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4 October 2024
Humans have continued to evolve, he thought, by making objects that are extensions of themselves, extensions not only in a physical and practical sense but in a mental sense also. Thinking is done mainly outside my head, he thought, my memories and intentions are embodied in and enacted by the great commonwealth of objects in which I hang suspended, displacing my volume perhaps, but entirely at the mercy of objects that mediate my every experience and over which I have only very narrow and limited control. These objects grasp me more tightly than ever I could grasp them, he thought, they define the scope of my thoughts and actions, they call to each other through the qualities they share with each other, and they bind me to all the other people similarly caught in this inescapable infinite web of objects. I am caught, he thought, I am connected through objects to everyone and to everything that everyone does with any object anywhere. I am not sure that I like this. Through the objects around me, both useful and ornamental, through these objects’ connections with and similarities to other and yet other objects, I am implicated in all actions committed by all humans using objects that embody intentions, that are made for a purpose or suggest themselves as suitable for a purpose, that are available for the use of humans, that press their purpose on the minds of humans. We are all connected through objects because all objects are connected. “Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” states the protagonist, so to call her, of Lara Pawson’s excellent little book, Spent Light. Although the ostensible scope of the book is entirely domestic and simple and small and plausibly claustrophobic, the quotidian household objects that she considers, objects that are seldom considered but merely used, reveal, by similarity, connections with objects used in and enabling acts of violence, injustice and exploitation committed on both humans and the environment anywhere in the world. A pepper mill is connected to a grenade, an egg timer is the same mechanism used to detonate a time bomb, on the toaster given to her by her disconcerting neighbour “above each light is a word printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL”. Every characteristic of every thing twitches a web of association and resemblance often leading to her memories or at least knowledge of despicable actions committed with similar objects or implicated by the functions of her objects somewhere distant or else. These associations often reveal Pawson’s close observation of cruelties from her time as a war reporter in parts of the world seemingly different from but in fact not unconnected with her current rather domestic existence. But although the reader never knows when they will next be shocked by Pawson’s association of an object, an object that they very likely have themselves or which is very similar to an object that they have in their own intimate environment, with an act of cruelty, torture or genocide, an association that may change forever the way that the reader looks at their own object, the same world-wide web of objects that links us to these acts contains also associations that connect us, despite or because of the objects that we own, with others in acts of support, nurture or love; acts of support, nurture and love that are all the more angry, vital and beautiful because of the global contexts in which they must be waged. Lara Pawson, he thought, on the evidence of this book, is good company in the waging of such acts.
Welcome back Raccoon, Badger, Fox, Bear, and Crow! Raccoon is reading a great book. It’s a wonderful adventure. It’s so exciting, he decides it’s time for his own expedition;— a journey around the world! For that he will need a boat, and he knows where he can find one. His friend, Badger, is just the fellow. Badger has everything, and all in their allotted places. Check out his storage shelves — so orderly! Badger also thinks he will be the perfect companion for this journey. Everyone needs a friend on such a journey. Boat and paddles in hand, they are ready to go. Setting off for the river, they meet Fox at the market selling her eggs. What about food? I better come along with you, insists Fox. The three friends are now prepared for their journey around the world. Bear is out fishing and reminds them about sea monsters and jellyfish. You’ll need a bear on your crew. Off to the river the four friends go. Crow flies past, and exclaims, I’ll be the look-out. Of course, they need a look-out for such a grand adventure. All together, they get under way. It’s a beautiful day for a journey down the river to the ocean. What a great adventure! Philip Waechter’s Around the World With Friends, like his previous picture book about our five wonderful friends ( A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends), captures us. The five friends are adorable, their joyful and positive interactions irresistable, and the story moves at just the right pace, and with a gentleness that is sometimes missing in picture books. The illustrations are delightful and there is always more to see with each reading. Each of the friends has their special talent and all this comes in handy on their adventure down the river. An adventure which mostly goes to plan, but isn’t always plain sailing, so there will be some problem-solving along the way. There will be games on a sandy bank, scrambled eggs and oh dear! — rain. Exciting adventures are wonderful, especially with friends, but what about Fox’s chickens, and Bear needs his teddy at night, and Raccoon forgot to bring his book. Heading home is just fine — especially when there are plans for a new adventure very soon! A perfectly charming picture book for young adventurers. Recommended for gift-giving and inspiring summer adventures, filled with imagination and delight.
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The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame $40
Janet Frame’s third novel, long out of print, is republished by the esteemed Fitzcarraldo Editions to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The Edge of the Alphabet is a piercing, startlingly strange work about identity, the post-colonial experience and the search for connection in a lonely world. Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world. This edition includes a new foreword by Catherine Lacey.
”Her writing is engaging and idiosyncratic – full of a character that proves that the best way to strike deep with the reader is not to do what everyone else is doing, but to grasp your distinctive vision of the world and hammer it hard. That is the joy of books like this, out of print for 60 years, but now roaring into view, stronger and brighter than ever. It’s good to have it back.” —JJohn Self, The Times
”Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob…. Frame’s fiction … made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.” —Kirsty Gunn, Times Literary Supplement
”‘It is the most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking The Waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.” —Catherine Taylor, Guardian
”Intensely personal, her writing is always spiralling in on itself, towards the condition of myth, and yet it nails the moment, pins down experiences so fleeting that others would never grasp them. What eludes ordinary language, she can capture in the extraordinary argot of her imagination.” —Hilary Mantel
”It is a revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.” —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman
”Frame achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels almost as if it were not written.” —Jane Campion, Guardian
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews) $34
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short — sometimes very short — stories. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.
