Read our #344th NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending.
25 August 2023
Postcard Stories by Richard von Sturmer does all those things that books should. From the moment you spy the cover — a group of Filipino dancers in brightly checked frocks arranged in front of a smoking volcano — your curiosity will be piqued. It will also confound you a little and ultimately hook you in, not once, but several times over, as you investigate what it is. Richard von Sturmer has chosen 100 postcards from his collection, arranged them into thematic groups and added text (prose and verse), creating narrative dimensions that resonate on multiple levels. Postcard Stories is a gem of a book — charming, curious, and just a little strange. In his introduction, von Sturmer talks about his collecting habits, and his attraction to the unusual or odd. “My own interest in postcards lies elsewhere, in a more eccentric and even subversive realm where the postcard is appreciated for itself, for its own oddness, which transcends whatever scene or image it may represent.” He sees postcards as a portal to places and times, thinking of them as “cells in a giant, universal brain” and as “postcard dreamscapes”. Postcard Stories gives us an opportunity to share in these dreamscapes.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part consists of postcard sequences (16 in total) with a corresponding verse. Each sequence is a group of four distinct postcards that von Sturmer feels resonate with each other — they are linked by a common element or theme. For example, in sequence 5, four postcards all containing monuments — statues — tell a story of escape and discovery. There are landscape images of deserts and roads to seemingly nowhere resonating together even as they are pulled from different places on the globe. There are strange groups of people participating in what might be tourist activities, and ancient wonders sitting alongside industrial haunts. The verse that accompanies these postcard sequences is sparse and cleverly composed, the narrative building between image and text constantly drawing us in, altering our perspective, our way of seeing. In the second part, von Sturmer has selected some individual postcards that stand alone in their oddness. Here he adds short prose pieces that let us look again at the images and notice so much more. In the final section, there is a short homage to postcard publisher John Hinde who would tell his photographers, “You can’t have enough sunsets.” Postcard Stories is initially delightful and witty, but it is ultimately this and more. It is an endlessly curious book that takes you into a realm of imagination and narrative playfulness. In these dreamscapes, you will find much to occupy your mind (and eye).
Bordering on Miraculous by Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek (Kōrero series)
How does a word reveal its meaning at the same moment as it becomes strange to us, he wondered. Or should that be the other way round, how does a word become strange to us at the same moment as it reveals its meaning. Same difference, though he was a little surprised. No closer to an answer in any case. Words, experiences, thoughts, the same principle seems to apply, he thought, or certainly its inverse, or complement, or opposite, or whatever. Familiarity suppresses meaning, he thought, the most familiar is that for which meaning is the least accessible, for which meaning has been obscured by wear until a point of comprehensibility has been attained, a point of dullness and comfort, a point of functional usefulness, if that is not a tautology, a point of habituation sufficient for carrying on with whatever there is to which we are inclined to carry on, if there is any such thing to which we are so inclined. Perhaps ‘meaning’ is not the right word. Or ‘strange’. Or the others. I should maybe start again and use other words, or other thoughts, or both, he thought. All philosophical problems can be solved by changing the meanings of the words used to express them, he had somewhere read, or written, or, more dangerously, both. All that is not the same or not exactly the same as to say that the simplest thing carries the most meaning but is too difficult to think about so we complicate it until we can grasp it in our thoughts, at the moment that its meaning is lost, the moment of comprehension, he thought. Again this strange use of the word ‘meaning’, whatever he meant by that, he was no longer sure. The everyday is that to which we are most habituated, that of which we are the most unaware, or the least aware, if this is not the same thing, to help us to survive the stimulation, he thought, a functional repression of our compulsion to be aware, but this comes at the cost of existing less, of being less aware, of becoming blind to those things that are either the simplest or the most important to us or both. Our dullness stops us being overwhelmed, awareness being after all not so much rapture as terror, not that there was ever much difference. Life denuminised, that is not the word, flat. How then to regain the terrible paradise of the instant, awareness, without risking lives or sanity? How to produce the new and be produced by it? These are not the same question but each applies. They are possibly related. Perhaps now, he thought, I should mention this book, Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration between poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek, as there appear to be some answers here or, if not answers, related effects that you could be forgiven for mistaking for answers even though there are no such things as answers. Near enough. Poetry seems sometimes capable, as often here, of briefly reinstating awareness, as does the discipline of painting, as does the presence of a baby as it simultaneously wipes your mind. And alters time. What a relief, at least temporarily, to lose what made you you, he thought, or remembered, or imagined that he remembered. What a relief to be only aware of that which is right now pressing itself upon you, or aware only, though only aware is the more precise choice. “Which is more miracle: the things / moving through the sky or the eyes that move / to watch them” asks the poet, looking at a baby looking, he assumes. Such simplicities, the early noticings of babies, infant concepts, are the bases of all consciousness, he ventured, all our complexities are built on these. The first act of comprehension, he thought, is to divide something from that which it is not. “A border is / as a border does.” This book, the poems and the paintings in this book, continually address this primal impulse to give entities edges or to bring forth entities through their edges. All knowledge is built from this ‘bordering’, he thought, but it is always fragile, arbitrary, subject to the possibility of revision, more functional than actual. The second act of comprehension is to associate something with something that it is not (“One cannot help but make associations,” the poet writes), but it is never clear to what extent such associations are inherent in the world or to what extent they are mental only, the result of the impulse to associate, he thought. Not that this matters. Everything is simultaneously both separating and connecting, it is too much for us to sustain, we would be overwhelmed, we reach for a word, for an image, for relief. We pacify it with a noun. To some extent. To hold it all at bay. But also perhaps to invite the onslaught, he wondered, perhaps, he thought, the words release what the words hold back, perhaps these words can reconnect while simultaneously holding that experience at bay. Not that that makes any sense, or much. “One / cannot help but make / nouns,” the poet writes, but there is always this tension, he thinks, between accomplishment and insufficiency in language, never resolved, the world plucking at the words and vice-versa: “Something is there that doesn’t love a page.” “It is this kind of ordinary straining / that makes the margins restless.” The most meaningful is that which reaches closest to the meaninglessness that it most closely resembles. He has thought all this but his thoughts have not been clear, he has lost perhaps the capacity to think, not that he ever had such a capacity other than the capacity to think he had it. He feels perhaps he has not been clear but this beautiful book by Edmeades and Leek is clear, these poems and these paintings address the simplest and most difficult things, the simplest are the most difficult, and vice-versa, this conversation, so to call it, between a poet and a painter, reaches down to the bases of their arts, he thought, to the primalities of consciousness, have I made that word up, a gift to us from babies, perhaps the babies we once were. It is not as if we ever escape the impulses we had as babies. A baby comes, the world is changed. “Goodbye to a future / without this / big head / in it.”
