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14 June 2024
Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship by Thomas Bernhard (translated by David McLintock)
"It is a folk art of sorts, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilised in the form of lifelong controlled suffering,” wrote Thomas Bernhard in Correction. In the ‘autobiographical’ novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A friendship, Bernhard explores the conditions needed for continuing to live in an intolerable world by at once both aligning and contrasting his accommodation of the contradictory impulses for survival and self-destruction with the accommodation or lack of accommodation made between these impulses by his friend Paul Wittgenstein, whose resulting madness periodically incapacitated and ultimately destroyed him. The novel opens with the narrator and Paul both confined to departments in the Baumgartner Höhe hospital in Vienna, “isolated, shunted aside, and written off”: the narrator in the pulmonary department, not expected to live, and Paul in the psychiatric department, receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and kept in a caged bed. The two had met at the apartment of a mutual friend at a time when the narrator was afflicted by suicidal thoughts, when at the height of his despair Paul appeared as his “deliverer”, a man who, like the narrator, ''loved and hated human beings with equal passion and equal ruthlessness.” Whereas the narrator writes because “I am forced to defend myself and take action against the insolence of the world in order not to be put down and annihilated by it,” Paul has no such defence. “Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness: one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine. … Paul had only his madness to live on; I have my lung disease as well as my madness. I have exploited both, and one day I suddenly made them the mainspring of my existence.” Both the narrator and Paul exhibit neuroses (such as “the counting disease”) as a means of resisting the pull of annihilation, and share a passion for music (‘culture’ itself being a neurotic mechanism for collectively resisting the pull of annihilation). All efforts, though, to act as if the intolerable is tolerable are increasingly difficult to maintain. “As we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise.” The narrator knows that continuing is always only a postponement of the moment at which continuing becomes impossible: “I had behaved towards myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessless that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own overestimation of myself and the world.” Paul is destroyed by their shared madness, but the narrator is not yet destroyed. He survives by, in effect, sacrificing Paul. The narrator at ones both claims and disavows Paul as his alter ego, both emphasises and denies their shared identity (is that not always so with friendships?): “We gradually discovered that there were countless things about us and within us that united us, yet at the same time there were so many contrasts between us that our friendship soon ran into difficulties, into even greater difficulties, and ultimately into the greatest difficulties.” When Paul, debilitated by his bouts of madness and the brutality of his treatment, desperate for some practical demonstration of friendship, invites the narrator to his apartment and the narrator sees in its squalor and hopelessness “the last refuge of a failure,” he feels a sudden revulsion for Paul and flees, leaving Paul weeping on his sofa (the last remaining artefact of his squandered former wealth). The narrator finds despicable what he once found admirable. His own destruction yawns too near his feet and he abandons his friend. He sees Paul as spent, as a man dying. “I myself could naturally not feel the same about Paul’s shadow as I had about the real Paul of earlier days. … I preferred to have a bad conscience rather than meet him [for] we shun those who bear the mark of death.” When the narrator returns from a period overseas he learns of Paul’s death in a mental hospital in Linz a few days after attacking his cousin in his final madness, and of Paul’s lonely, abject funeral. “To this day I have not visited his grave,” he states. Paul’s death could be seen as the narrator’s displaced suicide, as a way in which the narrator has continued to exist. “I had met Paul, I now see, precisely at the time when he was beginning to die,” he says. “It seems to me that I was basically nothing but a twelve-year witness of his dying, who drew from his friend’s dying much of the strength he needed for his own survival.” He goes on: "It is not far-fetched to say that this friend had to die in order to make my life more bearable and even, for long periods, possible." This book is both a tender tribute to a friend, written in guilt, and an unflinching examination of that guilt.
David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed and de-formed by his experience suffering from ME, an illness of chronic systemic dysregulation that makes ‘normal’ life impossible, fractures the supposed link between the self and its biography, narrows and distorts the focus of awareness, and disestablishes comfortable conventional notions of the ongoingness of time. Dealing not much at all with the half-life of bed and sofa that is the main occupation of the chronically ill, the book is rather a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond. Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible. The book contains much that I found compelling, thoughtful, memorable, suitably frustrating and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness. —Thomas
Choose yourself a new book from these titles that have just arrived at VOLUME. Click through to our website to get your copies:
Performance by David Coventry $38
“David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed — and de-formed — by his experience suffering from ME, and is compelling, thoughtful, memorable, and disconcerting. A unique contribution to the literature of illness.” —Thomas
Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood. For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness. From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text.
”Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.” —Martha Stoddard Holmes
”A masterpiece of narrative disintegration with a deep psychic grip on the reader – a book whose design not infrequently had me exhaling in both profound affect and aesthetic astonishment. A monumental achievement.” —Tracey Slaughter
Still Is by Vincent O’Sullivan $30
The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too are back, already worrying the thrushes, filching their choice worms. The gorse is running the hills along the Aramoana Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom, so much more politely, you call it gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling against the skyline. This is September.
Still Is gathers ninety new poems by Vincent O’Sullivan, who died recently. These are poems that call and respond, poems that elaborate and pare down, and poems in which an ending is a beginning.