”Pure genius.” — Max Porter
”Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to snatch this up.” — Publishers Weekly
”Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.” — Kirkus Reviews
”Kristóf’s sentences are like skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle. She seems to sculpt her stories by omission, the great unspoken throughout her books being Hungarian. One might think of Kristóf’s fiction as an act of recuperation, an expression of loss that preserves loss in the form. The brevity of The Illiterate alone tells you that this is not her whole story. It is simply the one she tells.” — Jennifer Krasinski, The New Yorker
”For Kristóf, fiction is the only thing that might provide an escape from solitude... Her novels likewise lead to an engagement with the world. They open things up because of how they undermine what we consider to be true; they shatter a supposed unity. Kristóf’s writing shows us both the pleasure and the necessity of literary refraction.” — Missouri Williams, The Nation
This Mouth Is Mine by Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (Yásnaya Aguilar) (translated by Ellen Jones) $40
"This Mouth is Mine is an important reminder that the linguistic is political and that linguistic discrimination tends to intersect with racism. The book shows that indigenous languages are modern languages too, as suitable for writing rock lyrics, tweeting jokes, or explaining quantum physics as Spanish and English." —The Times Literary Supplement
A passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them., this book should be required reading for our current government. Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yásnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico's relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil "cultural heritage" have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) today? How does the idea of Indigeneity stand up, when you consider Indigenous peoples outside of the frame of colonialism? Personal, anecdotal, and full of vivid examples, Aguilar does more than advocate for the importance of resistance by native peoples: she offers everyone the opportunity to value and enjoy a world in which culture, language, and community is delighted in, not flattened. "We have sacrificed Mexico in favour of creating the idea of Mexico" she says. This Mouth Is Mine is an invitation to take it back.
"This volume is a collection of denunciations against linguistic discrimination, contempt for speakers of languages other than Spanish, the constant violation of their linguistic rights, and the lack of access to self-determination over their territories. This is evidence that, although it proclaims otherwise, the Mexican state has failed to build a true intercultural relationship. This is a dialogical text that weaves an individual voice with that of the community to reflect on the struggle for linguistic diversity and vitality, in a context of systematic violence against peoples and communities who defend their language and territory." —ONAHCYT
"Thanks to the accessible and unpretentious language used by the author, this book is an undemanding and even fun read without losing the rigour and seriousness that such an important subject deserves. It is difficult to find a book to compare with This Mouth is Mine, since the struggle of Indigenous peoples to bring their own perspectives to the table has been hard and many obstacles are still placed in their way of achieving autonomy. Still, the fact that the foundations are only just being laid to amplify historically marginalised voices in the academy makes this work all the greater an achievement for those whose viewpoints have been ignored because they have been expressed in languages other than Spanish. The publication of This Mouth is Mine is not only a tool for questioning the role that the state has played in the elimination of the native cultures of the national territory, but also constitutes significant progress toward the creation of a socio-cultural policy focused on linguistic diversity." —Idiomatica, revista universitaria de lenguas
Orbital by Samantha Harvey $26
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? {Now in paperback}
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize (and a customer favourite).
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden $38
It's fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be — led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep — as a guest, there to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis — she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house — a spoon, a knife, a bowl - Isabel's suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation — leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva — nor the house — are what they seem.
Short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
”We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.” —Booker judges
”Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’, which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.” —Lauren Bufferd, BookPage
”This is a beautifully realised book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores the intricate nuances of resentment-hued sibling dynamics, the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.'“ —Kirkus
⿻ 數位 Plurality : The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl et al $68
A superb handbook for wresting digital technology from the hands of those who seek to use it to exploit and control us, and instead for using it to make a better, freer, more inclusive life for all. Digital technology threatens to tear free and open societies apart through polarisation, inequality, and loneliness. But in the decade since the weeks-long occupation of the Taiwan parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible. Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, withstood the pandemic without lockdowns, and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalising on a culture of innovation to "hack the government." Here, the architects of Taiwan's internationally acclaimed digital democracy share the secret of their success. Plurality (symbolized ⿻) harnesses digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth and beauty. From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, ⿻ offers tools to radically enrich relationships while leaving no one behind. ⿻ thus promises to transform every sector from healthcare to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as a chorus of open, self-governing collaboration of voices from around the globe. Their work in public on this openly available text shows — as well as tells — how everyone from a devout African farmer to a Hollywood celebrity can help build a more dynamic, harmonious and inclusive world.
Tree of Nourishment (‘Kāwai’ #2) by Monty Soutar $40
It’s 1818 on the East Coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the legendary warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of profound change that is destined to reverberate through many generations to come. The Europeans have arrived, and they’ve brought guns and foreign diseases, ushering in a whole new world of terror and trouble. They’ve also brought a new religion, which will cause Māori to question everything they had believed to be true. Hine and her sons Ipumare and Uha are caught in the crossfire of change, creating fractures in their close familial bonds and undermining everything they hold dear. From raids by musket-wielding war parties to heightened internecine warfare; from the influx of whalers, traders and Christian missionaries to the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi, Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment strikes hard and deep into the heart of the initial impact of colonisation on Māori.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie $28
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.