A book about everything ordinary, but there are birds! A Bird Day is a complete delight. Close your eyes and imagine you are a bird child. What would your day be like? Where would you go for some afternoon fun? And, when dinner is dished up would you be rolling your eyes and saying, “Not, again!” Maybe if it’s flies! Lena and Bo are siblings. We meet them on the first pages playing in the ditch beside the road. They’re playing chicken. It’s very dangerous. Luckily they can fly away quickly. When it’s time to eat, their mother reminds them to wash their beaks — the flies are ready. Dad’s not too keen on this ordinary meal. “Flies, again,“ says Papa. “You cook then,” says Mama.” He’ll be cooking up a feast later as long as the afternoon gathering goes well. Pop back a page and you’ll see that Papa has been relaxing listening to bird music while Mama has been hard at work putting the food on the table. These subtle pecking orders and ordinary family relationships are nicely explored through the illustrations and these dovetail perfectly with the engaging text. So what do birds do for fun? Well, chicken, and then there’s fainting. Falling out of a tree is a great lark for a creature with excellent wings. We all like to be daredevils especially when we know we are safe. In the afternoon they hunt for mosquitos and worms. When they need a rest Lena and Bo sit down and pretend their legs are fatter, thinner, or not there at all. Like any good sibling, Lena scares her little brother; but only a little bit. Papa’s making dinner. Yum, mosquitos. Mama doesn’t like mosquitos, but there are plenty of worms. Another excellent addition to the work of Eva Lindstrom, author and illustrator of My Dog Mouse and Everyone Walks Away.
We now have the wonderful Gecko Press books listed under their own category on our website.
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German by Michael Hofmann) $40
The much-anticipated new novel from this fine and thoughtful writer is set in the years straddling the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
”In this granular and, at times, shockingly intimate narrative of an all-consuming love affair that ultimately turns abusive, Jenny Erpenbeck has written an allegory of her nation, a country that has ceased to exist — East Germany. No writer on the world stage can make the texture and details of individual lives articulate so seamlessly and unobtrusively the way humans are subjects of, and subjected to, history. The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room — you'll be reeling for days and weeks to come.” —Neel Mukherjee
>>The turbulence of history.
>>Returning to East Berlin.
>>Reading and rereading.
>>Read our reviews of several others of Erpenbeck’s books.
The Flavour Thesaurus: More flavours by Niki Segnit $43
The first volume of Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus has a special place on our kitchen bookcase, and we consult it often, either because we are wondering how ingredients can go together (or not) in something we are about to make, or just because Segnit’s wit, wisdom and snide comments make the book endlessly dippable and a good way to spend those few minutes waiting for the dish to be ‘done’. Segnit introduces us to an ingredient and then ‘cross-references’ it with a whole range of other ingredients, describing the effects and resonances of that combination or flavour collision. Deeply researched and packed with notes, The Flavour Thesaurus is the perfect guide to cooking something exactly the way you want it to be, whether you are a kitchen novice or an experienced chef. It is also a way of avoiding disasters (or at least of going into them with your eyes open). We have had the first volume for years, and now we are delighted with the second volume, which adds another 92 mostly plant-based flavours and over 800 entries — double the delight!
>>The Flavour Thesaurus (1).
>>The Flavour Thesaurus: More flavours (2).
>>Segnit’s Lateral Cooking is also a brilliant and original aid to understanding and innovating food.
Great Liberty by Julien Cracq (translated from French by George MacLennan) $38
In 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: "In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation." Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled ‘The Habitable Earth’ presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring the Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction. Great Liberty is a liminal work that exists on an unmapped borderline. This is the first appearance of this key work in English translation.
>>Some other books published by Wakefield Press.
This Other Eden by Paul Harding $37
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain there, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbors — a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their nocturnal brood; the prophetic Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who carves Biblical images in a hollow tree. Then comes the intrusion of "civilisation" — eugenics-minded state officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark. Full of lyricism and power, This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference. A beautiful hardback.
”The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression. This Other Eden impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic light>” —Obsercer
”This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.” —Guardian
Granta 163: Best of young British novelists $33
Every ten years, Granta dedicates an issue to the twenty most significant British novelists under forty. In this issue Granta announces the fifth generation of the Best of Young British Novelists. This cohort was selected by judges Tash Aw, Rachel Cusk, Brian Dillon, Helen Oyeyemi and Sigrid Rausing. Featured are: Graeme Armstrong, Jennifer Atkins, Sara Baume, Sarah Bernstein, Natasha Brown, Eleanor Catton, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Camilla Grudova, Isabella Hammad, Sophie Mackintosh, Anna Metcalfe, Thomas Morris, Derek Owusu, K Patrick, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Saba Sams, Olivia Sudjic and Eley Williams.
>>’Doubtful Sound’ — Eleanor Catton’s piece included in this issue.
>>Meet the class of 2023 (and a few alumni).
A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the dark heart of the city by Edward Chisholm $28
A waiter's job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door... is hell. Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter is the perfect summer read. It takes you below the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world and right into its glorious underbelly. He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you're fighting your colleagues for tips. Colleagues - including thieves, narcissists, ex-Legionnaires, paperless immigrants, wannabe actors and drug dealers - who are the closest thing to family that you've got. It's physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. But it doesn't matter because you're in Paris, the centre of the universe, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be in the world.
”This astonishing book describes a cruel, feral existence and is worthy of standing on the shelf next to George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London (1933) as another classic about human exploitation.” —Daily Mail
>>What’s it really like?
Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools by Júlia Sardà (illustrator), Myriam Dahman, Nicolas Digard $30
Leina owns the only boat in town - she ferries townsfolk over to the forest where they chop trees and hunt animals. But everyone in the town fears the forest and not everyone who goes in comes back out again. When Leina's friend, Oren, doesn't return, she goes on a mission to find him. In the forest she meets the mysterious Mr Spadefoot who introduces himself as The Lord of the Toadstools. Mr Spadefoot is strange and magical and Leina suspects that he knows where she can find Oren. She accepts his invitation for dinner in his underground palace and there she discovers the secret of the forest and the mystery of the missing townsfolk. Featuring the lush and wondrous illustrations of Júlia Sardà, who also illustrated The Wolf’s Secret.
>>Look inside!
>>Those illustrations are wonderful!
The Last Days of Roger Federer, And other endings by Geoff Dyer $25
How and when do artists and athletes know that their careers are coming to an end? What if the end comes early in a writer’s life? How to keep going even as the ability to do so diminishes? In this ingeniously structured meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, musicians, and sports stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s proto-abstract paintings of blazing light, Jean Rhys’s late-life resurgence, John Coltrane’s final works. Ranging from Burning Man to Beethoven, from Eve Babitz to William Basinski, from Annie Dillard to De Chirico, Dyer’s study of last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty — and the sudden rejuvenation offered by books, films and music discovered late in life. Dyer has blended criticism, memoir, and badinage of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work. Now in paperback (but also still available as a pleasing hardback).
“Perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” —Tom Bissell
>>Those shelves!
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A sister’s search for justice by Cristina Rivera Garza $37
On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza's sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide. She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him. Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence — handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints 3 to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister's voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.
”Warning: Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer. A dexterous creator of atmospheres, with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language.” —Lina Meruane
>>Reshaping the conversation about femcide.
>>How can these stories be told?
>>”To write is to create empty space.”
>>Thomas reviews two other books by Cristina Rivera Garza.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett $35
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
”Those who want fiction to soothe, bolster and cheer will love Tom Lake.” —Guardian
>>”Quiet and reassuring.”
Now I Am Here by Chidi Ebere $38
In Now I Am Here, we begin at the end. The armies of the National Defence Movement have been crushed and our unnamed narrator and his unit are surrounded. Prepared for defeat at the hands of the enemy and with only his sins for company, he turns to confession. As he recounts the events leading to his disastrous finale, we learn how this gentle man is gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn't have thought himself capable. Chidi Ebere's debut is a reflection on how good people can do terrible things — precipitated by circumstances and the violence of war. Unflinching and thought-provoking, Now I Am Here resonates far beyond the individual story of our narrator.
>>By any means necessary.
Wine by Meg Bernhard $23
While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage.
”Meg Bernhard's Wine is a beautiful gem of a book, thankfully free of what we find in so much wine writing. This wine book is anything but typical. Bernhard covers a lot of ground in a short number of pages with her unique mix of memoir, travel writing, natural history, sensory science, and reporting on the social issues surrounding wine. But the beating heart of this book is Bernhard's experiences working at Spanish wineries and in the vineyards of Castilla-La Mancha and Catalonia, which she memorably brings to life.” —Jason Wilson
>>Other books in the excellent ‘Object Lessons’ series.
Book of the Week: TSUNAMI by Ned Wenlock
This excellent graphic novel from Paekakariki-based illustrator, animator, and comic maker Ned Wenlock deals with bullying, being an outsider, and that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood with raw honesty and clarity.
Meet Peter, a target for the school bullies. His commitment to truth and being right isn’t always the best fit for your final days of primary school. Being twelve is never easy and, for Peter, life is just too much. Peter’s parents are too busy bickering to notice his despair, his nemesis Gus and his cronies are on his case, and there’s a new girl at school just as much a misfit as him. But she’s a badass, and it’s difficult for Peter to navigate her motives. It all feels overwhelming to Peter — like a tsunami is coming and he isn't sure he can stop it.
Told in Ned’s unique and beautifully pared-down style, Tsunami is a taunt page-turner, a coming-of-age story, and nuanced examination of teenage alienation and the unpredictable consequences of our actions.
Another example of superb publishing from Earth’s End.
”Heartbreaking, acutely and devastatingly observed, and distinctively drawn.” —Thomas
The first volume of Niki Segnit’s FLAVOUR THESAURUS has a special place on our kitchen bookcase, and we consult it often, either because we are wondering how ingredients can go together (or not) in something we are about to make, or just because Segnit’s wit, wisdom and snide comments make the book endlessly dippable and a good way to spend those few minutes waiting for the dish to be ‘done’. Segnit introduces us to an ingredient and then ‘cross-references’ it with a whole range of other ingredients, describing the effects and resonances of that combination or flavour collision. Deeply researched and packed with notes, The Flavour Thesaurus is the perfect guide to cooking something exactly the way you want it to be, whether you are a kitchen novice or an experienced chef. It is also a way of avoiding disasters (or at least of going into them with your eyes open). We have had the first volume for years, and now we are delighted with the NEW second volume, which adds another 92 mostly plant-based flavours and over 800 more entries — double the delight!
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
POETRY QUARTER: Celebrate National Poetry Day (August 25th) with a stack of new poetry books. Use the code STANZA when checking out for an inspiring 25% discount on all poetry books. (Promotion ends on 27 August. In-stock items only). >>Start choosing!
Read our #343rd NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending — and about our POETRY QUARTER promotion.
