The Shivers for children and teens
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Lockwood: The Whispering Skull
Read our #352nd NEWSLETTER and build a reservoir of good reading.
20 October 2023
End Times by Rebecca Priestley
Is it the end times now? Was it the end times then? What is this end times? In Rebecca Priestley’s End Times she tackles the anxiety produced by climate change and an uncertain future; her 1980s teen experience of evangelical Christianity set against the background of nuclear threat, testing in the Pacific, and the advent of electronic technology; the existential search to find your place in the world; all explored through a 2021 lens as she road trips the West Coast with her best mate Maz. As with her previous book Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, Priestley has that knack for being deadly serious and hilariously funny, which is the perfect combination of keeping this many-headed hydra on track. For some the science will come to the fore, the details about the landscape, the rock and sediment, the sea level equations, and the Alpine fault line predictions based on facts and analysis. For others, the descriptions of the townships, empty spaces, and natural environment of the coast overlaid with pockets of history will resonate. There are also personal family histories, those stories that get passed down the generations, some backed up by passenger lists and gravestone records, while others embellished to make the patchwork we call family history. And yet, this is also a book about reconnection. For Priestley, it’s a road trip with her closest friend, in the here and now, but also a reckoning of their teenage years. From flirting with punk to raising their arms to praise, Rebecca and Maz were looking for somewhere to belong at a time when the world felt uncertain. And here they are again in 2021, a year into the pandemic — in a moment of relative calm when borders remained closed, but the isolation of lockdown was being shucked off — seeking an appreciation of these new end times. For Priestley, she’s on a mission to listen. To listen without prejudice, but not with acceptance. There are moments in her recorded conversations with miners, tourist operators, and a mayor, where she’s holding back. You see her desire to dish up the facts, but this restraint reveals better information than confrontation. She wants to work out what makes people believe in one thing over another. How they get their information, and the conclusions they draw using her own experience — her adventures in faith — as a mirror for reflection. Through these observations, there is also a personal reckoning in mid-life with her own anxiety which has peppered her teen and adult years. For both friends, it’s an opportunity to break out from their fifty-something lives, as they drive down the Coast, eat pies (there are not always vegetarian options), drink red wine, meet the locals, and catch up with old friends. There are silly moments, as there should be with close friends, as well as philosophical musings, pushing levity and concern up against each other much like the tectonic plates push against each other creating tensions and fissures. In writing, Rebecca Priestley works her way towards some answers in these end times.
Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre (translated from French by Sophie Lewis)
How should we occupy ourselves, he wondered, whatever that means, lest we be occupied by someone else, or something else, how do we keep our feet, if our feet at least may be said to be our own to keep, by leaning into the onslaught or by letting it wash through us? Too many metaphors, if they’re even metaphors, he thought, too much thought thought for us by the language we use to think the thoughts, he thought, too many ready-made phrases, who makes them and why do they make them, and what are their effects on us, he wondered, where is the power that I thought was mine, where is the meaning that I meant to mean, how can I reclaim the words I speak from those against whom I would speak them? No hope otherwise. The narrator of Noémi Lefebvre’s Poetics of Work happens to be reading Viktor Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich, in which Klemperer demonstrates that the success of, and the ongoing threat from, Nazism arose from changes wrought on the ways in which language was used and thus upon the ways people thought. Whoever controls language controls thought, he thought, Klemperer providing examples, authority exerts its power through linguistic mutation, but maybe, he thought, power can be resisted by the same means, resistance is poetry, he shouted, well, perhaps, or at least a bit of judicious editing could be effective in the struggle, he thought, rummaging in the drawer of his desk for his blue pencil, it’s in here somewhere. Fascism depends on buzzwords, says Klemperer, buzzwords preclude thought, and the first step in fighting fascism, says Klemperer, is to challenge the use of these buzzwords, to re-establish the content of discourse, to rescue the particular from the buzzword. Could he think of some current examples of such buzzwords, he wondered, and he thought that perhaps he could, perhaps, he thought, if terms such as the buzzword ‘woke’ or the buzzword ‘cancel’ were removed from discourse and the wielders of these buzzwords had no recourse but to say in plain language what they meant, these once-were-wielders would be revealed to be either ludicrous or dangerous or both ludicrous and dangerous and the particulars of a given situation could be more clearly discussed. That is a subversive thought, he thought, to edit is to unpick power. “There isn’t a lot of poetry these days, I said to my father,” says the narrator at the beginning of Poetics of Work. A state of emergency has been declared in France, it is 2015, terror attacks have resulted in a surge of nationalism, intolerance, police brutality, the narrator, reading Klemperer as I have already said, is aware of the ways in which language has been mutated to control thought, power acts first through language and then turns up as the special police, it seems. What purchase has poetry in a language also used to describe police weaponry, the narrator wonders. “I could feel from the general climate that imagination was being blocked and thought paralysed by national unity in the name of Freedom, and freedom co-opted as a reason to have more of it.” Freedom has become a buzzword, it no longer means what we thought it meant, but even, perhaps, well evidently, its opposite. “Security being the first of freedoms, according to the Minister of the Interior, for you have to work.” You have to work, is this the case, the narrator wonders, you have to work and by working you become part of that which harms you. The book progresses as a series of exchanges between the narrator and their father, the internal voice of their father, of all that is inherited, of Europe, of the compromise between capital and culture, of all that takes things at once too seriously and nowhere near seriously enough. “He’s there in my eyes, he hunches my shoulders, slows my stride, spreads out before me his superior grasp of all things,” the narrator says, embedded in their father, struggling to think a thought not thought for them by their father, their struggle is a struggle for voice, as all struggles are. “I am like my father but much less good, my father can do anything because he does nothing, while I do nothing because I don’t know how to defend a person who’s being crushed and dragged along the ground and kicked to a pulp with complete impunity, nor do I know how to get a job or write a CV or any biography, nor even poetry, not a single line of it.” What hope is there? Is it possible to find “non-culture-sector poetry”, the narrator wonders, or even to write this “non-culture-sector” poetry if there could be such a thing? What sort of poetry can be used to come to grips with even the minor crises of late capitalism, for instance, if any of the crises of late capitalism can be considered minor? “I watched the water flow south, and the swans driven by their insignificance, deaf and blind to the basic shapes of the food-processing industry, ignorant that they, poor sods, were beholden to market price variation over the kilo of feathers and to the planned obsolescence of ornamental fowls.” The book sporadically and ironically gestures towards being some sort of treatise on poetry, it even has a few brief “lessons,” or maxims, but these are too half-hearted and impermanent to be either lessons or maxims, perhaps, he thought, they might qualify as antilessons or antimaxims, if such things could be imagined, though possibly they ironise an indifference to both. “Indifference is a contemplative state, my father said one day when he’d been drinking.” Doing nothing because there is nothing to be done, or, rather, because one cannot see what can be done, is very different from doing nothing from indifference, but the effect is the same, or the lack of effect, so something must be done, the narrator thinks, even if it is the case that nothing can in the end be done. For those to whom language is at once both home and a place of exile, the struggle must be made in language, or for language, resistance is poetry, or poetry is resistance, I have forgotten what I shouted, I will sharpen my blue pencil, after all one must be “someone among everyone,” as the narrator says. “There’s a fair bit of poetry at the moment, I said to my father,” the narrator says at the end of Poetics of Work. “He didn’t reply.”
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Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq $42
Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. In this acclaimed debut novel – haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once – Tanya Tagaq explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.
”Tagaq's surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic's boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology.” —The New Yorker
>>Coming of age in the High Arctic.
>>Find out more.