Juice by Tim Winton $55
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone. So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
Self-Esteem and the End of the World by Luke Healy $45
Who is Luke Healy?' For over ten years, a graphic novelist called Luke Healy has invested all of his self-esteem into his career. Then, almost overnight, just as his brother is getting married, both seem to vanish. Spiralling and lacking purpose, he searches for identity — in self-help books, replacement jobs and human connection — and visits cheesy British hotels and abandoned Greek islands. Set against the backdrop of a dangerously changing global climate, with melting ice-caps and flooding cities, Self-Esteem and the End of the World spans two decades of tragicomic self-discovery until the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood revival of Luke's work comes into view — but what might be the cost?Quietly funny, smartly introspective, and grounded in deeply-felt familial highs and lows, Self-Esteem and the End of the World ponders what happens when the person you are isn’t who you need to be, who you are when nobody’s watching, and ultimately, who can you possibly be at the end of the world?
Cypria: A journey to the heat of the Mediterranean, A new history of Cyprus by Alex Christofi $40
Think of a place where you can stand at the intersection of Christian and Arab cultures, at the crossroads of the British, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman and Egyptian empires; a place marked by the struggle between fascism and communism and where the capital city is divided in half as a result of bloody conflict; where the ancient olive trees of Homer's time exist alongside the undersea cables which link up the world's internet. In Cypria, named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to The Odyssey, British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical history of the island of Cyprus, from the era of goddesses and mythical beasts to the present day. This sprawling, evocative and poetic book begins with the legend of the cyclops and the storytelling at the heart of the Mediterranean culture. Christofi travels to salt lakes, crusader castles, mosques and the eerie town deserted at the start of the 1974 war. He retells the particularly bloody history of Cyprus during the twentieth century and considers his own identity as traveller and returner, as Odysseus was.
Ideology: An introduction by Terry Eagleton $37
Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. Eagleton unravels its many definitions, exploring its tortuous history from the Enlightenment to the present. The book provides lucid accounts of the thought of key Marxist thinkers, as well as that of philosophers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Freud and the post-structuralists, and a political reformulation of a vital set of ideas.
”Witty, lucid, and powered by that stinging, militant, ironising intelligence which distinguishes Eagleton's work.” —Guardian
Odyssey by Stephen Fry $40
Troy has fallen. After 10 years of war, the Greeks make their way back to their own lands - but what homes now await them? Agamemnon must return to his wife Clytemnestra, who has been nursing her rage since he sacrificed their daughter to the gods for a favourable wind. Her revenge will know no bounds. Meanwhile, Odysseus has angered the god Poseidon and he is cursed to wander the seas. Follow Odysseus after he leaves the fallen city of Troy and takes ten long dramatic years — battling monsters, resisting goddesses, and suffering the curse of Poseidon — to voyage home to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca. The fourth and final volume of Fry’s epic undertaking of retelling Greek myths and legends.
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
* The New Directions title is Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , the Dialogue Books edition is titled Spontaneous Acts (same book, different titles, different jackets… buy the one you prefer!)
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27 September 2024
From the opening pages, its gothic lettering contents page, an image of a carriage arriving in a small mountain village surrounded by forests, the looming buildings of the sanatorium, you feel as if you have entered the opening scenes of Nosferatu. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Empusium, subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, builds intrigue from the outset. It’s 1913, a year before great turmoil, and curing tuberculosis is all the rage. Our young Polish hero, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, has been sent to the Silesian village of Gorbersdorf for the fresh air, the cold baths and the expert advice of Dr.Semperweiss. The sanatorium is popular and full. Wojnicz takes a room at the more economical Guesthouse for Gentlemen run by the unseemly Optiz with help of a rugged lad, Raimund. Here his fellow guests, after a day of health procedures and walks in the village, sit down to dinner together. It’s an evening of conversation, often arguments, about existence, human behaviour, psychology, and politics; as well as the purpose of women or more accurately their flawed views on the inferiority of women. This topic of conversation, much to the surprise and annoyance of Wojnicz, who they take pleasure in warning and teasing, is a frequent and recurring theme, helped along by a local speciality, a mushroom-infused liquor— the hallucinatory effects fueling the conversation, as well as driving the gentlemen towards introspection. Wojnicz’s fellow housemates include a serial returnee who seems driven by ennui, a humanist bent on lecturing our dear young hero, a young student of art (dying), and the aptly nicknamed The Lion, his bombastic nature making him easy to dislike. Thrown into this dysfunctional playground, the timid Wojnicz is unnerved, and this is not helped by a suicide by hanging on his first day in the house. A house with strange creakings, with cooing in the attic and the whoosh of that new thing, electricity. Not to mention the horror chair with straps in the room upstairs, the graves in the cemetery with an abundance of November death dates, and the uncanny behaviour of the charcoal burners in the forests. Secrets abound, and Wojnicz has several of his own he’s keeping close to his chest. Tokarczuk builds this multi-layered tale from snippets of Greek mythology, the new ideas of the period (think Freud) and as a response to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (published 100 years ago). Like Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead there is a mystery here, a fizzing at the edges, black humour, and a deadly serious exploration of ideas. While Drive Your Plow is pushing the idea of eco-activist in response to harmful tradition, The Empusium is examining the misogyny of the 20th century canon and by extension the influence of these writers, philosophers and psychologists on the contemporary intellectual landscape. To counter the conversations of the ‘gentlemen’, there is a wonderful sense of being watched, that things are not what they seem, and justice will be done. In Greek mythology, the Empusa were shapeshifting creatures. Appearing as beautiful women they preyed on young men, and as beasts devoured them. Beware of those that have one leg of copper, and the other, a donkey’s. As Wojnicz finds the Guesthouse increasingly repressive, the rigours of treatment intrusive, the hallucinogenic effects of liquor to be avoided, and the tragic decline of the young man Thilo unbearable, he also finds in himself a strength as to date untapped. Whether from curiosity, delusion, avoidance of his own fraught familiar relationships, or an unconscious desire to live, our hero explores the depths of the house and the village in an attempt to discover what drives the men of this village to act so horrifically. Add into this rich psychological horror, rich, fetid descriptions of the forest, its minutiae, the fungi and foliage, an atmospheric mindscape grows. Reading The Empusium is like looking through a telescopic lens, one that fogs over, but a twitch of the controls, and a whisk of a cloth, brings it all into sharp relief. If you haven’t read Tokarczuk, it’s time to start.
