A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Is memory the cement of your identity? Are we in danger of a new world order facilitated by nostalgia?
Georgi Gospodinov’s wholly remarkable and enjoyable novel TIME SHELTER (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) has just been awarded the 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE.
In this compelling novel of ideas, large concepts and fierce insights are carried on a generous tide of humour and human warmth, resulting in a memorable and thought-provoking reading experience.
When Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ to treat dementia patients by recreating previous decades in minute detail, the simulacra become so convincing that more and more healthy people seek to use the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ to escape the horrors of our present, and memory itself becomes a threat to our future.
What the judges said: “Time Shelter is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.
In scenes that are burlesque as well as heartbreaking, he questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative. But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented, and nostalgia is a poison. It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the West and the communist world.
It is a novel that invites reflection and vigilance as much as it moves us, because the language – sensitive and precise – manages to capture, in a Proustian vein, the extreme fragility of the past. And it mixes, in its very form, a great modernity with references to the major texts of European literature, notably through the character of Gaustine, an emanation from a world on the verge of extinction.
The translator, Angela Rodel, has succeeded brilliantly in rendering this style and language, rich in references and deeply free.
The past is only ever a story that is told. And not all storytellers have the talent of Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel.”
>>Your copy.
NEW BOOKS AND BOOK NEWS
>>Read our latest NEWSLETTER to find out what we’ve been reading and recommending; about new arrivals, fresh out of the carton; and to find out the winning books in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
19.5.23
The Beat of the Pendulum by Catherine Chidgey {reviewed by THOMAS}
What are you looking at?
Nothing. I’m not looking at anything.
Up there in the corner?
No, I’m concentrating. Trying to.
What on?
I’m writing a review of this Catherine Chidgey book.
You’re writing a review today? Why? It's not even deadline day. You’ve never written reviews before deadline day before. I like the cover.
It’s by Fiona Pardington. The photograph.
What is it?
A moth’s wing, or a butterfly’s. It’s probably some reference to Nabokov. He was a lepidopterist. I don’t know what, though. Nabokov not being a writer I particularly appreciate.
Why is it called The Beat of the Pendulum?
That’s a reference to Proust. Something he wrote about writing novels. It’s in the epigraph. The writer as the manipulator of the reader’s experience of time. The writer as able to make the reader experience time as such, by speeding it up. Or by slowing it down, I suppose. Proust might be mistaken on this, though.
What?
I am interested in the differential of the reader’s and the characters’ experience of time. The writer’s inclusion or exclusion of detail controls the reader’s awareness and makes the book move at a varying pace, that’s what detail is for, slowing down, speeding up, leaping over swathes of time that would have been experienced by the characters, if they weren’t fictional, a kind of hypothetical time, so to call it, but inaccessible to the reader because those moments are one step deeper into fiction than the text reaches.
Sounds more like a concertina than a pendulum.
Yes. The book should be called The Squeeze of the Concertina. I’m not sure readers are necessarily aware, consciously, of the difference between text time and narrative time, notwithstanding Proust, though they might well be.
What has this got to do with the book? It’s just a transcript of all the conversations the author overheard or that she was involved in. Is it even a novel?
Just? Have you read this book?
No. But [N.] read it. Or read some of it. Or a review. Or talked to someone who had read it.
Or some of it. Or a review.
Yes.
And said?
That it was self-indulgent.
I don’t agree with that. At least, it is less self-indulgent than most novels. I mean, what kind of person, other than a novelist, would be so presumptuous as to expect others to spend hours of their time witnessing their make-believe?
But people like doing that.
That’s beside the point.
And the point is?
The point is that this book turns the tables on the author, subjects her to the very kinds of scrutiny that most novels are constructed to deflect, if I can damn all writers with one blow, or at least the kinds of writers that write the kind of make-believe that the ‘people’ you referred to earlier like to indulge in.
There are other kinds?
So in a way this novel is a kind of literary gutting inflicted upon the author by the rigours of the constraint she has chosen, Knausgaard without the interiority.
It’s like Knausgaard?
No. It’s more a kind of extension of the Nouveau roman project outlined by Robbe-Grillet: a turning-away from the tired novelistic props of plot, character, meaning, a verbal ‘inner life’, inside-out, and all that.