18 August 2023
Sphinx by Cat Woodward
Each poem in this collection pits its voice both against silence and against the deluge of other voices suspended above it, or surrounding it, waiting for an opportunity to smother it. Every force is met with an equal and opposite force, or a baffling of that force that absorbs and reconstitutes and reclaims the force as its own, and under its own terms, terms that repudiate even the concept of force. The poems press against their surfaces, either bursting their forms or turning back upon themselves, entering the spaces they have left, increasing their weight and, concomitantly, the depth of their approach, increasing their intensity and also the release that that intensity enables through spaces opened up under pressure. The words and the impact of the words seldom occur simultaneously, the impact coming later, or, shockingly, somehow preceding the words. Similarly, the poems are often somehow geared so that the humour and the blades rotate in opposite directions, each impacting when least expected and from behind. The poems often create or explore a breach in the habits of subject/object relations: to be aware of something is to be that thing, to be swamped, overwhelmed, possessed by that thing, to think something is likewise to be that thing, to be swamped, overwhelmed, possessed. But somehow, through facing the threat directly, we find release enough through the heart of the image, to find emptiness and loss where the presence of the subject is most intense, to find release at the core of presence. Associative leaps leave behind the experience that induced them, pushing experience back into the past by the force of the leap, both retaining and denying the experience that induced them. Often drawing on folkloric elements and pulling at a strand of poetic animism that runs back through English nature poetry to medieval times, Woodward creates poems that have a referential hum of ambiguous valency, either mock-pagan and mock-transpersonal or pagan and transpersonal, only to have these polarities continually and playfully reversed. Each symbol outweighs its referent and replaces it, becoming a non-symbol. Each part replaces the whole and becomes no longer a surrogate for that whole but a whole in its own right, casting the body from which it has wrested itself free into a horizon, a backdrop, a context. There are hurts behind these works, whether of personal or existential nature it is irrelevant to speculate, and the poems reach out to cruelty, but often tenderly, with the tenderness with which one would deliberately and sustainedly press one’s hand or soft flesh down upon a knifeblade. At other times an anger surprises an image and draws a weapon unexpectedly from an idyll. Wherever an image comes from, it quickly becomes a source of fascination and also problematic, a threat to exactly the extent that it commands attention. It is necessary to face and enter the image, to turn the image inside out by passing through it, to overthrow and recalibrate (and Woodward does this so well) the lazy associations upon which poetry so often founders. Here dirty is neat and clean is messy and the bad thing is the neatest thing of all. The poems are aurally tight, at once exactly too much and just enough. There are no unnecessary words: each does its work of anger or of tenderness, of clarity and the disavowal of clarity. The poems simultaneously tighten and release, invite and repel, speak (and silence speech) with both tenderness and hatred. The reader (or hearer) is rewarded with a mixture of certainty and rejection, of wonderment and mockery. These poems are “an instruction guide to obtainable sobbing”, a shortcut to the bottom of the lake, a communing that will not be trivialised as communication.
The Long Take by Robin Robertson
A beautifully crafted novel, The Long Take is an epic narrative poem by renowned Scottish poet Robin Robertson. Kicking off in New York, 1946, it follows the life of Walker, a recently returned soldier. A survivor of D-Day, Walker is displaced by trauma, unable to return to his family, his life, and his love in Nova Scotia. His life, like that of many others he encounters, has been turned inside out, and he carries a burden, a guilt he can not discharge. Unemployed, a friend suggests fronting up to a local newspaper, The Press, which is looking for reporters. Walker joins the city news desk, reporting on crime and street politics. Walker’s affinity with the streets, living on the edge, and contact with skid row leads to an assignment to document the lives of the poor and homeless: an investigative piece of work that takes him to LA and San Francisco. As we travel across America with Walker and along these cities’ streets over a decade, we are given an insight into the lives of the disenfranchised and into the impact of war trauma on a nation and an individual. Add to this the politics of the 40s and 50s — the era of cronyism, McCarthyism and mob rule, organised crime, and state corruption — the novel is a cutting indictment of the ‘American Dream’, the rise of the automobile and the impact this had on communities (highways and parking lots that killed communities), the falsity of war as a democratic tool, and the injustice to those who fight for freedom yet become victims of power. It’s also a hymn to the film industry of this period — to film noir; the images and language of these films cleverly interweave with the tone of the streetscape and the atmosphere of the novel. Walker is a compelling man, a man who carries a history that he feels can only be understood by his comrades in arms, by those who have experienced similar trauma. He dulls his building emotional disintegration with liquor and by keeping his distance - never becoming entangled in relationships. His work colleagues find him unreadable, and those he has the most affinity with live on skid row, particularly Billy Idaho — a well-read street philosopher who helps those he can survive the streets. Walker, like Idaho, is kind and has compassion for his fellow humans: he is an anti-hero that we empathise with — an outsider who will get under your skin. Through the keenly observant Walker, we experience the city, its people, and its neighbourhoods. We see desperation, violence, and the strength of community. For Walker, burying his trauma is never going to be a solution. Violence simmers at his edges and guilt plays on his conscience, and as the decade progresses his past haunts him. Robertson’s writing is wonderful: evocative, enchanting, raw, and affecting. From narrative verse — descriptions of the cityscape and dialogue between characters — to hard, almost unbearable, staccato-like images of war, to lyrical memories of Walker’s childhood and life in Nova Scotia, the poetry has clarity and visibility yet never removes the reader from the story. The Long Take is a novel about us now just as much as it is a filmic exposé of post-war America, exploring issues of poverty, racism, fascism, and freedom. Powerful, inventive, and uncompromising.
Book of the Week: NEEDLES AND PLASTIC: FLYING NUN RECORDS, 1981—1988 by Matthew Goody
Stupendously well documented and illustrated, this book takes a clear and generous look at the over 140 records produced by Flying Nun during its prime years in the 1980s, when it was based in Christchurch and was an effective catalyst for homegrown music that rejected the ethos of the corporate labels. The book is packed with information about the bands that were central to an Aotearoan cultural resurgence, and also about bands that you have never heard of or had (sometimes justly) forgotten. Goody's discographic history provides a clear view from a distance, and is even better than you might have hoped it would be.
Our (nonrepresentative) playlist of sorts: Pin Group; The Builders; The Clean; Tall Dwarfs; Sneaky Feelings; Look Blue Go Purple; 25Cents; Victor Dimisich Band; Gordons; DoubleHappys; The Bats; Scorched Earth Policy; All Fall Down; The Fall; Marie and the Atom; The Terminals; &c, &c.
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley $40
A collection of twelves stories plumbing the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognise each other. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age — everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams.
>>A master of non-elaboration.
>>On building a story from details.
>>Read the title story.
Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe $37
”It was hard to be in the present, she said, but if her body were heavier and more in control, then her thoughts would clear and her mind would recover its power.”