TEXT EDITION
FITZCARRALDO EDITION
Boredom is a sub-optimal mode, he thinks, but it is at least a functional mode compared with the revulsion it conceals, boredom at least connects one end of the day to the other, boredom is doubtless detrimental but it is by definition tolerable, let us all hope for boredom. That is not a good way to start his review, he thinks, it has some bearing on the book but it is not a good introduction to the book. Two is a situation of stasis, he thinks, three is dynamic, three is the catalyst that reveals the harms hidden in two, the harms that mathematics suppressed mathematics reveals, or not mathematics, physics perhaps, or chemistry, more likely. This also is not a good way to start. Well, he thinks, the review is far enough through not to worry any longer about starting it, a bad start is at least a start, that is something, I can adjust the performance using the choke, or perhaps the throttle, I need to find out the difference between these two obstructions, he thinks, these two forms of respiratory impediment, our relationship with engines is a violent one, he thinks, and this thought stalls the review. There is no access to the interior save through performance, he thinks, restarting, there is perhaps only performance, who can know, a middle class couple converse, the words pass between them but also bounce off their surroundings, language is a force-field, he thinks, a sonar, and a conversation is the pattern of disturbance, the pattern of interference, produced by two emitters, or should that be transmitters, of language. In this book, he thinks, Quin reproduces, well actually produces, that disturbance, those two voices, the Ruth voice and the Leon voice, as they run together as one entity, caught on the page, as if there is anything about a novel that is not on the page. In the Ruth-and-Leon sections of the novel, these verbal slurries, that is not the word, are both Ruth’s and Leon’s, caught on the framework of descriptions as bald and precise and mundane as stage directions, they are stage directions in the past tense, so hardly directions, stage descriptions perhaps. We learn that S, a younger, working-class woman who had lived with them, has committed suicide by drowning, Quin’s fate eventually incidentally, she left a note, but they still hope it might have been an accident. Are they guilty? In S’s room they find some tapes she has recorded, and her journals, and these are transcribed, if that is the word, inscribed is more accurate perhaps but we have to play the fiction game so transcribed is the better word, in other sections of the novel, but Ruth and Leon do not find either the absolution nor the indictment they both hope for and fear in these tapes and these journals, the tapes and the journals merely complicate the picture, add other layers of performance, leave more unsaid than said. The more that is unsaid, the greater the weight of what is unsaid, the stronger its gravity, the more distorted the said, the said, even in its utter mundanity, points always at the source of its distortion. As the book progresses, though progresses is not the word, there is no progress in Quin, we read also a tape made by Ruth and a diary written by Leon as, respectively, Leon and Ruth gain access to them, they take access, if that is the way to put it. There is no progress but the tension increases, tension in the past, if that which is in the past can be said to increase, each mundanity is freighted, that is not the word, with the catalytic action of each one upon each other two, a sexual static that builds and cannot discharge but reveals ultimately the fundamental destructive incompatibility not only of Ruth and Leon but of any combination of Ruth and Leon and S, and, perhaps, of any persons whatsoever, if Quin held this misanthropic view, perhaps she did. The instance of sexual violence eventually revealed is no surprise, but its awfulness floods backwards through all that precedes it in the book. Boredom is all that holds the horrible at bay, but the horrible is no less horrible for that.
In this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon, Tokarczuk playfully pulls the tails of intellectual tropes found in Thomas Mann’s great novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, published 100 years before. In both novels a young man finds himself subsumed by an alpine sanitorium and subject to the conversations, foibles and opinions of his fellow refugees from ‘ordinary’ time. In both novels, the outside world (so to call it) changes in threatening ways as the characters are isolated from it, but Tokarczuk manages to splice into hers additional strands of horror and the macabre, and a sustained sense of the ludicrous that makes The Empusium simultaneously both light and deep, both intellectual and indulgent, angry, spooky, and very funny. Recommended!
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Kataraina by Becky Manawatu $37
Becky Manawatu's new novel is the much-awaited sequel to award-winning bestseller Āue and is unflinching in its portrayal of the destructive ways people love one another and the ancestral whenua on which they stand. In Āue, eight-year-old Arama was taken by his brother, Taukiri, to live with Kat and Stu at the farm in Kaikoura, setting in train the tragedy that unfolded. Arama's aunty Kat was at the centre of events, but, silenced by abuse, her voice was absent from the story. In this new novel, Kat and her whanau take over the telling. As one, they return to her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins — the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of her tīpuna, the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the girl shot the man.
The Empusium: A health resort horror story by Olga Tokarczuk (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) $40
In September 1913, Mieczysław Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone — or something — seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling in this propulsive satire of the misogyny deeply embedded in the Western canon.