Robbe-Grillet wanted a novel made only of objects, surfaces, objective description. This book doesn’t have any of those.
Hmm. Yes. This book has cast off all those. It’s even more rigorous. There are only words, spoken by people about whom we know nothing but what the words tell us, or imply. We are immersed in language, it is our medium, or the medium of one strand of our consciousness. Our sensory awareness and our verbal awareness are very different things.
Are you giving a lecture here?
I suppose this book, by removing both the referents for language and the matrix of interpretation, or context, the conceptual plinths that weigh down novels, is testing to what extent speech is any good at conveying anything by itself.
Conceptual plinths?
There aren’t any. The book reminds me, a little, of Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium perhaps, where the novel is comprised only of voices. In this book the reader does the same sort of work to ‘build’ the novel around the words.
Is that fun?
Fun? Well, actually, yes, this book is very enjoyable to read. I thought I would read a bit, get the idea, and then take some pretty large running stitches through it, so to speak, but, even though nothing much happens in the way of plot, it is just an ordinary life, after all, the book is hugely enjoyable, and frequently very funny, you want to read every bit, because it so perfectly captures the way people say things, the way thought and language stutter on through time. The book is takes place entirely in the present moment, a present moment regulated by language. By the beat of the sentence. What is said is unimportant. Relatively unimportant.
It doesn’t matter what happens?
Why should anyone care about that? Apart from the characters, so to call them.
She spent a year spying on people and writing down whatever they said, whether she was in the conversation, probably quite private conversations, or things she overheard people saying? How could she do that?
How could she not do that? A novelist is always spying on other people, not to overhear what people say but how they say it, not to find out information but to find out how people approach or are affected by or transfer information.
You don’t think a novelist is predatory of plot, then? Or scavenging for plot?
You can’t hear or see plot. There’s no such thing, objectively. So I suppose you can’t steal one, only impose one. The realist novel, or the so-called realist novel, as a form, makes the most outrageous of its fantasies, its fallacies, in the area of plot. I think that’s unjustified.
But people like plot.
Yes.
Yes, I suppose plot has little to do with objective reality.
So to call it. Yes. In fact, coming back to what you said before about objectivity. Dialogue is the only objective form of writing. Description is prone to error, to the interposition of the viewer to the viewed, and no-one would pretend that interiority was anything but an unreliable guide to the actual…
No-one as in not even you?
…which is its richness, I suppose. But no-one would dispute the saying of what is said.
No-one as in not even you?
Verbatim is actuality, or, I mean, resembles actuality, at least structurally. Verbatim creates an indubitable immediacy for the reader, which is very seductive, and clocks time against speech.
Why write conversation?
Conversation is propulsion. It is rocket fuel for a stuck writer, for any writer. It gets the writer out of the way of the text and lets the characters take responsibility for its progression. Conversation gives at least the illusion of objectivity. Conversation draws the reader into the illusion of ‘real time’.
Even if it’s not.
No. Irrelevant, though.
But this novel, The Beat of the Pendulum, purports to be a record of things actually said, in the real world.
Yes, I believe it.
How is that a novel?
All novels are a kind of edited actuality, some more swingeingly edited than others. Otherwise they wouldn’t be believable.
She’s edited this?
Well, obviously there’s been some sort of selecting process going on, some choosing. A year’s worth of “I’m putting on some washing. Is there anything you want to add to the load”/”There are some socks on the floor in the bedroom, if you wouldn’t mind.” might get a bit tedious.
But is not out of keeping with the project.
Well, no. I suppose not. But then it wouldn’t be a novel. Literature is potentised by exclusion rather than by inclusion. What makes this book a novel is the rigour of its form. It is an experiment in form. A laboratory experiment, if you like.
You said this book is funny. Where does the humour come from?
Scientific rigour is indistinguishable from humour.
The world is a relentless funfair?
If you look at it dispassionately. And a relentless tragedy. There are some very memorable and enjoyable passages, revelatory I would call some of them.
Such as?