Always Song in the Water: An ode to Moana Oceania by Gregory O’Brien $45
An expanded edition of O’Brien’s superb 2019 rumination on experiences of art, cuture, and environment, considering the ocean that reaches around Aotearoa and stretches to the Kermadecs and beyond as the medium that bears our thoughts in suspension and washes them on both familiar and unfamiliar shores. The entire book celebrates — in images, words and sound — our connectedness with the wider Pacific region, its peoples, flora, fauna and the expansive waters which both inspire and define us. The expanded edition returns to the themes, ongoing concerns and unresolved issues of the earlier project. In essence, the 2011 Kermadec voyage never ended. O'Brien considers that he and the other artists who voyaged to Rangitahua Raoul Island on HMNZS Otago in 2011 never really disembarked from the ship that took them north. He thinks of thems as still out there, on the ocean, absorbing its energy, listening to its oceanic songs and confronting the environmental issues which have only increased in urgency over the ensuing decade. The new edition includes a section of 40 extra pages of images and thoughtful text.
Old Black Cloud: A cultural history of mental depression in Aotearoa New Zealand by Jacqueline Leckie $50
Mental depression is a serious issue in contemporary New Zealand, and it has anincreasingly high profile. But during our history, depression has often been hidden under a long black cloud of denial that we have not always lived up to the Kiwiideal of being pragmatic and have not always coped. Using historic patient records as a starting place, and informed by her own experience of depression, academic Jacqueline Leckie's timely social historyof depression in Aotearoa analyses its medical, cultural and social contexts through an historical lens. From detailing its links to melancholia and explaining its expression within Indigenous and migrant communities, this engrossing book interrogates how depression was medicalised and has been treated, and how New Zealanders have lived with it.
Without Model: Parva aesthetica by Theodor W. Adorno (translated by Wieland Hoban) $47
In Without Model, Theodor Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of 'Amorbach', but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticises attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.
The Social Space of the Essay, 2003—2023 by Ian Wedde $50
“From the outset, the social space of the essay is involved with the text' s readers to the degree that conversation is implied - more or less intimate, even argumentative. The essay will often have originated in conversation, or the conversations of groups gathered around an event. Its long form may both contain and measure the extended time of face-to-face conversation or imply that extent; in this it will differ from social media, email and instant messages. These forms are often both dynamic and distanced, with the immediate energy of in-the-moment exchanges. The essays collected here, though, hope for the pleasure of extended conversation, both in their content and in the critical participation of their readers.” Wedde’s third collection of essays ranges widely through Aotearoa, the Pacific ocean, and the libraries and museums of the world. Artists considered in depth and often from multiple perspectives include Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Judy Millar, Peter Black, Anne Noble, Yuk King Tan, Elizabeth Thomson and Gordon Walters, while writers including Allen Curnow and Russell Haley are remembered.
Interesting Times: Some New Zealanders in Republican China by Chris Elder $40
The era of Republican China began with the fall of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty in 1912, and came to an end in 1949, when Mao Tse-tung declared the People's Republic of China. The 37 years in between were marked by power struggles between competing warlords, anti-foreign riots, floods and widespread famine, an eight-year conflict with Japan, and the depredations of an ongoing civil war. For the Chinese people, and for foreigners living in China, these were indeed interesting times. Some New Zealanders were drawn to China by missionary zeal or humanitarian concern, others by commercial opportunities, still others by political curiosity or simply by their appetite for risk. In this book, famous figures like Rewi Alley, James Bertram and Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde) rub shoulders with long-term China hands like the YWCA secretary Agnes Moncrieff and the missionary Alice Cook. Interesting.
Eat Pacific: The Paific Island food revolution cookbook by Robert Oliver $60
Eat Pacific includes 139 zesty recipes from Fiji, Sāmoa, the Kingdom of Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tahiti, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea, taken from the popular TV series Pacific Island Food Revolution, now in its third season. There’s more than healthy, tasty, affordable food, however. This book has a powerful health and food-sovereignty message: local food cultures hold the key to better diets, economic sustainability and combatting diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul $60
Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I'm alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, "Time is a strange substance" and who knows really, with our time-bound com- prehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.
Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876-1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists' work), and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory — the artist at present — and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.
Human? The lie that’s been killing us since 1788 by Ziggy Ramo $39
So-called Australia is built upon a lie — that 97% of the population are human, and the others simply 'Indigenous', devoid of the same basic rights. Human? is the story of Ziggy Ramo's experience growing up under the weight of this lie. “We've had 235 years of continued destruction in the name of 'civilised progress', under an oppressive colonial system that punches down on almost everyone. We all deserve more. But to move forward we have to be honest about the past.” Written on the precipice of becoming a parent, Human? is Ziggy Ramo's offering for the future an attempt to bridge a nation-wide knowledge gap, and start a new conversation. Ramo asks — Would you still fight for human rights if it meant giving up your privilege?
