THE WRITER'S MAP by Huw Lewis-Jones and THE ATLAS OF UNUSUAL BORDERS by Zoran Nikolic — reviewed by Stella

The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands by Huw Lewis-Jones

What could be better than opening a new book to find a map of a yet-to-be-discovered world? If you were a child like me, you would have spent as many hours looking at the map and imagining yourself in it as you would have done reading (and re-reading) the book itself. From Milly Molly Mandy’s village — her home, the house that little friend Susan lived in, where they picked berries, the village green where the fete would be — to the land of Narnia through the wardrobe, maps in books were a key that opened a portal to the worlds beyond home, school and the dreariness of the ‘real’ world. Finding a Moomin book in the deaccessioned shelf at the public library was a discovery in itself, but that it included an amazing and delightful world, with a detailed map, was unforgettable. Maps still have that fascination and I never tire of atlases. There’s something about imagining oneself elsewhere. The Writer’s Map is a beautifully illustrated atlas of literary maps, edited by historian Huw Lewis-Jones, with accompanying insightful essays from writers, designers, and illustrators. They talk about the influence of maps on their own work, the importance of map-making in creating plot and place, and the wondrous spaces, emotional and physical, where maps have taken and continue to take them. Philip Pullman, the creator of Northern Lights, opens with an essay entitled 'A Plausible Possible', where he describes creating a map for a book he wrote called The Tin Princess. To create a plausible scenario for his princess, Adelaide, he needed a possible world where the plot could play out. Other authors in the book write about the relationship between map-making and fiction: David Mitchell sketches and draws maps for his books, even though these do not appear in the finished novels. There are examples from his private notebooks showing islands, mountain trails, and fortifications. “Maps of fictitious places are maps of mind. You lose yourself in them and find, if not factual truth, then other kinds.” Brian Selznick, the author/illustrator of several amazing books, remembers his fascination with the anatomy section of his Golden Encyclopedia, with its mapping of the human bodies, and all the pathways of connected systems played out with layered acetate sheets. As a ten-year-old, he had a major operation, one that he recovered slowly from. Drawing was his world and continued to be so. “We all end up drawing the maps to our own futures, though we usually don’t know it at the time.” The book is split into four sections, 'Make Believe', with introductory essays from Huw Lewis-Jones and Brian Sibley; 'Writing Maps', with author contributions; 'Creating Maps', with contributions from illustrators and designers; and Reading Maps. Many of the contributors draw on their childhood memories and their love of books and maps, and how these influenced their own work. References include Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia, and Moomin Valley. They also outline their journeys as map-makers, storytellers, and creators of imaginary worlds. The Writer’s Map is lavishly illustrated and a pleasure to read. It will have you wanting to delve into an imaginary world immediately or to take up your pencil to draw your very own. Highly recommended for lovers of books and maps. 

 

The Atlas of Unusual Borders by Zoran Nikolic

Here’s one for the curious and for those who love the strange histories of borders. Why are there odd pockets of land surrounded by another country? How did an action a thousand years old, possibly a whim, remain relevant and intact? Why do people with so much in common make life so complicated? And what happens when mistakes are made on paper? What are the stories behind the quirks of territorial demarcation?  In this wonderfully fascinating book, Zoran Nikolic takes us into the world of enclaves and exclaves, the finer points of unusual geography, and the heady politics, as well as arbitrary nature, of borderlines. There are over 40 places, each with tales and maps, alongside snippets about island enclaves in rivers and lakes, ghost towns, border quadripoints, and unusual capitals. Where did I go first? To Cyprus, to discover a little more. While I knew that it is split in two — north and south — and that there was/is a UN buffer zone, and that there were British military bases there, I hadn’t realised the border implications of this beyond the obvious. At 9,250 square kilometres (that’s roughly the same size as Tasman region) the Mediterranean island consists of four political territories and numerous borders. There is a southern enclave in the north — a village mistakenly not occupied in 1974. And there is a Turkish village enclave in the south now with only a small Turkish garrison. The two British military bases are their own territories, with one of them split into two with a communications station in a nearby village connected by a narrow road of sorts — another strip of British territory. There is the ghost town, once luxury resort, of Varosia. The UN Green Line still exists but it is demilitarised and has a population of about 10,000 and a UN force of roughly 1000. It’s a semi-open buffer zone mostly used for farming, but retains elements of abandonment, and still plays a role in keeping the peace. Each place Nikolic takes us to has a story, quirky facts, and sometimes convoluted histories. There is the Bosnian wedding gift village that now sits in Serbia. They pay taxes to Bosnia, but utility bills to Serbia. There is the all-male population of Mt Athos and the man-made Oil Rocks industrial town in the middle of the sea. There is the German Green Belt which belongs to nature, and the Australian Island aptly named Border Island because the line runs right through it. It’s a rock in a windswept sea! Intriguing and endlessly diverting, this is an enjoyable book to lose yourself in, and discover something unusual.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
NEW RELEASES (23.2.24)

These books have just arrived and are ready to be read.
Click through for your copies:

Out of Earth by Sheyla Smanioto (translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis) $45