There is a long passage, maybe a dozen pages, which just records the sales pitch of a sales assistant showing Catherine and her husband a carpet shampooing machine. The use, or misuse, of language is just so well observed, it’s hilarious and tragic. Likewise the patter used by Fiona Pardington when taking Chidgey’s portrait, or there’s the compound pretension and insecurity of the conversations in the creative writing classes Chidgey tutors, or the attempt to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to an inattentive child. Humour often comes from the simultaneous impact of multiple contexts upon language.
I thought humour comes from noticing the world as it actually is. That’s why humour is often cruel.
Or all the medical appointments, or the woman overheard in a waiting room talking about her jewellery. “I’m a silver person but my three daughters are gold people,” or something like that. Chidgey reveals the distortions, the structural flaws and inconsistent texture of the verbal topographies we wander through.
Hark at him.
And the way words act as hooks or burrs that accrete details to entities in ways sufficiently idiosyncratic to make them specific.
So you get to know the characters in this book? Even though nobody’s named.
No, not really. At least, not closely. Surprisingly, perhaps. But then an overdefined personality, or ‘character’ is a definite flaw that fiction, even — sometimes — good fiction, but certainly — always — bad fiction, is prone to fall into. What we call identity is really just a grab-bag or accretion of impressions and tendencies, and multiple voices, including incompatible impressions and contradictory tendencies and conflicting voices. We are much less ourselves than we pretend we are.
Speak for yourself.
Attachment to what we, for convenience, call persons, is something imposed upon actuality and is not something inherent in it. Chidgey’s book is not involving in the way we sometimes expect novels to be involving, there’s no story, or any of those other appurtenances, but there is both a fascination and a shared poignancy that comes with this cumulative evidence of the feeling that actual life is slipping away, with each beat of the pendulum, its loss measured out in words.
Each squeeze of the concertina.
The moments whose residue is on these pages will never return. The words both immortalise them and mark their evanescence. It’s both an anxiety and a release from anxiety.
So our anxiety about our vulnerability magnifies our vulnerability?
That’s a fairly accurate observation. That’s what we use words for.
Ha. The book is arranged on a day-by-day basis through the year.
Yes.
You’re supposed to read only what’s on today’s date, then, for a year.
Haha. That would be a bit religious. Yes, you could.
That would be an experiment in reading.
It’s been done.
But not in a novel.
I don’t know.
What are you doing?
I’m putting my computer away.
You’re not going to write the review?
All this talking has used up the time I was going to write it in.
Sorry.
Don’t say that.
Sorry.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, our situation, two fictional characters engaged in a fictional conversation about an objective novel comprising only actual, ‘real-life’, material.
What are you saying?
We’re both fictional, authorial conceits if you like. Mind you, you are rather more fictional than I am. Someone might mistake me for an actual person.
But you’re not?
Not on the evidence of our conversation.
Book of the Week: Catherine Chidgey's latest inventive, acute and entertaining novel THE AXEMAN’S CARNIVAL has just been awarded the prestigious Jann Medlicott Acord Prize for Fiction at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Narrated by Tama, a magpie who very cleverly 'does all the voices' and mimics even an author's relationship to their story and characters, the novel treats life in the backblocks of rural Aotearoa as a scenario in which humans fail to suppress their inner faults and play out their ambivalences towards each other and toward the so-called natural world.
>>All hail the Book of the Year.
>>Each book is a different creature.
>>Book of the Week: Bird of the Year.
>>Life on the farm.
>>Pecky reviews the book.
>>An excellent conversation with Sara Baume (author of Seven Steeples).
>>"There's a fire under me."
>>The New Zealand 12" Championship.
>>Read Stella's review of The Wish Child.
>>Read Thomas's review of The Beat of the Pendulum.
>>Remote Sympathy.
>>Quardleoodleardlewardledoodle #1
>>Quardleardleoodlewardledoodle #2
>>Other winners in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Your copy of The Axeman's Carnival.
NEW RELEASES (19.5.23)
Click through to find out more — and to purchase your copies!
August Blue by Deborah Levy $40
”If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.”
Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.
”August Blue is an enigmatic novel. It’s sparsely written, with evocative sentences, yet crisp ideas. 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” —Stella
>>Read Stella’s entire review.
>>How Deborah Levy can change your life.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan $23
Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a remarkable feat of synthesis. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.” Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.
