot know him, the person that Asle could have been rescues Asle when he has collapsed in the snow and takes him to the Clinic and to the Hospital, and takes the dog to look after, who knows, though, if the third-person Asle, the one I was calling the alter-Asle until that became too confusing, at least for me, survives, neither we nor the first-person Asle know that, but after the first-person Asle goes to the city and rescues the third-person Asle from the snowdrift, how could he know where to find him, I wonder, he begins, in the second part of the book, to have access to some deeply buried memories of the Asle that perhaps they once both were, memories all in the third person, for safety, I think, memories firstly of Asle’s and his sister’s disobedience of their parents in straying along the shore and to the nearby settlement, a narrative in which threat hums in every detail, a narrative in which colour impresses itself so deeply upon Asle that, I think, he could have become nothing other than a painter, a narrative that seems searching for a trauma, for a misfortune, a narrative assailed by an inexplicable motor noise as they approach the settlement but which resolves with a misfortune that is anticlimactic, at least for Asle, a trauma but not his trauma, what has this narrative avoided, I wonder at this point, what has not been released, or what has not yet been released, I wonder, Fosse is a writer who writes to be rid of his thoughts, I think, just as his narrator says, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, to get rid of them in a way, to be done with them, I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, I try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away,” and, yes, when the narrator lies in bed at the end of the book and is unable to sleep, he does recover the memory, a third person memory, the memory of the trauma that split the Asles and trapped one thereafter in the third person, the memory that explains the awful motor noise that intruded on the previous narrative of disobedience as the children approached the locus of the trauma, and, I think, all the sadness of the book leads from here and to here |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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NEW RELEASES
In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on.
"The Beckett of the twenty-first century." —Le Monde
"It is some measure of Fosse’s talents that he manages to weave such a compelling narrative from a largely static setting. Nothing really happens and yet there is something quietly dramatic about Fosse's meandering and rhythmic prose, aided by Damion Searls's limber translation, which has a strangely mesmerising effect. An intense reading experience." —Lucy Popescu, Independent
"Prose doesn’t have hooks, and Fosse’s incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots. On it goes, building layer upon layer of past and present, ancestors and loved ones, until you are immersed in that world and the prose conjures luminous glory flashing past like Blakean angels. Maybe it is convincing to say that Fosse is the only writer whose book has made me weep with emotion as I translated it." —Damion Searls
Many New Zealanders hold firm to the belief that Maori have been treated better than other indigenous peoples, and that they receive benefits that other New Zealanders do not. Some argue that the supposed privileges that Maori receive are a direct attack on the foundations of the nation. 'Privilege in Perpetuity' charts the eighteenth-century origins of this idea, tracing its development over time, and assesses what impact this notion of privilege has had on Maori communities. Central to this history is the paradox, explored by Meihana, of how Maori were rendered landless and politically marginalised, yet at the same time were somehow still considered privileged. The idea of privilege is revealed as central to colonisation in New Zealand and to the dispossession and marginalisation of Maori - and as a stubbornly persistent prejudice that remains in place today.
>>Maintaining power imbalances.
>>Maintaining power imbalances.
Paris is constantly changing as a living organism, both for better and for worse. The gentrification and internal colonisation of poorer and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods are changing the city and causing new neighbourhoods to spring up elsewhere. In some thirty succinct vignettes, from bookshops to beggars, Art Nouveau to street sounds, Parisian writers to urban warts, Jacobins to Surrealism, from the Périphérique to Place Vendôme, its markets of Aligre and Belleville, its cafés and tabacs, its history from Balzac to Sartre, Hazan offers a host of invaluable aperçus that help us to see the social forces that are changing the city. 
The Looking-Glass: Essential stories by Machado de Assis (translated by Daniel Hahn) $28
Solenoid by Mercea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter) $45
Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions by Owen Hatherley $30
Artificial Islands tests the idea that Britain's natural allies and closest relations are New Zealand, Australia and Canada, through a good look at the histories, townscapes and spaces of several cities across the settler zones of the British Empire. These are some of the most purely artificial and modern landscapes in the world, British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world from Britain. Were these places really no more than just a reproduction of British Values planted in unlikely corners of the globe? How are people in Auckland, Melbourne, Montreal, Ottawa and Wellington re-imagining their own history, or their countries' role in the British Empire and their complicity in its crimes? Some in Britain see these countries as a natural fit for 'union' in the wake of Brexit, but would any of them be interested in such a thing? Interesting.