This remarkable Brazilian novel follows four generations of female characters as they navigate the hardships of life in the parched landscape of the Brazilian sertao. Male figures are peripheral, but are also revealed as the origin of much of the suffering in the novel, generating for the women a kind of exile not only in relation to the land but to their sense of self. This is a ground-breaking feminist work, a bracing modernist fable, of sorts, formally reminiscent of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

 

The Grimmelings by Rachael King $25

Thirteen-year-old Ella knows that words are powerful. So she should have known better than to utter a wish and a curse on the same day, even in jest. When the boy she has cursed goes missing, in the same sudden, unexplained way as her father several years earlier, Ella discovers that her family is living in the shadow of a vengeful kelpie, a black horse-like creature. With the help of her beloved pony Magpie, can Ella break the curse of the kelpie and save not just her family, but the whole community?
”Rachael King's The Grimmelings is one of those very rare books that feels like it has always existed, as if the world has been holding space for this story. With wonderfully assured writing, this is Susan Cooper for the next generation. King writes with the utmost respect for her readers, for the story and for language itself. The Grimmelings is a beautifully written story of old magic; uncontainable, unpredictable, wild and true — I could not put it down. And although the phrase is thrown around a lot, this genuinely is a future classic.” —Zana Fraillon
”The Grimmelings is a riveting adventure set on a horse-trekking farm in the lakeside wilds of the South Island of New Zealand, where lonely thirteen-year-old Ella, the granddaughter of a rumoured witch, finds herself the target of an ancient and vengeful water horse. Ella's courage, grief and grit make her a worthy protagonist; the reader cannot help but sympathise with and root for her as she fights to save her family from the saddle of her feisty pony, Magpie. Exquisitely crafted and thrumming with old magic, The Grimmelings wraps the reader like an heirloom quilt, stitched with glittering folklore, mysterious family secrets and the love of horses.” —Rachael Craw
”The Grimmelings is a compelling, lovingly crafted novel about magic, liminal spaces (of several kinds), language and folkloric fusion. Rachael King's characters live and breathe. Her dialogue glitters quietly. She discovers new perspectives in inherited narratives to create a world that is familiar yet unexpected, tense and eerie with flashes of beauty..” —David Mitchell

 

The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp $40

How long can you run from a lie, if that lie is what your life is founded on? In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade. Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe. Befriended by a stranger, she grabs an old, faded history book and writes her own version over the top — a record of the Great Undoing on the run. But in deciding what truth to tell Scarlet must face her own history. How do we navigate identity when it is all a lie? She must reckon with her past before she can imagine her future.
”For First Nations people, Australia is a nation founded on a lie. But this is not one single amorphous lie, but rather a web of lies that seeks to erase and make invisible First Nations peoples, her/histories and experiences. In her debut novel, The Great Undoing, Bundjalung author Sharlene Allsopp deftly juxtaposes the national and the personal mythscapes that still haunt Australia today. Through the larger-than-life character of Scarlet Friday, Sharlene explores the consequences of living a lie in a nation that refuses to acknowledge its past.” —Jeanine Leane
"Sharlene Allsopp's The Great Undoing is a remarkable book that reaches back into the early 20th century and forwards into the future to examine discontinuities in recorded histories, and the resonances of this within the lives of First Nations people. Allsopp's style is lyrical and almost poetic, even when describing ugliness. The Great Undoing joins the works of authors like Octavia Butler and Claire G Coleman, who use the light of what could be to illuminate what actually is.'“ —Books + Publishing

 

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale) $32

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, postcards, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family managed to survive the last century. Dipping into various forms — essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents — Stepanova's In Memory of Memory assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory. New edition.

 

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (translated from Japanese by David Boyd} $33

Beyond the town, there is the factory. Beyond the factory, there is nothing. Within the sprawling industrial complex, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work — days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while — it could be weeks or years — the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here?

 

Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene $37

Set in Soweto, the urban heartland of South Africa, Innards tells the intimate stories of everyday black folks processing the savagery of apartheid. Rich with the thrilling textures of township language and life, it braids the voices and perspectives of an indelible cast of characters into a breathtaking collection flush with forgiveness, rage, ugliness and beauty. Meet a fake PhD and ex-freedom fighter who remains unbothered by his own duplicity, a girl who goes mute after stumbling upon a burning body, twin siblings nursing a scorching feud, and a woman unravelling under the weight of a brutal encounter with the police. At the heart of this collection of deceit and ambition, appalling violence and transcendent love is the story of slavery, colonization and apartheid, and it shows in intimate detail how South Africans must navigate both the shadows of the recent past and the uncertain opportunities of the promised land.
”A gut punch of a collection...it astonishes as it reveals how malignant political forces can both ravage and vitalize the human spirit.” —New York Times
”An unforgettable debut that hits with all the force of the sun. Complex and breathtaking, Innards is a book haunted by apartheid's monstrous shadow and illuminated by the radiant talent of one of our generation's most original voices. Makhene writes like liberation should feel: transcendently.” —Junot Diaz

 

I Can Open It For You by Shinsuke Yoshitake $32

Akira has a problem: He is too small to open packages by himself. He still needs grown-ups to help him. But one day, perhaps one day soon, he'll be able to open so many things without anyone's help — and not just packages. When that time comes, he'll make amazing discoveries, help other epople to open things, and maybe even save the day with his new skills. There is so much to look forward to! With humor and wit, acclaimed author-illustrator Shinsuke Yoshitake explores a child's feelings about growing up: the push and pull of relying on parents while striving to learn and do things by yourself. Delightful.