“Magical.” —Lydia Davis
“Scanlan’s inventive debut novel documents a woman’s hardscrabble yet jubilant life and her dedication to working with racehorses. Shaped from interview transcripts with a real-life trainer named Sonia (no last name given), Scanlan’s vignettes carry readers across the arc of Sonia’s life...but the most beautiful moments are quiet ones, in which Sonia processes the choices she and others have made, and of the consequences she faces in a field dominated by men. With this sharp and lovely tribute to a singular woman, Scanlan continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Dominant Animal.
Ink on Paper: Printmakers of the Modern era edited by Peter Vangioni $55
Revolutionised by the introduction of the linocut, early to mid twentieth-century printmaking is one of the most progressive and dynamic periods in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. This exquisitely illustrated book features ambitious and delightful etchings, lithographs, wood-engravings and linocuts by some of the country’s finest artists.
– Engaging introduction to the establishment of printmaking in Aotearoa by Peter Vangioni
– Short biographical texts on each artist.
– Full page colour illustrations of more than 100 artworks.
– Etchings, lithographs, wood-engravings and linocuts drawn from collections around the country.
– Beautifully designed hardcover book with dust jacket and marker ribbon.
>>Look inside!
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to station by Redmer Yska $50
Guided by Mansfield's journals and letters, Redmer Yska traces her restless journey in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe. In Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, Yska takes us to the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, churches, towns, beaches and cities where Mansfield wrote some of her finest stories. Hauntingly, these are also places where she suffered from piercing loneliness and homesickness, rooms in which she endured illness and extreme physical hardship, windows from which she gazed as she grappled with her mortality. With maps and stunning photography, this engaging and well-researched book richly illuminates Katherine Mansfield’s time in Europe and reveals her enduring presence in the places she frequented.
”Redmer Yska, once again, brings his sharp eye, his wry personal take, to the facts and legends of Katherine Mansfield. In A Strange Beautiful Excitement, he showed how we can no longer truly understand her apart from the city that was first hers, and then his own. Now, with her stories and legends in hand, he traces how in Europe she survives in places that were deeply important to her, and where still she trails devotees and alternative facts. This book is a delight — never solemn, always alert to even the faintest whispers, among buildings and memories and her swathes of slightly evangelical 'true believers.'“ —Vincent O’Sullivan
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman $38
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
”Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self…It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.” —Anthony Quinn, Observer
>>I don’t just want you to love me.
>>It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet) $38
The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him. This novel by International Booker Prize winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai — perhaps his most serene and poetic work — describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area, making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.
”Krasznahorkai throws down a challenge: raise your game or get your coat ... the intensity of his commitment to the art of fiction is indisputable ... exhilarating, even euphoric.” —Hari Kunzru
”Laszlo Krasznahorkai writes prose of breathtaking energy and beauty. He has elevated the novel form and is to be ranked among the great European novelists.” —Colm Toibin
”The universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.” —W.G. Sebald
”This is a book preoccupied with infinity. Krasznahorkai’s project, it seems, is to thwart the passing of time through a program of looking. It takes millions of years of chance occurrences to make a bird in its perfect machinery and just a moment for it to be destroyed, impossible to be remade.” —Laura Preston, The Believer
>>A garden in this wretched world.
>>The infinite mistake.
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai.
Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential stories by Bruno Schulz (translated by Bill Stanley) $28
The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms. Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the 15 stories in his collection showcases Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his essential status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical: August, A Visitation, Birds, Pan, Cinnamon Shops, The Street of Crocodiles, Cockroaches, The Gale, The Night of the Great Season (from Cinnamon Shops); The Book, The Age of Genius, A July Night, My Father Joins the Firefighters, Father's Final Escape (from Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass); Undula— Schulz's recently discovered first published story. Excellent new translations.
”One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
Ducks: Two years in the oil sands by Kate Beaton $70
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates. Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal. Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
>>Look inside!
>>How to pay off your student loans.
>>Humour and humanity in the oilfields.
>>”I need to tell you this.”
Elixir: In the valley at the end of time by Kapka Kassabova $50
In the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe, where the surrounding forests and mountains are a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Kapka Kassabova finds a story with vast resonance for us all. Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place. Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing.Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.