An enigmatic young woman drastically transforms her body, working to become bigger, stronger, and stiller in the wake of a trauma. We see her through the eyes of three people, each uniquely mesmerized by her, as they reckon with the consequences of her bizarre metamorphosis. Each of them leaves us with a puzzle piece of who she was before she became someone else. Elliot, a recluse who notices her at the gym, witnesses her physical evolution and becomes her first acolyte. Bella, her mother, worries about the intense effect her daughter's new way of life is beginning to have on others, and she reflects on their relationship, a close cocoon from which her daughter has broken free. Susie, her ex-colleague and best friend, offers her sanctuary and support as she makes the transition to self-created online phenomenon, posting viral meditation videos that encourage her followers to join her in achieving self-sufficiency by isolating themselves from everyone else in their lives. Chrysalis raises questions about selfhood and solitude. It asks if it is possible for a woman to have agency over her body while remaining part of society, and then offers its own explosive answer. (A lovely hardback.)
”Unputdownable, ice-cool and wittily contemporary, Chrysalis announces Anna Metcalfe as a distinctive and daring fresh literary voice. Utterly original and with shades of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, Yoko Ogawa and Alexandra Kleeman, this brilliant portrayal of desire and transcendence had me totally entranced.” —Sharlene Teo
>>Loneliness and online selfhood.
>>Transformation.
>>Read an extract.
Wish I Was Here: An anti-memoir by M. John Harrison $40
”Late style is when the people who have all your life jumped in front of you waving their arms — No! Careful! — jump out one more time to encourage you to run them down, and this time you do.”
M. John Harrison has written space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit. This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020.
”One of the best writers currently at work in English.” —Robert Macfarlane
”Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece. Formally inventive, constantly surprising, M John Harrison has written an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness. It's exquisite.” —Helen Macdonald
”As always with M John Harrison, you're never quite sure what you're reading or where it will take you next. There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed.” —Jonathan Coe
”'Harrison is the shape-shifting master of absent and elusive things, many of them absent and eluding in Barnes and the Peak District. In this mesmerising book, the author — or rather his style — goes in search of what may have been his memories of different versions of his life. The result is an enchantment of instability, usually ungraspable, always intense.'' —Neil MacGregor
“So wholly original that a label doesn’t do it justice” —New Statesman
>>The consequences are real.
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, vaccine, and the health of nations by Simon Schama $70
Covid 19 was not the first instance of a mass infection being met and tempered with a vaccine, as Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox struck London; cholera hit Paris; plague came to India. Threading through Schama’s stories of terror, suffering and hope — in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums — are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai. At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice. Just as with the current pandemic, it is politics and self-interest that prevent humanity from receiving the full benefits of science.
>>An indictment of modern leaders’ response to Covid.
>>Science has to run ahead.
>>What history teaches us about pandemics.
Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi (translated by Jeremy Tiang) $33
A fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talkedabout — the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humour thataccompanies such desperate situations.
>>”I wrote this book to let go of my childhood.”
>>”When I looked at myself, I saw a stranger.”
>>Read an extract.
>>”Everyone should translate.”
>>Also available in this edition.
The Food Almanac 2 by Miranda York $40
A collection of recipes and stories celebrating the joy of food , as a beautifully produced and illustrated hardback. Miranda York has curated a dynamic, diverse mix of history, memoir, stories and poems, alongside recipes, cooking tips and techniques, menus and reading lists — from Caroline Eden describing the dining car on the Siberian Express to Diana Henry honouring the softness of autumn, from Simon Hopkinson discussing the glory of puddings to Russell Norman celebrating bitterness in the beautiful form of chicory and its many Italian varieties. Each month includes a seasonal three-course menu from food writers such as Jeremy Lee, Tommi Miers, Emily Scott and Calum Franklin, plus additional recipes from the likes of Mary Berry, Asma Khan, Darina Allen and Gill Meller — there is an abundance of thought-provoking, hunger-making food writing for you to tuck into, whatever the season.
>>Have a look inside!
The Amazing and True Story of Tooth Mouse Pérez by Ana Cristina Herreros, illustrated by Violeta Lopiz $35
Long ago, throughout the Spanish-speaking world, the Tooth Mouse brought children their permanent teeth, strong and straight as a mouse's. Tracing the Tooth Mouse's beginnings through to his descendants, this book artfully weaves the Tooth Mouse's changing habits as the world industrializes, with the growing independence of the child, as teeth fall out and the child learns to care for themselves. It's also a playful, thought-provoking history of our changing world — as even Tooth Mice and children must adapt their customs when faced with the culture-shifting forces of urbanization, migration, and capitalism… Just remember, magic can always be recovered, and the real gift in losing baby teeth is growing up!
>>Look inside!
The Men with the Pink Triangle: The true life-and-death story of homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps by Heinz Heger $35
For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed ‘undesirable’, suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart-wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, now with a new foreword by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable testament to the resilience of those who experienced the unimaginable cruelty of the concentration camps.
>>About the author and the book.
No Love Lost by Rachel Ingalls $25
After a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman. Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion. A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own. Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers. Rachel Ingalls's incomparable novellas are surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath. From the author of Mrs Caliban.
”Wonderful.” —Margaret Atwood
”Genius.” —Patricia Lockwood
”Remarkable.” —Joseph Heller
”Perfect.” —Max Porter
>>Hallucinatory realism.
Penance by Eliza Clark $37
It's been years since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time. That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec. Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder — and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil. The only question is: how much of it is true? From the author of Boy Parts.
"Eliza Clark is a genius with voice and a master of flipped expectations. Penance astonished me with its breadth, wit and confidence. A wickedly clever deep dive into the nastier corners of the national psyche--you've never read anything like this." —Julia Armfield
"A work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence." —The Guardian
>>A slippery take.
>>A bravura deconstruction of our voyeuristic love for true crime.
The Waters by Carl Nixon $37
One family. Forty years. The Waters kids ― practical, athletic Mark; the physically beautiful dreamer Davey; and the baby of the family, Samantha ― have had to face more than their fair share of challenges. 1979 was the year their father sold up the farm and invested all the family’s money in a doomed property development next to the ocean in Christchurch. Is that when 'everything started going wrong', as Mark believes? Will their bond survive the passage of time or will the three siblings succumb to their parents’ legacy of failure? Can the past be overcome . . . and forgiven?
The Wolf’s Secret by Nicolas Digard and Myriam Dahman, illustrated by Júlia Sardà $23
Wolf is a hunter, feared by every creature. But he has a secret: in the middle of the forest lives a girl whose beautiful voice has entranced him . The Wolf longs for friendship. But is he prepared to sacrifice his own true nature in order for his wish to come true? A beautifully illustrated contemporary fairytale about difference, trust, and the power of friendship.
