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16 February 2024
Dinah has arrived in Japan to teach English. Her apartment is dismal, her job mediocre, but here, in this foreign city far from her suburban New Zealand upbringing, she thinks she can escape and forget about her twin brother. Yet everywhere she looks he is there. Dinah is moving through the city streets on the edge of tipping into despair. This city is what she wants but it is unexpectedly strange. She is at odds with it. Sleeping outside in the grim park outside her building, suspecting she is the only person living in the apartment complex (she never sees anyone) and wary of an overly aggressive crow. Is what she senses real? How far is she removed from herself when she is not playing the role of the foreign language teacher? Can she thrive here or will she be subsumed by her grief? Yasuko, a teacher at the same school, is polished and precise. From her elegant wardrobe to her observant eye, she is an enigma to her colleagues. They are wary but captivated by her charm and daring, while she holds herself separate and aloof. For this world is of little importance to her. She hides a secret self. One which she represses for her adult son Jun. When her son disappears Yasuko begins to unravel. She has powers within her that connect her to another world, a natural world. This supernatural world seems drawn to Yasuko, as much as she is drawn to it, and the carefully manicured roles she plays as teacher and parent are tentative. The animals in her past and present are increasingly close, although it is to the strange young foreigner she leans. She is convinced that the girl can help her reconnect with Jun. This unexpected relationship will take them both on a journey. For Yasuko, she is driven on by a desire to be released from her burdens towards a place where the voices can fly free. For Dinah, in the hope she will come home to herself, she will follow, as she has always done, without understanding the peril or the pleasure. Bird Life examines the forces that allow us to slip from one world to another, the relationship between the internal and external, and the tentative membrane that exists between genius and madness. As with Anna Smaill’s acclaimed previous novel, The Chimes, the writing is taut and evocative with subtle symbolism and a rhythmic beauty. The magical realism hints at Murakami and Allende, while the quotidian observations keep the novel in the here and now, creating a satisfying fracture in this absorbing story.
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard's I Remember and Edouard Levé's Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries.
Alphabetisation is a way to achieve this. Alphabetisation as an organising principle at least possesses the virtue of scientific rigour. Alphabetisation is very clean, even when that which is alphabetised is very dirty (I mean dirty in a non-pejorative sense). Although it appears to be a principle that organises without adding meaning to that which is organised, a principle that organises without aiding understanding of that which is organised, that is actually its virtue. Although the experiences to which our memories relate may have been temporally organised, if organised is the right word, our memories are themselves certainly not temporally organised. Diaries are not memories, but memories could be somehow rescued from diaries, if we only knew how. Do we force new conjunctions of meaning upon sentences that abut each other merely due to their alphabetical sequence, and is this a good thing? Experimental writing needs to follow a rigorously scientific method to yield interesting results. Heti could have alphabetised all the words or alphabetised all the letters, but these, although they may have some scientific or statistical value (probably a fairly low value, I would guess), would not have been very interesting. Heti took ten years of her diary entries and put all the sentences into alphabetical order. Heti’s text is 60000 words long; my review is not long enough to be interesting. How would we arrange our lives, our thoughts, if we did not use time as a method of arrangement? I am aware that I am unlikely to do this, for reasons that could reasonably be labelled laziness. I, at least, can seldom stretch my comprehension beyond a sentence. I do not think that my attempt is very successful (even though it doesn’t need to be very successful; somewhat successful would be sufficient), but why not? I do not think that we would have got bored, though we do get bored of many things. Is this interesting? I was going to say that the way in which the book is written transforms its contents, or the context of the contents, changing our experience of the contents from what it would otherwise have been. In any case, you will find Alphabetical Diaries funny, tender, poignant, and certainly good company (or maybe it’s the author who is good company). In presenting Heti’s thoughts non-temporally arranged, the book resembles a personality, which is also a phenomenon non-temporally arranged, similarly expressed from sequentially lived experience. Is this an interesting way to proceed? It is, however, difficult to determine by what principle our memories are organised, if they can be said to be organised at all, or, if they are organised, whether they are organised by a principle, if it is not impossible to be organised without a principle of organisation. It presents that which it organises without imposing a meaning or context that would dictate or influence our understanding. Living, I suppose, is a forwardly propulsive phenomenon, temporally speaking, and reading also is forwardly propulsive wherever it lands upon a text. Memories appear to be associatively organised, which is what could be called a slippery principle of organisation, or a soft principle of organisation. Memory, however, is not forwardly propulsive. Now I will put all my sentences into alphabetical order. Otherwise the knowledge that the method will in due course be applied to it may influence the writing of the text. Perhaps there is a quantum length of text at which alphabetisation reveals repetitions, patterns, tendencies that might otherwise not be noticed (that is to say, in a shorter text). Perhaps, though, the alphabetical method, if we can call it a method, only