”The mark of a good book is that it changes you. I've rarely been so aware of an internal change being wrought, word by word, as I have these past days immersed in Kapka Kassabova's alchemical prose. She had me under her spell from page one.” —Guardian
”Her ability to bring out the best in her subjects is born of a genuine horror at the unsustainability of the ways we live and the toll they are taking on places such as the Mesta valley. But Elixir is not a lecture: like the forests and fells it inhabits, it is by turns dark and mysterious and beautiful. Ecologically minded writing can often tell too much and show too little, but Kassabova sensibly lets the landscape and locals do the talking. —Financial Times
This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes) $38
Set in and around the city of Veracruz in Mexico, This Is Not Miami delivers twelve devastating stories that spiral from real events. These cronicas — a genre unique to Latin American writing, blending reportage and fiction — probe the motivations of murderers and misfits, compelling us to understand or even empathise with them. Melchor is like a ventriloquist, using a range of distinctive voices to evoke the smells, sounds and words of this fascinating world that includes mistreated women, damaged families, refugees, prisoners and even a beauty queen.As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor's masterful stories show how the violent and shocking events that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos."
”Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off.” —Samanta Schweblin
>>The house on El Estero.
The Russo-Ukranian War by Serhii Plokhy $40
On 24 February 2022, Russia stunned the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of checking on the family and friends who were now on the front lines of Europe's largest conflict since the outbreak of the Second World War, acclaimed Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy inevitably found himself attempting to understand the deeper causes of the invasion, analysing its course and contemplating the wider outcomes. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the comprehensive history of a conflict that has burned since 2014, and that, with Russia's attempt to seize Kyiv, exploded a geo-political order that had been cemented since the end of the Cold War. With an eye for the gripping detail on the ground, both in the halls of power and down in the trenches, as well as a keen sense of the grander sweep of history, Plokhy traces the origins and the evolution of the conflict, from the collapse of the Russian empire to the rise and fall of the USSR and on to the development in Ukraine of a democratic politics. Based on decades of research and his unique insight into the region, he argues that Ukraine's defiance of Russia, and the West's demonstration of unity and strength, has presented a profound challenge to Putin's Great Power ambition, and further polarized the world along a new axis.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris $32
Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves; each morning, the residents — whether Muslim, Croat or Serb — push the makeshift barriers aside. Zora, an artist and teacher, is focused on her family, her students, her studio in the old town. But when violence finally spills over, she sees that she must send her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England. Reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a handful of weeks, she stays behind. As the city falls under siege and everything they loved is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over. Inspired by real-life accounts of the longest siege in modern warfare, only thirty years ago, Black Butterflies is a breathtaking portrait of disintegration, resilience and hope.
”In this compelling and convincing debut novel, Morris brilliantly evokes a world slipping, day by day, under the surface of the opaque waters of war. Dark and yet starkly beautiful, Black Butterflies is a narrative of how violence scars the soul of a city and its inhabitants. It is at once a testament to the victims and survivors of the Siege of Sarajevo, to the power of art and to Morris's skills as a storyteller, all the more keenly felt for the subtlety with which they are deployed.” —Aminatta Forna
>>Short-listed for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré (translated by Holly James) $28
When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him. She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance's approach is monastic and military — she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night. A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.
”'Committed to truth-telling, no matter how rough, but also intriguingly suspended in a cloud of unknowing and pain, Love Me Tender is a wry, original, agonizing book destined to become a classic of its kind.” —Maggie Nelson
”A deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic.” —Rachel Kushner
”In cruel, brilliant sentences that tighten around the truth like teeth, a fierce character emerges; a new kind of rebel in a queer masterpiece.” —Holly Pester
>>A conversation about the exit.
100 Things to Know about Architecture by Louise O’Brien, Dalia Adillon and Leanne Daphne $33
Learn all about the world of architecture in only 100 words! This book explores the most iconic buildings from around the world as well as the history of architecture, from basic huts to incredible skyscrapers. From columns to pyramids, each of the carefully chosen 100 words has its own 100-word long description and colourful illustration, providing a fascinating introduction to amazing architecture from throughout history. From the familiar to the jaw-dropping, the medieval to ultra-modern, this is an inspiring look at some of architecture’s greatest developments. With a clean, contemporary design, each word occupies a page of its own. A large striking illustration neatly encapsulates the accompanying 100 words of text. A fascinating introduction to cool buildings in a fun and accessible format, this is the perfect gift for aspiring architects or curious young minds!
