Penny: A graphic memoir by Karl Stevens

If you think you know what your cat is thinking, think again. Penny is a graphic novel about the world of a domestic housecat. We meet Penny as a kitten, found on the street (in her words kidnapped), and discover what a world in prison (inside an apartment) with humans consists of. Here’s Penny’s take on the situation: “Am I in denial that I am living in prison? Is this vision of the ‘outside world’ a real thing? Or is it a hologram used to amuse me?” From the opening pages of this lovingly drawn graphic novel, we are offered a glimpse into the existential thoughts of a cat, this cat, and her musings on a life well-lived. “Em, I should probably stop asking all these questions and be happy that I am warm, dry, and well-fed. It is good to be a petit bourgeois wallowing in smug privilege.” But, like us, we discover that cats — well, Penny — get restless, too. Penny has times of discontent, irritability, and general scratchiness. She also tires of the games that her humans think amuse her, but she indulges them, and does quite like the catnip toys. Some of them are favoured — she adorns them with names and some even make the grade to boyfriend. The catnip gives her opportunities for escape, and her drug-induced dreams are psychedelic. Discovering a portal seems to be a constant obsession (alongside the other fixation — food), and where does that door lead to? Her humans go out and come back weighed down with items. It must be a portal. If only she could get past the door — imagine all the delicious morsels she could find. She thinks about her past life, wondering where her mother is now. If she focuses, she can remember her kind eyes. She likes her humans okay, and does miss them when they pack and head away for a few days: “I miss the humans’ dull, ugly faces. Their vacant eyes, their crude behaviour…I miss the god damn wet food.” Penny is adorable and extremely enjoyable. She’s a cat with too many questions, her thinking drives her crazy, but also is useful for countering time. That and sleeping. A 30-hour day of sleep is her bliss. So, next time your cat is staring at you, be nice, and be careful. That innocent look may be anything but. Mostly though, if Penny is anything to go by, the existentialism is unlikely to play out into nefarious behaviour (well, some of the time it does — there are many “Penny, no!”s scattered throughout) or actions that will undermine your ability to coexist with your cat, no matter how maddening they can be. They like to sleep, can embrace mediocrity, and like to be petted, even when their motivations are beyond our human grasp. Apparently.

>>Look inside!

Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig

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 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. 

Jen Craig has written three remarkable novels, each a thought-fugue inside the head of its protagonist (so to call her). Craig’s wonderful sentences loop and repeat and mutate, revealing the immense pressure of memory on the short periods of mundane action (or inaction) that form their ostensible narratives, and the ways in which consciousness (so to call it) slips sideways and onto new paths to avoid that pressure, and yet is drawn again and again back towards the irritation (so to call it) that it can neither assuage nor transcend. Recommended!
Find out more:
>>Since the Accident (2009/2023).
>>Panthers and the Museum of Fire (2015/2020/2023)
>>Wall (2023).
>>Read Thomas’s review of Panthers and the Museum of Fire.
>>Slow literature.
>>Animated by the depth of withheld information.
>>Haze.
>>Not too much of a stretch.
>>Talking and walking.
>>Complexifying.
>>Disturbance.
>>Not many of us there.
>>Being in lieu.
>>The heirs of Thomas Bernhard.

Click through to find out more, and to secure your copies.

Since the Accident by Jen Craig $35
In a suburban Sydney pub, a woman tells her younger sister the story of how her life has changed since a serious car accident. She speaks of the blossoming of romance, the rediscovery of her long-dormant creativity: her ability to draw. And yet an exhibition comes to nothing, a lover is abandoned. She leaves everything behind. In the driving monologue of her own narrative, the younger sister attempts to make sense of her life and the events and thoughts that have obsessed the elder since the accident.
”Since the Accident effectively realises a formal alternative to the realist tradition that dominates contemporary Australian writing, yet does so in an accessible way that deserves to find a wide readership. This ability to explore innovative novelistic form that cuts to the core of the human condition without lapsing into gratuitous experimentation is very rare, and to be highly commended.” —Anthony Macris
”Both of Jen Craig’s novels, Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire, exhibit a distinctive style which features careful precision of the narrative voice, coupled with an intriguing digressive approach. This draws the reader in to stories that seem endlessly reflective, yet the novels quickly display a logic and continuity that is sustained until the very last sentence. She has the astonishing ability to make us believe she has held every word of the story in her head, then delivered it onto the page in a seamless whole. There is a powerful hypnotic effect upon the reader of Craig's work, and it is not too much of a stretch to compare her work with the otherwise incomparable WG Sebald.” —Debra Adelaide
>>New by Jen Craig: Wall.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Panthers and the Museum of Fire.
>>Relative wholeness.
>>[S.E.P.]

Mothercare: On ambivalence and obligation by Lynne Tillman $39
An honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the healthcare system. When Tillman’s mother's unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on her, her sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In Mothercare, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her. In Tillman's celebrated style and as a 'rich noticer of strange things' (Colm Toibin), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent. Mothercare is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.
 “A true force in American literature.” —George Saunders
“'A new thought in every sentence.” —Lydia Davis
”Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
>>Read an extract.

A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha - An anthology of new writing for a changed world edited by Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy $40
Sixty-eight writers and eight artists gather at a hui in a magnificent cave-like dwelling or meeting house. In the middle is a table, the tepu korero, from which the rangatira speak; they converse with honoured guests, and their rangatira-korero embody the tahuhu, the over-arching horizontal ridge pole, of the shelter. In a series of rich conversations, those present discuss our world in the second decade of this century; they look at decolonisation, indigeneity, climate change . . . this is what they see. Edited by Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy, this fresh, exciting anthology features poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as korero or conversations between writers. The lineup from Aoteraoa includes Alison Wong, Paula Morris, Anne Salmond, Tina Makereti, Ben Brown, David Eggleton, Cilla McQueen, Hinemoana Baker, Erik Kennedy, Ian Wedde, Nina Mingya Powles, Gregory O'Brien, Vincent O'Sullivan, Patricia Grace, Selina Tusitala Marsh and Whiti Hereaka. Guest writers from overseas include Jose-Luis Novo and Ru Freeman.
>>Look inside.
>>How to respond to SOS messages.