The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
Witold Gombrowicz is considered by many to be Poland's greatest modernist, and in The Possessed, he demonstrates his playful brilliance and astonishing range by using the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and lively subversion ofthe form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his class, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside to train Maja Ochołowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. Yet as Maja and the young man are alternately drawn to and repulsed by the other, they find themselves embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby, where a mad prince haunts the halls, and bewitched towels, conniving secretaries, famous clairvoyants, and uncanny doubles conspire to determine the fate of the lovers. Serialized first in Poland in the days preceding the Nazi invasion, and now translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is both a comic jewel and a hair-raising thriller.
”Gombrowicz is one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century. The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.” —Susan Sontag
”What we have here is an unusual manifestation of a writing talent.” —Bruno Schulz
”Despite his anxiety about genre fiction, Gombrowicz acquits himself masterfully, moving deftly between horror, romance and crime. The web of dark motivations and interdependencies that links the characters is intricately and compellingly drawn, and the plot moves at an impressive speed. The novel’s shifts in tone and texture are handled expertly by translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who shows a keen sensitively not only to the language of the period but also to the genres being parodied, the translation interlaces passages of prose worthy of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and P G Wodehouse, expertly re-creating the original’s tonal palette for the anglophone reader.” —Uilleam Blacker, Literary Review
>>Through the unreal to reality.
Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world by Naomi Klein $42
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity — all we have to meet the world — so unstable? To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world — one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
”Naomi Klein never disappoints. Doppelganger swirls through the bewildering ideas of the ultra-right that often appear as a distorted mirror of left struggle and strategy. With her always incisive analysis of the systems and structures linked to global capitalism, Klein now fiercely and brilliantly urges that our justice movements be prepared to follow the quest for new meaning into dimensions where we might least expect to find it: in injury and vulnerability.+ —Angela Y. Davis
”Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that prompts us to completely rethink the moment we're in. If you want to understand where we are now — and how to find our way back to sanity — you have to read this totally brilliant book.” —Johann Hari
>>Down the rabbit hole.
Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest $28
I want to sing you early songs. Go deeper.
I want to take you back where you began,
Find the scraps of you you hid in secret
And bring them back to life beneath my tongue.
Tempest’s new poetry collection shows their familiar passion and truth-telling infused with a newer, more contemplative and metaphysical note; it is a book engaged with the big questions and the emotional states in which we live and create. Some of the poems experiment with form, some are free, and yet all are politically and morally conscious. Divisible by Itself and One is also a book about human form, the body as boundary and how we are read by the world. Taking its bearings — and title — from the prime number, Divisible by Itself and One is concerned, ultimately, with integrity: how to live in honest relationship with oneself and others.
"Tempest delivers their thoughts gorgeously, rhythmically, but also with clarity and a fierce grace." —Observer
>>Looking for the rhythm in a different place.
>>’Simple Things’.
The Abundant Kitchen: A practical guide to making ferments, preserves and pickles by Niva Kay and Yotam Kay $50
The authors of the remarkably approachable and practical The Abundant Garden, Niva and Yotam Kay, share their knowledge and experience in making ferments, pickles, preserves, sourdough, koji, cured meat, ginger beer, yoghurt, vinegar, kombucha, and much more. With 100 easy-to-follow, meticulously written recipes, this book will become a much-loved fermenting bible. Using these recipes is the perfect way to preserve and transform the bounty from your garden into delicious classics, Middle Eastern flavours and other tastes from around the globe. Whether you are a seasoned fermenter or taking your first steps into the world of live cultures, The Abundant Kitchen, with its helpful tips, step-by-step instructions and timeless techniques, will be very useful.
>>Look inside!
>>Back into The Abundant Garden.
Abolishing the Military: Arguments and alternatives by Griffin Leonard, Joseph Llewellyn and Richard Jackson $18
In an era of escalating global conflicts, this book challenges the conventional belief that nation-states need military forces to ensure their security and contribute to international peace. As academic discourse on non-violent methods of national defence and global peace promotion gains momentum, there is growing evidence supporting the viability of such policy approaches. Far from being a matter of solely academic concern, this debate parallels increasing public awareness that militaries are struggling to deal effectively with (and may actually exacerbate) contemporary threats and challenges such as terrorism, climate change and inequality. Abolishing the Military: Arguments and Alternatives critically examines several widely held assumptions regarding the necessity of a military force for Aotearoa New Zealand. In doing so, it demonstrates that these assumptions often rest on shaky foundations or evidence. Moreover, the book explores alternative non-violent strategies for national defence and international peace promotion, offering a fresh perspective on global security in the twenty-first century.
The Language of Trees: How trees make our world, change our minds, and rewild our lives by Katie Holten $40
A beautifully illustrated homage to the hidden wonders of the forest and our indelible connection to trees, filled with prose, poetry and art from over fifty collaborators, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Powers, Suzanne Simard, Gaia Vince, Tacita Dean, Plato and Robin Wall Kimmerer. In this thoughtful collection, artist Katie Holten gives us her visual Tree Alphabet -—made of the trees themselves — and uses it to translate and illustrate these pieces from writers and artists, activists and ecologists. Holten guides us on a journey from prehistoric cave paintings and creation myths to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to the language of fossil poetry. In doing so, she unearths a new way of seeing the natural beauty that surrounds us and creates an urgent reminder of what could happen if we allow it to slip away.
”A masterpiece.” —Max Porter
>>Look inside!
>>Pulling at the roots.
Polish’d: Modern vegetarian cooking from global Poland by Michał Korkosz $65
100 fresh, modern Polish vegetarian recipes — from new takes on traditional favorites to fusions from around the world. Polish'd includes both typical Polish favorites made vegetarian, like Kakory (Potato Empanadas) Filled with Roasted Vegetables and Cheese, and new flavors brought to Poland through immigration and cultural exchange, like Miso Burek with Mashed Potatoes, Roasted Mushrooms, and Dill. Its recipes showcase fresh vegetables, grains, and herbs, but there's also plenty of buttery, sugary, and cheesy comfort-food goodness to be found. Readers will see, and taste, Polish food in a new way as they enjoy dishes like: —Chilled Cucumber-Melon Soup with Goat Cheese, Crispy Apple, and Mint —Kopytka with Umami Sauce, Spinach, Hazelnuts, and Poppy Furikake —Nettle Pesto Pasta with Radishes and Asparagus —Grilled Broccoli with Lemon Mayo, Umami Bomb Sauce and Poppy Seeds —Tomatoes and Peaches with Soft Goat Cheese, Crispy Sage, and Superior Brown Butter Sauce —Carmelized Twarg Basque Cheesecake.
>>Look inside!
>>Korkosz has won awards for his food photography.
>>The author’s video channel (in Polish).
The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod story by John Taylor Williams $43
An intimate portrait of the legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who set about creating a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century. Their names are iconic: Eugene O'Neill, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius — the list goes on and on. Scorning the devastation that industrialisation had wrought on the nation's workforce and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, they gathered in the streets of Greenwich Village and on the beachfronts of Cape Cod. They began as progressives but soon turned to socialism, then communism. They founded theaters, periodicals, and art schools. They formed editorial boards that met in beach shacks and performed radical new plays in a shanty on the docks, where they could see the ocean through cracks in the floor. They welcomed the tremendous wave of talent fleeing Europe in the 1930s. But at the end of their era, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism when the anticapitalist movement fragmented into other causes.
An Honourable Exit by Éric Vuillard (translated from French by Mark Polizzotti) $40
19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option - a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants — but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found. In this gripping novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France's prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology — greed.
”Excoriating and profound — a remarkable work. I cannot think of an Anglophone author who writes with such polemical, poetical indignation.” —The Scotsman
Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia by Chris Aslan $45
The famous Silk Road united east and west through trade. Older still was the Wool Road, of critical importance when houses made from wool enabled nomads to traverse the inhospitable winter steppes. Then, later, came the Cotton Road, marked by greed, colonialism and environmental disaster.