”The Nobel Prize-winning novelist is exceptionally adept at blending the high-minded sanctimoniousness of the sanatorium with the ever-present threat and legacy of violence. Tokarczuk’s outstanding novel is a striking reaffirmation of literature’s genius for nuance in a world darkened by murderous polarities.” —Michael Cronin, Irish Times
”A magnificent writer. —Svetlana Alexievich
”A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.” —Annie Proulx
”One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.” —The Economist
”Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious – and spooky – web of intrigue and suspense. A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus
”Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is a richly entertaining, captivating and thought-provoking novel. Despite its acute engagement with The Magic Mountain it’s more Hoffmann than Mann, which works in its favour.”
—David Hayden
Seeing Further by Esther Kinski (translated from German by Caroline Schmidt) $40
While travelling through the Great Alfold, the vast plain in southeastern Hungary, the narrator of Seeing Further stops in an all but vacant town near the Romanian border. There she happens upon a dilapidated cinema. Once the heart of the village, it has been boarded up for years. Entranced by the mozi, as cinema is known in Hungarian, she soon finds herself embarking on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by what she calls "a dream in a glass coffin," the preservation of the cinematic experience, "beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people's thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of it reawaking." What follows is a history of place, told by the town's few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema's former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures.
”Seeing Further is an elegy for the shared space of the cinema and the promise of a collective waking dream, a profound and melancholy meditation on the shift from public to private viewing that is itself a visionary feat. Esther Kinsky’s narrator is both camera and projector, capturing and transmitting haunting images of daily life in the endless expanse of the Hungarian lowlands, where past and present dissolve into one another as people wait for a future that never arrives. It is a novel saturated with loss and mystery, and a profound reckoning with the historical forces and material conditions that have forever altered the terms of how we see.” —Christine Smallwood
"This fixation with ‘the how of seeing’ allows Kinsky to show off her fine-tuned skills as a cultural theorist, with flashes of essayistic brilliance running through the narrative as she tries to tease out the essential, elusive charm of the cinema.” —Lou Selfridge, FRIEZE
”Kinsky delivers a discursive paean to the transformative power of cinema.” —Publisher's Weekly
”Sorrow bleeds through... the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss.” —Kirkus Reviews
”Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality. Far from 'eco-dreaming' without sorrow or critique, Kinsky's novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.” —2022 Kleist Prize jury
An Inconvenient Place by Jonathan Little (translated from French by Charlotte Mandell), with photographs by Antoine d’Agata $45
What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality. With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small sub-urban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph when, there is literally nothing to see — or almost nothing?
”Of the three ways of observing – as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come – Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn’t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia’s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it’s not because Littell’s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d’Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.” —James Meek
”In An Inconvenient Place, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Littell’s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the willful amnesia imposed on history’s savageries by its perpetrators.” —Jon Lee Anderson
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder $40
Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. Timothy Snyder has been called "the leading interpreter of our dark times." As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarianism throughout the world. His book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Now, in this tour de force of political philosophy, he helps us see exactly what we're fighting for. Freedom is the great Western commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means — and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we're free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn't so much freedom from as freedom to — the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes — the habits of mind — that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish.
”Timothy Snyder is one of our most original and perceptive thinkers, on the history of Europe, on American politics, and now, on freedom. Everyone who cares about freedom — what it means and what it takes to preserve it — should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum
”There's nothing else like On Freedom. This time the acclaimed historian draws not just from global history but his own. The result is a wonderfully provocative and profoundly persuasive book. Snyder leads us away from our misconception that freedom is just the removal of what stands in our way and toward a project of liberty that, through active engagement and commitment to the common good, we can achieve together.” —J. J. Abrams
”A must-read. Timothy Snyder is one of the leading minds of our times. This new book draws from his work as an historian of central Europe, his travelling and moving encounters in Ukraine at war, and his thinking on how democracy, pluralism and wealth inequality will look like in 2076 United States and the world at large.” — Thomas Piketty
”Much like life itself, freedom needs to defined and redefined. On Freedom offers fresh insight into essential aspects of human existence — the values and obligations inherent in every individual's life.” —Ai Weiwei
Great Women Sculptors edited by Lisa Le Feuvre $110
Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day. Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today's rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today's most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.
Playground by Richard Powers $38
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, author of The Overstory. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three thousand- year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure — a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to green light the project or turn the seasteaders away.
”Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive.” —Percival Everett
”An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways — gripping, alarming and uplifting.” —Emma Donoghue
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss $40
A memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Sarah Moss, author of The Fell and Summerwater, confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. It narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah had developed a dangerous and controlling relationship with food, and that illness returned in her adult life. Now the mother and teacher of young adults, in My Good Bright Wolf she explores a childhood caught in the trap of her parents' post-war puritanism and second-wave feminism, interrogating what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did - and still does - with her hard-working body and her furiously turning mind.