Calamities! by Jane Arthur $25
In her second, spine-cracking collection, Jane Arthur wants ‘to get morbid’. Moving with ease between the cerebral and the ethereal she measures her anxieties against a cosmic canvas — taking in everything from meteorites and distant planets to pomanders and cat’s ears. Whether contemplating time, regret, or the end of the world, these poems don’t flinch. But in writing against hope, Arthur also writes against hopelessness, and finds, at the heart of it all, a bear, sleeping soundly — or perhaps dead.
”Calamities! is a compelling book of the unsettled and unsettling, set in a world where comfort is an endangered animal and the apocalypse lurks outside our front doors. Jane Arthur’s perceptive and all-too-relatable poems are what we need in these uncertain times — they make me an even bigger fan of her already astonishing body of work.” —Chris Tse  
“It’s hard for poems to be funny without undermining their own seriousness, but Arthur’s are like that.” —Kate Camp
”She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moments are informed by awe and intelligence — quick and seamless. They don’t have to try so hard. I felt novels and films in these poems. I thought: this is a poet of capacity.” —Eileen Myles
>>Craven.

The Artist by Ruby Solly $30
At first there is nothing but black sand, then something begins to grow; a gentle song emerges so bright that sound becomes sight . . . And so from the black the world is sung into being, not for us, but for itself, but for the song. In a Southern land, where the veil of time and space has worn thin, twins with otherworldly ways are born to a stone carver and his wife. As they grow into themselves, the landscape and its histories will rise up to meet them and change their whānau forever. Cave art leaps from walls, pounamu birds sing, legends become reality, and history becomes the present in this verse novel by Ruby Solly (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu). The Artist brings to life the histories of our great Southern iwi through the whakapapa of its characters and the rich world they and their ancestors call their tūrakawaewae—their place to stand, their place to sing.
>>Tōku Pāpā.
>>Ode to the aunties.
>>Compositions.

This Is a Story About Your Mother by Louise Wallace $25
In her latest collection, Louise Wallace raises an existential eyebrow at pregnancy-birth-motherhood. Is this universal rite-of-passage really an intimately personal event, down to the degree of fluid rising in your ankles, or is it a societal machine, forever churning out the next generation to an unrelenting voiceover of parenting advice? Wrestling auto-generated Huggies text and her own sometimes heart-breaking experiences into meaning, Wallace weighs the evidence. With equal parts curiosity and pique, she writes her way through to the human.
”Wallace's exquisite poems declare that women's lives matter (mothers or otherwise), and domestic and emotional labour matters because this unseen and undervalued work permits society to function. Few other poets capture the possibilities of domestic mess so well, and make me laugh at the same time.” —Sarah Jane Barnett

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksander Hemon $38
As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective. And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto's protector and lover. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman that will truly survive.
”A staggering work of beauty and brutality.” —Douglas Stuart
”A twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem . . . This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece.” —David Mitchell
“An explosive novel. Bursting with energy, wits, and insights, it's an epic meditation on history, philosophy, and human conditions. Aleksandar Hemon once again proves himself to be one of our most innovative and invigorating novelists.” —Yiyun Li

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock $38
We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the 'Old World' encountered the 'New', when Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others — enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders — the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse — a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times. From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned 'home' with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalised, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilisation. Drawing on their surviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against the grain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, and impact on, early modern Europe.
”A thrilling, beautifully written and important book that changes how we look at transatlantic history, finally placing Indigenous peoples not on the side-lines but at the centre of the narrative. Highly recommended.” —Peter Frankopan
”An untold story of colonial history, both epic and intimate, and a thrilling revelation, not about the invasion of the Americas by Europeans, but the journeys of Indigenous people to Europe. Caroline Dodds Pennock is the perfect guide, cannily and eloquently shifting the axis of global history away from its Eurocentric grip.” —Adam Rutherford

The Bear and the Wildcat by Kazumi Yumoto, illustrated by Komako Sakai $30
One morning the bear was crying. His friend, the little bird, was dead. When the little bird dies, the bear is inconsolable. Full of grief, he locks himself in his house and ventures out again only when the smell of young spring grass blows through his window. He meets a wildcat and finally feels understood. As the cat plays on her violin, the bear remembers all the beauty that he has experienced with the little bird. Now he can bury his friend, because he knows he'll always have his memories. A new edition of this beautiful, gentle picturebook about grief.
>>Look inside!

Sentience: The invention of consciousness by Timothy Humphrey $50
We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes his fifty-year quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind. The goal is to solve the hard problem: to explain the wondrous, eerie fact of ‘phenomenal consciousness’—the redness of a poppy, the sweetness of honey, the pain of a bee sting. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here in full a new, plausible solution that phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, is a relatively late and sophisticated evolutionary development. The implications for the existence of sentience in nonhuman animals are startling and provocative.

To Trap a Taniwha (te Reo Pākehā edition) by Jane Cooper $25
To Trap a Taniwha | He Raru ki Tai is an adventure story set in seventeenth-century Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland when the hapū of Ngā Oho/Ngā Iwi predominated. Armed with the courage of their convictions, two girls embark on a perilous journey to challenge their leaders’ actions. Cousins, Te Kawenga and Kakati learn of a plan being hatched against a neighbouring iwi and strange activity occurring at a seasonal fishing camp. A huge trap is being built to snare and kill Ureia, the taniwha of Hauraki iwi. The cousins fear the retribution that will be taken on their people if Ureia is killed. So they take a dangerous journey to defy the decision of their people and try and save the taniwha.
>>He Raru ki Tai.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel $25
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core. Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. Sea of Tranquility is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. New edition.
>>Read Stella’s review.

Children of the Night: The strange and epic story of modern Romania by Paul Kenny $25
Balanced precariously on the shifting fault line between East and West, Romania's schizophrenic, often violent past is one of the great untold stories of modern Europe. The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful King and his vivacious British-born Queen, the country oscillated wildly. Its interwar rulers form a gallery of bizarre characters and extreme movements: the corrupt and mentally unbalanced King Carol; the fascist death cult led by Corneliu Codreanu; the vain General Ion Antonescu, who seized power in 1940 and led the country into a catastrophic alliance with Nazi Germany. After 1945 power was handed to Romania's tiny communist party, under which it experienced severe repression, purges and collectivisation. Then in 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power. And thus began the strangest dictatorship of all.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh $35
For generations, deadly storms have ravaged Mina's homeland. Her people believe the Sea God, once their protector, now curse them with death and despair. To appease him, each year a maiden is thrown into the sea, in the hopes that one day the 'true bride' will be chosen and end the suffering. Many believe Shim Cheong — Mina's brother's beloved — to be the legendary true bride. But on the night Cheong is sacrificed, Mina's brother follows her, even knowing that to interfere is a death sentence. To save her brother, Mina throws herself into the water in Cheong's stead. Swept away to the Spirit Realm, a magical city of lesser gods and mythical beasts, Mina finds the Sea God, trapped in an enchanted sleep. With the help of a mysterious young man and a motley crew of demons, gods and spirits, Mina sets out to wake him and bring an end to the storms once and for all. But she doesn't have much time: a human cannot live long in the land of the spirits. And there are those who would do anything to keep the Sea God from waking.