Tarot by Jake Arthur $25
Jake Arthur's beguiling second poetry collection opens with a tarot reader coaxing us into a reading over a cup of tea. And in a rush of vivid scenes and impressions, we begin to imagine episodes from different lives — a woman tries to train a robin; parents anxiously attend a teacher-parent interview; a man is cast overboard and wonders if he will ever be found. Each card prompts a new character to mull over their uncertainties, hopes, obstacles and joys.Loosely inspired by the illustrations of the famous 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, with its riotous depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools and angels, these poems have us grappling our way towards a clear path.
”An enchanted and enchanting clamour. Intimate, wise, utterly glorious. —Catherine Chidgey
The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright $26
Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent. New format.
The Pinchers and the Diamond Heist by Anders Sparring & Per Gustavsson $20
Theo is good at most things. He can almost count to a thousand, knows several French words and can operate the washing machine. But he can't lie or steal. “You must try harder,” says his mother sternly. The Pincher family love to steal things. It’s what they are born for! When his parents leave to visit the diamond exhibition, Theo's heart sinks. After breaking Grandma out of prison (his little sister needs someone to read her bedtime story), Theo sees no alternative but to stop his parents stealing the diamond. His shout of “Stop! Police!” brings them only delight—Theo's lie has shown he is a true Pincher. A mix of adventure, silliness and everyday family life.
The finalists have been announced celebrating the best in Aotearoa’s children’s and teen books. There are some exceptional gems, and some of my personal favourites from the past year have made the cut. A finalist for the Young Adult Fiction Award and the NZSA Award for Best First Book is Tsunami.
This excellent graphic novel from Paekakariki-based illustrator, animator, and comic maker Ned Wenlock deals with bullying, being an outsider, and that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood, with raw honesty and clarity.
Meet Peter, a target for the school bullies. His commitment to truth and being right isn’t always the best fit for your final days of primary school. Being twelve is never easy and, for Peter, life is just too much. Peter’s parents are too busy bickering to notice his despair, his nemesis Gus and his cronies are on his case, and there’s a new girl at school just as much a misfit as him. But she’s a badass, and it’s difficult for Peter to navigate her motives. It all feels overwhelming to Peter — like a tsunami is coming and he isn't sure he can stop it.
Told in Ned’s unique and beautifully pared-down style, Tsunami is a taut page-turner, a coming-of-age story, and nuanced examination of early teenage alienation and the unpredictable consequences of our actions.
Another example of superb publishing from Earth’s End.
A selection of books from our shelves.
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Read our latest newsletter and stack up some books for winter reading.
7 June 2024
The Limits of My Language by Eva Meijer (translated from Dutch by Antoinette Fawcett)
He did not want to write any aphoristic gems about depression, and he did not want to read any, either. When he wrote, Depression sharpens the tools but makes them too heavy to use, he crossed this out immediately, it was simply not true, after all, depression blunts the tools and makes them too heavy to use, which is hardly an aphoristic gem. Nothing to be gained. As Eva Meijer points out in her excellent and well-written book The Limits of My Language, the sensitivities that may appear to be a side benefit of depression might in any case just as well be precursors of the depression that renders them useless, at least in those times when the depression is at its most obliterative and those sensitivities are impossible to recognise as any sort of benefit, no matter how kindly others might assure us that they are. Meijer’s book is not a self-help book, thank goodness, he thought, but a thoughtful account of the experience of depression, or rather the non-experience that so often constitutes depression, and of the philosophical and practical considerations entailed by that (non)experience. It is what Meijer terms “the expired present” that makes it impossible for the depressed person to see the point in anything, even, or most especially, their most basic everyday needs; if they do see value in anything, they cannot see any possible connection between this value and themselves. The depression prevents the depressed person from achieving the benefits of agency and identity that commonly result from (or produce) a person’s experience of time (agency being a connection with a future (through intention); identity being a connection with the past (through memory)). “When you are depressed, all the time is between-time or anti-time, just as the depressed person is a between-person, not dead but certainly not alive (if only you were actually dead or alive).” The present is erased, he thought, or I am erased in that present, which is the same thing, at least for me. This depression, a state with no feelings, with no capacities, is indistinguishable from brain damage, he thought, that is, unless I do have actual brain damage, which sometimes I wonder; this self-loss, this moment-by-moment existence that resembles an erasure, this inability to actually achieve anything that I would recognise as thought or action, or, at best, the achievement of what seems to me a mere simulacrum of thought, a mere simulacrum of action, the best I can achieve, that I have learned to achieve, on a good day, simulacra that may carry me through that day, though their connection to me is less than tentative, as far as I can see, but not nothing. “Depression isn’t always something that you can solve with your head,” writes Meijer, who has herself slowly learned, over the years, her own habits and techniques that help to pull her though depressive periods, or to avoid some of their worst effects (for instance, by putting “into brackets” what cannot be removed (a useful editing technique)). “Time persists in moving forward and moving you too,” she writes. Although thinking may have its uses, even as far as depression is concerned, the withstanding of depression, if it is to be withstood, seems to come from some other something in oneself, perhaps, he thought, something to do with the physical aspects of oneself, whatever they are, or the physical aspects of the world around, so to call it, or of some relationship between the two, physical aspects being more conducive to the physics of momentum, he supposed, which can carry us though. Even though I hardly believe in momentum, at least as far as I am concerned, here I am, carried forward, there is at least some evidence that I have been susceptible to being carried forward, despite it all, for what it’s worth, at least so far. What is it that enables or compels us to continue, he wondered. Whatever depression makes most difficult could be the best tool to use against it, but depression makes that tool blunt and makes it too heavy to use. All we can hope to do, he thought, and this is not nothing, is learn to withstand it all, perhaps, anchored maybe by whatever is too heavy to be used, and allow time to pass. This is not nothing, at all.