>>Look inside!
>>Storytime!
>>Júlia Sardà’s website.
War and Punishment by Mikhail Zygar $40
Zygar explores how more than 300 years of propaganda, bad historical scholarship, folk tales and fantasy, from the legendary deeds of the Cossacks to 1970s spy novels, led Russia to commit an act of violence on the Ukraine. By unpicking the historical confusions and telling the strange but true stories of Russo-Ukrainian relations over the past centuries, Zygar reveals the origins of Russia's actionas and points the way out of its self-destructive imperial delusions.
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, love, and the art of dying by Sarah Tarlow $40
As an archaeologist, much of Tarlow’s work is concerned with the ritual and belief behind the practices of grief. In 2012, she was awarded the Chair in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. But in the years that followed this appointment, her husband, Mark, would begin to suffer from a progressive but undiagnosed illness, finally resulting in his inability to drive, to walk, to taste or to care for himself. Though Sarah had devoted her professional life to the study of emotion, of how we anticipate and experience grief, nothing could have prepared her for the realities of care-giving, of losing someone you love and the helplessness attached to both.
>>Wholly Mark and wholly dead.
In Limbo: A graphic memoir by Deb JJ Lee $35
Deborah (Jung-Jin) Lee knows she's different. Ever since her family emigrated from South Korea to the United States, she's felt her Otherness. And as the pressures of high school ramp up, friendships change or end and everything gets harder. Even home isn't a safe place, as fights with her mother escalate. Deb is caught in a limbo, with nowhere to go. But Deb is resilient. And during a trip to South Korea, she realises something that changes her perspective on her family, her heritage, and herself.
>>Look inside!
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
POETRY QUARTER
Celebrate National Poetry Day (August 25th) with a stack of new poetry books.
Use the code STANZA when checking out for an inspiring 25% discount on all poetry books.
(Promotion ends on 27 August; applies to in-stock items only).
Read our #342nd NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending — and about our POETRY QUARTER promotion.
11 August 2023
Great Works by Oscar Mardell
Oscar Mardell's freezing works poems are a clever addition to the tradition of New Zealand gothic literature. Think Ronald Hugh Morrison’s The Scarecrow and David Ballantyne's Sydney Bridge Upside Down and you’ll get a sense of the macabre that edges its ways through these poems like entrails. There’s the nostalgia for the stink of the slaughter yards, the adherence to the architects of such vast structures on our landscapes, and the pithy analysis of our colonial pastoral history. That smell so evocative of hot summer days cooped up in a car travelling somewhere along a straight road drifts in as you read 'Horotiu' with its direct insult to the yards and its references to offal. In these poems, there is the thrust and violence of killing alongside the almost balletic rhythm of the work — the work as described on the floor as well as the poetic structure of Mardell’s verse.
“ th sticking knife th steel th saw
th skinning knife th hook th hammer
th spreader the chop & th claw "
“ the dull thud resonates
through bodies / still
swings rhythmically & out of time
pours out of me / equivocal ”
Most of the poems note the architect and the date of construction for these ominous structures, which had a strange grandeur — simultaneously horrific and glorious. One of the outstanding architects was J.C.Maddison, a designer known for both his slaughterhouses and churches, alongside other stately public buildings. In 'Belfast', Mardell cleverly bridges these divides — the lambs, the worship, the elation.
“ did he who set a compass
to port levy & amberly
who traced th wooden hymnhouses
for st pauls / divided
& th holy innocents / drowned ”
There are plenty of other cultural references tucked away in these poems. Minnie Dean makes an appearance in Mataura and James K Baxter in Ngauranga Abattoir. In the latter, Mardell slips in Baxter's line "sterile whore of a thousand bureaucrats". Yet the poems go beyond nostalgia or clever nods to literature, to sharpen our gaze on our colonial relationship. 'Burnside' tells it perfectly:
“ & ws new zealands little lamb
to britains highest tables led
& were th final works performed
out here in godsown killing shed ”
Mardell’s collection, Great Works, is pithy and ironic with its clever nods to cultural and social history, gothic in imagery, and all wrapped up like a perfectly trussed lamb in our ‘God’s Own Country’ nostalgia, with a large drop of sauce and a knife waiting to slice.
The Math Campers by Dan Chiasson
where the poet writes
or wrote
it was impossible to say
it is impossible to say
where faraway was or why
the reader writes
“it was impossible to say
it is impossible to say
where faraway was or why”
to remember the words
or avoid remembering
but where the poet writes
It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind.
He wrote: “It may just be my mind.”
how can the reader write
or rewrite that
he thought
who never claimed to be a poet
maybe once
how can I write
or rewrite all those wrotes
within wrotes, nests
within nests
here the poet the reader thought writes
or wrote about the writing
of the poems he wrote
or is writing or soon will either write
or not
the poem of how the poem is made
or will be made
or is then being made
or could be made
or not
in some room of the poet’s mind
or on some paper
less likely
or in the house of a dead poet
more precisely
literally
On the upstairs deck, I read about
The deck upstairs. In the daybed
I read about the daybed. In the books
I read about the books I read.
the poet wrote the reader wrote
or rewrote
sharing the labour
each expected of the other
with the other
their separation more a distance of time than a distance of person
not that each is one person
only
the moments flicker
because time
as the poet’s past is the same age as his sons
as the reader knows the poet knows
each is not one person
only
He turned to meet me, but our element was time. He approached me, where I was standing, years later; and I approached him where he stood, but he was too far in the past.
the pages turn the poems turn
or turn again
the poet is carefully squeezed out of the poem
or squeezed in
the poem changed slightly, crucially—
because, you know why, because time
this slow precise perfecting process
as the poet writes
as the reader reads
unlike these lines tossed off
if that is how to put it
in less than a minute and unrevisited
the reader can do no justice to the form
but to be fair made no such claims
in that direction
towards the province of the poet
he thinks
I had no real name. I was the channel through which the mind passed, and then I was a gap, an absence, which frightened me.
again this space this wound in time
this crack
where the words get in
or out
this rift between the poet and his past
if only a moment
passed between poet and poem
which is to say
the poet who breathes and stumbles
and the one squeezed out of the poem
or in
from sleep to type
We were held, suspended within the larger dream;
we alternate coming into, then stepping out of, the light.
the poet wrote the reader wrote
if that makes sense
then
the world wakes up, enlarged—
there is not nor can there be
anything more than this
Our Book of the Week has just been named the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Mat Tait’s dark and beautiful Te Wehenga: The separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku is a stunningly illustrated bilingual telling of the Māori creation story, memorably bringing it to life as a new generation struggles into the light.