28 Days: A novel of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto by David Safier $25
Warsaw, 1942. Sixteen-year old Mira smuggles food into the Warsaw ghetto to keep herself and her family alive. When she discovers that the entire ghetto is to be "liquidated"—killed or resettled to concentration camps—she desperately tries to find a way to save her family. She meets a group of young people who are planning the unthinkable: an uprising against the occupying forces. Mira joins the resistance fighters who, with minimal supplies and weapons, end up holding out for twenty-eight days, longer than anyone had thought possible. During this time, Mira has to decide where her heart belongs. To Amos, who will take as many Nazis as he can with him into the grave? Or to Daniel, who wants to help orphans in a shelter?
"Throughout this complex novel, rich in evocative detail, Mira's view evolves from a narrow focus on herself and her family to consideration of the larger community around her, reflected in her first-person narrative." —Booklist

The Utopians: Six attempts to build the perfect society by Anna Neima $25
Santiniketan-Sriniketan in India, Dartington Hall in England, Atarashiki Mura in Japan, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France, the Bruderhof in Germany and Trabuco College in America: six experimental communities established in the aftermath of the First World War, each aiming to change the world. The Utopians is an absorbing and vivid account of these collectives and their charismatic leaders and reveals them to be full of eccentric characters, outlandish lifestyles and unchecked idealism. Dismissed and even mocked in their time, yet, a century later, their influence still resonates in progressive education, environmentalism, medical research and mindfulness training. Without such inspirational experiments in how to live, post-war society would have been a poorer place. Now in paperback,
”Neima offers an original perspective on the entire period and a new way of navigating its artistic and ideological upheaval. By showing how a global crisis can lead people to question tradition and reshape society, the subject remains important to this day.” —Guy Stagg
>>The flower still blooms.

A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:

Harrow

Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End

A Ghost in the Throat

The Vegetarian

Anti-Establishment Pencils

The Red Deal

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Protest Tautohetohe

Fierce Hope

The short list for the 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE contains some outstanding books. Read what the judges have to say, and then click through for your copies: 

Standing Heavy by GauZ' (translated from French by Frank Wynne): ”A sharp and satirical take on the legacies of French colonial history and life in Paris today. Told in a fast-paced, and fluently translated, style of shifting perspectives, Standing Heavy carries us through the decades.”

Time Shelter Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel): "A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, macabre and humorous novel about nationality, identity and ageing, and about the healing and destructive power of memory."

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey): “Two best friends share an aversion to ‘the human shackles’ of motherhood, only to discover that life has other plans. With a twisty, enveloping plot, the novel poses some of the knottiest questions about freedom, disability, and dependence – all in language so blunt it burns.”

Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches): “Boulder is a sensuous, sexy, intense book. Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen more ordinary novels into just over 100 pages of exhilarating prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood that slices open the dilemmas of exchanging independence for intimacy.”

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan (translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim): "A carnivalesque fairy tale that celebrates independence and enterprise, a picaresque quest through Korea’s landscapes and history, Whale is a riot of a book. Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s vivid characters are foolish but wise, awful but endearing, and always irrepressible. This is a hymn to restlessness and self-transformation."

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé (translated from French by Richard Philcox): ”The book borrows from the tradition of magical realism and draws us into a world full of colour and life. This is a book that succeeds in mixing humour with poetry, and depth with lightness.”

>>Order your copies now.
>>The other long-listed books are also excellent. 
The winner will be announced on 23 May.

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5.5.23

The Table by Francis Ponge (translated by Colombina Zamponi) {Reviewed by THOMAS}

“The table is a faithful friend, but you have to go to it,” writes Francis Ponge, poet of ‘things’, in this extraordinarily subtle little book, written sporadically between 1967 and 1973, on his relationship with the table that lay beneath his elbow whenever he was writing. “The table serves as a support of the body of the writer that I sometimes {try to be | am} so that I don’t collapse (which is what I am doing at this moment) (not for fun) (not for pleasure) (but as a consolation) (so as not to collapse).” A thought may come, or not, and be expressed, or not, perhaps in some relationship with text, a problematic relationship at best, when you think of it, and go, and be perhaps forgotten, more and more commonly forgotten, or the text unread, for even the most-read text lies mostly unread, but the table continues, whatever it is, object or concept, and whatever the relationship between the table and the idea of the table that presses upon, or from, the word Table. The table lies under the work of the writer (the working of the writer), whatever that work might be, the labour of writing is supported by the table, under all writing lies the table. “The table has something of the mother carrying (on four legs) the body of the writer.” Once all the unnecessities have been removed from the act of writing, once the content and the intent have been removed, Ponge finds his table. Because the table is always beneath the writing, all writing is ultimately never on anything other than the table. “As I remember the table (the notion of the table), some table comes under my elbow. As I am wanting to write the table, it comes to my elbow and the same time the notion comes to mind.” If language could mediate the space between the object pressing at his elbow and the concept of the table, if language could allow this object to exist other than merely as the index of the idea that is imposed upon it, Ponge’s patient, precise, careful, playful rigour will approach it certainly closely enough to both deepen and dissolve the concept, to begin to replace ideas with thought. “It takes many words to destroy a concept (or rather to make of this word no longer a concept but a conceptacle).” Ponge’s operations are forensic, and his “table was (and remains) the operating table, the dissecting table.” As a support for the writer, the (t)able represents that which is able to be, and remains uncertain, and not that which must be. “One could say that this Table is nothing other than the substantification of a qualifying suffix, indicating only pure possibility.” All new thought comes from objects, from objects pushing back against the concepts imposed upon them, pushing through the layers of memory and habituation that separate us from them. If the aesthetic is not the opposite of an anaesthetic it is in fact the anaesthetic. Only objects can rescue us from the idea we have of them, but they are hard for us to reach. “The greater my despair, the more intense (necessarily intense) my fixation on the object.” Objects may be reached through the patient, precise, careful, playful abrasion of the language used to describe them, a process known as poetry, an operation Ponge performs upon a table. That which is horizontal is in a state of flux but that which is vertical has been hoisted to the plane of aspiration and display. Viewing the vertical we see that walls are built from bottom to top whereas text is built from top to bottom, but viewing on the horizontal we see that the labour of laying brick by brick and the labour of laying word by word are the same labour, or at least analogous labours. On the horizontal table the relationship between objects and language is co-operative, each operating on the other, each opening and redefining the other on the delimited space of the table. “I will remember you my table, table that was my table, any table, any old table,” writes Ponge of the object whose presence has written this book, but which still remains a presence beyond the language he uses to reach towards it (and he reaches closer to an object than language ordinarily can reach). “I let you survive in the paradise of the unsaid,” he says. Language can be stretched but not escaped. “We are enclosed within our language … but what a marvellous prison,” writes Ponge.