really works if the author of the text to which it is applied is unaware of its future application to the text. Plot is as artificial in texts as it is in our lives. Reading would not be reading if it didn’t have propulsion. Really it is the having of memories that is associatively organised and perhaps not the memories themselves, if there are such things as memories that are separate from the having of them, which I doubt (though it is hard to say where memories come from if there are not). Really, the alphabetisation of the sentences is an editorial intervention that is more part of the process of reading than of writing. Surprising results are only surprising if we are surprised by them. The alphabetisation dictates how we access the text. The alphabetisation is a morselisation of the writing and has much in common with the way in which we access memory, which also appears in morsels. The book in many ways is a celebration of the sentence because the sentence is the form preserved or foregrounded by the alphabetisation. The sentence is an optimum unit of interest. This is interesting. This makes me want to apply Heti’s alphabetical method to pre-existing works of literature to see what the method may reveal about them once they are liberated from their traditionally temporal arrangement. Time is a harder principle of organisation than association but it is a softer principle than alphabetisation. Time is almost as soft a principle as association. We must free ourselves from plot. We used to read sections of the Alphabetical Diaries when they appeared online about a year ago in The New York Times back when we subscribed to The New York Times, largely, in the end, to read the Alphabetical Diaries. We would read the latest instalment of the Alphabetical Diaries aloud in bed each Sunday morning, alternating the reading so that we could also drink coffee while reading the Alphabetical Diaries. We would still happily be reading instalments of The Alphabetical Diaries in bed on Sunday mornings if the alphabet and our subscription to The New York Times had not run out at pretty much the same time. Why do I present all my ideas, if they can be said to be ideas, as questions? Will my review obscure the book it addresses in the way my reviews typically obscure the books they address? Would it be possible to write a review of this book in the way that the book itself is written, alphabetising the sentences in the review? Would such a review illuminate the book in a way that adds something to our, or my at least, understanding of it? You might think that reading someone else’s diary entries, especially when they are presented without a diary’s traditional organising principle, would become boring if it did not start out boring, but Heti’s sentences are compelling, compoundingly so, either because she has interesting thoughts; or because her thoughts, vulnerabilities, longings and so forth are entirely relatable, if that is not too nauseating a term, even if they are not interesting per se; or because boredom is a temporal phenomenon that has been excluded or bamboozled by the form.
The end of the year and a fresh season for cooking always brings a flurry of new publications. Here are some new cookbooks on our shelves at VOLUME. From everything you need to know about rice to everything you need to know about cooking, to flavours that make you happy, and food to nourish body and soul.
Phaidon produces wonderful comprehensive volumes on specific cuisines. New from their stable is The Korean Cookbook. In typical fashion, there are masses of recipes (over 350) and expert knowledge of cooking techniques, ingredients and pantry staples, and food history. Definitive and authentic.
Sri Owen’s The Rice Book, first published 30 years ago, has been reissued with a new forward by Bee Wilson. It brings together renowned food writer Sri Owen's extensive travels and years of research with recipes for biryanis, risottos, pilafs, and paellas from Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and beyond. A stunning book with updated information and a further 20 new recipes, this is an award-winning classic. Winner of the André Simon Award and One of OFM's 50 Best Cookbooks of All Time.
From San Franscico’s popular Rintaro comes a hip and stylish collection of Japanese izakaya recipes for your home kitchen. Rintaro features straightforward and delicious recipes: dashimaki tamago, gyoza, and homemade udon as well as such delights as a towering melon parfait with bright melon jellies. This is food that tastes both like Japan and California – not fusion food but the food that you’d expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan. Idiosyncratic and packed with comforting, tasty delights.
Start Here: With stellar reviews, this is an ideal book for anyone starting in the kitchen or for anyone who wants to improve their cooking. Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook. Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook. Start Here is a standout— a one-stop resource packed with practical advice and scientific background, helpful tips, and an almost endless assortment of recipe variations.
Looking to spice up your cooking, sisters Maria and Eva Konecsny — the founders of Gewurzhaus — will introduce you to their favourite spices. In Kindred, there’s excellent information about food pairing your spices, how to use them, and how much to use. The recipes are drawn from their German heritage and reflect their love of shared food. Kindred embraces home and kin celebrating the special moments as well as everyday nourishment.
And here’s something irresistible. From the author of Persiana and Persiana Everyday, comes Flavour. Another delicious collection of recipes. Nigella Lawson says it perfectly: “Sabrina Ghayour's Middle-Eastern plus food is all flavour, no fuss - and makes me very, very happy”. For Middle Eastern and Persian food with a twist, Sabrina Ghayour is golden excellence.
A sweet selection of books from our shelves.
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Choose from the new books that arrived this week and click through to secure your copies:
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti $36
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard's I Remember and Edouard Levé's Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries.