Doll by Maria Teresa Hart $23
Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders $37
>>My Paris.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is widely regarded as among the greatest Brazilian writers of all time. He was born to a poor family in Rio de Janerio and, with little formal education, took work as a typographer's apprentice and began to write and publish at age 15. Machado went on to a successful career as a writer of romantic novels and government bureaucrat. In the late 1870s he suffered a severe bout of illness, after which he wrote the ironic, complex masterpieces for which he is now famous, including The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro. This volume collects his best short fiction, in excellent fresh translations.
"Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible." —Salman Rushdie
"The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America." —Susan Sontag
"'Another Kafka." —Allen Ginsberg
"A great writer who chose to use deadly humor where it would be least expected to convey his acute powers of observation and his penetrating insights into psychology. In superbly funny books he described the abnormalities of alienation, perversion, domination, cruelty and madness. He deconstructed empire with a thoroughness and an esthetic equilibrium that place him in a class by himself." —New York Times
"Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James." —New York Times Book Review
>>The greatest writer the world has never heard of.
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history—the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.
"Solenoid is a novel made from other novels, a meticulously borrowed piece of hyperliterature. Kleist's cosmic ambiguity, the bureaucratic terror of Kafka, the enchantments of Garcia Marquez and Bruno Schulz's labyrinths are all recognizable in Cartarescu's anecdotes, dreams and journal entries. That fictive texture is part and parcel of the novel's sense of unreality, which not only blends the pedestrian and the bizarre, but also commingles many features of the literary avant-garde. Although the narrator himself is largely critical of literature he also affirms the possibility inherent in the 'bitter and incomprehensible books' he idolises. In this way, he plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself." —New York Times
Artificial Islands tests the idea that Britain's natural allies and closest relations are New Zealand, Australia and Canada, through a good look at the histories, townscapes and spaces of several cities across the settler zones of the British Empire. These are some of the most purely artificial and modern landscapes in the world, British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world from Britain. Were these places really no more than just a reproduction of British Values planted in unlikely corners of the globe? How are people in Auckland, Melbourne, Montreal, Ottawa and Wellington re-imagining their own history, or their countries' role in the British Empire and their complicity in its crimes? Some in Britain see these countries as a natural fit for 'union' in the wake of Brexit, but would any of them be interested in such a thing? Interesting.
The haunted doll has long been a trope in horror movies, but like many fears, there is some truth at its heart. Dolls are possessed—by our aspirations. They're commonly used as a tool to teach mothering to young girls, but more often they are avatars of the idealised feminine self. (The word 'doll' even acts as shorthand for a desirable woman.) They instruct girls what to strive for in society, reinforcing dominant patriarchal, heteronormative, white views around class, bodies, history, and celebrity, in insidious ways. Girls' dolls occupy the opposite space of boys' action figures, which represent masculinity, authority, warfare, and conflict. By analysing dolls from 17th century Japanese Hinamatsuri festivals, to the '80s American Girl Dolls, and even to today's bitmoji, Doll reveals how the objects society encourages girls to play with shape the women they become.
>>Other books in the excellent 'Object Lessons' series.
It’s 1866 and the three-masted sailing ship General Grant is on the southern route from Melbourne to London, with gold from the diggings secreted in returning miners’ hems and pockets. In the fog and the dark, the ship strikes the cliffs of the Auckland Islands, is sucked into a cave and wrecked. Only fourteen men make it ashore and one woman – Mrs Jewell. Stuck on a freezing and exposed island, the castaways have to work together to stay alive, but they’re a disparate group with their own secrets to keep and their only officer is disabled by grief after losing his wife in the wreck. A woman is a burden they don’t need. Meanwhile stories about the gold grow with the telling: who has it, where is it and how much went down with the ship.
>>Long-listed for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Long-listed for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.
>>Other books in the excellent 'Object Lessons' series.
Hurt by her parents' divorce and struggling to accept her new stepfamily, Jo decides to run away and live alone in the woods. But she soon discovers that she's far from alone. Jo stumbles into a fantastical world full of tiny elves, talking foxes, and mischievous, multicolored ponies known as the Wondrous Wonders. Her new friends are on a mission: rise up against Emperor Tomcat, the tyrannical leader who rules the enchanted forest they call home. Can Jo find the courage to vanquish an evil empire and get back to her family before dinnertime? A delightful graphic novel for children.