Our Book of the Week, CHICANES by Clara Schulmann, is a collection of short pieces about voice and women’s experience. Schulmann dips and pivots, captures, and lets fly. As well as interrogating the events of her own life (especially the loss of a job and a break-up with a lover), she delves into literature and classics, art and film, exploring how women use their voice and how they are used (or are stigmatised) by their voice. Her digressions move against each other, building questions and ideas. Through a medley of female voices, from anglophone and francophone theorists to the stranger on the street, Schulmann weaves an anarchic, polyphonic essay where wayward words take seed.
>>Read Stella’s review.
>>Many translating voices.
>>The author reads from Zizanies while wearing five different jackets.
>>Your copy of Chicanes.
>>Other excellent books from Les Fugitives (one of our favourite small publishers).

Chicanes by Clara Schulmann (translated from French by Naima Rashid, Natasha Lehrer, Lauren Elkin, Ruth Diver, Jessica Spivey, Jennifer Higgins, Clem Clement and Sophie Lewis) {Reviewed by STELLA}

Looking for some background about author Clara Schulmann, I clicked on a link to a written Q&A. Looking for the ‘translate’ button (not that this is a perfect science on most computers), I happened upon the ‘read aloud’ option. As Chicanes is an investigation into voice, it felt appropriate to listen (even though it’s beyond my understanding of French). The AI failed terribly. Chatbots have been all the rage this week in the news and this failure may bring cheer to some, and amusement to others. This is a segue into a review of Chicanes, a collection of short pieces about voice and women’s experience. Schulmann dips and pivots, captures, and lets fly. She delves into literature and classics, art and film, exploring how women use their voice and how they are used (or stigmatised) by their voice. Her digressions move against each other building questions and ideas under the chapter headings ‘On/Off’, ‘Breathing’, ‘Fatigue’, ‘Overflowing’, ‘Speed’, and ‘Irritation’. The essays and snippets are both personal and critical (feminist theory and art critique are bundled here nicely, without being too pointy-headed; in other words, you can take it as you find it or investigate further), angry, and amusing. Taking her watching (cinema) and reading (essays and fiction), Schulmann drives us, never in a straight line, so we can observe her thinking about voice — its physical, emotional and intellectual power — and its cultural significance. How are women through their voice portrayed in films? Are they mostly silent/ screaming/ husky or simpering? How do women use their voices to protest and complain about inequality? Is it subtle? A pointed yet subtle change in mode or a tirade of small irritations (no time, too many family demands, commonplace sexism at work)? There are so many ideas packed into these short pieces, and they point in further directions and diversions. She quotes writers and draws up a map by which we can navigate her thinking out loud — about voice and in voice. In French the title is Zizanies which translates as discord or disharmony. When we say the word ‘voice’ we are likely to think of harmony or articulation. Yet if we think about the idea of voice as Schulmann has in the context of gender, discord is more than appropriate. The English language title, Chicanes: a sharp double bend, likely with some obstacle; is an apt descriptor also. Interestingly, there are several translators (one for each section), each with their ‘own voice’ interpreting Clara Schulmann’s interpretations. This observation by the author of language and tone (voice) by other writers/artists and then in turn via interpretation gives readers in English another level of voice. And then, in turn, we use our voice in its imperfect way (but probably less imperfectly than a chatbot, as if perfection was even the aim), to reflect our emotional and cultural condition. The book is immersive and curious in the best possible way.

>>Find out more about the book.

Wall by Jen Craig $33
A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father's house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn't reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her — a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.
”Wall is an extraordinarily compacted work of rich complexity, humour, and sadness. Its narrator's steadfast desire to explain herself, to clarify the seemingly unclarifiable, is as close to mirroring the roiling momentum of real consciousness that I've read in a modern novel. When I read Jen Craig I find it impossible to imagine a better way to capture the mysterious workings of the mind — its inadvertent epiphanies, its loose but determined associations, its cruelly recurring entrapments — without writing just like her. But no one else could.” —Shaun Prescott
"Every new novel by Jen Craig is cause for celebration. They are a reminder that literature is still being written in the English language.” —Mauro Javier Cárdenas
>>”Vast ambition and meticulous execution.”
>>’Waste Not’ by Song Dong.
>>’Haze’.
>>Read Thomas’s review of Panthers and the Museum of Fire.

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Zoë Perry) $38
Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil. In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo's slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It's important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it's a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness. 
"Brutal yet gripping, as if Cormac McCarthy penned an anti-meat noir." —Kirkus
>>Read an extract.

Fungi of Aotearoa: A curious forager’s guide by Liv Sisson, with photographs by Paula Vigus $45
Enter and explore the fascinating world of fungi. In this very clear and informative, practical up-to-date guide, forager and fungus enthusiast Liv Sisson shares her top tips and takes the reader on a journey to discover the unique and diverse fungi Aotearoa has to offer. Discover how to identify the best edible varieties, and how to cook with them, how these incredible organisms have shaped the world as we know it, and the role they are playing in modern medical and environmental research. Featuring full-colour photographs, fun facts and current descriptions of over 130 species (including our brilliant blue national fungus, werewere kokako), Fungi of Aotearoa is packed full of information and advice that will delight armchair enthusiasts, backcountry explorers and budding experts alike.
>>Look inside!