“I wonder if I am allowed to love my sister Baby more than I love the Duce.” Penny ranks her love for her sister against her love of Jesus, Mussolini, Italy and the Fatherland, and compares all this to love for her yellow bear. It’s 1944 in fascist Italy. Penny and Baby, orphaned, have been left in the care of Uncle Wilhelm and Aunt Katchen. They attend school where they sing fascist songs and wear their Piccola Italiana uniforms with pride. At home, their uncle won’t allow them to go to mass and Penny finds herself constantly in trouble for her high spiritedness. Yet, it’s a happy life with her loving Uncle and Aunt, the cousins and the adoring household servants. Penny and Baby have a good life in the country and spend hours in the fields and the woods playing games both imaginative, and punitive, with the village children. Many of their games include penitent actions, as Penny knows that to save their Jewish Uncle from Hell sacrifices have to be made. Many of Penny’s ideas are hilarious and wrong-footed in the way that only children can achieve. The Sky is Falling is a charming, deceptive and ultimately shocking autofiction. Like the sisters, Penny and Baby, filmmaker, artist, and writer Lorenza Mazzetti and her twin were left with their relatives after their mother died. They lived in Italy during the second world war and witnessed the deaths of their family. In the 1950s, having made their way to England, Mazzetti talked her way into The Slade and began making films. She was instrumental as a founder of the Free Cinema and won several prestigious awards before returning to Italy in the late 1950s. (In this new translation, there’s an excellent introduction by Ali Smith about Mazzetti, and a thoughtful critique of this novel). However, Mazzetti’s alter ego Penny is younger, and this makes the end of childhood innocence all the more shocking and enables the author to playfully compose situations which are blackly, hilariously funny. She captures the voice, feelings and thoughts of a chid — their truth, as well as their missteps — with honesty in simple evocative language. The beautifully produced book from Another Gaze Editions includes a series of naive drawings by the author, adding to the air of impending doom. This is a novel about facing down trauma and about exposing the cruel and often arbitrary nature of war. It is carefully calibrated, the tension teased out by Penny’s often riotous behaviour, witty dialogue and sharp observation; yet builds without relief to its inevitable horrific end.
A selection of books from our shelves.
Click through to find out more:
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets
A History of New Zealand Women
A History of Islam in 21 Women
Keep warm with one (some) of these new books — just out of the carton:
The Garden Against Time: In search of a common paradise by Olivia Laing $50
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens — not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
”I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind.” —Observer
”What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.” —Nigel Slater
”A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise.” —Neil Tennant
”Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read.” —Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
”No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained.” —Philip Hoare
Do Not Send Me Out among Strangers by Johua Segun-Lean $36
Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers is a wholly remarkable text considering shame, isolation, and the strange terrain where private and public grief meet. 31 illustrations: black-and-white and colour photos, iPhone dawings.
”Beautiful, strange, captivating.” —Olivia Laing
”Clear-eyed and brilliant and desperately sad.” —Sara Baume
Foraging New Zealand: Over 250 plants and fungi to forage in New Zealand by Peter Langlands $50
Aotearoa is full of incredible, edible wild foods — fruit, fungi and seaweed; berries, herbs and more — you only need to know where to look and how to use it safely. This remarkable, definitive book is the ultimate guide to unearthing more than 250 of our tastiest wild plants. Packed with stunning photography, up-to-date information and helpful tips, this book will have you venturing into the countryside or your own garden, viewing urban weeds with fresh eyes, and returning to the larder with zest. Peter Langlands has spent a lifetime compiling Aotearoa's largest database of wild foraged species, running workshops and sourcing wild produce for chefs as one of our only licensed professional foragers. He brings his years of expertise together in this essential compendium. This book will change the way you eat and the way you think of where you live.
The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon $38
A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. In the Edo Period, a samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen. In upstate New York, a formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in the far east of Russia?
Missing Persons, Or, My grandmother’s secrets by Clair Wills $50
A history of unmarried motherhood and concealed secrets through three generations of an Irish family. How far would you go for the missing? When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. How could a whole family — a whole country — abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence — stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.