>>Look inside!
A selection of books from our shelves.
Find out more:
The OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS recognise some of the outstanding books published in Aotearoa in the last year.
Read what the judges have to say about the winners of each section, and then click through to secure your copies.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
“The Axeman’s Carnival is a novel that has been clasped to New Zealanders’ hearts. It is narrated by the unforgettable Tama, a fledgling magpie taken in and raised by Marnie on the Te Waipounamu high country farm she shares with champion axeman husband Rob. Without anthropomorphism, Tama is constantly entertaining with his take on the foibles and dramas of his human companions. An underlying sense of dread is shot through with humour and humanity. Chidgey’s masterful writing explores the diversifying of rural life, the predicament of childlessness, the ageing champ, and domestic violence. She provides a perspicacious take on the invidious nature of social media and a refreshingly complex demonstration of feminist principle. The Axeman’s Carnival is unique: poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.”
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised by Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) (Auckland University Press)
“Alice Te Punga Somerville’s collection, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised, voyages out like a waka seeking new ground, visiting four areas of life: language in ‘Reo’, identity in ‘Invisible Ink’, work in ‘Mahi’ and love in ‘Aroha’. Readers are challenged but crucially invited in to accept that challenge and reach a new understanding of what it is to be a Māori woman scholar, mother and wife in 2022, encountering and navigating uncomfortable and hostile spaces. Always Italicise shines for its finely crafted, poetically fluent and witty explorations of racism, colonisation, class, language and relationships. A fine collection, establishing and marking a new place to stand.”
BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press)
“With its homage to the look and feel of a countercultural tract, Jumping Sundays is a triumph of production and design. The cover alone is one of the best of the year and signals the visual excellence that follows: vibrant endpapers, distinctive typography and bountiful images on an appropriately uncoated stock. Yet Jumping Sundays is more than just a well-designed book. Drawing on archival research and rich personal narratives, Nick Bollinger has written a compelling account of an epoch-making period, linking international trends to the local context in a purposeful-yet-playful way. A joy to read and to hold, Jumping Sundays is a fantastic example of scholarship, creativity and craft.”
GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books)
“The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi is a meticulously constructed work of scholarship that provides surprising and essential analysis of Te Tiriti. It will shift and inform debates about the intentions of those who constructed and signed the Treaty and how we interpret it today. Though it is weighty, Ned Fletcher’s book leads readers through a series of clear and well-evidenced hypotheses. It provides colourful and necessary detail about the characters and context involved in the creation of the English text of Aotearoa’s founding document. Fletcher’s comprehensive examination sheds new light on the document's implications and contributes fresh thinking to what remains a very live conversation for all of us that call this country home.”
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARDS
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR FICTION
Home Theatre by Anthony Lapwood (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Pākehā) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
“Home Theatre, a collection of interlinked short stories, is unfailingly inventive. Narratives move between the twentieth and twenty-first century, with strong characterisation and genuine voice. The stories are humane and warm at the same time as being cerebral and challenging. Anthony Lapwood writes skilfully in all genres, ranging smoothly from domestic stories to science fiction to love stories to historical fiction, and sometimes all four at once. He demonstrates a keen interest in technology, both contemporary and of the past. Lapwood’s writing is sophisticated and of great promise.”
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR POETRY
We’re All Made of Lightning by Khadro Mohamed (We Are Babies Press, Tender Press)
“Khadro Mohamed’s We’re All Made of Lightning takes us to distant lands, Egypt and Somalia, in heightened sensory language as she grieves for her homeland. Heart-breaking vulnerability and anger are revealed after a man had taken a knife and sliced straight through the sky on the March 15 attacks. Time, memory, dreams and reality are fluid and woven into lyrical poems and prose poems that consider what she would take if she were to go back to where she came from.”