The Patriarchs: How men came to rule by Angela Saini $38
Angela Saini goes in search of the true roots of what we call patriarchy, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.
Travelling to the world's earliest known human settlements, analysing the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and tracing cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, she overturns simplistic universal theories to show that what patriarchy is and how far it goes back really depends on where you live. Despite all the push back against sexism, abuse, and discrimination in our own time, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. Saini ends by asking what part we all play — women included — in keeping patriarchal structures alive, and why we need to look beyond the old grand narratives to understand how it persists in the present.
”The Patriarchs is a hopeful, essential read, not just for feminists, but for anyone with a stake in existence. I learned something new on every page of this totally essential book. And for such a serious topic, I was surprised to be greatly entertained too. Angela is the best possible guide.” —Sathnam Sanghera
”Bold, incisive, and beautifully told, The Patriarchs is a truly riveting investigation into the origins and consequences of structural power. The depth and originality of Angela Saini's thought and research is breath-taking, and world-changing. A phenomenally important and deeply enjoyable book.” —Elinor Cleghorn

The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé (translated by Richard Philcox $43
A miracle baby is rumoured to be the child of God. Caribbean author Maryse Condé follows his journey in search of his origins and mission. Baby Pascal is strikingly beautiful, brown in complexion, with grey-green eyes like the sea. But where does he come from? Is he really the child of God? So goes the rumour, and many signs throughout his life will cause this theory to gain ground.  From journey to journey and from one community to another, Pascal sets off in search of his origins, trying to understand the meaning of his mission. Will he be able to change the fate of humanity? And what will the New World Gospel reveal? 
”The book borrows from the tradition of magical realism and draws us into a world full of colour and life. This is a book that succeeds in mixing humour with poetry, and depth with lightness.” —judges’ citation, short-listing the book for the 2023 International Booker Prize
>>Read an extract.
>>Intimate enemies.
>>The author’s voice.
>>Other books on the 2023 International Booker Prize short list.

Sewer (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Jessica Leigh Hester $23
What can underground pipes tell us about human eating habits and the spread or containment of disease, such as COVID-19? Why are sewers spitting out plastic and trash into waterways around the world? How are clogs getting gnarlier and more numerous? Jessica Leigh Hester leads readers through the past, present, and future of the system humans have created to deal with our own waste and argues that sewers can be seen as a mirror to the world above at a time when our behaviors are drastically reshaping the environment for the worse. Sifting through the muck offers a fresh way to approach questions about urbanization, public health, infrastructure, ecology, sustainability, and consumerism — and what we value. Without understanding sewers, any attempt to steward the future is incomplete.
>>Other books in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

The Deck by Fiona Farrell $37
During a time of plague and profound social collapse, a group of friends escape to a house in the country where they entertain themselves by playing music, eating, drinking and telling stories about their lives. The Deck borrows the motifs of Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century masterpiece The Decameron to tell the story of another small group gathered in a bay on Banks Peninsula during a time, a little way off in the future, of contagion and global catastrophe. What is the role of fiction, this novel asks, as civilisation falters? What is the point of inventing stories when reality so eclipses what we can imagine?
”The evocative nature writing, the nuanced points of view, and the sharpness and clarity of the non-fiction wraparound sing the The Deck to vivid life. Flashes of wit and humour sparkle through the text. The Deck is a modern masterpiece of invention and curated facts by a writer at the height of her powers, a luminous intelligence and compassion shining forth from every page.” —Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
>>Lynn Freeman reviews the book.

Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin $45
Witness to the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the civil rights movement and anti-war and environmental activism, Le Guin continued to fight for social and environmental justice throughout her life. The book shows the development of Le Guin’s expansive, multilayered and deeply radical feminist consciousness. Famous for her experiments in imagining society where gender is irrelevant in novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin’s feminism kept ahead of the times to reimagine gender in a non-essentialising way. Her feminism developed from its roots in her ecological, anti-war and anti-nuclear activism, to her self-education about racism and her writing about ageing.

There’s a Cure for This: A memoir by Emma Espiner $35
Encompassing whānau, love, death, '90s action movies and more, Espiner charts her life in a dozen poised, interconnected chapters, from her childhood shuttling between a 'purple lesbian state house and a series of man-alone rentals' to navigating parenthood on her own terms; and from the quietly perceived inequities of her early life to hard-won revelations as a Māori medical student and junior doctor during the Covid-19 pandemic.
>>What makes a doctor?
>>Why become a doctor?

The Road: A story of Romans and ways to the past by Christopher Hadley $38
In the beginning was Watling Street, the first road scored on the land when the invading Romans arrived on a cold and alien Kentish shore in 43 CE. Campaign roads rolled out to all points of the compass, forcing their way inland and as the Britons fell back, the roads pursued them relentlessly, carrying troops, supplies and military despatches. In the years of fighting that followed, as the legions pushed onwards across what is now England, into Wales and north into Scotland in search of booty, mineral wealth, land and tribute, they left behind a vast road network, linking marching camps and forts, changing the landscape, etching the story of the Roman advance into the face of the land, still channelling people’s lives today.

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s last theory by Thomas Hertog $40
Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. Pondering this mystery led Hawking to study the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the maths predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse — countless different universes, most of which were far too bizarre to harbour life. Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked shoulder to shoulder for twenty years on a new quantum theory of the cosmos. As their discoveries took them deeper into the big bang, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fades away. Once upon a time, perhaps, there was no time. This led them to a revolutionary idea — the laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape.

Glimpse by Jane Higgins $24
The city authorities have abandoned the D-Zone as damaged beyond repair. It's a no-go area where ongoing earthquakes threaten to destroy what's left. But Jonah and Bas and everyone else trying to survive in the devastation there can't leave-they're 'illegals', without citizenship, without rights. Jonah can see the quakes - before the ground shudders and grinds, before the buildings fall. Glimpsing is a rare ability and a great survival asset. It has attracted the attention of the entertainment company GlimpseCorp and the cult movement People for a New Nation. Both are desperate to control and cash in on this remarkable power. When Bas joins People for a New Nation and disappears, Jonah knows his friend is in great danger. And he knows that GlimpseCorp, with its reality TV program, offers a way to save him-and a way to bring new hope to the people of the D-Zone. But Jonah's plan puts everything, including his own life, at risk.