At this intersection of human history in Central Asia, fortunes were made and lost through shimmering silks, life-giving felts and gossamer cottons. Aslan gives a fascinating account of this area little known to the West.
>>Find out more.
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward $37
A reimagining of American slavery, Ward’s new novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits — of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
”For all its boundless suffering, this is a novel of triumph.” —Washington Times
This Is ADHD: An interactive and informative guide by Chanelle Moriah $33
An essential Aotearoa guide to understanding Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder — commonly known as ADHD — written and illustrated from the perspective of someone with ADHD. Chanelle Moriah was officially diagnosed with ADHD at 22, and soon discovered just how inaccessible a lot of information can be for ADHD adults and those who may not yet have been able to obtain an assessment or supports. Chanelle has created a simple resource that explains what ADHD is and how it can impact the different areas of someone's life. This is ADHD is a tool for both diagnosed and undiagnosed people with ADHD to explain or make sense of their experiences. It also offers non-ADHD people the chance to learn more about ADHD from someone who has it.
>>Look inside.
I Am Autistic: A interactive and informative guide to autism (by someone diagnosed with it) by Chanelle Moriah $37
An essential Aotearoa guide to understanding autism — for autistic people and their families, friends and workmates. When Chanelle Moriah was diagnosed with autism at 21, life finally began to make sense. Hungry for information, Chanelle looked for a simple resource that could explain what autism is and how it can impact the different areas of an autistic person's life, but found that there was little written from the perspective of someone who is autistic. So Chanelle decided to create that missing resource. Chanelle discovered just how difficult it can be for autistic adults — particularly females or those assigned female at birth — to be diagnosed or even be assessed for autism. This is partly because there is very little understanding of the different ways autism can present itself. I Am Autistic is a tool for both diagnosed and undiagnosed autistics to explain or make sense of their experiences. It also offers non-autistic people the chance to learn more about autism from someone who is autistic.
>>Look inside.
Split Tooth, by Inuk writer, composer and singer Tanya Tagaq, is presented as a sequence of heightened verbal experiences conveying a teenager’s coming of age in the Canadian far north. The book eschews the narrative binds of the literary fiction novel as we typically see it, alternating between poems, short vignettes that read like flash fiction, and lengthier passages that unfold wondrous, spiritual happenings in the vein of magical realism before returning with a snap to the realities of Arctic indigenous life, and meandering back again through literary forms, artistic genres, and modes of being, thinking, experiencing, knowing.
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)
Sand absorbs water poured upon it just as it absorbs blood spilt upon it and the actions committed upon it. Where does this water, this blood, and where do these actions go? Can they be recovered? How do they return? Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel is comprised of two parts. The first, told in the third person, describes with elegant impassivity and equivalence the actions and movements of an officer in the Israeli army in the Naqab/Negev desert during the 1948-49 Naqba/War of Independence. Although we gain no access to his thoughts (how could we gain access to his thoughts, after all?), we are witness to his obsessive washing routines, his watchfulness for spiders and insects within his hut and his destruction of them, his tending of a festering spider bite on his thigh, his journeys into the surrounding desert either in vehicles with his soldiers, using maps, searching for Arab ‘insurgents’, or alone, on foot around the camp, following the topography. The other soldiers have no reachable dimension other than being soldiers because any such dimensions would be irrelevant. The officer is the only one who speaks, and that hardly at all except for a long lecture expressing the view that the desert is a wasteland that can be made fertile when cleansed of its current inhabitants. As the rituals of army life are repeated and repeated, the tension builds beneath the narrative. The soldiers come across a group of unarmed Bedouin at an oasis and kill them and their camels, taking a dog and a young woman back to the camp. Their mistreatment of her, culminating in gang rape and later her murder and burial near the camp, can be felt in the narrative long before they occur. The howling dog witness shifts the first section of the book to the second, where a howling dog keeps the first-person narrator awake at night in her house in contemporary Ramallah. She has become obsessed with the fate of the young woman, which she has read about in a newspaper article, and by “the conviction that I can uncover details about the rape and murder as the girl experienced it, not relying on what the soldiers who committed it disclosed.” What happens to those who have no agency in their own story? The narrator cannot accept that the young woman is “a nobody who will forever remain a nobody whose voice nobody will hear,” and, with a borrowed ID, which will help her to enter different areas, and a rented car, one weekend she sets out to see if she can find out more. She takes a pile of maps: the official Israeli maps that show the roads, checkpoints, settlements and army zones in the Negev but do not mark even still-existing Palestinian settlements, and maps of the Naqab before 1948, which give information possibly relevant to her search. Maps are a way in which power imprints itself on territory, and Shibli spends a great deal of careful attention in both parts of the novel to the movements of her main characters over the land, contrasting the movement associated with maps with that concerned with and guided by the terrain. These different ways of moving have, for eeach of them, quite different results. The movements of the officer in the first section imprints power upon a territory, a pattern traced by the woman in the second section over land that holds the trace of violence in itself. The past is never left behind though it can never be recovered, either. In the first part, the officer has complete ease of movement, heading wherever he wishes, inside or out; in the second part the narrator has her movement checked and restricted wherever she goes (until she reaches the Naqab). “The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences,” she notes, waiting at the checkpoints in the wall that divides the territory. “There are some who consider focusing on minor details as the only way to arrive at the truth, and therefore proof of its existence, to reconstruct an incident one has never witnessed simply by noticing little details that everyone else finds to be insignificant,” she says, as a reason for her search. This may be true, but if such minor details exist their significance may also be unrecognised by the searcher. In the military museum that she visits, the only ‘evidence’ is the soap, the jerricans, the uniforms, the vehicles and the weapons mentioned in the first part. Intention leaves no residue. Also these objects constitute the majority of the soldiers’ experience, given how little the woman meant to them. Part of the narrator’s and Shibli’s project is to uncover the particular from the general, the experience from the history. Although both she and the author bewail injustice, the narrator shows no enmity towards any of the people she meets, all are treated with sympathy; harm arises only from structures of power. Power withdraws the evidence of its actions, hides its victims, disappears into the understructure of everyday life. There is no residue unless the land holds a residue. The second half of the book is lightly told, in keeping with the personality of its narrator, and often funny (she describes a film rewinding in a museum and the settlers dismantling their houses). She visits the settlement with the name of the place where the crime occurred and learns that the actual place is near by, she visits the place and finds nothing of interest, she walks through the surrounding plantations where the desert has been made fertile, but is frightened back by a dog. “I am here in vain,” she says. “I haven’t found anything I’ve been looking for, and this journey hasn’t added anything to what I knew about the incident when I started out.” Reluctant to return to Ramallah, she drives back and forth in the desert, gives a ride to an old woman, and then decides to follow her through a military zone, where she comes across an oasis. The land has drawn her to the core of her quest, but she has no way of recognising it as such, and she does not expect that her quest will be, still unknowingly, fulfilled in the last sentence of the book.
A revolving selection of excellent recent fiction, significantly reduced in price to encourage your discovery.
Just enter the discount code CAROUSEL2 when adding the books to your cart for a 20% discount.
This offer is extended on these books only until 22 October 2023, and is limited to the copies currently in stock.
Read our #351st NEWSLETTER. Find out who won our Bookshop Day competition (and look at all the entries!), choose from the new books that arrived this week, and take a ride on our Literary Carousel!