”A pointillist description of the raging, vacillating, euphoric, despairing turbulence of Heti’s mind. Heti has turned the pitfalls of the diary form – the relentless self-absorption, the combination of trivia and pathos – into a dazzling aesthetic virtue. Like a hologram, this book refracts an endlessly shifting light.” —Claire Allfree, Telegraph
”The resulting book is exhilarating: both intimate and withholding, repetitive and generative, undeniably self-centred and yet moving beyond the self.’ —Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman
”Heti's books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer. She has spoken of writing a book that would be like a Richard Serra sculpture, which a reader might walk through in the same way that the writer has undergone its creation, not knowing exactly where it is heading or how it will end... Though the formal challenges vary, Heti is always pressing at the membrane between life and art, beauty and ugliness” —Parul Sehgal, New Yorker
”Sheila Heti keeps transforming my idea of writing. Her Alphabetical Diaries isn’t just dirty and funny and poignant; it reproposes everything you thought about a self and the way time passes.” — Adam Thirlwell
Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $40
On the road to Lublin, plagued by birds that whistle like a Cossack's sword, three young lads from Mezritsh brave drought, visions, bad shoes, Russian soldiers, cohorts of abandoned women, burnt porridge, dead dogs, haemorrhoids, incessant sneezing, constipation, and bad jokes in order to seek their fortune. Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren’t so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of Girls (how disappointing); they may well stumble into Russian Town, rumoured to be a dangerous place for Jews (it is). As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. Absurd, riveting, alarming, hilarious, the dialogue devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary, Lublin is a journey to nowhere that changes everything it touches.
“A true boy's own adventure with a deep heart set against a backdrop of ferocious world events, Lublin will charm and devastate readers in equal measure with its compulsive, funny and moving prose. Manya Wilkinson has given us a fable-like story whose characters live and breathe through the ages to speak to us of childhood dreams and the inequities of war today.” —Preti Taneja
At the Drop of a Cat by Elise Fontenaille, illustrated by Violeta Lópiz (translated by Karin Snelson and Emiles Robert Wong) $35
At six years old, the child-narrator of this picture book loves nothing more than spending time with his grandpa, Luis — especially in his marvelous garden, where green beans reach as high as the sky. Luis's garden is where the little boy practices reading and writing. But just as importantly, it's also where he learns wonderful things from Luis, like the names of all the birds in the trees and new expressions that are so much fun to say. Luis's playful vocabulary is as vibrant and full of life as his garden, and phrases that are particular to his way of talking, like "at the drop of a cat" (which means right away), are soon adapted into the little boy's lexicon, too. A talented cook, artist, and gardener, Luis has much wisdom to impart and many experiences to share with his grandson — even though, as a war refugee, he never went to school himself and never learned to read and write. A loving testament to the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and the breathtaking beauty of the natural world, illustrated with evocative, multilayered art by Violeta Lópiz.
Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman $38
For the narrator life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels and strangers, art, books, and films. Adrift in Europe, her life becomes a carousel of unusual encounters, where coincidences and luck shape la vita nuova. In London our narrator is befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband. In Paris she meets Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting 'Las Meninas'. In Barcelona she meets two generations of Germans. She tours the hill towns of Italy in a London taxi with two surprising Englishmen in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. She buys postcards to send, but often tears them up, not sure of what the pictures mean. At once dreamlike and tough, hilarious and melancholic, Motion Sickness is a contemporary picaresque in which a young woman drifts and reinvents herself with every new encounter.
”A true force in American literature.” —George Saunders;
”A new thought in every sentence.” —Lydia Davs
How to Be: Life lessons from the early Greeks by Adam Nicolson $40
What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other?
Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus in Ephesus was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves 'How can I be true to myself?' In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal -- all became the Greeks' legacy to the world. Born out of a rough, dynamic — and often cruel — moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of understanding.
”Passionate, poetic, and hauntingly beautiful, Adam Nicolson's account of the west's earliest philosophers brings vividly alive the mercantile hustle and bustle of ideas traded and transformed in a web of maritime Greek cities, where men and women first questioned the nature of the universe and established what it is to be human. In this life-affirming, vital book, those ideas sing with the excitement of a new discovery.” —David Stuttard
Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? by Lynn Davidson $35
Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? tells the story of poet and teacher Lynn Davidson’s late-life decision to leave Aotearoa New Zealand, with scant resources, to build a life in Scotland. In 2020, in the frightening quiet of a Covid-emptied Edinburgh, she begins her memoir; temporarily at home at the Randell Cottage residency in Wellington, she completes it. Lynn Davidson’s long look back at what made and fractured her includes an account of single parenting with its shadows of poverty and stigma, and is interwoven with the ghostly presence of her uncontainable and courageous great aunt, and the long reach of witch hunts. Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? is a love letter to the literature of Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand. It has an ear to the land and its stories. It is a celebration of choice. It is an act of resistance to the persistent idea that women are safer to stay at home.
”This memoir weaves together particular interests in an agile way: place, motherhood, feminism, women’s history, contemporary ideas of witchcraft and magic, art, writing and reading. I loved it.” —Claire Mabey
“This compelling memoir explores the large themes of women’s experience and history, motherhood, migration and home; unusually for a woman, not tethered to a domestic space that she herself has created. Lynn Davidson ricochets from New Zealand to Scotland and back again, vividly recreating the landscapes she has inhabited. She is a brave spirit, in search of a life that will enable her to be the family member she wants to be, while remaining true to herself as the reader and writer she must be.” —Robyn Marsack
The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova $40
In Grudova's unforgettably surreal style, these stories expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of work, identity, and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness. A little girl throws up Gloria-Jean's teeth after an explosion at the custard factory; Pax, Alexander, and Angelo are hypnotically enthralled by a book that promises them enlightenment if they keep their semen inside their bodies; Victoria is sent to a cursed hotel for ailing girls when her period mysteriously stops. In a damp, putrid spa, the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt; in a Margate museum, the new Director curates a venomous garden for public consumption. A brilliant, unsettling collection that revels in the rotten and festers in the imagination.