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
Tsunami by Ned Wenlock $35
At school, being right isn't always the right answer. Peter's bull-headed commitment to the truth has already picked him out as a target for the school bullies. The misfit new girl is a complete badass, but seems as interested in his nemesis, Gus, as she is in Peter, and his parents are too busy bickering to care about any of it. It all feels overwhelming to Peter — like a tsunami is coming and he isn't sure he can stop it. Tsunami is a 278-page graphic novel about Peter, a self-righteous 12-year-old boy, and his fraught last six weeks at primary school. Told in Ned’s unique and beautifully pared down style, Tsunami is a taunt page turner, a coming-of-age story, and nuanced examination of teenage alienation and the unpredictable consequences of our actions.
”Heartbreaking, acutely and devastatingly observed, and distinctively drawn.” —Thomas
>>Look inside!
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey $35
When X — an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarising shape-shifter — dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals and destruction. All the while she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the United States after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A counter-factual literary adventure, complete with ‘documentary’ images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from David Bowie and Tom Waits to Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realises her wife's deceptions were far crueller than she imagined. Biography of X plumbs the depths of grief, art and love, and introduces an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
”Discerning facts from fiction is the pleasure of this Russian doll of a book: a biography of an imaginary subject, written by an imaginary biographer, housed inside a novel pretending not to be one. Biography of X is almost certainly one of the most interesting books you'll read this year.” —Financial Times
”From the superb opening line to Lacey's skewering of the art world and its pretensions, her discernments on grief and loss, the book is endlessly quotable. Come for the glamorous premise, stay for the icy precision of the prose.” —Irish Times
>>Pushing all the buttons at the same time.
>>A novel in disguise.
>>I cannot explain my wife.
>>A different America.
>>Blending fact and fiction.
Hiwa: Contemporary Māori short stories edited by Paula Morris and Darryn Joseph $45
Hiwa is an essential collection of contemporary Māori short stories, featuring twenty-seven writers working in English or te reo Māori. The writers range from famous names and award winners — Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Whiti Hereaka, Becky Manawatu, Zeb Nicklin — to emerging voices like Shelley Burne-Field, Jack Remiel Cottrell, Anthony Lapwood and Colleen Maria Lenihan. A showcase of contemporary talent, Hiwa includes biographical introductions for each writer’s work, and explores the range of styles and subjects in the flourishing world of Māori fiction. Named for Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the ninth star of Matariki, signifying vigorous growth and dreams of the year ahead, this anthology reveals the flourishing world of Māori writing today, in Aotearoa and beyond.
>>Paula Morris talks to the book.
Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta by William Shakespeare (translated into te reo Māori by Te Haumihiata Mason) $40
He whakamāoritanga o te whakaari hinapōuri a Hakipia mō te aroha pūhou i waenga i ētahi whānau toheriri e rua. Whakaorangia ana i te pukapuka nei e tōna kaiwhakamāori e Te Haumihiata Mason te ao o Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta ki te reo whakaatu i te wairua Māori. Mauroa ana te kaingākautia o ngā whakaari a Wiremu Hakipia i te ao Māori – mai i ngā whakamāoritanga a Tākuta Pei Te Hurinui o Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēneti, o Othello me Julius Caesar ki ngā whakamāoritanga a Tākuta Merimeri Penfold i ngā oriori aroha a Hakipia. Whāia ana e Te Haumihiata tēnei tikanga i tana whakamāoritanga o Toroihi rāua ko Kāhira i whakaaritia ki te Whare Whakaari o te Globe i Rānana i te 2012, tahuri ana ki te whakaari a Hakipia mō te aroha whaiāipo hinapōuri e tino kaingākautia ana. Te aroha, te tuku mātātahi, te tōwhare, te pākūhā – katoa atu kei a Rōmeo rāua ko Hurieta. Ka kawea ake te whakaari nei e tōna whakamāoritanga ki te manawa o Aotearoa.
>>Star-crossed lovers at Matariki.
Look by Gavin Bishop $25
Completely delightful (and developmentally valuable)! Presented as a two-metre long two-sided concertina board book, Look can be opened out to surround a baby during ‘tummy time’ (building motor skills and strength), or shared as a book (building concepts and affectionate ‘conversations’). The simple and very appealing illustrations show faces for one direction/side, and toys and other familiar objects for the other. This will immediately become one of those special books that are central to a baby’s (and a parent’s) life.
>>Recommended by a baby!
Te Rā : The Māori Sail by Ariana Tikao and Mat Tait $25
Te Rā, which means the sail in te reo Māori, is the last remaining customary Māori sail in the world. Woven from harakeke more than 200 years ago, Te Rā has for many years been held in storage at the British Museum in London. In July 2023, our oldest taonga will once again be brought into the light as it returns home to Aotearoa. Evocatively written by Ariana Tikao from the point of view of Te Rā and beautifully illustrated by Mat Tait, this book commemorates the homecoming of our oldest taonga, and celebrates our past, present and future as New Zealanders.
>>Look inside!
>>The old sail reaches shore.
Pyre by Perumal Murugan (translated from Hindi by Aniruddhan Vasudevan) $25
Saroja and Kumaresan are in love. After a hasty wedding, they arrive in Kumaresan's village, harboring a dangerous secret: their marriage is an inter-caste one, likely to upset the village elders should they get to know of it. Kumaresan is naively confident that all will be well. But nothing is further from the truth. Despite the strident denials of the young couple, the villagers strongly suspect that Saroja must belong to a different caste. It is only a matter of time before their suspicions harden into certainty and, outraged, they set about exacting their revenge. A devastating tale of innocent young love pitted against chilling savagery, Pyre conjures a terrifying vision of intolerance.
Listed for the 2023 International Booker Prize.
>>’Honour’ killings compelled me to write.
>>Read an extract.