How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama — where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. Finlay began her research just after the deaths of both her parents, and Fabric is also Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery. Now in paperback (but still available as a lovely hardback).
From the fourteenth century through to the present day, women who write have been understood as mad, undisciplined or dangerous. Female writers have always had to find ways to overcome or challenge these beliefs. Some were cautious and discreet, some didn't give a damn, but all lived complex, eventful and often controversial lives. Eve Bites Back places the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage in the history of literature in English. From Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet, to Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, this book will change the way you think about our literary heritage.
"Essential reading." —Claire Tomalin
>>Meeting minds.
>>Meeting minds.
The Curse is changed. You'll never know. The truth is lost. The lie will grow. The year is 1726 and the Royal Sorcerer of England is on the hunt for those who are Magicborn. When Tempest is captured, she is taken to Kensington Palace alongside a boy like her, Thomas. Trapped, Tempest and Thomas find their magic flickering to life and, with it, long-buried memories. For they are the lost prince and princess of Fairyland, bound by a deadly curse. But now the fairies are coming to get them, and with the truth revealed—can they both survive?
VOLUME FOCUS : Women
A selection of books from our shelves.
International Women's Day, March 8
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Collapsing reality.
>>Joy Williams does not write for humanity.
>>Ecological ruin and postmodernism.
>>Reset.
>>A millennial's purgatory.
>>Fruitless taxonomies.
>>Where are the great climate novels?
>>See also Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement.
>>Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by Thomas}
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>>Each book suggests its own form.
>>Signs of hope.
>>Author and translator present Chilean Poet.
>>Chatting with Megan and Daniel.
>>'Skyscrapers'. >>Omitted characters.
>>Read Bonsai, Zambra's breakthrough novel.
>>Read Thomas's review of My Documents.
>>Read Thomas's review of Multiple Choice.
>>Read Thomas's review of the essay collection Not To Read.
>>Read Zambra's most recent novel Chilean Poet.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that,” wrote Clarice Lispector, quoted by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra in one of the essays in this highly enjoyable collection of literary observations on, ostensibly, some of the more interesting largely (but not exclusively) Latin American literature of the last quarter century, literature that distrusts, as Zambra dismisses, the clichéed fluidity of the ‘Magic Realists’ most readily (and lazily) associated with Latin American literature by Western readers. Zambra instead values literature that is hesitant, inventive, always aware of new possibilities, mentally and linguistically supple, striving always towards new forms. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” wrote Walter Benjamin (not quoted by Alejandro Zambra (at least not in this book)). Because the reviews collected here are often of books the reader of Not to Read has not read and by authors with whom the reader (at least this reader) is unfamiliar, the reader at the outset may think they might skip quite a bit of the book, to make reading faster, but Zambra’s book is too interesting, too nicely written, and too enjoyable. There are indeed considerations of many authors the reader has not heard of, but the essays deliver the same fascination as reading Borges’s studies of nonexistent books (Borges thought it more worthwhile, and faster, to write about books that do not exist than to write the books themselves), with the added benefit that, just possibly, works by these authors may already be, or may one day be, available in English. At the very least, one reads to read about the writing and reading of texts, which is, after all, the most interesting thing to read about. The reader might have thought that skipping might save time, but the text runs so lightly and so sprightlyly that the reader is in any case carried forward more rapidly by following the text than they would have proceeded had it been possible to skip. The essays and reviews included in Not to Read also function as a sort of literary autobiography of Zambra himself, his concerns, approaches, influences and motivations, and provide a greater appreciation of his other work, direct yet subtle, playful yet poignant, personal yet politically and socially acute, compact yet wonderfully expansive. Zambra recommends books we are sure that we will like, even though we may never get to read them, but, more importantly, the reasons for his recommendations, his observations on and his responses to these books, provide a portrait of a reader we come quickly to admire, and who we as readers may well wish to be more like, as well as of a writer alert to the possibilities of writing. Zambra is frequently very funny, as he is in the title essay ‘Not to Read’, which starts out as a review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read, which Zambra has himself not read, and carries on to become a deliciously prickly lampoon of opinions formed