I”n its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy — a brave and rigorously humane book.” —Sean Hewitt
”If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement.” —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
”Clair Wills retrieves from time's abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland.” —Paul Lynch
Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann (translated from Russian by Imogen Taylor) $40
What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? As a child, Lena longs to pick hazelnuts in the woods with her grandmother. Instead, she is raised to be a good socialist: sent to Pioneer summer camps where she’s taught to worship Lenin and sing songs in praise of the glorious Soviet Union. But perestroika is coming. Lena’s corner of the USSR is now Ukraine, and corruption and patronage are the only ways to get by – to secure a place at university, an apartment, treatment for a sick baby. For Tatjana, the shock of the new means the first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops; it means terrible choices about how to love. Eventually both women must decide whether to stay or to emigrate, but the trauma they carry is handed down to their daughters, who struggle to make sense of their own identities. Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how the collapse of the Soviet Union reverberated through the lives of ordinary people.
''A story of several generations of women that poignantly demonstrates the imprint of history on people's lives, often with tragic consequences. Salzmann conveys the emotional turmoil and agonizing choices their characters make with exquisite nuance and sensitivity. Their distinctive voice, elegant prose and engaging narrative result in a marvelous work.” —Victoria Belim
”Glorious People is hypnotic, sweeping, and more relevant than ever. The mothers and daughters of Glorious People will stick with you long after you turn the last page of this mesmerizing, sharp, and devastating novel. They are searching for meaning and belonging as immigrants, mothers, wives, professionals, and citizens of a complex and ever-changing world. This novel offers a fresh take on the Soviet diaspora that offers both a meaningful critique and a semblance of much-needed hope for the future.' —Maria Kuznetsova
How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican memoir by Safiya Sinclair $38
There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved. Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Safiya Sinclair grew up guarding herself against an ever-present threat. Her father, a volatile reggae musician and strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari, railed against Babylon, the corrupting influence of the immoral Western world just beyond their gate. Rastas were ostracised in Jamaica, and in this isolation Safiya's father's rule was absolute. To protect the purity of the women in their family he forbade almost everything: no short skirts and no opinions, nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path. Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books, poetry and education. But as Safiya's imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it greater clashes with her ever more radical father. Safiya realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. But how? In seeking to understand the past of her family, Safiya Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it and offers an astonishing personal reckoning.
'“Dazzling. Potent. Vital.” —Tara Westover
”To read it is to believe that words can save.” —Marlon James
”Unforgettable, mesmerising, heartbreaking and heartwarming. One of the best memoirs in world literature.” —Elif Shafak
Sebze: Vegetarian recipes from my Turkish kitchen by Özlem Warren $65
Here you will find Kahvati (all day breakfast), Meze and Salata, Sokak Yemekleri (street food) as well as breads, mains, pickles, and sweets. Everything looks and sounds delicious. Winter garden favourites could be Pazih Lebeniye Corbasi (Yoghurt Soup with Chickpeas and Swiss Chard), Pazih, Cevizli Eriste (Eriste Noodles with Chard, Walnuts and Crumbly Cheese), or Firinda Sebzeli Karnabahar Mucveri (it’s a baked cauliflower dish!).
Wild Figs and Fennel: A year in an Italian kitchen by Letitia Clark $65
A beautifully presented delight. It’s a seasonal culinary journey through the sun-soaked landscapes of Italy sure to please. In the Winter section there’s the always popular Spaghetti Puttanesca, Lemon and Wild Fennel Polpette and the wonderfully named Ricotta Cloudballs. Packed with recipes for everyday and special occasions.
Empire, Incorporated: The corporations that built British colonialism by Philip J. Stern $74
Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan — a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
The Other Side: A journey into women, art, and the spirit world by Jennifer Higgie $30
In an illuminating blend of memoir and art history, The Other Side explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women artists. From the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen and the nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton to the pioneering Hilma af Klint, these women all — in their own unique ways — shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of their myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie considers the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. New paperback edition.
”In effervescent and atmospheric prose, Jennifer Higgie explores some of history's most innovative artists and their spiritual investigations into this realm and the next. I was entranced from start to finish, as she takes us on both a personal and artistic journey across time and across the globe. The Other Side is an exhilarating read.” —Katy Hessel
”The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists.” —Sinead Gleeson
Mediterranean (‘The Passenger’) $40
The word ‘Mediterranean’ evokes something larger than geography, and has historically marked a distinct cultural space, one where different people have met, traded, and clashed. Today the Mediterranean appears to be in crisis, neglected by the EU, and at the centre of one of the greatest migrations in history. While millions of tourists flock to its shores, hundreds of thousands of people face a dramatic journey in the opposite direction-to escape wars, persecutions, and poverty. The liquid road, as Homer called it, is increasingly militarized, trafficked, and polluted-as well as overheated and overfished. But the Mediterranean remains a source of wonder and fascination-a space not entirely colonized by modernity, where time flows differently, and where multiple cultures and languages are in very close contact and dialogue. Includes: ‘The Sea Between Lands’ by David Abulalfia; ‘The Liquid Road’ by Leila Slimani; ‘The Cold One, the Hot One, the Mad One, and the Angry One’ by Nick Hunt — plus: the sounds and smells of the Mediterranean; the invention of the Mediterranean diet; and more.
Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll $20
Edinburgh is a city filled with magical creatures. No one can see them… until Ramya Knox. As she is pulled into her family’s world of secrets and spells, Ramya sets out to discover the truth behind the Hidden Folk with only three words of warning from her grandfather: Beware the Sirens. Plunged into an adventure that will change everything, Ramya is about to learn that there is more to her powers than she ever imagined.