”Camilla Grudova's books make other young writers seem meek. It's weird, dark and graphic, but as her new collection proves, it's also funny and poignant and distinctive, so inventive that it makes other writing seem uncourageous.” —Sunday Telegraph
”Angela Carter’s natural inheritor.” —Nicola Barker
Girls by Annet Schaap $30
A determined girl gives up on kissing a frog. A fearless heroine comes face-to-face with a not-so Big Bad Wolf. A monstrous princess, held captive on a deserted island, yearns to break free. Within this book are seven famous fairy tales turned into enchanting, inspiring and sometimes hair-raising stories for today's world, about girls with their own dreams and desires. These are no damsels in distress, but real young women of flesh and blood - who certainly don't need rescuing.
”A wickedly delicious book. Surprising, subversive and totally addictive.” —Sophie Anderson
Endless Flight: The genius and tragedy of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim $33
The mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was an outstanding observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's account of Roth's chaotic life speaks to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism.
My Friends by Hisham Matar $37
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh in the 1980s — two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. Government officials open fire, killing a policewoman and wounding eleven Libyan demonstrators. Both friends are critically injured and their lives are forever changed. Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.
”My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist.” —Colm Toibin
”I have always admired Matar's tender and compassionate but equally strong and compelling voice.” —Elif Shafak
”It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. My Friends is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation. If there is a language of exile, My Friends is what it sounds like: exquisite and painful, compassionate and unflinching, and above all, overwhelming in its boundless hope that within exile rests a path towards a different kind of return. One that leads us back to ourselves. Hisham is one of our greatest writers, how lucky we are to be in his midst.” —Maaza Mengiste
Open Throat by Henry Hoke $40
“I've never eaten a person but today I might . . .” A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Fascinated by the voices around them, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their own identity. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call 'ellay'. As they confront a carousel of temptations and threats, the lion takes us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: do they want to eat a person, or become one? Feral and vulnerable, this novel views modern life with fresh eyes.
“A slim jewel of a novel. Open Throat is what fiction should be.” —The New York Times Book Review
”A blinding spotlight beam of a book that I was completely unable and unwilling to put down.” —Catherine Lacey
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A family memoir of miraculous survival by David Finkelstein $40
Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded Holland. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed, humiliated, and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists and sent to do hard labour in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave labourers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung. A compelling account of the combination of desperation and despair experienced by people on the receiving end of genocide.
”Powerful and beautifully written. Once the second world war breaks out the book works like a thriller, as both families race against the clock to escape certain death. But there are bigger themes running through Finkelstein's writing, elevating Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad to the status of A modern classic — and just as deserving of acclaim as Philippe Sands's East West Street or Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes, both of which used inventive ways to examine the Holocaust afresh.” —Observer
The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the revolution in mental health care by John Foot $45
In 1961, when Franco Basaglia became Director of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror. Patients were restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. Basaglia was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled. Instead, he closed down the place by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, as well as to the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that 'total institution'. The first comprehensive study of his revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is an account of one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century psychiatry.
”Peopled by a cast of extraordinary characters - patients, colleagues, friends and enemies - revolving around the charismatic and now legendary psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, John Foot's sympathetic account de-mythologises the reform by uncovering little-known precedents, distancing Basaglia from anti-psychiatry and situating his work within Italian radical politics of the late 1960s. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in psychiatric reform.” —Howard Caygill
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we’ve been reading and recommending.
Choose yourself a new book!
9.2.24
If you are interested in making up stories, playing games, and looking for an alternative to the screen, you need one of these brilliant myriorama storytelling card games. With their great graphics — there are different illustrators for each set; archetypal characters — there’s a wolf in the woods, a mad scientist experimenting in the lab, and a butler lurking in the hall; and numerous paths to take the possibilities are endless. Your imagination is the only impediment and the key. In The Shadow World, the graphic designer Shan Jiang's two-tone palette of black and yellow with a hint of metallic blue creates an underworld industrial park meets steampunk meets science lab with a hint of mad obsession as a scientist delves into a theory that may have disastrous implications. Anything could happen in this underworld where space and time meet chaos. The Mystery Mansion recalls 1920s glamour with a splash of country gentry and Agatha Christie. Foul play is at hand, the butler is grumpy, revenge is in the air and there are too many accidents. The game is afoot. Lucille Clerc’s illustrations are charming and cleverly detailed leaving a trail of clues. Make your own rules and invent your mystery in this grand country house. If howling at the moon is more your style, then a walk in The Hollow Woods is on the cards. Rohan Daniel Eason’s excellent black and white pen illustrations are apt for these fairytale-inspired storytelling cards. Beware! On your journey, you may encounter a giant, a wolf, or a fire-breathing dragon. Sinister shadows abound, so keep moving and keep to the path. The most beautiful in this series so far is The Endless Odyssey. The stunning drawings are the work of award-winning illustrator Marion Dechars. Inspired by the Greek myth, here the Minotaur will roar, the warrior endure, magical creatures race across the landscape, and gods and goddesses help or hinder your journey. Fire up your imagination and let the telling of tales begin.