”Devastating, funny and full of brilliant insights. This is a brave book, but more than that it is generous. It has made me think about how incredibly porous we all are: to our families, to society, to culture, to each other. That's why this book is important: it asks us to take responsibility for our impact on each other.” —Melissa Harrison
”Defiant in its anger and humour, My Good Bright Wolf is a compulsive and compelling story of how hard it is to break free of the punishing narratives around women's bodies and how easy it is to nearly lose yourself to them. And it is also a story of how words — painful and beautiful, wolf-sharp words — can be a way back.” —Emilie Pine
Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders $37
The Burke and Hare 'anatomy murders' of 1828 terrify Edinburgh, until Burke is hanged and Hare disappears. Over a decade later, in the early days of New Zealand colonial settlement, a whaler washes up on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. He calls himself Ōkiwi Brown, sets up a pub with a nasty reputation and finds himself a woman who had been abandoned on his beach. Nearby, children sing dark nursery rhymes of murder. One afternoon Ōkiwi is visited by a pair of ex-soldiers, a bo'sun looking for a fight, and itinerant worker William Leckie with his young daughter Mary. When a body is discovered on the beach, it could be that a drunken man has drowned. But it could be that the gathered witnesses know something more. From the author of Jerningham and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant.
Nature’s Ghosts: The world we lost and how to get it back by Sophie Yeo $62
For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world. Our activities have permanently altered the environment — for good and for bad. In Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries. Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found. And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth. Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives — archaeological, cultural and ecological — reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost. Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been. But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future.
Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell $50
During lockdown, Lyell Cresswell wrote this far from conventional autobiography. Each chapter begins with an increasingly fanciful — and very colourful — account of an exciting life. Under the cover of this playful narrative, he smuggles in deeply considered ideas about music, and about what it means to be a composer - a person who is both philosopher and storyteller. These ideas are accompanied by beautiful and exuberant pen and ink drawings — some for graphic scores, others for his own pleasure. He says, ‘When we look at art, we look for something deep and private. If we find what we're looking for we realise that no attempt to put it into words is adequate.” His music was like the man himself: emotional, uncompromising, richly textured, often quite noisy - and wonderful.
Kahurangi: The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson by Dave Hansford $80
Kahurangi is a celebration of the biodiversity of Kahurangi National Park, Northwest Nelson and Golden Bay. Energised by ancient, complex geology and a multitude of habitats, from vast beech stands to lush coastal rainforest, from sprawling ramparts of karst and marble to extensive wetlands and estuaries, this region holds the greatest variety of plants and animals in the country. Hansford argues for the urgent protection of these precious areas
Geckos and Skinks: The remarkable lizards of Aotearoa by Anna Yeoman $60
One of the least known, and subsequently least celebrated parts of Aotearoa's native wildlife surely are our lizards. The reason is simple - our geckos and skinks are shy, secretive creatures, rarely seen except by seasoned observers. They are remarkable creatures found in a huge range of habitats, from rocky islets on the Fiordland coast, through all our forests and shrublands and up to the high mountains. While identification guides have been written Geckos and Skinks is the first book to tell stories about these creatures, how and where they live, and how they breed. But crucially, this book is a fascinating insight into the myriad conservation efforts that are ongoing in New Zealand, for our geckos and skinks are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and predation from pests. Heavily illustrated with beautiful photographs, this book shines a light on our remarkable lizards, and exposes a world that deserves to be far better known.
Marina Abramović Turned Herself into Art and Wasn’t Sorry. by Fausto Gilberti $30
Marina Abramovic is an artist who uses her body to perform in unexpected and unusual ways that make an audiences think. She once sat back-to-back with her partner and had their hair tied together for over 17 hours. Another time, museum visitors watch her scrub 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day. This innovative book tells an inspiring story about the pioneering performance artist who is also the first female artist to hold a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This celebration for young readers of one of the most important contemporary woman artists of our time features striking black-and-white and red illustrations printed in Pantones throughout, together with a reproduction of the artist's work and a brief biography at the back of the book. In this innovative volume, Marina Abramovic and her cutting-edge work are brought to life for young readers like never before.
A selection of books from our shelves.
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Read our latest newsletter and find out (among other things) the books short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize.
20 Septmeber 2024
WINNER: Miles Franklin Literary Award 2024
WINNER: The Stella Prize 2024
WINNER: The James Tait Black Prize – Fiction 2024
WINNER: University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
WINNER: ALS Gold Medal 2024
SHORTLISTED: The Dublin Literary Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – People’s Choice Award 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2024
SHORTLISTED: New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award – Indigenous Writers’ Prize 2024
SHORTLISTED: Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance, Queensland Literary Awards 2023
SHORTLISTED: Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award 2024
LONGLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2024
‘I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of [Alexis Wright’s] work, from fiction such as Carpentaria and The Swan Book, to her “collective memoir” of an Aboriginal elder in Tracker. As essayist, activist, novelist and oral historian she is vital on the subject of land and people.’ — Robert Macfarlane, New York Times Book Review
This multi-award winning novel has been described as ambitious, accomplished, astonishing, a wonder of twenty-first century fiction, fiercely political, fiercely and gloriously funny, uncompromising, a genre-defiant epic, monumental, urgent, dazzling, exhilarating, polyphonic, and a formidable act of imaginative synthesis.
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
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With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang $40
Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.
With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract modern artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang's new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.
”In Agnes Martin's grid paintings, each pale rectangle can feel like an hour, a day, or a year. The effect of all these small variations seen at once approximates the overwhelming fact of other lives. With My Back to the World gives Victoria Chang that same kind of quiet, intimate, constrained but infinite room to work in. This book is the record of an artful, attentive mind, full of startling insights ("My solitude is like the grass. I become so aware of its presence that it too begins to feel like an audience"), a testament to care, integrity, and persistence.” —Elisa Gabbert
”Victoria Chang's lucid and playful poetry surprised and moved me with its friendly abundance of Koanlike lines-stimulating yet calming news from the dreamy outskirts of human consciousness.” —Tao Lin
Lublin by Manya Wilkinson $35
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
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett $38
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll — Cillian's teenage brother — in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother's dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.