Termush by Sven Holm (translated from Danish by Sylvia Clayton) $25
Welcome to Termush: a luxury coastal resort like no other. All the wealthy guests are survivors: preppers who reserved rooms long before the Disaster. Inside, they embrace exclusive radiation shelters, ambient music and lavish provisions; outside, radioactive dust falls on the sculpture park, security men step over dead birds, and a reconnaissance party embarks. Despite weathering a nuclear apocalypse, their problems are only just beginning. Soon, the Management begins censoring news; disruptive guests are sedated; initial generosity towards Strangers ceases as fears of contamination and limited resources grow. But as the numbers — and desperation — of external survivors increase, they must decide what it means to forge a new moral code at the end (or beginning?) of the world. Sven Holm’s 1967 post-apocalyptic dystopia feels eerily prescient today.
Beastly: A new history of animals and us by Keggie Carew $45
In a Polish forest a young woman befriends a boar. An Englishman sets up home with two beavers in Saskatchewan. A zoologist watches a fish make a conscious decision. Darwin finds the evidence for evolution in the backyards of pigeon fanciers. The entire population of Croatia anxiously awaits the arrival of a single stork. Animals have shaped our lives, our land, our civilisation, and they will shape our future. Yet as our impact on the world and the animals we share it with increases, there has never been a greater urgency to understand this foundational relationship. Beastly is the 40,000-year story of animals and humans as it has never been captured before, seen eye-to-eye and claw-to-hand through those humans who have stepped into the myriad worlds of our animal relatives. Our relationship with animals has always been paradoxical, but the greatest paradox may yet be this: diversity of life can heal ecosystems. Animals — if given the chance — could save us.
”What a wonderful and unexpected book. The very opposite of beastly: heavenly and amazing, powerful and affecting, a beloved and very fine teller of tales reminds us how small we are in the face of a nature that we neither understand nor wish to respect or, in any real sense, live with.” —Philippe Sands
”Full of necessary rage, joy and passion: Beastly should be mandatory reading for all humans.” —Claire Fuller
John Mulgan and the Greek Left: A regrettably intimate acquaintance by C.-Dimitris Gounelas and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas $40
In September 1943, New Zealand writer John Mulgan was parachuted by the British Special Services (SOE) into remote mountain terrain in the centre of Nazi-occupied Greece, where he worked with the left-wing resistance to facilitate some of WW2’s most successful episodes of guerrilla warfare. This experience shaped his leftist politics in critical ways, but with the Cold War climate taking over, Mulgan’s allegiance was torn between the andartes he fought alongside and the British command he served under. Found dead in his Cairo hotel room shortly after leaving Greece, Mulgan left many questions about his tragically shortened life unanswered. Drawing on extensive new research, including much Greek scholarship, as well as close readings of Mulgan’s own writings, this detailed investigation revises the political canvas of wartime and post-war Greece and provides new insight into Mulgan’s activities and contacts – including the identity of the mysterious woman he was with on the night he died – bringing us a much fuller understanding of Mulgan, one in which his ‘intimate acquaintance’ with the Greek left is proved to have been profound and enduring.
”Every generation has found something of its own debates in Man Alone and John Mulgan's complex legacy. C. Dimitris Gounelas and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, in this scrupulously scholarly and utterly absorbing bi-focal exposition of Mulgan in the Greek crisis, give us a figure for our own day: enmeshed in an under-recognised anti-colonial struggle, caught and bucking against the political compromises of war, and drawn into the currents of the Greek left. An intimately detailed account of Mulgan's then, this story of austerity, resistance, and bureaucracy has much to teach our now.” —Dougal McNeill
A Bird Day by Eva Lindström (translated by Julia Marshall) $30
"Wash your beaks, it's time for lunch—flies again today," says Dad. After lunch the young birds get sent off to play—they sing, hunt mosquitos, compare leg size, and poke grubs. This is how birds spend a day! Eva Lindström reflects the familiar and the absurd in human behavior through this funny bird family. We all recognize the family dynamics of bickering over fried mosquitos and worm pie—only the youngest is allowed to pick out the worms. Toddlers will recognize key moments in a perfectly down to earth day—play, mealtimes, stretching boundaries, and sleep.
>>Look inside!
>>A ordinary day for some birds.
The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgewood and the transformation of Britain by Tristram Hunt $32
From his kilns and workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, Wedgewood revolutionised the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing efficiency and retail flair. He transformed the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool, Bath and Dublin but of America and the world, and helping to usher in a mass consumer society. But Wedgwood was radical in his mind and politics as well as in his designs. He campaigned for free trade and religious toleration, read pioneering papers to the Royal Society and was a member of the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham. Most significantly, he created the ceramic 'Emancipation Badge', depicting a slave in chains and inscribed 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' that became the symbol of the abolitionist movement.
”This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste, commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the powerful case for rediscovering his humane entrepreneurial spirit. The Radical Potter brings Wedgwood's protean energy alive for a new generation and I loved it.” —Edmund de Waal
Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A memoir by Shoji Morimoto $33
”If everyone has to be useful, that is just the law of the jungle. Civilisation also values the useless.” Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told that he was a ‘do-nothing’ because he lacked initiative. Dispirited and unemployed, it occurred to him that if he was so good at doing nothing, perhaps he could turn it into a business. And with one tweet, he began his business of renting himself out . . . to do nothing. Morimoto, aka Rental Person, provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. Sitting with a client undergoing surgery, accompanying a newly-divorced client to her favourite restaurant, visiting the site of a client’s suicide attempt are just a few of his thousands of true life adventures. He is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger and the curious encounters he shares are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology.
>>The only one who does nothing.
Too Many Rabbits by Davide Calì; illustrated by Emanuele Benetti $33
After a month of pleading, Dad finally takes Owen and Zoey to the pet store to adopt a rabbit. Once there, a two-for-one special offer just cannot be ignored; so they take home two rabbits - one male, and one female. Two rabbits make more rabbits, who then make even more rabbits, and soon there are just too many of the sweet little creatures. So begins a hilarious counting adventure as Owen and Zoey find homes for all of the rabbits. Full of little 'easter eggs' hidden in the art, Too Many Rabbits is a mirthful reminder to be careful of what you wish for and a hilarious lesson in chaos control for young readers. A very enjoyable counting book.
>>Look inside!