The Lost Writings by Franz Kafka (translated by Michael Hofmann)
“People are individuals and fully entitled to their individuality, though they first must be brought into an acceptance of it.” If I write more of this it will mean nothing, but this does not stop me sitting at my little desk, here in the hall of our apartment, writing away each night after the others have gone to sleep. The clock in the sitting room slices away the seconds with each swing of its pendulum; the seconds, the minutes, the hours, each moment a decapitation of all that I have written, these sentences just as deserving of being considered shavings from my pencil as the shavings that accumulate at my page-side. Which is the better monument to my labour? It is hard to begin to write, but I am one who believes that beginning to write is possible, perhaps with superhuman effort, or with effort that is human if superhuman effort is not attainable by humans, but I do not believe that it is possible to bring writing to completion, and so I complete nothing. Not that it is not easy to stop; nothing could be easier. Anyone who writes has an equal ability to stop writing; though the ability to write may be very unequally distributed, to stop writing is within the reach of all. Why then, if stopping is so easy, do so many writers not improve the quality of their work by availing themselves more often of this common ability? If a good writer is one who manages not to write bad books, a reasonable definition, then, and I state this without conceit, though I complete nothing I am a better writer than many writers more famous than me. If it is possible to begin and possible to stop but impossible to complete, at least for me who does not believe in the possibility of completion and who does not believe that the world contains completion, only beginnings and stoppings, what is produced by all this writing? I produce nothing but fragments. I believe in nothing but fragments. Even the great sheaf of pages that I call The Proceedings is a fragment, an interminable fragment, uncompletable, and I would rather this is burned after my death than turned into a work by an editor or executor, no matter how well-intentioned. Will there come a day, perhaps a hundred years from now, when the fragment is recognised as a literary form in itself, perhaps the only literary form, the only form that can approach the truth, no matter that it limps in its approach. The smaller the fragment, then, the more perfectly it expresses its inability to be anything other than a fragment, but how shall these fragments be assembled and arranged? Fragments are best arranged in a fragmentary way. Just as dust accumulates throughout an unswept house, but more in some places than in others, such as in the space between an unclosed door and the wall against which it rests, so fragments naturally become lost within the drifts of which they are part. How shall they be found among all the other fragments in which in plain sight they are as good as lost? There is nothing lost about these lost writings. The writer and the reader are more lost than what is written, but only when they write and read. I write to be rid of myself. I write to be rid of thought. I write to be rid of what I have written but every fragment adds to this burden I write to put down. I sharpen my pencil again as the pendulum swings and add to the pile of shavings that is my more fitting legacy, the one that my executor will not hesitate to burn, should they happen to survive that long. I write as the birds begin to sing in the trees in the street below. I will not complete what I write. It is not possible to complete what I write. Whether I wish to complete what I write or not affects nothing, I will produce a fragment, but the question of whether I should strive for completion remains. I will be found where I am lost. Every opportunity is a trap, but I leap in regardless [...]
The following new books deserve your reading attention. Click through for your copies:
Understanding Te Tiriti: A handbook of basic facts about Te Tiriti o Waitangi by Roimata Smail $25
A very clear introductory booklet about what was actually agreed between rangatira and the Crown in 1840, why Te Tiriti was signed, and how subsequent violations and neglect of the treaty responsibilities of the Crown have required and still require redress, restitution and restoration of rights over land, resources and self-determination (all of which were guaranteed to iwi in 1840).
Suitable for both adults and younger readers.
Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the philosophy of fashion by Charlie Porter $50
Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group — the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings; from Duncan Grant's liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes's power play in the traditional suit. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of creative, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control. As he travels through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he begins making his own clothing, his own perspective on fashion — and on life — starts to change.
”A triumph. I could read Charlie Porter's books all day long. He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality.” —Katy Hessel
”Charlie Porter is a magician, a radical historian who has pulled away all the threadbare myths about Bloomsbury, using clothes as a way of revealing the vulnerable bodies and wild new ideas of Woolf and her circle. In his hands, what people wear becomes an astoundingly rich way of thinking about love and grief, art-making and intimacy — and above all about old power structures and how to upend them. Bring No Clothes is at once an enriching account of the past and a primer for the future: a guide to how we too can clothe our bodies for freedom.” —Olivia Laing
Kafka, A manga adaptation by Nishioka Kyōdai and Franz Kafka (translated by David Yang) $30
Nine of Franz Kafka's most memorable tales are here given fresh life with remarkable graphic renderings by the brother-and sister manga creators Nishioka Kyōdai. With their distinctive, surreal style of illustration, they have reimagined the fantastic, the imperceptible and the bizarre in Kafka's work, creating a hauntingly powerful visual world. These stories of enigmatic figures and uncanny transformations are stripped to their core, offering new understandings. Includes ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘A Hunger Artist’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘A Country Doctor’.