of books without reading them, intercut with seemingly very valid reasons not to read some writers’ books. Zambra’s concision and lightness (Zambra is an exemplar of the literary qualities Italo Calvino thought most important in his Six Memos for a New Millennium) can produce beautiful sentences, such as this one on Santiago, quivering with a sensitivity that undercuts ease and fluidity and leaves us utterly aware: “It’s the city that we know, the city that would follow us if we wanted to flee from it (from ourselves), with its permanent architectural eclecticism, with the dirty river, almost always a mere trickle, cutting the landscape in half, with the most beautiful sky imaginable in those few days of autumn or winter after it rains, when we rediscover the mountains.” |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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Curious and more curious, in Pure Colour Shelia Heti takes us further than she has before. If you’re a Heti fan, you will be used to her turn of phrase and oblique references as well as her wry absurdist touch. In her earlier novels, How Should A Person Be? Heti gave us a wild and wonderful exploration of a young person dipping her feet in the world, with all the bravado you would expect as well as the doubt; while Motherhood explored that moment in life when you ask the big questions about art, relationships and parenthood. In Pure Colour, Heti makes another jump and then plunges sideways. It’s more existential and probing, and flat bang in the middle the main character becomes a leaf. Seriously. Mira leaves home for college and studies art criticism, she works in a lamp shop and has fallen for the woman who works in the bookshop. She’s piecing together information and coming up with her own interpretations. People are either birds, fish or bears and respond according. Birds look down and see the world from above in an abstract fashion, thinking their way around it. Fish, being one of many, is more concerned with the collective whole, while Bear is particularly loyal to only a few or even one, and those in their ambit are completely secure in the Bear’s love. God’s got a lot to answer for in what Mira sees as God’s 'first draft', and there are some hilarious interludes about what God thinks/does: God “doesn’t want the criticism of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life… God doesn’t care what you think about a band”, and when Mira muses on why God didn’t make every face the same “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face.” The first draft is also real and scary — it’s too hot and much of life is pointless. Mira wanders through her life as though she is sleepwalking, and when her father dies she is pulled into a vortex of grief and an intense sense of her life as a leaf. She does emerge from the leaf, but life has moved on. Annie, the woman she is obsessed with, has moved on, the lamp store has gone and art critics who have been trained on paper are no longer as valid. She’s become one of the precariat and when she finally decides to up sticks and track down Annie, it’s too late. It was always too late — it was a mistake. Where is Shelia Heti going with this? Is she gently nudging us towards the inevitable second draft with Mira as our not-so-great-but-okay guide or is she simply playing another game in abstraction? Mira wonders “why she spent so much of her life… looking at websites, when just outside the window there was a sky”. Maybe Heti felt the same way. Pure Colour is intriguing and full of ideas that trigger more ideas, and you can decide whether you’re a bird, fish or bear if you play along. |
NEW RELEASES
Driven by a deep-seated desire to understand his mother's life before he was born, Derek Owusu offers a powerful imagining of her journey. As she moves from Ghana to the UK and navigates parenthood in a strange and often lonely environment, the effects of displacement are felt across generations. Told through the eyes of both mother and son, Losing the Plot is at once emotionally raw and playful as Owusu experiments with form to piece together the immigrant experience and explore how the stories we share and tell ourselves are just as vital as the ones we don't.
"Derek Owusu is a writer of rare empathy, intensity and allure. This brief verse novel, in untranslated Twi and various registers of English, observes the inner life of an exhausted immigrant mother, notions of cultural disinheritance, and mutable identities." —Paul Mendez
"I write from the heart, first."
"Derek Owusu is a writer of rare empathy, intensity and allure. This brief verse novel, in untranslated Twi and various registers of English, observes the inner life of an exhausted immigrant mother, notions of cultural disinheritance, and mutable identities." —Paul Mendez
"I write from the heart, first."
In 2015, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed over 200,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent two years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear in What Have You Left Behind? Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia and those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment and anguish felt by civilians trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, Bushra al-Maqtari's unvarnished chronicle of the conflict in Yemen serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, and offers a searing condemnation of the international community's complicity in the war's continuation.