The Sparrow by Tessa Duder $22
In September 1840, two ships arrive on the shores of the Waitemata Harbour to establish Auckland, the new capital of New Zealand. Among the settlers on board the Platina is young Harry, travelling alone and determined to return to family in England. But the more immediate challenge is finding food and shelter - and hiding the truth about Harry's real identity and what was left behind in Van Diemen's Land.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld $37
With a series of heartbreaks under her belt, Sally Milz — successful TV script writer for a legendary late-night TV comedy show — has long abandoned the search for love. But when her friend and fellow writer begins to date a glamorous actress, he joins the growing club of interesting but average-looking men who get to date accomplished, beautiful women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch, poking fun at this 'social rule'. The reverse never happens for a woman. Then Sally meets Noah, a pop idol with a reputation for dating models. But this isn't a romantic comedy — it's real life. Would someone like him ever date someone like her? Sittenfeld, as always, skewers all our clicheed preconceptions about the dynamics of relationships.
>>”Anyone who ever reads Sittenfeld will read anything she ever writes.” —The Times

A selection of books from our shelves.
(Click through to find out more)

The Loser

Losers

Getting Lost

Lost and Somewhere Else

Lost and Gone Away

The Lost Writings

Lost Possessions

Losing Ourselves

For new books and book news, read our latest NEWSLETTER.

BOOKS @ VOLUME #327

28.4.23

Who Owns the Clouds? by Mario Brassard and Gerard Dubois {Reviewed by STELLA}

Beautifully told and drawn, this story of wartime trauma is delicate and honest. Told through the eyes of Mila as she looks back at her nine-year-old self, it places memory at the centre of the story — both its necessity and its burden. A girl whose life is shattered by war; who has walked a road to escape, who has witnessed things that she couldn’t understand at the time, nor fully assimilate in her adult life, Mila is a thirty-four-year-old woman living in the country her family escaped to, being like any other young woman, but always there is a part of herself that is different. Trauma plays with memory, and memory is unreliable. As she considers the road to the new country, she realises that each member of her small family will have their own telling — their own witness. A reminder to us all, as we witness countless people on the move right now (from our distant remove), seemingly a common story in fact is no more common than our very own existence which we hold dear as our very own. For Mila sees and doesn’t see — she is a witness (and victim of) to the stark tragedy and misery of war, but also protected by her own family and more interestingly by her own psyche. She sleeps and sleeps — an endeavour to keep reality at bay. Told as memory, some elements are removed and others elevated. Objects, in this case the clouds, are used as a tool to articulate this pain, and also as hope for better or more hopeful times. White clouds are to strive towards, away from the black smoke bomb clouds of memory. Cats are to stroke and resurrect gentleness. And perhaps, also innocence. But a new life, even years on, cannot still Mila’s fear of queues or black clouds, but the memory of a brave act can make her smile and look beyond the pain she carries with her. Mario Brassard’s lyrical words and Gerard Dubois's stunning limited palette drawings are an evocative combination. 

>>Look inside!

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated from Korean by Emily Yae Won and Deborah Smith)

In Han Kang’s much-anticipated new novel, two characters experiencing loss find profound connection through language. In a class in Ancient Greek, a woman who has lost the ability to speak due to losses in her personal life and the tutor who is in the last stages of losing his eyesight find in each other and in the subtleties of the languages in which they are immersed, a new awareness and clarity that will help them overcome their feelings of displacement and alienation. Through language they become accessible to each other — and accessible to us. This slim volume of Han Kang’s crystalline prose is presented as a beautiful hardback.
>>How language misses the mark.
>>Losing language.
>>Solace in language.
>>An intimate connection.
>>I couldn’t bear fiction.
>>Your copy.

Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (translated by Frank Wynne) $38
”Initially a little intrigued, all babies eventually return the security guard's smile. The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales.”
The 1960s — Ferdinand arrives in Paris from Côte d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a big somebody. The 1990s — It is the Golden Age of immigration, and Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous change. The 2010s — In a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, the all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those who come to worship at this church to consumerism. Amidst the political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for Students from Côte d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of everything that passes under a security guard's gaze. There are fresh ideas and observations of the human condition (so to call it) on every page of this remarkable book, expressed with a concision and humour that may well change the way you think.
Short-listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
”A sharp and satirical take on the legacies of French colonial history and life in Paris today. Told in a fast-paced, and fluently translated, style of shifting perspectives, Standing Heavy carries us through the decades.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation
>>A succession of fictions.
>>Read an extract.
>>The most powerful way of fostering empathy.

May the Tigris Grieve for You by Emilienne Malfatto (translated by Lorna Fox Scott) $34
Rural Iraq, during the war against the Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all. Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour.
”A prose poem of devastating power, conveyed in simple devastating prose. It’s about war and loss, conformity and obligation, but most importantly about misogyny, femicide, power, vulnerability, and the injustice of it all. A poignant and thought-provoking novella, that will take you an hour to read, but the inequity at its heart will stay with you for a very, very long time.” —Paul Burke
>>Read the first chapter.

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) $35
For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux (the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate) has explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life. 
"Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. Ernaux's diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention." —Kate Briggs, Washington Post
"The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. Ernaux's singular style conveys both the soullessness and the dreamlike charm of the place." —Tess Little, Literary Review
>>Alone together.
>>”I don’t see writing as liberation.”
>>Both comfort and alienation.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett $32
A deceptively slender volume, Pond captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator's persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. New edition.
”Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.” —Jenny Offill
”Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and treasured.” —Deborah Levy
>>Read Thomas’s review.
>>The mind in solitude.
>>Modes of solitude.