 

Day by Michael Cunningham $38

April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel's younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house - and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. 
April 5th, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan circle each other warily, communicating mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts - and his secret Instagram life - for company. 
April 5th, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family comes together to reckon with a new, very different reality - with what they've learned, what they've lost, and how they might go on. 
”Unsparing and tender.” —Colm Tóibín
”A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers".” —Colum McCann

 

Collected Folktales by Alan Garner $23

A superbly told collection of familiar and unfamiliar British folktales from an author who has been breathing them throughout his long life, and drawing from them the inspiration for all his novels.

 

The Postcard by Anne Berest $40

January 2003. The Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opera Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacques. Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself. At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

 

The Waste Land: A biography of a poem by Mathew Hollis $30

A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's masterpiece remains a work of comparative mystery. In this gripping account, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the making of the poem and brings its times vividly to life. He tells the story of the cultural and personal trauma that forged the poem through the interleaved lives of its protagonists — of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, who endured it, and of T. S. Eliot himself whose private torment is woven into the fabric of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions: Eliot's into redemptive stardom, Vivien's into despair, Pound's into unforgiving darkness. Now in paperback.

 

The Flow: Rivers, water and wildness by Amy-Jane Beer $25

On New Year's Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer's beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration. The Flow is a book about water, and, like water, it meanders, cascades and percolates through many lives, landscapes and stories. From West Country torrents to Levels and Fens, rocky Welsh canyons, the salmon highways of Scotland and the chalk rivers of the Yorkshire Wolds, Amy-Jane Beer follows springs, streams and rivers to explore tributary themes of wildness and wonder, loss and healing, mythology and history, cyclicity and transformation. Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is an immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature.
”A true masterpiece; generous, elegant, acute, tender and furious.” —Charles Foster

 

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros $24

Would you sacrifice your soul to stop a killer? Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity. Despite the unbearable summer heat, his threadbare clothes, and his constantly empty stomach, Alter still dreams of the day he'll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter's best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World's Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov's dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows. Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter's body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer — before the killer claims them next.
"An achingly rendered exploration of queer desire, grief, and the inexorable scars of the past." —Katy Rose Pool
”With stark, poignant prose and an endearing main character, The City Beautiful is an entrancing and chilling tale that deftly analyzes complex themes of identity and assimilation. One-part historical fantasy, one-part gothic thriller, this genre-blending story has something for everyone." —Kalyn Josephson

 

KIndred: Recipes, spices and rituals to nourish your kin by Eva Konecsny and Maria Konecsny $55

Sisters Maria and Eva Konecsny, founders of the Gewürzhaus spice stores, know that spices have the power to transform our everyday cooking. They also believe that cooking to feed our kin — whether it's chocolate semolina porridge, tender fennel roast pork or a tray of spiced Christmas cookies — can be a deeply nourishing and connective force in our lives. In Kindred, Maria and Eva take you into their homes to share the spices, seasonal rituals, traditions and recipes from their German heritage that bring their families around the table. Learn how to use spices in simple ways to elevate your cooking and discover key principles for spicing different types of food.

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
Book of the Week: LORI & JOE by Amy Arnold

When Lori takes her partner Joe coffee in the morning, she finds him dead. She immediately sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells. This remarkable piece of writing shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold compellingly captures the way her protagonist’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.   

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
LORI & JOE by Amy Arnold — reviewed by Thomas

The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape; the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I actually think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes her partner Joe’s morning coffee up one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical fog and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively, towards whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. It shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies.  It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his stumbling attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
BIRD LIFE by Anna Smaill — reviewed by Stella

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.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella
Book of the Week: ALPHABETICAL DIARIES by Sheila Heti

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.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week
ALPHABETICAL DIARIES by Sheila Heti — reviewed by Thomas

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. 

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
WHISK — Cookbooks at VOLUME — Fresh Inspiration for your Plate & Palate

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.

VOLUME BooksWHISK
NEW RELEASES (16.2.24)

Out of the carton and straight to your shelf (or bedside table).
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

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
Telling Tales

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.

VOLUME BooksReview by Stella, Children's books
THE LOST WRITINGS by Franz Kafka — Reviewed by Thomas

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 [...]

VOLUME BooksReview by Thomas
NEW RELEASES (9.2.24)

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.

 
VOLUME BooksNew releases
WHISK — Cookbooks at VOLUME - A Sweet Summer

*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.

VOLUME BooksWHISK
Book of the Week: THIS PLAGUE OF SOULS by Mike McCormack

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.

VOLUME BooksBook of the week