The Great Wave: The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider by Michiko Kakutani $38
In the twenty-first century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider — the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, and others have provided inspirational leadership. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. Writing with a critic’s incisive understanding of cultural trends, Michiko Kakutani outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward. For there is, Kakutani argues, always the promise of transformation in times of turmoil. We can surrender to the waters, give in to the gathering chaos, or we can use the wave’s momentum to propel us into a more stable and sustainable future.
”Michiko Kakutani offers a profoundly inspiring and prophetic perspective on the contemporary world. The Great Wave is an exceptionally rare book, marked by its deep, sincere, and precise comprehension of the formidable challenges that humanity faces in the third millennium. This may well be a pivotal turning point.” —Ai Weiwei
Art is all around you, and Jamie Baird finds it on the street. For four decades he has walked the streets of Wellington with his camera, capturing both large murals in and small incursions into the urban landscape — from the loud to the quiet, from the subtle to the flashy, from the planned and approved to the furtive and the fleeting. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow is a social commentary and cultural history of one of our most dynamic cities, and in these pages you’ll find political moments and personal messages, through the imagination and talent of street artists and the tenacity of social protest — and through the lens of Jamie Baird. A fascinating book, absolutely packed with images that capture time and place, with a forward by historian Redmer Yska, and superbly designed by Matthew Bartlett. A must for Wellingtonians, past and present, and an excellent gift for anyone interested in politics, visual culture and social history.
Jamie on Seven Sharp (starts at 4 mins 40)
Four Decades of Street Art
Welcome to winter. Feeling like the days are a bit bleak? Maybe you need a ray of sunshine in your kitchen. Sometimes books arrive in clusters. Just in the door at VOLUME are some lovely sunshine-inducing Mediterranean cookbooks. We think these could bring cheer to your kitchen and your palate.
Portico is Leah Koenig’s excellent survey of Roman Jewish cooking. It’s a love letter to Rome, the flavours and the atmosphere, and Koenig’s recipes expertly reflect this wonderful blend of cultures. So whether you are feeling like something hearty — Stuffed Pasta in Broth (Carcioncini in Brodo), or sweet — Fried Almond Pastries with Orange Syrup (Burik Belluz), there will be something here to please the tastebuds.
Melbourne food writer Ella Mittas takes us on a trip to Greece and Turkey in Ela! Ela! This is local cuisine at its best with a focus on four distinct places: Istanbul, Alacati, Crete and Melbourne. It’s an exploration of Mittas’s own cultural heritage and her cooking adventures working in the mountains and by the sea. Discover Kisir, Briam, and her all-time favourite dessert, Galaktoboureko.
Staying with the theme of cultural roots, there’s a new book from the excellent Georgina Hayden. In Greekish, Hayden brings us everyday recipes with all the vibrance of Greek cuisine and the simplicity of cooking at home. Her recipes are a joy to use and even more joyful to eat. Her previous book, Taverna, is a firm favourite in our household. There are handy V, DF and GF markers for easy reference and the recipes range from snacks — Filo-wrapped Feta with Spiced Honey ; to feasts — Pumpkin and Feta Kataifi Pie; to sweet treats — Baklava Riccotta Semifreddo. Delicious.
Back to Italy, Wild Figs and Fennel, is a beuatifully presented delight. It’s a seasonal culinary journey through the sun-soaked landscapes of Italy sure to please. In the Winter section there’s the always popular Spaghetti Puttanesca, Lemon and Wild Fennel Polpette and the wonderfully named Ricotta Cloudballs. Packed with recipes for everyday and special occasions.
Sebze is a celebration of vegetarian Turkish cooking. Here you will find Kahvati (all day breakfast), Meze and Salata, Sokak Yemekleri (street food) as well as breads, mains, pickles, and sweets. Everything looks and sounds delicious. Winter garden favourites could be Pazih Lebeniye Corbasi (Yoghurt Soup with Chickpeas and Swiss Chard), Pazih, Cevizli Eriste (Eriste Noodles with Chard, Walnuts and Crumbly Cheese), or Firinda Sebzeli Karnabahar Mucveri (it’s a baked cauliflower dish!).
Read our latest newsletter. Prepare yourself for winter with a new book.
31 May 2024
Énard 's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the ‘Zone’), past and present. Énard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Énard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Énard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them.