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Kai: Food Stories & Recipes from my Family Table by Christall Lowe (Bateman Books)
“Kai has everything you’d expect from an internationally recognised food photographer: elegant and enticing images, topped with well-placed illustrations and the compelling use of colour. But it is the substance of the book that shines. Whānau stories and recipes provide the reader with a wider insight into te ao Māori, creating a homage to food that is both grounded in tradition yet modern. Kai is the Edmonds cookbook for our time.”
E.H. MCCORMICK PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION
Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin Random House)
“This exquisite debut masterfully weaves together the threads of Noelle McCarthy’s life, and her relationship with her mother, in a memoir that connects with truths that unite us all. Poignant and poetic language renders scenes with honesty and colour. Intimate, but highly accessible, the fragility and turbulence of the mother-daughter relationship is at times brutally detailed. Despite this, Grand is an uplifting memoir, delicate and self-aware, and a credit to McCarthy’s generosity and literary deftness.”
Three by Ann Quin
Boredom is a sub-optimal mode, he thinks, but it is at least a functional mode compared with the revulsion it conceals, boredom at least connects one end of the day to the other, boredom is doubtless detrimental but it is by definition tolerable, let us all hope for boredom. That is not a good way to start his review, he thinks, it has some bearing on the book but it is not a good introduction to the book. Two is a situation of stasis, he thinks, three is dynamic, three is the catalyst that reveals the harms hidden in two, the harms that mathematics suppressed mathematics reveals, or not mathematics, physics perhaps, or chemistry, more likely. This also is not a good way to start. Well, he thinks, the review is far enough through not to worry any longer about starting it, a bad start is at least a start, that is something, I can adjust the performance using the choke, or perhaps the throttle, I need to find out the difference between these two obstructions, he thinks, these two forms of respiratory impediment, our relationship with engines is a violent one, he thinks, and this thought stalls the review. There is no access to the interior save through performance, he thinks, restarting, there is perhaps only performance, who can know, a middle class couple converse, the words pass between them but also bounce off their surroundings, language is a force-field, he thinks, a sonar, and a conversation is the pattern of disturbance, the pattern of interference, produced by two emitters, or should that be transmitters, of language. In this book, he thinks, Quin reproduces, well actually produces, that disturbance, those two voices, the Ruth voice and the Leon voice, as they run together as one entity, caught on the page, as if there is anything about a novel that is not on the page. In the Ruth-and-Leon sections of the novel, these verbal slurries, that is not the word, are both Ruth’s and Leon’s, caught on the framework of descriptions as bald and precise and mundane as stage directions, they are stage directions in the past tense, so hardly directions, stage descriptions perhaps. We learn that S, a younger, working-class woman who had lived with them, has committed suicide by drowning, Quin’s fate eventually incidentally, she left a note, but they still hope it might have been an accident. Are they guilty? In S’s room they find some tapes she has recorded, and her journals, and these are transcribed, if that is the word, inscribed is more accurate perhaps but we have to play the fiction game so transcribed is the better word, in other sections of the novel, but Ruth and Leon do not find either the absolution nor the indictment they both hope for and fear in these tapes and these journals, the tapes and the journals merely complicate the picture, add other layers of performance, leave more unsaid than said. The more that is unsaid, the greater the weight of what is unsaid, the stronger its gravity, the more distorted the said, the said, even in its utter mundanity, points always at the source of its distortion. As the book progresses, though progresses is not the word, there is no progress in Quin, we read also a tape made by Ruth and a diary written by Leon as, respectively, Leon and Ruth gain access to them, they take access, if that is the way to put it. There is no progress but the tension increases, tension in the past, if that which is in the past can be said to increase, each mundanity is freighted, that is not the word, with the catalytic action of each one upon each other two, a sexual static that builds and cannot discharge but reveals ultimately the fundamental destructive incompatibility not only of Ruth and Leon but of any combination of Ruth and Leon and S, and, perhaps, of any persons whatsoever, if Quin held this misanthropic view, perhaps she did. The instance of sexual violence eventually revealed is no surprise, but its awfulness floods backwards through all that precedes it in the book. Boredom is all that holds the horrible at bay, but the horrible is no less horrible for that.
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.
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:
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.
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.