”Strange and beautiful. A book to live inside.” —Sally Rooney
”A gift of true storytelling. Barrett's talent burns up the page.” —Anne Enright
”So consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison.” —Guardian
Family and Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg (translated from Italian by Beryl Stockman) $28
Two novellas chronicling domestic life, isolation and the passing of time. Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends. During a bout of pneumonia, Carmine – uneasy in his life of aspiration and materialism – begins to look back over opportunities missed and choices made. Set against postwar social breakdown, the melancholic, quietly dazzling Family elegantly examines the human condition and what brings happiness to a life. Borghesia is a delicate evocation of one life and the relationships that constrain and define it. In both novellas, underneath a subtle, stripped-down prose and a rich cast of characters, runs a seam of unhappiness and isolation, as Natalia Ginzburg explores the allure of memories and the complexity of family and relationships.
“Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.” —Rachel Cusk
”Ginzburg's beautiful words have such solidarity. I read her with joy and amazement.” —Tessa Hadley
”I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style — her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.” —Maggie Nelson
X-Ray (‘Object Lessons’ series) by Nicole Lobdell $23
X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity. In X-ray, Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we're still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design.
Mediterra: Recipes from the islands and shores of the Mediterranean by Ben Tish $60
More than a hundred mouth-watering Mediterranean dishes from Spain to Syria and everywhere in between — one delicious cuisine gives way to the next. From Spain and Italy, through Greece and Turkey and down to North Africa, the region is rich with deeply delicious food. With seven-spice falafel from Lebanon, gyros from Greece, classic tiramisu from Italy, and grilled smoky sardines from Crete, the full flavors of the region are on glorious display for recipes that work across diets and seasons. But while each country has its own unique dishes and distinct cultures, there is a distinct Mediterranean signature that brings them all together: hot summers, dry winters, coastal briny winds, alfresco eating, street markets, sacrosanct meal times, and bringing the best out of as many local seasonal ingredients as possible.
”Ben takes us across the Mediterranean and then back to his table. From Italy to Tunisia, Croatia to Morocco, capturing the heart of Mediterranean cooking. Simple, seasonal, and heartfelt. Count me in, Ben. “ —Yotam Ottolenghi
”Not only is Ben's Mediterra a beautiful book, but it is so well researched, with mouth-watering, accessible recipes.” —Georgina Hayden
”You probably think you don't need another book about Mediterranean food, but you need this one. I leaf through Ben's books thinking 'I want to make that, and that, and that!'. His food is rich, intense and alive.” — Diana Henry
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions, Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning by Eli Burnstein, illustrated by Liana Fink $40
What's the difference between mazes and labyrinths? Proverbs and adages? Clementines and tangerines? Join author Eli Burnstein on a hairsplitter's odyssey into the world of the ultra-subtle with Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, this humorous dictionary takes a neurotic, brain-tickling plunge into the infinite (and infinitesimal) nuances that make up our world. There is no distinction between precision and pedantry, after all.
The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the politics of work by Jason Read $40
In a world of declining wages, working conditions, and instability, the response for many has been to work harder, increasing hours and finding various ways to hustle in a gig economy. What drives our attachment to work? To paraphrase a question from Spinoza, "Why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?" The Double Shift turns towards the intersection of Marx and Spinoza in order to examine the nature of our affective, ideological, and strategic attachment to work. Through an examination of contemporary capitalism and popular culture it argues that the current moment can be defined as one of "negative solidarity." The hardship and difficulty of work is seen not as the basis for alienation and calls for its transformation but rather an identification with the difficulties and hardships of work. This distortion of the work ethic leads to a celebration of capitalists as job creators and suspicion towards anyone who is not seen as a "real worker." The Double Shift argues for a transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.
”Drawing on Marx, Spinoza, and popular film, Jason Read builds an illuminating analysis that not only astutely captures, but also helps to make sense of, our double experience of wage work as a locus of freedom and compulsion, hope and fear, self-actualization and self-impoverishment, love and hate. This book is a must read for students of contemporary capitalism.” —Kathi Weeks
Te Pukapuka ka Kore e Pānuihia by Tim Tipene, illustrated by Nicoletta Sarri, translated by Kanapu Rangitauira $23
The boy at the centre of Tim Tipene's striking new story doesn't like reading, until one day he picks up The Book that Wouldn't Read. Suddenly the book takes on a life of its own, with sentences moving up and down, words changing colour and disappearing, and strange characters that get the reader jumping around, even burping — and before he knows it, he's finished the book. “What should I read next?”
Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison $40
Harlan Ellison's work shaped the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres in the twentieth century, and this collection of his best-known and most-acclaimed stories is a perfect treasury for old Ellison fans as well as those discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time. Includes: '“Repent Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman’ (Hugo Award winner); ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Mefisto in Onyx’ (Bram Stoker Award winner); ‘Jeffty Is Five’ (British Fantasy Award winner); ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ (Edgar Allan Poe Award winner).