Tremor by Teju Cole $38
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, and a traveller drawn to many different kinds of stories: from history and the epic; of friends, family, and strangers; those found in books and films. One man's personal lens refracts entire worlds, and back again. A weekend spent shopping for antiques is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles" — but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy.
”A quietly dazzling novel.” —Deborah Levy
The Rice Book: History, culture, recipes by Sri Owens $65
The Rice Book became an instant classic when it was published thirty years ago, and to this day remains the definitive book on the subject. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world, and the creativity with which people approach this humble grain knows no bounds. From food writer Sri Owen's extensive travels and years of research come recipes for biryanis, risottos, pilafs and paellas from Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Spain, Italy, Brazil and beyond. Nicely presented, with a new foreword by Bee Wilson and an updated introduction on the nutrition, history and culture surrounding rice, more than 160 delicious, foolproof recipes (20 of them new) and beautiful illustrations and food photography throughout, this is an essential book for every kitchen and every cook.
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism by Walter Benjamin (translated by Harry Zohn) $27
Benjamin is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.
The Needs of Strangers: On solidarity and the politics of being human by Michael Ignatieff $33
What does a person need, not just to survive, but to flourish? In this thoughtful, searching book, Ignatieff explores the many human needs that go beyond basic sustenance: for love, for respect, for community and consolation. In a society of strangers, how might we find a common language to express such needs? Ignatieff's enquiry takes him back to works of philosophy, literature and art, from St. Augustine to Hieronymus Bosch to Shakespeare. Is there a possibility of accommodating claims of difference within a politics based on common need?
”Michael Ignatieff writes an urgent prose. He will convince people, in highly readable fashion, that the ideas he discusses really matter.” —Salman Rushdie
”Beautifully written and profoundly thoughtful.” —New Statesman
Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Ted Goossen) $35
Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea. Kawakami’s eight stories each pivot on a moment of transformation, moments when boundaries dissolve and new lives become possible. From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.
"Spirits, animals, and people cohabit the universe of these eight stories, which capture with quirky insight and deadpan humor the strangeness of human relationships." —The New Yorker
Illustrating the Antipodes: George French Angas in Australia and New Zealand, 1844—1845 by Philip Jones $40
Angas’s meticulous depictions of Māori in the 1840s provide an invaluable record of life and persons in the period. In this sumptuous illustrated volume, Philip Jones has used Angas’ sketches, watercolours, lithographs and journal accounts to retrace his Antipodean journeys in vivid detail. Set in the context of his time, Angas emerges both as a brilliant artist and as a flawed Romantic idealist, rebelling against his father’s mercantilism while entirely reliant upon the colonial project enabling him to depict Indigenous peoples and their ways of life.
Yellow Butterfly by Oleksandr Shatokhin $35
A wordless picture book portrayal of war seen through the eyes of a young girl who finds hope in the symbolism of yellow butterflies against the background of a pure blue sky. Using the colors of his national flag, Oleksandr Shatokhin has created a deeply emotional response to the conflict in Ukraine and provided a narrative full of powerful visual metaphors for readers to consider as they travel from the devastating effects of war to a place of hope for peace and the future.
Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Tom de Freston $20
She was very tired. She lay down, her soft head on her soft paws. The sunset licked her face. The snow covered her like a blanket. Fox wakes, and begins to walk. She crosses ice and snow, over mountains and across frozen oceans, encountering bears and birds beneath the endless daylight of an Arctic summer, navigating a world that is vast, wild and wondrous. Meanwhile, Leila embarks on a journey of her own — finding her way to the mother who left her. On a breathtaking journey across the sea, Leila rediscovers herself and the mother she thought she'd lost, with help from a determined little fox.
A Letter to My Transgender Daughter by Carolyn Hays $28
The Hays family fled for safety across the US from an intolerant community to a slightly less intolerant one. This book is an ode to Hays's brilliant, brave child, as well as a cathartic revisit of the pain of the past. It tells of the brutal truths of being trans, of the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and of the lengths a family will go to shield their youngest from the cruel realities of the world. Hays asks us all to love better, for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a celebration of difference, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future, but moreover, it is a love letter to a child who has always known herself and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
The World of the Brontës: A 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with over 50 characters to find by Amber Adams $45
Enter the world of the Brontës with this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Travel across the blustery Yorkshire moors and into the dark, gloomy schoolrooms and weathered stone buildings of nineteenth-century England to spot Cathy and Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, Jane and Mr Rochester getting married, and a host of other fictional and real-life characters while you build the puzzle. Includes a fold-out poster that highlights characters, locations and key moments.
*These are not the small red plums mentioned, but another variety waiting to be processed. The plum season continues….
It’s been a summer of trying out new recipes and different cuisines. The abundance of fresh vegetables and heavily laden fruit trees (what a year for plums!) has had me looking for fresh ideas. If you haven’t tried the baked plum recipe in SWEET (by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh), this is highly recommended. (It’s the fruit accompaniment to the Almond Butter Cake.). It worked for our small red plums and our small tart yellow plums. And was delicious on its own or with a little crème fraîche or yoghurt. I was surprised to see a fancy New Zealand-inspired Louise Cake recipe. A very nice, but usually hardly exciting traditional cake given a successful uplift to become a celebratory standout. I haven’t delved into this cookbook much (yet) as some of the recipes looked complicated, but, in fact, I was surprised by the clarity of instructions, and while some of the recipes have several steps (this is not quick after-work baking), it’s not at all daunting — great for delving in on your days off or for special occasions. Saying that, there are also biscuits and moreish snacks. And the aforementioned plums are quick to prepare and even quicker to eat.