Recently, I was in a reading pit, where the novels I picked up were good or even very good, but not holding my attention. What I needed was something fresh, compelling and altogether distracting. Distracting in that good way; in the ‘I’m not stopping this book until I’m finished’ kind of way. You’ll only get a hmm or a later from me until I close the back cover. I read Kick the Latch in one gulp. Kathryn Scanlan is a genius. From transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, Scanlan has lost nothing of the voice of this woman and her hard life at the track in this moving and fascinating account of the underbelly of racing culture, while simultaneously constructing a novel of tidbits, of scrabble and insight, that jumps alive from the page. A book of twelve chapters; each chapter a series of succinct episodes which are sharply arranged and rich in texture and character. With titles like ‘Bicycle Jenny’, ‘It Wasn’t His Fault’, ‘I Wouldn’t Barely Break’, ‘Gallon of Blood’, ‘Grandstanding’, ‘A Thousand Pounds of Pressure’ and ‘I Tried To Be a Normal Person’ it’s hard not to be curious. Every small bit-player has a role to play in revealing the person at the centre, Sonia. Those that help her, break her, and the ones she observes. There are horses, front and centre; and the jockeys that ride well and badly, the owners who cheat and the ones who are okay. There’s the family of track workers who work the circuit, looking out for each other. Sonia, herself, is forthright and compelling. The stories or memories build and bounce off each other. There are times of losing and winning; of destitution and just making a living. There are the horses Sonia trains and the respect that she garners. There is the hard Midwest childhood and the misogyny which spells danger for a young woman determined to kick out on her own. And then there is the fact that this is Scanlan’s novel. It’s a joy to read something that you can’t be sure about. Sonia is a family acquaintance. The interviews were transcribed. Fiction is unreliable, but completely compelling. It’s truthful in a way that often memoir is not. Fiction is a portal and here, as I was submerged into the foreign world of horse trainer, track and the midwest, I was wonderfully distracted in the best possible way.
Start winter with a book still warm from the carton.
Click through to our website for your copies:
Long Island by Colm Tóibín $37
Eilis Lacey is Irish and married to Tony Fiorello. They live in a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, surrounded by Tony's large Italian family. Spring 1976. Eilis is now in her forties with two teenagers. An Irishman knocks on her door and tells her his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. Eilis has choices to make.
”Brilliantly written with a deft touch, it is only at the end that the breath you have been holding will be exhaled, but only briefly. —Stella
"A masterful novel full of longing and regret." —Stuart Douglas
"Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue: this is Toibin at his best." —Robbie Millen, The Times
"Glittering with all of Toibin's intelligence and humane wit." —Colin Barrett
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis $45
Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers. This book has taken six months to come back into stock, so we will celebrate it as if it were a new release!
”This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust.” —Ali Smith
”Davis captures words as a hunter might and uses punctuation like a trap. Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail, a most original and daring mind.” —Colm Toibin
Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, A journey home through food by Ella Mittas $45
A collection of recipes and stories from cook and food writer Ella Mittas. Inspired by her time working in a village in the mountains of Crete and the hot, loud streets of Istanbul, as well as her Greek heritage, they represent a journey of food, culture and belonging. These simple, comforting recipes are a mix of things Ella saw, ate and was taught on her travels, though years of cooking them have made them something more her own. Above all, they represent community — the reason Mittas ever wanted to cook at all.
In Italy: Venice, Rome, and beyond by Cynthia Zarin $23
Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her we see anew the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, Assisi and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life for the reader.
”These pieces induce a comparable sense of being pleasurably lost, of wanting to live imperfectly in the present tense.” —Observer
A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch $55
The way we remember the past today remains dishearteningly patriarchal: a place where women have always been oppressed by men, from ancient times to the present day. A History of Women in 101 Objects tells a new story of female history, revealing the evolution of the role women have played in society through the quiet power of their everyday items. Much of what we've read about history focuses on the men in power: women's stories are too often hidden or considered unremarkable. But in this collection, Annabelle Hirsch curates a compendium of women and their things, uncovering the thoughts and feelings at the heart of women's daily lives, to offer an intimate and lively alternative history. The objects date from prehistory to today and are assembled chronologically to show the evolution of how women were perceived by others, how they perceived themselves, how they fought for freedom. For example, what do handprints on early cave paintings tell us about the role of women in hunting? What does a mobile phone have to do with femicides? Or Kim Kardashian's diamond ring with Elena Ferrante?
”I love this book — a new feminist history of the world — stirring, provocative and carefully researched.” —Lauren Elkin
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville $40
A novel of the life of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother — a woman Kate feared as a child, and only came to understand in adulthood. Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society's long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
Short-listed for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
”The writing sparkles with Grenville's gift for transcendently clear imagery. This is a work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding.” —Guardian
Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler $65
Butler confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed 'anti-gender ideology movements' dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization — and even 'man' himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights. But what, exactly, is so disturbing about gender? In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how 'gender' has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and transexclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonises struggles for equality and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice.
”Who's Afraid of Gender? calls for gender expression to be recognized as a basic human right, and for radical solidarity across our differences. With masterful analysis of where we've been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge.” —Esquire
”If we want to see the political temperature fall to something that might allow for progress, there are few thinkers better placed to guide us than Butler. Crucially, Butler sets out an ethical vision for how gender freedoms and rights might be better integrated within a collective broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food for everyone everywhere.” —Angela Saini
Papyrus: The invention of books in the Ancient world by Irene Vallejo $30
Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are fascinating stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humourists, Sappho and the empowerment of women's voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world. New edition.