Pathogenesis: How germs made history by Jonathan Kennedy $75
Humans did not make history — we were its host. This humbling and revelatory book shows how infectious disease has shaped humanity at every stage, from the first success of Homo sapiens over the equally intelligent Neanderthals to the fall of Rome, and the rise of Islam. How did the Black Death lead to the birth of capitalism? And how did the Industrial Revolution lead to the birth of the welfare state? Infectious diseases are not just something that happens to us, but a part of who we are. The only reason humans don't lay eggs is that a virus long ago inserted itself into our DNA. In fact, 8% of the human genome was put there by viruses. We have been thinking about the survival of the fittest all wrong- human evolution is not simply about our strength and intelligence, but about what viruses can and can't use for their benefit.
”Pathogenesis doesn't only cover thousands of years of history - it seeks radically to alter the way the reader views many of the (often very well-known) events it describes.” —Rachel Cooke, Observer
>>A golden age for microbes.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs $38
It’s early morning and there’s a whole new day ahead. How will it unfold? The baby will feed, hopefully she’ll sleep; Helen looks out of the window. The Long Form is the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – gets delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. Matters of care-work share ground with matters of friendship, housing, translation, aesthetics and creativity. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love. With lightness and precision, Kate Briggs renews Henry Fielding’s proposition for what a novel can be, combining fiction and essay to write an extraordinary domestic novel of far-reaching ideas.
”The Long Form is an absorbing and profound novel in which Kate Briggs breathes extraordinary life into the quiet moments of a young woman: one who is also a new mother, a reader, a daughter, a friend. With every carefully weighted sentence, action and thought, one is immersed in the radical generosity of this writing, its principles of collectivity and its feminist commitment to making the smallest, most everyday act worthy of consideration within a literary canon. A beautifully written book about the art of reading, of criticism, and of surviving through the strangest yet most normal of times.” —Preti Taneja
”Ostensibly about a single day in the lives of a new mother and her infant, The Long Form – with its recursive structure, its subtle connections and reverberations, its attentiveness to physical and social life, and its animated conversation with other works of fiction and theory – presents the novel form as the most elastic of containers. Kate Briggs is a brilliant writer and thinker.” —Kathryn Scanlan
”Briggs is a fantastic writer: that is clear by the end of this eminently strange novel. Briggs has written a work that will constantly reward a re-reading, with a voice that combines a deep complexity with moments of piercing clarity. It is an intelligent and well-read book: but it is also emphatically convincing and moving.” —Patrick Maxwell, The Big Issue

Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival, and triumph by Inge Woolf $35
Resilience is a Holocaust story and a New Zealand story. Born to a prosperous Jewish family, Inge Woolf witnessed the Nazis marching into Vienna in March 1938. To escape certain death, the family audaciously boarded a train to the heart of Nazi Germany – Berlin – and from there caught a plane to England, pretending they were going on holiday. Hiding their Jewish identity until after World War II, Inge and her family began a new life as impoverished refugees. A move to New Zealand signalled new beginnings. Inge met the love of her life, Ronald Woolf, and together they created the country's pre-eminent photographic studio. They settled in Wellington, raising two children when tragedy struck again with Ron killed at age 57 in a helicopter crash in 1987. Resilience is ultimately the story of a woman who harnessed her past and used it to encourage a more cohesive, inclusive society. In her later years, Inge was pivotal in establishing the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and was its founding director. She educated thousands on the Holocaust and the dangers of antisemitism, racism and prejudice, often observing that hate starts small. She was often called on by the media to comment about antisemitism and would speak freely about the need to remember the lessons learned from the Nazi genocide.
>>Woolf’s daughter speaks about the book.

Mala’s Cat by Mala Kacenberg $26
Alone in a forest with only a cat for company, this is the true story of a little girl's remarkable survival in the shadow of the Holocaust. Growing up in the Polish village of Tarnogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest has given twelve-year-old Mala Szorer the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends reduced to starvation, she takes matters into her own hands, bravely removes her yellow star and sneaks out to the surrounding villages to barter for food. It is on her way back that she sees her loved ones rounded up for deportation, and receives a smuggled letter from her sister warning her to stay away. With only her cat, Malach, and the strength of the stories taught by her family, she walks away from her village and everything she holds dear into the dangerous unknown. Malach becomes her family, her protector, her only respite from painful loneliness, and a reminder to stay hopeful even when faced with unfathomable darkness.
”Fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable, this memoir, rescued from obscurity by the efforts of Mala Kacenberg's five children, should be read and cherished as a new, vital document of a history that must never be allowed to vanish.” —The New York Times
>>Mounting horrors.

Questions I am Asked about the holocaust (young readers’ edition) by Hédi Fried (translated by Alice E. Olsson) $30
Hedi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis arrested her family and transported them to Auschwitz. While there, apart from enduring the daily horrors at the concentration camp, she and her sister were forced into hard labour before being released at the end of the war. After settling in Sweden, Hedi devoted her life to educating young people about the Holocaust. In her 90s, she decided to take the most common questions (such as: "Why did you not fight back?"; "What helped you to survive?"; "Are you able to forgive?"), and her answers, and turn them into a book so that children all over the world could understand what had happened. This is an excellent illustrated edition for young readers.
>>Look inside.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad $38
After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. Once at Haneen's, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertude's lines in classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many invasive and violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
”Outstanding. Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying. It is astonishing but true that Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty — an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity.” —Leila Aboulela

Aftermath: Colonialism, violence and memory in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific edited by Angela Wanhalla, Lyndall Ryan and Camille Nurka $50
”What we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about the violent past tell us something about the society we live in now. Whether we like it or not, we’re part of each other’s story. So how do we talk about the past?“ —Joanna Kidman and Vincent O’Malley
Aftermaths explores the life-changing intergenerational effects of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. The settings of these accessible, illustrated short essays range from Ōrākau pā in the Waikato to the Kimberleys in northwest Australia, from orphanages in Fiji to the ancestral lands of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California. Contributors include: Tony Ballantyne, Rachel Burgess, Penelope Edmonds, Anaru Eketone, Stephanie Gilbert, Victoria Haskins, Anna Johnston, Joanna Kidman, Shino Konishi, Jane Lydon, Caitlin Lynch, Keri Mills, Kirstine Moffat, Grace Moore, Amanda Nettelbeck, Erica Newman, Camille Nurka, Patricia O’Brien, Vincent O’Malley, Lachy Paterson, Lyndall Ryan, Sian Smith, Kate Stevens and Angela Wanhalla.
“Story by story, this collection powerfully reveals the living legacy of historical events, showing how they have been remembered (and misremembered) within families and communities into the present day.
'It is a rare publication that can cross the difficult divide between academic history and accessible reading. Every chapter is well-written and evocative. Aftermaths will open eyes. Aftermaths makes a powerful case for ending our historical ignorance. It forces readers to confront the violence embedded in our collective colonial past and it reveals the many reverberations of that violence in our present. It also asks us to unbury the skeletons in our own closets and fairly carry our share of this ‘emotional freight’ and trauma. It asks us to be brave and unchain our dragons.” —Maartje Abbenhuis, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Laughing in the Dark by Barbara Else $40
By the time Barbara Else was in her forties, she was married to a globally recognised academic physician, had two beautiful teenage daughters and a house in Karori. Gradually she realised her husband didn't want her to have a career of her own or do anything outside his orbit. He refused to acknowledge there was a problem. In the end, the man who became her second husband offered a way out. It was a huge risk. But she fled, with a laundry basket of oddments, two suitcases, and her little Mac Plus and dot matrix printer. The result was best-selling books and literary honours. With her wit and humour, Barbara describes her transformation from a shy but stubborn child into a fulfilled and successful adult.
”I laughed and laughed, and I cried and cried. It's got everything in it except a murder.” —Lesley Graham, soprano (and totally unbiased sister)
>>It’s been quite a ride.