A kafkaesque selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
K.
52 Ways of Thinking About Kafka
Kafka’s Last Trial (not pictured)
This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack $40
Our Book of the Week is the long-awaited new novel from the Goldsmiths Prize-winning author of Solar Bones. When Nealon returns to his family home in Ireland for the first time in years, he finds a completely empty house. No heat or light, no furniture, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. The one exception is a persistent caller on the telephone, someone who seems to know everything about Nealon's life, his recent bother with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family. All Nealon needs to do is talk with him. But the more he talks the closer Nealon gets to the same trouble he was in years ago, tangled in the very crimes of which he claims to be innocent.
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2 February 2024
Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon (translated from French by Cole Swensen)
Whose is this voice, addressing the artist Louise Bourgeois as ‘you’? It is the voice of Louise Bourgeois as written by Jean Frémon, a gallerist and writer who knew her and has written this insightful, beautifully written little book, which could be classified as a 'second-person ventriloquised autobiographical fiction'. Bourgeois is here, as in her art, both ‘I’ and ‘you’, both present and cast through time, both active and passive, both spectator and actor, both mathematician and instrument of the id, both innocent and knowing, at once both highly connected and aware and utterly separate, both ancient and young; gendered, ungendered, double- and multi-gendered; highly personal and rigorously particular, yet also universal. Bourgeois inhabits a zone that is at once “too complicated and too clear. No need to shed too much light on it,” a zone of vagueness in which the body is the territory of metaphors, though never of signs, the zone from which the formless coalesces into form. Bourgeois’s dreams are as real — and as inscrutable — as actuality: “Let them decipher my dreams — me, I’m fine with the mystery. No need to interpret them. Obscurity has its virtues.” Frémon-Bourgeois captures perfectly the singular intensity and fluidity of awareness that both enables and accesses art like that of Bourgeois, a mode of approach in which the distinction between initiative and surrender is erased. The book explores the key experiences of Bourgeois’s life without converting them into fact — they remain experiences, with all the ambivalences of experiences (though I here list them as facts): her childhood in France, where she would make the representations of leaves and branches with which her mother would replace the genitals cut from old tapestries in her family’s tapestry refurbishment business; her father’s philandering and double standards; her obsessiveness; her sensitivity to trauma, especially childhood trauma; her mother’s death, which prompted Louise to abandon mathematics for art; her departure for New York (“That’s what exile’s like. Apart from here and part from there, apart from everything. … Take an electric adaptor along with you.”); her long obscurity as an artist; her long loneliness following the death of her partner; her immense productivity; her ‘discovery’ in old age; her continued immense productivity; her very old age; her death. Bourgeois strives to understand what Frémon-Bourgeois calls “the survival of the unfit”, the evolutionary counter to the survival of the fittest. Art, perhaps, is a method of survival, as it is for Cyclose and Uloborus spiders, who “sculpt doubles of themselves, and then they place them on the web where they can be easily seen so that predators will attack this bait instead of them.” For Bourgeois only the gauche is beautiful: “Aim for beauty, and you get the vapid, aim for something else — encyclopedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching — and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.” And all the time, there is the artist who is indistinguishable from her art yet inaccessible through it (because her art is primarily a point of access to ourselves): “I am what I make and nothing else. I make, I unmake, I remake.”
Let me introduce you to a wonderful bedtime story. It’s not your usual “goodnight, sleep tight” tale. In fact, it is possible it could you keep awake with thinking or make you dream of elusive blue rhinoceroses. Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider and Golden Cosmos is an amusing gem of a book. Let’s start with the illustrations. The bold colour palette and drawing style call to mind a combination of 1930s Soviet children’s books and 1960s pop art, but with their own twist the duo who are Golden Cosmos give the book an energetic pulse. Those pinks, yellows, and blues bounce off each other and require action on the part of the characters to search and announce, while the darker blue pages perfectly fit the more reflective nature of the night and the concept at the centre of this book. For this is a story of a rhinoceros who is and isn’t there. This is a picture book about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his discussion with Bertrand Russell about the limits of language. There is a nice explainer at the end about their difference of opinion, as well as information about Wittgenstein and a 'What is a philosopher' paragraph. So plenty of room for further discussion. Yet the charm of the book is in the straightforward and lively text. The back and forth of the child Ludwig and his parent as they disagree on whether the rhinoceros is in the room. Enjoyable for children and adults alike. What’s there not to like about a philosophical bedtime story?
New books for a new month!
Thunderclap: A memori of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cumming $75
”We see with everything that we are.” On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ and barely a dozen known paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden revelations of sight.
”No one writes art like Laura Cumming.” —Philip Hoare
”I shall never look at any painting in the same way again.” —Polly Morland
About ‘The Goldfinch’, which features in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch.