"This is an extraordinary collection of testimonies. It’s almost unbearable to read, but averting your eyes from the suffering to which the book bears witness feels craven. Brave, painful, necessary and harrowing, Bushra al-Maqtari’s work confronts the reader with the devastation of the war in Yemen and gives a voice to those whose lives have been destroyed by it." —Marcel Theroux
"Bushra al-Maqtari's boundlessly humane project of collecting firsthand accounts to document the nearly decade-long Yemeni civil war – and the West's complicity in it – is unblinking in its moral gaze. Every single voice collected in these pages is a blow to the heart. By the time I finished this book, I was consumed by sorrow and rage. This is an act of witnessing, and of making us engage in the witnessing of a disgraceful, criminal war that will shake your soul." —Neel Mukherjee
>>"They robbed me of my children."
>>A locked room for loss.
T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem 'The Waste Land' has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings its charged times to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism, and new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged 'The Waste Land' through the lives of those involved in its genesis: Ezra Pound, who edited it; Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and T.S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. "Deeply and brilliant concerned with the tendrils of unhappiness and Eliot's triumphant creative response to it." —Guardian
>>Animated sand.
>>Words heard and seen.
>>Death by water.
Trilogy is Jon Fosse's critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav's Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love.
"It is easy to see Fosse's work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more." —New York Times
>>Read Thomas's review of Fosse's (later) Septology.
Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working as a chambermaid in one of the state-owned tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, The Fallen offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young.
"A beautiful and painful novel that demonstrates the power of fiction to pursue the unutterable." —Alejandro Zambra
"Álvarez does a neat job in this very short but nutritious novel of establishing the personalities of his characters firmly enough that it comes as a real shock when he upends our expectations of how they might behave." —Jake Kerridge
"A war foretold that never takes place. A death foretold that never takes place. And in the middle of this is the inevitable collapse of a family and a country. The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape." —Alia Trabucco Zerán
Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral. Mamet has curated some of the most prominent voices in art and culture to tackle the topic of food in its elegance, its profundity and its incidental charm. With contributions from David Sedaris on the joy of a hot dog, Jia Tolentino on the chicken dish she makes to escape reality, Patti Smith on memories of her mother's Poor Man's Cake, Busy Philipps on the struggle to escape the patterns of childhood favourites and more, My First Popsicle is an ode to food and emotion.
'Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars' by Lauren Groff; 'The Universe Underground' by Paolo Giordano; 'We All Hated Each Other So Much' by Frank Westermann; Plus: discovering new planets and destroying satellites; returning to the Moon (this time to stay); the Mars delusion. In the 1960s, the rivalry between the superpowers brought us into space, adding a whole new dimension to human life. The last frontier was open: between 1969 and 1972 twelve men (but no women) walked on the moon. No one has since. The space race revealed itself for what it really was: a political and military competition. Space agencies, however, have not been idle and the exploration of the solar system has continued with probes and robots. Without politics, science has thrived. But the lack of government funding has opened space exploration to the forces of capitalism: the race has started again, with different rules and different players. Colonising Mars might not be the solution to humanity's problems, but the promise of space - whether expressed in a tweet by Elon Musk or a photo taken by a NASA rover on Mars - keeps proving irresistible (as does this illustrated miscellany).
>>What is it about space?
What does it mean to be out walking in the world? From pilgrimages to protest marches, mountaineering to meandering, this modern classic weaves together numerous histories to trace a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Touching on the philosophers of Ancient Greece, the Romantic poets, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett, Andre Breton's Nadja, and more, Rebecca Solnit considers what forms of pleasure and freedom walkers have sought at different times. Wanderlust invites us to look afresh at the rich, varied, often radical interplay of the body, the imagination, and the world when walking. New edition.
"Radical, humane, witty, sometimes wonderfully dandyish, at other times, impassioned and serious." —Alain de Botton
1870s, the Black Country. Michael is a miner. But it's no life. Michael exhausts himself working two jobs, to send his son Luke to school, so he won't have to be a miner too. Down the pit one day, he finds a seam of gold. If he gets it out, he can save his own life, and Luke's. But his workmate has other ideas. Mercia's Take summons an England in the heat of the industrial revolution, and the lives it took to make it.