Abigail and the Making of the Moon by Matthew Cunningham and Sarah Wilkins $21
One clear day, Abigail thinks of a question and knows that she won't be able to do anything else if she doesn't have an answer to it. "Daddy," she asked, "where did the Moon come from?""From the Earth, Abigail," replied Daddy. "The Moon was once a part of the Earth.""It was?" Abigail asked. "But how did it get in the sky? And how does it stay in the sky? And why do we only ever see one side of the Moon?" What follows is an evocatively simple story within a story explaining how the newborn Earth collided with another planet, and how gravity acts like invisible hands reaching out and keeping the Moon spinning around the Earth, the Earth spinning around the Sun, and the Sun spinning around the galaxy. And of course by dinner time, Abigail has thought of a new big question...

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.” Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's remarkable book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Encounters with persons and with the infraordinary are treated with equivalence: acute, highly acute, overly acute, observations immediately plunge the narrator’s awareness into the depths of her response (“My head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances.”), far from the surface at which outward contact may be made, or may be being made, a process that is both deeply isolating, terrifying and protective. Bennett’s unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction and quotidian existence seem here induced by an acceptance or a resignation that is enabled by despair, or is indistinguishable from despair, both a resignation and a panic, perhaps, a panic on the edge of self-dissolution which is perhaps our last resistance to self-dissolution and therefore fundamental to individual existence: the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal. Bennett’s is a very individual voice (click here to hear her read a sample), resonating at times with other works of irredeemably isolated interiority, such David Markson’s superb Wittgenstein’s Mistress or the suppressed hysteria of Thomas Bernhard’s narrators, but tracking entirely her own patterns of thought (I have perhaps made an error here of conflating the author with the narrator, but, if this is an error, it is one hard to avoid in the book in which style and content are inseparable) with an immediacy that precludes the artificially patterning, pseudo-assimilable explanation of a ‘story’. In one excellent section, ‘Control Knobs’, the narrator describes the gradual disintegration of the three knobs that control her cooker and speculates a coming time when the last interchangeable knob breaks and the cooker will become unusable. This reminds her of the counted matches in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (another novel of irredeemably isolated interiority), which mark the time to the point at which that narrator will no longer be able to light a fire to cook and warm herself. Following a discussion of Bennett’s narrator’s reading and misreading of that book, she returns to an account of the ultimate hopelessness of her attempts to procure new knobs for her cooker. “I feel at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, not dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.”

A selection of books from our shelves.
(Click through to find out more)

Dr.No

Nothing To See Here

Void Studies

Absence

The King of Nothing

Nothing To See

No Document

NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS

(21.4.23)

Read our 326th NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending.

August Blue by Deborah Levy {Reviewed by STELLA}
August Blue is an enigmatic novel. It’s sparsely written, with evocative sentences, yet crisp ideas. Elsa, a famous concert pianist, has walked off the stage in humiliation and is now traveling Europe teaching music to anyone who will have her. Her downfall extremely public; her inner world in turmoil. From the outset, Elsa would like you to believe she has a devil-may-care attitude towards her crisis, but it doesn’t take too much picking at a wound to see her hurt and confusion. But let’s put aside her parentage (or rather abandonment), let’s put aside her recently dyed blue hair, let’s put aside her craving to be free of expectation; for Levy does something from the outset — she sets a perpetual question mark at the centre of this story which underscores each page. Who is the woman in the Athens marketplace? Someone so familiar that the viewer and the viewed are compelled to see each other, to be drawn inexplicably to each other in spite of an enticing rivalry. Doppelganger or mirror image? Familiar or stranger? The same, but different, or not really there at all? A desire, all-consuming. Elsa is drawn to the woman who steals the mechanical horses from under her nose; whose acquisition sends her on an obsessive quest to have the horses as her right, and, when she can’t have them, stealing the woman’s hat is the next best thing to possess, as if possessing this hat binds the two strangers to each other. And maybe it does. Elsa’s flagrant wearing of the trilby is a flag to wave in provocation: Here I am, and you better not forget it — I’m coming for my horses. It’s 2020 and the pandemic is set to lock in. Elsa, back in London, finds a different pattern to live by — an enforced schedule, or non-schedule that will ring familiar to many. That strange time/non-time, of lengthening and shortening; a strange mix of frustration and contentment somehow co-existing, spiked with uncertainty. In August Blue, Levy uses this out-of-time moment in history to best effect in her novel about a woman in limbo. Moving between Greece, Paris, London, and Sardinia (where Elsa visits her maestro in his final months), Levy uses this movement to jointly discombobulate — reflecting Elsa’s fractured state as well as giving us, the reader, mere episodic moments with Elsa, as though we are allowed only glances into her life. In this novel, readers of Levy’s other novels will recognise the themes of mothers and daughters (Hot Milk), of heat as an oppressor as well as an escape (Swimming Home), and enigmatic actions (The Man Who Saw Everything) but will see a change in the telling. Levy seems to draw her memoir style (from her 'Living Autobiography' trilogy) into this novel, creating a fiction that has few boundaries — that impregnates itself into the reader with an ease that is beguiling, so that you are continually entering and re-entering the story, learning a little more each time, but nothing at all — yet paradoxically knowing everything, as if starting again is the only option towards understanding, if that is possible when facing oneself.