13 October 2023
W, or, The memory of childhood by Georges Perec (translated from French by David Bellos)
“I write: I write because we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.” Both of Perec’s parents were killed in the 1939-1945 war, his father early on as a French soldier, and, soon after, his mother sent to a death camp. Their young son was smuggled out of Paris and spent the war years in a series of children’s homes and safe villages. “My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don’t know much about,” he writes. W alternates two narratives, the first an attempt by Perec to set down the memories of his childhood and to examine these not only for their accuracy but in order to learn the way in which memory works. Often factual footnotes work in counterpoint to the ‘remembered’ narrative, underscoring the limitations of the experiences that formed it. Right from birth the pull of the Holocaust is felt upon Perec’s personal biography, and his story is being shaped by this force, sucking at it, sucking his family and all stability away. Sometimes he attaches to himself experiences of which he was merely a witness, the memories transformed by remembering and by remembering the remembering, and so forth, and by the infection of memories by extraneous imaginative details. “Excess detail is all that is needed to ruin a memory.” The absences around which these memories circulate fill the narrative with suppressed emotion. The other narrative begins as a sort of mystery novel in Part One, telling how one Gaspard Winckler is engaged by a mysterious stranger to track down the fate of the boy whose name he had unknowingly assumed and who had gone missing with his parents in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego where they had gone in search of an experience that would relieve the boy’s mutism. In Part 2, the tone changes to that of an encyclopedia and we begin to learn of the customs, laws and practices of the land of W, isolated in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego, a society organised exclusively around the principles of sport, “a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort.” Perec tells us that ‘W’ was invented by him as a child as a focus for his imagination and mathematical abilities during a time when his actual world and his imaginative world were far apart, his mind filled with “human figures unrelated to the ground which was supposed to support them, disengaged wheels rotating in the void” as he longed for an ordinary life “like in the storybooks”. Life and sport on W are governed by a very complex system of competition, ‘villages’ and Games, “the sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory.” It is not long before we begin to be uncomfortable with some of the laws and customs of W, for instance, just as winners are lauded, so are losers punished, and all individual proper names are banned on W, with athletes being nameless (apart from an alphanumeric serial number) unless their winnings entitle them to bear, for a time, the name of one of the first champions of their event, for “an athlete is no more and no less than his victories.” Perec intimates that there is no dividing line between a rationally organised society valuing competition and fascism, the first eliding into the second as a necessary result of its own values brought to their logical conclusions. “The more the winners are lauded, the more the losers are punished.” The athletes are motivated to peak performance by systematic injustice: “The Law is implacable but the Law is unpredictable.” Mating makes a sport of rape, and aging Veterans who can no longer compete and do not find positions as menial ‘officials’ are cast out and forced to “tear at corpses with their teeth” to stay alive. Perec’s childhood fantasy reveals the horrors his memoir is unable to face directly. We learn that the athletes wear striped uniforms, that some compete tarred and feathered or are forced to jump into manure by “judges with whips and cudgels.” We learn that the athletes are little more than skin and bone, and that their performances are consequently less than impressive. As the two strands of the book come together at the end, Perec tells of reading of the Nazi punishment camps where the torture of the inmates was termed ‘sport’ by their tormentors. The account of W ends with the speculation that at some time in the future someone will come through the walls that isolate the sporting nation and find nothing but “piles of gold teeth, rings and spectacles, thousands and thousands of clothes in heaps, dusty card indexes, and stocks of poor-quality soap.”
After a request for children’s picture books about making friends and getting on with others, we had a decent stack on our table. Here’s a selection from the pile.
You and Me and Everybody Else is a wonderful book about what makes us different, but more importantly what we have in common. Its bold colours, playful design, and Playmobil-like characters are instantly appealing. On every page, there is action (plenty of activities are taking place), but also quiet spaces where children rest, read, chat, and relax. The text at the bottom of each page has repeating lines creating a sense of familiarity which works well as a read-aloud. Each paragraph starts with ‘everybody’, then moves on to ‘some’. Everybody loves to play. Everybody learns new things. Everybody gets angry, Everybody dreams. / Some like to play with others. Some learn by doing it themselves. Sometimes things don’t work out. Some dream of things that don’t exist yet. Children play, get bored, are happy and sad, are lonely and scared, laugh, eat and sleep. They dream and are surprised. The illustrations show children building with blocks, on swings and slides, waiting and watching, alone, and with friends, giving gifts and frights, falling off bikes, playing chess, making music, and making art. There is a diverse range of activities and cultures on every page and the table spread for lunch has noodles and fruit, pizza and popcorn, couscous, and sushi. [>>Look inside.]
In Eva Lindstrom’s Everyone Walks Away things aren’t so straightforward. Frank is always alone. The others (Tilly, Paul, and Milan) are having fun, and they have each other to play with, and they laugh together, not always kindly. When Frank wanders off to the surprise of the others, Tilly, Paul, and Milan become curious. Where has he gone? They follow at a distance. Frank has gone home to cry, and like Owl (in Owl at Home) he’s making tear-water tea letting his tears fall straight into the pot. Later when the tea has been made with the much-needed sugar (if you look closely, you will see Frank is a jam connoisseur) and cooled by the breeze from the window, Frank makes toast and gets things ready. Will anyone come to drink and eat? Maybe. Or will the others keep larking about outside? Lindstrom’s illustrations are a mix of watercolour, gouache, and pencil giving the pages a delightful and sometimes dreamy aspect juxtaposed with deft detail. Her colour palette for this book of yellows, blue-greens, and oranges is strangely attractive. Humour threads its way through the illustrations; there are suggestively sly side glances, and her children’s personalities are expressed by their quirky, slightly animalish features. Tilly’s braided green hair sticks up like perky animal ears, two of the children have snouts rather than petite noses and Frank’s yellow helmet hat gives him a mole-like aspect. The more times you read this sweet sad story, the more you will notice. And I think there might be a happy ending. [>>Look inside.]
There’s more crying in The New Friend, but don’t worry; this is an optimistic tale. Having a best friend is excellent. Losing a best friend is difficult. The excellent author Charlotte Zolotow manages to talk about betrayal, sadness and anger, and the empowering action of overcoming a difficult situation without resorting to easy saccharine answers. At the beginning is memory. Memories of all the wonderful things you did with your friend. Walking in the woods, listening to the rain, picking flowers, eating apples in a tree, and reading books together. And then, they are no longer there. They are with a new friend, sharing all your wonderful friendly things. You’re sad and mad. You cry until you fall asleep. You dream of a someone else. They take you on new paths with different adventures to places you have never been before. When you wake up, it’s time to go in search of this new friend. Looking for them is an adventure in itself, and your memory of your first friend is tucked inside. This classic Zolotow story (first published in 1968) has fresh joyful illustrations by Benjamin Chaud. Chaud’s style is both quiet (the rain falling over the rooftops, the soft wallpaper that cocoons the child in bed) and effervescent (running across the field, a jaunty sun umbrella for a reading shelter) capturing the different moods of the text. There are small birds flittering through the pages and a rabbit popping up when least expected which add little, surprising details to this dreamy thoughtful, and hopeful landscape. [>>Look inside.]
On short-listing Sarah Bernstein’s unsettling and relentlessly granular Study for Obedience for the 2023 Booker Prize, the judges said: ”Study for Obedience is an absurdist tale about how a stranger’s arrival in an unnamed town slowly unearths deep undercurrents of xenophobia, and it feels very like an allegory for the rise of ideological radicalism today. It is also a stirring meditation on survival. It has the uncanny charm of feeling like both a historical work – with its pastoral settings, petty superstitions, and suspicious villagers – and something bracingly modern. In this way it very cleverly, and with great irony, draws a link between a past we’d like to believe is behind us and our very charged present. The humour here is dry as a bone, very Bernhard-esque; it is obliquely and surprisingly funny.”
A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:
End Times by Rebecca Priestley $35
In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose, they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first - nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus — they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse. Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz — now a science historian and an engineer — are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake. End Times interweaves the stories of these two periods in Rebecca's life, both of which have at heart a sleepless fear of the end of the world. Along the way she asks: Why do people hold on to some ideas but reject others? How do you engage with someone whose beliefs are wildly different from your own? And where can we find hope when it sometimes feels as if we all live on a fault line that could rupture at any moment? [Paperback]
>>Apocalypse.