”In this generous, sprawling work Vallejo sets out to provide a panoramic survey of how books shaped not just the ancient world but ours too. While she pays due attention to the physicality of the book, Vallejo is equally interested in what goes on inside its covers. And also, more importantly, what goes on inside a reader when they take up a volume and embark on an imaginative and intellectual dance that might just change their life. As much as a history of books, Papyrus is also a history of reading. “ —Guardian
A Thread of Violence: A story of truth, invention, and murder by Mark O’Connell $33
In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland's Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history and the words used to describe the crimes (grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, and almost unbelievable) have remained in the cultural lexicon as the acronym GUBU. Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk.
”Like all great books, A Thread of Violence is the document of a great writer's obsession. Mark O'Connell draws the reader into a deeply engrossing story, and at the same time into a complex investigation of human brutality and of narrative writing itself. This is a superb and unforgettable book.” —Sally Rooney
”Phenomenal. It's very dark, necessarily, but I found it very rich. Macarthur seems as though he's being generous and open, but there's also this manipulative side of him. It's like a chess game between the two of them, which I found really compelling. No contemporary literary mind seems to me more subtle, perceptive or trustworthy. An eerie, philosophically probing book. A Thread of Violence instils the certitude not only that no one else could have written this book, but that no other need ever be written on the subject. It's a marvel of tact, attentiveness, and unclouded moral acuity.” —Guardian
The Curtain and the Wall: A modern journey along Europe’s Cold War border by Timothy Phillips $28
The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. But we cannot consign the tensions and restrictions of the past to history. At a time when Russia is once again making war and when divisions elsewhere in Europe are on the rise, these old fault lines have new resonance. What do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What have they left in their wake? In this book, Timothy Phillips travels the route of the Iron Curtain from deep inside the Arctic Circle to the meeting point of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. He explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world's most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. The people he meets bear vivid witness to times of change. There are those who look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection. Others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. In these historic landscapes lie buried many of the seeds of our world's current disputes - over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress.
12 Theses of Attention edited by D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss $20
"True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable." So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics — one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend. It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously "frack" our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer. The book is illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.
Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe (translated from Japanese by David Boyd) $25
Successful entrepreneur A.A. Abrams is pursuing the enigmatic writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who appears to have the ability to write expertly in the language of any place they go. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding the writer, but Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always manages to stay one step ahead, taking off moments before being pinned down. But how does the elusive author move from one place to the next, from one language to the next? Ingenious and dazzling, Harlequin Butterfly unfurls one puzzle after another, taking us on a mind-bending journey into the imagination.
”The novel is perhaps most provocative as a meditation on language. A satisfying and reflective read” —Asian Review of Books
Brave Kāhu and the Pōrangi Magpie by Shelley Burne-Field $20
Poto is the perfect fledgling – the apple of her father's eye and a natural at hunting and flying. Anything a kāhu is supposed to be good at, Poto can do best of all. She can't understand why her sister Whetū gets cross with her – it's not her fault she's good at everything! As for her baby brother Ari, he's so weird and annoying. After their mother is killed by a flock of magpies, Poto and Whetū have to get an injured Ari to safety before a deadly foretold earthquake arrives, unleashing a flood and destroying their home. With the help of the birds and new friends they meet on the way, the hawk siblings journey through the Valley, keeping an eye out for a menacing flock of magpies who are on a mission to take back the Valley for their own. Can they stop Tū the makipai and her flock from ruining the harmony of the Valley? Will aroha win out over hate? And will Poto realise that everyone has something special to offer, even if they can't do everything quite like she does?
Maurice and Maralyn: A whale, a shipwreck, a love story by Sophie Elmhirst $45
Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England - and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation — forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On their tiny raft, over the course of days, then months, their love is put to the test. When Maurice begins to withdraw into himself, it falls upon Maralyn to keep them both alive. Their pet turtle helps, as does devising menus for fantasy dinners and dreaming of their next voyage. Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive — not just at sea, but in life.
”Electrifying. A tender portrait of two unconventional souls blithely defying the conventions of their era and making a break for freedom.” —Fiona Sturges, Guardian
”Easily one of the most captivating works of narrative nonfiction I've ever read.” —Oliver Burkeman
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler $30
When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn't pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA — a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence — has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research. But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
”A first-rate speculative thriller, by turns fascinating, brutal, powerful, and redemptive.” —Jeff Vandermeer
In Long Island we meet Eilis twenty-five years on from Brooklyn. Upset with Tony and the surprising revelation of a new baby (not hers) , Eilis leaves America and returns to Ireland. In Enniscorthy little has changed, yet Eilis is perturbed; emotionally drawn to her past and what might be her future. Long Island propels you forward with ease, but under the seemingly benign runs a thread of tension. There’s the three-way complication of Eilis, her old friend Nancy and the love interst Jim. And then the problem of Tony and the children — can Eilis make a new life for herself in America? Long Island is not merely driven by its captivating plot, it is a commentary on expectation and illusion, where everyone has a private dream, but no one is honest with each other nor themselves. Colm Tóibín has a gift for capturing intimate relationships — their nuances, inconsistencies, and delusions. Brilliantly written with a deft touch, it is only at the end that the breath you have been holding will be exhaled, but only briefly.
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