"Energy and passion fuels this harsh and beautiful first novel; Daniel Wiles connects us viscerally to the past we have buried, the history we choose to ignore." —Hilary Mantel
"Read this novel and marvel at its language, dark and gleaming as obsidian. Daniel Wiles channels the Southern Gothic into the vernacular of the Black Country and unearths from the past a tale of desperation that speaks to our current damnation. A striking debut." —Paul Lynch
Humans have always revered long-lived trees. Our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travellers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world's oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.Combining rigorous scholarship with lyrical writing, Elderflora chronicles the complex roles ancient trees have played in the modern world and illuminates how we might need old trees now more than ever.
>>The tree whisperer.
In our era of 24/7 illumination, an excess of light is a pressing problem. Just about every creature on earth, humans included, operates according to the circadian rhythm. The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night, but now light pollution has become a major issue. This challenges our instinctual fear of the dark and urges us to cherish the darkness, its creatures, and its unique beauties.
Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba, the three guardians of magic, disappeared with no warning nearly ten years ago, leaving the Kingdom of Thrynne in the icy grip of a powerful sorceress. Most people have fled in desperate search of warmer lands, escaping the snow monsters that roam the streets. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Tiggy Thistle lives hidden and safe with a kindly Badger — until the day she meets the elf Crumple Stiltskin, one of the crafty Stiltskin brothers, she suddenly has to run from her happy home. So begins Tiggy's quest to find Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba - the lost guardians and their beautiful cloud horses - the only people, she believes, who can save Thrynne from the curse of endless winter. Tiggy Thistle and the Lost Guardians is the second and final title in 'The Cloud Horse Chronicles'. Illustrated throughout in two colours by Riddell at his best, and presented as a handsome hardback.
>>Drawing and reading.
>>Drawing and reading.
Since the world fell sick with fantastical illnesses, sisters Payton and Ani have grown up in the hospital of King Jude's. Payton wants to be a methic like her father, working on a cure for her mother's sleeping fever. Ani, however, thinks the remedy for all illness might be found in the green wilderness beyond the hospital walls. When Ani stumbles upon an imprisoned boy who turns everything he touches to gold, her world is turned upside-down. The girls find themselves outside the hospital for the first time, a dark mystery unravelling.
Thirteen-year-old Rowan is helping her older sister Ash paint her bedroom when she discovers a mysterious ring that transports them both back in time to 1999. To a party being held in the very same house! While Ash dances, Rowan unwittingly disrupts the laws of time, and when she wakes up back in the present day, her sister is missing, and - even worse - everyone in their family seems to be forgetting she ever existed. With the help of her magical neighbour Verity, Rowan must find the courage to travel back through the history of the house. But can she find everything she needs to rescue Ash before her sister disappears forever?
The Future is Degrowth: A guide to a world beyond Capitalism edited by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan $35
Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialisation, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.
Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany where she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. Now in paperback.
"While never less than scrupulously researched, this biography explodes the genre of 'biography': experimental but achieved, Donner's story reads with the speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel and the urgency of an essay, like some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald'." —James Wood
"A bewitching, invigorating history of women artists, the work they've made and the impossibly hard conditions in which it was produced. I can't think of a more satisfying riposte to anyone who asks why there have been no great women artists than to present them with this incandescent book." —Olivia Laing
"Brilliant, reveals an until-now hidden history of women's self-portraiture. A gift that keeps on giving." —Ali Smith
Now in paperback. >>Also available in hardback.
Over a century ago, Rilke went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he watched a pair of flamingos. A flock of other birds screeched by, and, as he describes in a poem, the great red-pink birds sauntered on, unphased, then 'stretched amazed and singly march into the imaginary.' This encounter - so strange, so typical of flamingos with their fabulous posture - is also still typical of how we interact with animals. Even as our actions threaten their very survival, they are still symbolic, captivating and captive, caught in a drama of our framing. This issue of Freeman's tells the story of that interaction, its costs, its tendernesses, the mythological flex of it. From lovers in a Chiara Barzini story, falling apart as a group of wild boars roams in their Roman neighbourhood, to the soppen emergency birth of a cow on a Wales farm, stunningly described by Cynan Jones, no one has the moral high ground here. Nor is this a piece of mourning. There's wonder, humour, rage and relief, too. Featuring pigeons, calves, stray dogs, mascots, stolen cats, and bears, to the captive, tortured animals who make up our food supply, powerfully described in Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's essay, this wide-ranging issue of Freeman's will stimulate discussion and dreams alike.