>>Granity is falling into the sea.
>>A meditation on apocalyptic thinking.
Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop (translated from French by Sam Taylor) $37
The new novel from the International Booker Prize-winning author of the astounding At Night All Blood Is Black. The Door of No Return, on the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal, is where millions of Africans last touched their home continent's soil, before they were transported to slavery in the Americas. When French naturalist Michel Adanson travels to Senegal in 1749, he hears the story of a woman who passed through the door... but then returned. He begins to search for this fabled woman, and soon his search becomes an obsession that leads him on a desperate journey through a land torn apart by slavery. [Paperback]
“At once melancholy and luminous.” —Le Monde
”Stunningly realized and written in exquisite prose. A love story, an adventure tale, and an unflinching examination of the unexpected ways that colonialism and greed ravaged everyone it touched, European and African.” —Maaza Mengiste
>>Can you conquer death by depicting your life on paper?
>>Read Stella’s review of At Night All Blood Is Black.
In the Temple by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle $35
Following their 2021 collaboration On We Go, artist Catherine Bagnall and poet Jane Sayle return with another collection of watercolours and poems inspired by their contemplation of nature within the context of the feminine sublime. In the Temple maintains a focus on ecological thinking, exploring intense personal connections with the natural world that take the reader into the realms of private ritual and the power and meaning of special places. In the Temple evokes a magical atmosphere, a mythological world of enchanted places with powerful and intangible connections to other living beings and to history. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>Darker, or deeper.
>>Read Stella’s review of On We Go.
Remember Me: Poems to learn by heart from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Anne Kennedy $45
”To remember a poem is to carry it with you always – the poem a distillation of thought, feeling, sound. To remember a poem is to go freely, without your keys, your bag, your baggage, yet to possess a valuable taonga. It’s the ability to speak a poem out loud, to yourself, to the air, to your folks. There’s a reason we say ‘off by heart’ when we commit words to memory: to remember a poem is to hold that poem close to your heart.’” —from the introduction by Anne Kennedy
In haka and waiata, sea shanties and ballads, in the words of Sam Hunt and Selina Tusitala Marsh, Hone Tuwhare and Hera Lindsay Bird, the rhythms of poetry have carried our sounds and stories, our loves and losses for generations. Now Anne Kennedy brings together for the first time a selection of over 200 poems from Aotearoa to learn by heart – whakataukī and odes, poems of love and of nature, of whānau, history and politics. For a wedding, a tangi, for a day at school or an evening at home, Remember Me will be a lively poetic companion for years to come. [Softcover]
Urgent Moments — Art and social change: the Letting Space projects, 2010—2020 edited by Sophie Jerram, Amber Clausner and Mark Amery $65
After first occupying vacant spaces in post-stock-market-crash Auckland in the mid-1990s, public art curators Letting Space re-emerged in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Confronted by the thin net of social welfare, the waste of the capitalist system and the climate emergency, it brokered spaces for artists to think and act radically, outside gallery walls. This book chronicles the projects those artists drove. From a grocery store where everything was free to an ATM for depositing moods and a citizens' water-testing lab, they added to the civic dialogue at a time when public space and media were increasingly commodified and under surveillance. Written by writers and thinkers, including Pip Adam and Chris Kraus, Urgent Moments demonstrates the vital role artists can play in the pressing discussions of our times. [Softcover]
>>Look inside, and see the contents!
A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau $25
Penelope Wells, precocious daughter of a poet, is holidaying at her family's distinctly bohemian hotel on the French Riviera. She spends the summer beneath the green umbrella pines and oppressive purple bougainvillea scribbling into her Anthology of Hates to pass the time. Until she meets the Bradleys. Don and Eva Bradley are well-behaved and middle-class; everything she is not. It is love at first sight. But the friendship ends in tears. Penelope and Don Bradley leave the Riviera, embarking on the painful process of growing up. She, in love with an elusive ideal of order and calm. He, in rebellion against the philistine values of his parents. Compellingly told in a series of first-person narratives, A Wreath for the Enemy explores death, morality, friendship and shows just how brittle and chaotic our lives can become once they collide explosively with those around us. [Paperbck]
”A cousin to both Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and Iris Murdoch’s philosophical fiction.” —Daily Telegraph
Visible Cities: Lockdown to liberation, stress to sustainability: Aotearoa fiction inspired by Italo Calvino edited by Marco Sonzogni, Sydney J Shep, and Daniel K Brown; illustrated by William du Toit $30
The celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities explores the intersection of reality and imagination through 11 startling themes, from 'Cities and Desire' to 'Trading Cities' to 'Cities and the Dead'. A hundred years after his birth, 11 writers from Aotearoa have each taken a city from their own country and written a short story that pays tribute to Calvino's work while addressing the themes that besiege our cities in the twenty-first century. Stories from Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, Russell Boey, Dinithi Nelum Bowatte, Jack Remiel Cottrell, Erin Donohue, Madison Hamill, Melanie Kwang, Marlon Moala-Knox, Nkhaya Paulsen-More, William Pigott, and Elsie Uini. [Paperback]
Femina: A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it by Janina Ramirez $40
The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings: a patriarchal society which oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the 'dark' ages were anything but. Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women's names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burnt, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated. Only now, through a careful examination of the artefacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women like Jadwiga, the only female King in Europe, Margery Kempe, who exploited her image and story to ensure her notoriety, and the Loftus Princess, whose existence gives us clues about the beginnings of Christianity in England. [Paperback]
”Ramirez shows again and again that dark age Europe was a far more various place than we like to believe.” —Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
”Beautifully written, wonderfully free-ranging and gloriously original, Femina makes us look into the mists of history in new, exciting and provocative ways.” —Frankopan
This Is Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross $45
A journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts — and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
>>The authors introduce us to neuroaesthetics (and show us how to live longer and better).
Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation by Anton Zeilinger $30
What is the true nature of reality? To find out, Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger takes us (along with his fictional students Alice and Bob) on a voyage through a quantum wonderland, explaining entanglement, teleportation, time-travel paradoxes and why our view of the world must change. Originally published in America in 2012, a new Afterword in the light of the author's 2022 Nobel Prize means the book brings readers up-to-date with the most recent developments in quantum teleportation. This describes the author's collaboration to perform the first intercontinental video call encrypted using quantum cryptography, and how Chinese scientists teleported entangled quantum states to an orbiting satellite. Readers also learn how both volunteer humans and astronomical objects billions of light years away have been part of experiments to conclusively prove that quantum states cannot provide a full description of reality at a local level. Einstein had always refused to accept aspects of quantum theory, deriding the notion of instantaneous communication between faraway 'entangled' particles as 'spooky action at a distance'. However, this playful yet deep book takes readers through a series of ingenious experiments conducted in various locations that demonstrate entanglement is indeed real, and speculates that information is an essential part of reality. From a dank sewage tunnel under the River Danube to the balmy air between a pair of mountain peaks in the Canary Islands, with various time-travel paradoxes explained along the way, the author and his fictional physics students Alice and Bob demonstrate the true nature of quantum entanglement and teleportation using photons, or light quanta, created by laser beams. The ideas described have laid the foundations for a new era of quantum technology, including the development of quantum computers and much more. [Paperback]
>>The book has even inspired a performance piece.
The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross $38
Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices — from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction — and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles.
Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipator initiatives and desires. The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life explores our attempts to represent our lived reality in media such as painting, literature and film, paying particular attention to contemporary transformations in the genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of ordinary life: detective fiction. Elsewhere, in Ross's investigation of the present-day politics of ecological occupations, such as the zad at Notre-Dame des Landes, the everyday emerges as a repository of rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity. [Paperback]
”In these remarkably lucid essays, real critics, rebellious farmers, artisans, and diverse character-types are summoned to remind us of moments of conformist immobility, disavowals of colonialism, violence and class difference; but also, of how French cultural history offers paths toward public beauty, collectivity, ecological ways of living. Ross has an uncanny ability to zero in on what matters in the forms of the Paris Commune and beyond, letting participants speak without the usual virtue-signaling.” —Karen Pinkus
”Kristin Ross's work is a necessary point of entry into the infinite insurrection of everyday life envisaged by Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre, Arthur Rimbaud and Jacques Ranciere, variously enacted from the Commune to May 68, and that animates the rural radicalism of today's Zad. Anyone interested in altering the questions of our day towards a new everyday life will find here an abundant reservoir to think and do anew.” —Manu Goswami
Glass Houses $80
Glass Houses presents 50 stunning architect designed homes that utilize glass to maximum effect. The international selection includes early modernist houses from the 1930s, such as Philip Johnson's Glass House and Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, and glamorous mid-century LA villas like Pierre Koenig's Case Study #22, alongside outstanding contemporary examples, where new innovations have made even more daring glass structures possible. Includes works by Tatiana Bilbao, Lina Bo Bardi, Ofis Arhitekti, Herzog & de Meuron, Hiroshi Nakamura, Kazuyo Sejima, Philip Johnson, Mecanoo, John Lautner, Richard Rogers, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Very impressive. [Hardback]
>>Look inside (and resist it if you can)!
The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker dwarf who became the first revolutionary abolitionist by Marcus Rediker $39
The transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man — a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life. [Paperback]
>>The Quaker Comet.
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek myth by Natalie Haynes $40
a female-centered look at Olympus and the Furies, focusing on the goddesses whose prowess, passions, jealousies, and desires rival those of their male kin, including: Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father's brow, the goddess of war and provider of wise counsel. Aphrodite, born of the foam (and sperm released from a Titan's castrated testicles), the most beautiful of all the Olympian goddesses, the epitome of love who dispenses desire and inspires longing — yet harbours a fearsome vengeful side, doling out brutal punishments to those who displease her. Hera, Zeus's long-suffering wife, whose jealousy born of his repeated dalliances with mortals, nymphs, and other goddesses, leads her to wreak elaborate and often painful revenge on those she believes have wronged her. Demeter, goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone; Artemis, the hunter and goddess of wild spaces; the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; and Hestia, goddess of domesticity and sacrificial fire. [Paperback]
”Cheerfully erudite and academically rigorous, combining immense scholarship with a sarky easy-going tone.” —The Times
Ngā Kaihanga Uku: Māori Clay Artists by Baye Riddell $70
The rise of an impressive ceramics movement is one of the more striking developments in contemporary Māori art. Clayworking and pottery firing was an ancient Pacific practice, but the knowledge had largely been lost by the ancestors of Māori before they arrived in Aotearoa. After the national clayworkers’ collective, Ngā Kaihanga Uku, was established in 1987, traditional ancestral knowledge and customs and connections with indigenous cultures with unbroken ceramic traditions helped shape a contemporary Māori expression in clay. This book is the first comprehensive overview of Māori claywork, its origins, loss and revival. Richly illustrated, it introduces readers to the practices of the five founders of Ngā Kaihanga Uku and also surveys the work of the next generation.
>>Look inside!
>>”It’s not just about pottery, is it?”
The Korean Cook book by Junghyun Park and Jungyoon Choi $80
This definitive collection features more than 350 recipes organized into traditional Korean meals, including pantry staples, fermented foods, rice, vegetable dishes, raw food, noodles, stir-fries, grilled meats, soups, stews, hotpots, noodles, dumplings, porridges, rice cakes, and desserts. Acclaimed Atomix chef JP Park and culinary historian Jungyoon Choi share their years of research and expertise, together with their knowledge of the ingredients, culture, and traditions of Korean food in this, the first comprehensive book on Korean home cooking, expansive in breadth and approach and filled with tasty and achievable authentic recipes for the home cook. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson $37
In this first short story collection in twenty years, we meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man whose luck changes when a horse speaks to him. With clockwork intricacy, inventiveness and sharp social observation, Atkinson conjures a feast for the imagination, a constantly changing multiverse in which nothing is quite as it seems.
”A brilliant and profoundly original writer.” —Rachel Cusk
Bon Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien $90
Flight Path follows the painter from Te Henga / Bethells Beach — his artistic turangawaewae — through his years of wandering not only the length of Aotearoa but as far afield as Latin America and Europe. Drawing extensively on Binney's letters, journals and other writings, O'Brien takes us into the world of this gifted but paradoxical artist. Richly illustrated with Binney's paintings, drawings and prints — alongside photographs and documentary materials — this is the first full-length monograph on one of New Zealand's most iconic twentieth-century artists. [Hardback]
>>Look inside!
The Only Girl in Town by Ally Condie $25
What would you do if everyone you love disappeared? What if it was your fault? For July Fielding, nothing has been the same since that summer before her senior year. Or that late-August night at the jump. Before, she had Alex to be her loyal bestie, always up for playing endless rounds of minigolf or trying every ice cream flavour at local favourite, Verity. She had Sydney, who pushed her during every sweaty and wonderful cross-country run, and who sometimes seemed to know July better than she knew herself. And she had Sam. Sam, who told her she was everything and left her breathless with his kisses. Now, July is alone. Every single person in her small town of Lithia has disappeared. No family. No Alex or Sydney. No Sam. July's only chance at unravelling the mystery of their disappearance is a series of objects, each a reminder of the people she loved most. And a recurring message that begins to appear all over town: GET TH3M BACK.
Mangō: Sharks and rays of Aotearoa by Ned Barraud $35
The oceans surrounding Aotearoa are home to over a hundred astonishing and strange species of sharks and rays. This fact-filled book takes you down into the fascinating underwater lives of these expert hunters, illustrates their evolution and explores their place in our culture. And it explains why these ancient fish and their environments need our kaitiakitanga more than ever. [Hardback]
>>Look inside.
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Read our #350th NEWSLETTER. Find out about our Bookshop Day competition, the Nobel Prize in Literature, our Literary Carousel of savings and discoveries, and choose some excellent new books!