The Singularity by Balsam Karam (traslated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $38
In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman — on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses — of a language, a country, an identity--when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze.
”Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.” —Preti Taneja
”Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity’. With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji
The Bridge by Eva Lindström $38
A pig drives by looking for a bridge but ends up the houseguest of two wolves in the woods. Who are they? What do they want? And where is the pig rushing off to, anyway? Written and illustrated in Lindström's laconic, razor-sharp, and darkly comical style, The Bridge is a droll, fast-paced, and ever-so-slightly-sinister story in which, as in a classic fairy tale, an ordinary chance encounter suddenly morphs into an adventure that feels both wildly improbable and true to life.
"The Bridge is so many things at once. It is very funny, it is very mysterious, it is very beautiful, and it is like no book I've ever seen. I love it very much." —Jon Klassen
Shame by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $28
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the 12-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
”Shame and The Young Man deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies. Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.” —Megan Nolan, The Times
”Exceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do…a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ ‘cafe-haberdashery-grocery’ in a small town in Normandy.” —Julie Myerson, Observer
The Young Man by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $20
In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior — an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing — producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
”Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done. The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives. And for those who have been reading her for decades, it adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.” —Francine Prose, Guardian
”Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.” —Sheila Heti
Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider, illustrated by Golden Cosmos $38
"There's a rhinoceros in my room!" Ludwig claims. His father doesn't think so. He looks for the huge pachyderm in every corner, but he just can't find it. There CANNOT be a rhinoceros in Ludwig's room. It's way too small for a rhinoceros. But Ludwig shows his father that it is impossible to be certain that something isn’t there. This enjoyable picture book replicates the 1911 argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on whether knowability is a property of the actual world or of the set of epistemological propositions we make about it.
Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) $38
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
"A virtuoso literary work. Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies." —Annie Proulx
”Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn't turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so — the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture." —Manuel Munoz
Corner by Zo-O $38
A crow finds itself in an empty corner and begins to make the space its own. First, it furnishes the corner with a bed, a bookshelf, a rug, even a potted plant. In the newly decorated space, the crow reads and eats, listens to music and waters the plant, but something's missing. What is it? The crow decides to decorate more, drawing geometric patterns on the walls in yellow. The corner is filled with colour and shapes, but something is still missing. The crow adds a window, and finally discovers what it needed all along — a way to connect with the world outside and to make a new friend. This highly original, almost-wordless picture book cleverly uses the gutter of the book to make the crow’s corner. Soft, detailed illustrations of the cosy corner will inspire children to express themselves in their own spaces, and the crow's problem-solving skills encourage readers to think about how they can comfortably step outside of their comfort zone.
Opinions: A decade of arguments, criticism, and minding other people’s business by Roxane Gay $38
Outstanding non-fiction pieces from The New York Times and elsewhere on politics, feminism, the culture wars, gender, sexuality, and equality.
”Gay has a gift for clean, well-ordered prose, and strong feelings on matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Most important, she possesses a fearlessness essential to doing the job right; though she can observe an issue from various angles, she never wrings her hands or delivers milquetoast commentaries. She comes to her opinions more out of empathy than ideology.” Fierce and informed riffs on current events and enduring challenges.” —Kirkus
Can I Sit in the Middle? by Susanne Strasser $19
It’s story time, but first everyone needs to arrive and everyone needs to find their place on the sofa. Just when everyone seems ready, a clumsy and very real rhinoceros comes looking for its slippers. How will the story ever be read? Board book.
Marilyn Webb: Folded in the Hills edited by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti $70
Featuring over 80 colour plates from throughout Webb’s career, from 1968 to 2005, this impressive monograph includes essays by curators Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, and Bridget Reweti, extant poems by Cilla McQueen and Hone Tuwhare and two new ekphrastic poems by Essa May Ranapiri and Ruby Solly.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray $25
A life without freedom to choose is not worth having. In Alasdair Gray’s postmodern metaphysical lampoon of Frankenstein, Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realised when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat, and with the brain of an infant. His dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his ‘creation’. But what does Bella think? Gray’s novel, with its dual narratives by Bella and McCandless, is an unsparing but hilarious exploration of traditional power imbalances between the sexes and the ways in which women are crushed both by men’s imposed notions of ‘propriety’ and by their projected fantasies of ‘impropriety’. How can true liberation and fulfillment be achieved?
”A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book.” —London Review of Books
How was the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi understood by the British in 1840? That is the question addressed by historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher, in this extensive work. With one exception, the Treaty sheets signed by rangatira and British officials were in te reo Maori. The Maori text, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was a translation by the missionary Henry Williams of a draft in English provided by William Hobson, the Consul sent by the British government to negotiate with Maori. Despite considerable scholarly attention to the Treaty, the English text has been little studied. In part, this is because the original English draft exists only in fragments in the archive; it has long been regarded as lost or 'unknowable', and in any event superseded by the authoritative Maori text. Now, through careful archival research, Fletcher has been able to set out the continuing relevance of the English text. The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi enriches our understanding of the original purpose and vision of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi and its foundational role in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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A selection of books from our shelves.
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