6 October 2023
The Other Name (Septology I—II) by Jon Fosse (translated from Nynorsk by Damion Searle)
and I see myself sitting and reading the thick blue book of two parts, not that thick, actually, and I have reached that point in the book, though it is not in fact a point in the book for there is nothing in the book that would mark such a point, but rather a point in my reading of the book, which just happens to be around page seventy-five, that I came to realise that the book is written entirely in one sentence, one slow, patient, uninterrupted flow of words, no, I think, that is not correct, the book is written in two parts, though each begins with the word And, but neither part ends, each rather just leaves off, so it would not be correct that the book is written in one sentence, or in two sentences, one for each part, but rather in no sentences, one, or two, slow, patient, uninterrupted flow, or flows, of words, that much at least I got right, I think, just the kind of thing I like, but done with such virtuosity and with such little display of virtuosity that I had not realised until page seventy-five or thereabouts that there are no full stops to be found in this book, or no full stop, I am uncertain if this absence should be singular or plural, possibly both, this Jon Fosse and his translator Damion Searls having built these words without one misstep, or missomething, the metaphor seems mixed and I has not even realised that it was a metaphor, I must be more careful, capturing the flow of thought, so to call it, and speech, realistically, seemingly of the narrator, a middle-aged painter named Asle, living, I am almost tempted to put, as such people do, in a small town in western Norway, driving in the snow to and from a city on the western coast of Norway, the city of the gallery which shows, which is a euphemism of sorts for sells, his paintings, but also the city in which lives a middle-aged painter named Asle, resembling both in looks and clothing, if clothing is not part of looks, the narrator, the narrator narrating in the first person and this other Asle, the alter-Asle if you like, this alter-Asle to the thoughts and memories of whom the narrator-Asle has extraordinary access, though there is no evidence of any reciprocal mechanism, we are, I am sure, never given an instance of the alter-Asle even being aware of the existence of such a person as the narrator, this aler-Asle, being confined to the third person, and, I wonder, what sort of trauma confines a person to an existence only in the third person? presumably a trauma, I think, this alter-Asle being also an alcoholic and a person who “most of the time, doesn’t want to live any more, he’s always thinking that he should go out into the sea, disappear into the waves,” but not doing so because of his love for his dog, there is, I think as I am reading, some relationship between the two Asles, well, obviously there is, my thought, or the thought I have, being that the alter-Asle is the actual Asle and the narrator-Asle is the Asle that the alter-Asle-who-is-actually-the-actual-Alse would have been if he was not the Asle he became, which, I think, I have made sound a bit confusing, and the opposite of an explanation, not that that matters, on account of whatever trauma, or whatever it is that I speculate is a trauma, that confined him to a third-person existence, the characters being one character, all characters being one character as they are in all books, I speculate, though in this book The Other Name, almost all the characters have, if not the same name, almost the same name, which tightens the knot somewhat, if I can be forgiven another metaphor, though I will not forgive myself for it at least, I will try to avoid, I think, thinking of the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, or, in any rate, describing the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, in any way other than a literary way, whatever that means, nothing, I think, the person that Asle could have been sees the Asle that Asle became, though Alse cannot know him, the person that Asle could have been rescues Asle when he has collapsed in the snow and takes him to the Clinic and to the Hospital, and takes the dog to look after, who knows, though, if the third-person Asle, the one I was calling the alter-Asle until that became too confusing, at least for me, survives, neither we nor the first-person Asle know that, but after the first-person Asle goes to the city and rescues the third-person Asle from the snowdrift, how could he know where to find him, I wonder, he begins, in the second part of the book, to have access to some deeply buried memories of the Asle that perhaps they once both were, memories all in the third person, for safety, I think, memories firstly of Asle’s and his sister’s disobedience of their parents in straying along the shore and to the nearby settlement, a narrative in which threat hums in every detail, a narrative in which colour impresses itself so deeply upon Asle that, I think, he could have become nothing other than a painter, a narrative that seems searching for a trauma, for a misfortune, a narrative assailed by an inexplicable motor noise as they approach the settlement but which resolves with a misfortune that is anticlimactic, at least for Asle, a trauma but not his trauma, what has this narrative avoided, I wonder at this point, what has not been released, or what has not yet been released, I wonder, Fosse is a writer who writes to be rid of his thoughts, I think, just as his narrator says, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, to get rid of them in a way, to be done with them, I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, I try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away,” and, yes, when the narrator lies in bed at the end of the book and is unable to sleep, he does recover the memory, a third person memory, the memory of the trauma that split the Asles and trapped one thereafter in the third person, the memory that explains the awful motor noise that intruded on the previous narrative of disobedience as the children approached the locus of the trauma, and, I think, all the sadness of the book leads from here and to here
Bookshop Day is a time to celebrate your bookshop and the books that we find and recommend for you. We take pleasure in introducing new books to you, finding the books you want, and going the extra mile for those special customer requests. At VOLUME we are knowledgeable, and our many years of bookselling experience speaks for itself. Our interest in literature is unquenchable. Bookshop Day is also a time to reflect on the literary ecosystem of Aotearoa. It's small and mighty, with passionate authors, publishers, and booksellers who, against the odds, make superb books appear and land in your hands. Many work long hours for little recompense, and every sale makes a difference. This Bookshop Day I'm recommending my two favourite books — so far — this year from two very special New Zealand publishers. From Gecko Press: the daring and delightful Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai. From Lawrence & Gibson: The Words For Her. This collective of authors not only publish their books, they make them!
As we say at VOLUME, buying interesting books makes interesting books happen.
P.S. A small plug for our own writing/publishing endeavours for 2023: Just out, Thomas's Some Things Wrong — it will take you to another layer of consciousness! And in its second print run, my own I, Object.
And thanks for your ongoing support!
This week we are featuring the books of the remarkable Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who has developed a method he calls 'slow prose' to explore the depths and subtleties of memory and experience and to grapple with the complex predicaments of human existence, language, time, and personhood. His prose is hypnotic, looping, emotionally resonant, philosophical, and often also funny. Fosse has just been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.
>>It's not me who's seeing.
>>The mystical realist.
>>Giving voice to the unsayable.
>>Biobibliography.
>>A search for peace.
>>Pure prose.
>>Frames and levels.
>>Revisions and the ear.
>>A new name.
>>Where to start.
>>Septology (also available as The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name).
>>Thomas reviews The Other Name.
>>Melancholy 1—2..
>>Trilogy.
>>Aliss at the Fire.
>>Scenes from a Childhood..
>>A Shining.
A new book is a promise of good times ahead. Click through for your copies:
Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq (translated from French by Penny Hueston) $45
Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. In Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers – ‘as if writing were not sleeping’ – Ovid, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec and others. With her inimitable humour, she describes her dealings with a somnologist and her attempts to find a remedy – trying sleeping pills, cannabis, alcohol, bedtime rituals, acupuncture, yoga, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, a gravity blanket and a range of sleep-aid devices. Darrieussecq considers bedrooms, beds, clinophilia (‘the tendency to remain in a prone position without sleeping for prolonged periods of time’), her need to be alone in bed, those without beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma and capitalism’s role in sleeplessness, our constant wakefulness online, the forest as a hypnagogic zone and how our relationship with animals is connected to our sleep, or lack of it. Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation and criticism, Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation and an innovation in form.
”Marie Darrieussecq invites us on an extended patrol of the corridors of Hotel Insomnia in the company of the ghosts of the famous sleep-deprived, then turns to the story of her own intimate tussle with sleep that will not come. Amid the torrent of publications in the new sleep science, this is the only book I know that concedes to sleep its proper majesty and its own dark poetry.” —J. M. Coetzee
”On the page Sleepless is fragmentary, footnoted and studded with photos and illustrations. It’s panoramic in its survey of insomniac literature, and also softly intimate where it touches on the author’s own life. In its range and genre it’s unpindownable. Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work. All her familiar acuity, humour, humility and intensity are evident in Sleepless.” —Samantha Harvey, Guardian
”Darrieussecq shows convincingly that the socioeconomic organization of twenty-first-century life conspires to rob us of sleep. It is that, in the eyes of capitalism, sleep is a ‘structural attention deficit’ that impedes ‘non-stop-connectivity’ and the possibility of being open for value extraction and commodification twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For her readers, whether they are insomniacs or not, Sleepless is a meditation on a condition that is more widespread than is generally acknowledged, and impinges, at least philosophically, even on those who do not have it.” —Ryan Ruby, Times Literary Supplement
>>Waking up to Kim Hill.
>>Sleep as another awakening.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein $40
In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator. A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country’ to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill. (Hardback) Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Study for Obedience is an absurdist tale about how a stranger’s arrival in an unnamed town slowly unearths deep undercurrents of xenophobia, and it feels very like an allegory for the rise of ideological radicalism today. It is also a stirring meditation on survival. It has the uncanny charm of feeling like both a historical work – with its pastoral settings, petty superstitions, and suspicious villagers – and something bracingly modern. In this way it very cleverly, and with great irony, draws a link between a past we’d like to believe is behind us and our very charged present. The humour here is dry as a bone, very Bernhard-esque; it is obliquely and surprisingly funny.” —Booker judges’ citation
”Bernstein paints from a palette of dread. This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite.” —Observer
>>The question of innocence is a complicated one.
>>Read an extract.
>>Read Thomas’s review of The Coming Bad Days.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo $48
Chetna Maroo's tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl's struggle to transcend herself — and squash. Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. (Hardback) Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Western Lane is a mesmerising novel about how silence can reverberate within a family in the aftermath of grief. The story unfolds on a squash court; the reader quickly learns how sport can act as a balm for the living. It is also about sisterhood, and about the love that remains after a devastating loss. The language in this novel is truly something to be savoured. Western Lane contains crystalline prose that also feels warm and tender, which can be a difficult balance to strike. Bereavement is something which we will all experience one day in some shape or form, and the complexity of familial dynamics is another universal theme which Western Lane explores with great sincerity and depth of feeling.” —Booker judges’ citation
”The work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it.” —The Guardian
>>Focussed attention.
>>Read an extract.
Star 111 by Lutz Seiler (translated from German by Tess Lewis) $45
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they’ve harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father’s car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it’s with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry. Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.
”There aren't many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun.” —Will Ashon
”The presence of objects have is no doubt one of the most extraordinary things about Star 111. Everything is unique, everything has a price, everything is respected because it is the fruit of work or of making. Nothing is thrown away, everything kept. What if the objects have a soul? Read Star 111 (the title is the name of an East German transistor radio) and understand the real value of an object.” —Cecile Dutheil de la Rochere
>>Read a sample.
The Observologist: A handbook for mounting very small scientific expeditions by Giselle Clarkson $40
An observologist is someone who makes scientific expeditions, albeit very small ones, every day. They notice interesting details in the world around them. They are expert at finding tiny creatures, plants and fungi. They know that water snails glide upside down on the undersurface of the water; not all flies have wings; earthworms have bristles; butterflies taste with their feet. The Observologist puts over 100 small creatures and features of the natural world under the microscope, piquing our curiosity with only the most interesting facts. Subjects range from slugs, ants and seeds, fungi and flies through to bees and bird poop. But this is no everyday catalogue of creatures. It is an antidote to boredom, an encouragement to observe our environment, with care and curiosity, wherever we are. Facts combine with comics, detailed illustrations, science and funny stories in this unique, warm and fascinating account of the small things all around us. Completely wonderful.
>>Look inside!
Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay $37
The new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country. A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship plows through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men. With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers hallucinogenic glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans behave like animals and animals talk like humans.
”Amidst a pile of shed skin and fur, McKay moulds a kaleidoscopic and horrifyingly real portrait of life at the fringes. By turns gritty, surreal, and absurd, Gunflower isn’t afraid to weigh flesh on the scales of our own judgments, a delicate balancing act between life and death, connection and disconnection. Perhaps part Kelly Link and Ottessa Moshfegh, McKay delivers an assured follow-up to The Animals in That Country in her own singular voice that zeroes in on our anxieties and existential crises with deft and often poetic flair.” —Sequoia Nagamatsu
>>Given up on book clubs?
>>Read Stella’s review of The Animals in That Country.
The Forgotten Forest: In search of the lost plants and fungi of Aotearoa by Robert Vennell $40
Deep in the forest, in places you would never think to look, are some of the most remarkable creatures. Overlooked and unsung, this is the forgotten forest: a world of glow-in-the-dark mushrooms and giant mosses, where slime moulds travel the forest in search of prey and ancient lichens live for thousands of years. A beautifully illustrated guide to the spectacular oddities of the forests of Aotearoa, by the author of The Meaning of Trees and Secrets of the Sea. Fascinating, surprising, and mysterious.
>>Look inside!
Constance Barnicoat: A cool head and a sharp pen by Annabel Schuler $30
Nelsonian Constance Barnicoat (1872-1922) was sassy, strong, opinionated, brave, meticulous, and very intelligent. She should be celebrated as a leading journalist of her time, but she is unknown to most people. While she was born and brought up in New Zealand, Constance Barnicoat wrote for publications around the world, having learned her craft in London from the pioneer of modern journalism, W. T. Stead. Annabel Schuler came across Constance’s story five years ago and wrote a brief article about her achievements for a historical journal. People wanted to know more, so she dug deeper into Constance’s writing, her climbing, her grit in a man’s world, and her unflagging work ethic. In A Cool Head and a Sharp Pen readers will learn about Constance Barnicoat’s career as a multi-lingual journalist firstly in England, then based in Switzerland during World War I. Her contacts included the Archbishop of Canterbury, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georg F. Nicolai and, back in New Zealand, politicians such as Richard John Seddon and Sir Francis Dillon Bell. If that was not enough, she claimed several ‘firsts’, climbing some of the most treacherous mountain peaks of Europe as her form of relaxation.
Earth & Fire: Modern potters, their tools, techniques and practices by Kylie Johnson and Tiffany Johnson $80
From clay to kiln and all the techniques between, this is an introduction to the craft and techniques of working with ceramics by ceramicists. Visit the studios of established ceramicists who are making waves in the art world, of midcareer potters who work diligently at their craft daily and make a living from their work, as well as those who turn to clay for relaxation and a hobby. With a focus on techniques and processes, Earth and Fire captures the diversity of ceramics and how clay doesn't just get under your fingernails; it gets under your skin.
>>Look inside!
Rintaro by Sylvan Mishima Brackett and Jessica Battilana $70
This cookbook, from one of San Francisco's most acclaimed restaurants, translates the experience of a Tokyo izakaya to the home kitchen. Crowd-pleasing foods like curry rice, tonkatsu, and yakitori, eaten most often at lunch counters and in home kitchens, live alongside sashimi, fresh bamboo shoots, and other dishes that are usually considered part of a more elevated Japanese cooking tradition and not often covered in cookbooks. Through clear instruction, abundant photography, and delicious recipes, Rintaro demystifies Japanese food for home cooks with over 70 recipes for rice, simmered dishes, homemade udon, and grilled foods.
>>Look inside!
>>Visit Rintaro!
What Is Antiracism? And why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani $40
What is ‘racial capitalism’ and how do we overcome it? This sharp, slim, revelatory book argues that we misunderstand contemporary capitalism if we miss the centrality of racism to neoliberalism.
From David Harvey to Wendy Brown, the leading scholars of neoliberalism's rise treat racism as an ornamental feature of recent capitalist politics — an ugly ornament, to be sure, but not one that is central to neoliberalism. In crisp, accessible prose and via descriptions of some key moments of modern history in the US (like the Black Power movement) and the UK (like Enoch Powell's introduction of neoliberal ideas in parliament), Arun Kundnani argues that this misapprehension of the role of race in neoliberalism contributes to the Left's inability to build a successful movement connecting race and class.
Kallocain by Karin Boye (translated from Swedish by David McDuff) $26
Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye's classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.
"The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye's little-known 1940 novel, Kallocain, is a close cousin to those depicted in We and Brave New World. The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in Kallocain it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state's power over its citizens and their own power to resist." —The New Yorker
>>Reimagining the dystopian novel.
The Book that No-One Wanted to Read by Richard Ayoade and Tor Freeman $23
Have you ever thought about how it feels to be a book? To be left under a whiffy pant pile or shelved, forever collecting dust? To have your pages bent backwards or your spine BROKEN? What if you don't have a sparkly unicorn or dragon adorning your cover — who will pick you out of the bookshop then? This is the story of the sadly neglected Book That No One Wanted To Read — Can its destiny change when it finally meets the right reader? Spoiler alert: yes.
”Very funny, with brilliant illustrations. It should be called The Book That Everyone Wanted To Read." —Nadia Shireen
>>Look inside (what fun!).