”In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison has always been a sociological writer and an affirmed liberal and freethinker. Most of all, we sense outrage and anger — as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.” —Stephen King
Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene by Lauren Fuge $45
From the beginning, humans have been wanderers. Our feet carried us out of Africa and propelled us to far-flung corners of the world, often through incredible feats of innovation and imagination. These explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. But in every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Our appetites have pushed planetary systems to breaking point — yet still we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new forests to fell. Fuge takes the reader on a journey from the dramatic fjords of the Pacific Northwest to the shifting coastlines of Norway, from the ancient geology of outback Australia to the outer reaches of the known universe, and asks: what drives our urge to explore? How has it changed our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?
Will You Care If I Die? by Nicolas Lunabba $40
In a world where children murder children, and where Swedish gun violence is the worst in Europe, Nicolas Lunabba’s job as a social organiser with Malmö’s underclass requires firm boundaries and emotional detachment. But all that changes when he meets Elijah — an unruly teenage boy of mixed heritage whose perilous future reminds Nicolas of his own troubled past amongst the marginalised people who live on the fringes of every society. Allowing Elijah into his home and then into his heart, Nicolas crosses one of his own red lines. With the odds stacked against them, and completely unprepared for the journey he and Elijah now set off on together, can Nicolas keep Elijah safe from harm and steer him towards a better future? Written as a letter to Elijah, Will You Care If I Die? is a disarmingly direct memoir about social class, race, friendship and unexpected love in the context of social polarisation and the rise of the far right.
Poetry Play Kit: Games to get your poems started by Joseph Coelho $25
Make poetry fun with Joseph Coelho: This activity kit is packed with games and activities - discover all kinds of ways to start writing poems. A compendium of literacy games and activities: Create endless poetic combinations with over 300 word cards! Spin the spinner for linguistic techniques and use the game and activity cards to start your poems off. Edutainment for children aged 6-9: Inspire your child's love of language and give them the tools they need to express themselves and succeed in school - and in life! Learning through play: Developed with the help of kids, parents and teachers, this kit contains 320 word cards, 15 double-sided game and activity cards, 28 rhyming dominoes, a poetry spinner and a rules and inspiration booklet.
A selection of bounding delights from our shelves.
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Right now I am reading Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium (you can pre-order now — due very soon!) and so far a big thumbs-up. I’ll be reviewing this on Monday for RNZ Nine to Noon. In anticipation of the new novel, I’ve been revisiting the excellent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Janina ("don’t like my first name, so please don’t address me by it") Duszejko is in her sixties and lives in a remote Polish village. An ex-engineer, she teaches children English at the local school on a very part-time basis and is the caretaker of the holiday homes closed up for the winter. It’s mid-winter and Duszejko is busy with her horoscopes, translating William Blake with her friend Dizzy, clearing snow, fixing leaks, and keeping an eye on the forest animals. She has names for her neighbours, names which reflect their character: Big Foot for the weasel of a man with big feet who traps animals cruelly, Oddball for her large-statured yet very particular closest neighbour, Black Coat for his son - the local detective, Good News for the woman who runs the charity shop, and so on. She has a close affinity with nature and with the animals that live around her - she calls the deer the Young Ladies, and her dogs (who have recently disappeared) are referred to as her Little Girls. Drawing on Blake’s philosophy of nature, voicing her beliefs in the ideal equitable relationship between human and animal (a philosophy that many of her hunting neighbours have no time for), and using astrology - the alignments and ascendencies of planets and stars and birth dates to predict outcomes for her community, Duszejko has firm opinions, which she has no qualms about sharing, on how people should behave, on traditional Polish culture, and on the importance of nature to the health (intellectual and emotional) of human psyche. Overlay this with a series of murders and you have a very compelling novel. Mrs Duszejko starts investigating, drawing together facts and suppositions based upon birth dates and star signs. The first to tumble is Big Foot, choking on a deer bone. As more hunters fall, Duszejko is convinced that this is the revenge of the animals, that they have risen up against the human hunters who pursue them mercilessly. As the net tightens, the villagers become increasingly paranoid, and rumours of corruption and bribery are rife. This is a blackly comic novel which investigates pressing ideas about the nature of traditions, cultural stereotypes and the role of the outsider, the hypocrisy of the church and other institutions of authority, and the impact of development on ecological structures. As Duszejko gets closer to the truth, her Ailments (never fully explained) become increasingly severe and her accusations extreme. Ostracised by her community she is considered a 'mad' woman. Yet it is her insistence that will lead to a revelation that will shock everyone, including her few loyal friends. Throughout the novel there are references to Blake’s writings: each chapter starts with a quoted verse, and the title of the book comes directly from Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’. Olga Tokarczuk’s second book to appear in translation is an intriguing and feisty exploration of fate and free will, of cultural politics and personal endeavours, of injustice and ultimate revenge.
“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses.” Upon entering the room of her apartment that had been inhabited by her maid, the narrator is frightened by a large cockroach emerging from the wardrobe and shuts the door upon it. This act of violence creates a bond of association between the two, a bond which language-based thought is not able to withstand, and, as the narrator looks into the face of the cockroach and at the white paste that oozes from its fatal wound, she becomes indistinguishable from the cockroach and indeed from all life, she becomes what she terms 'neutral', not individuated by the spurious but 'useful' concepts of identity and time. "Until the moment of seeing the roach I'd always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn't get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona." Her mental disintegration is both a symptom of and an escape from life traumas that are barely hinted at (an abortion, a lost lover), and her experience with the cockroach entails a relinquishment of everything she had thought of as herself. The ecstatic and the horrific cannot be distinguished from one another. Only thinking and the use of language can keep this reality at bay. "I was abandoning my human organisation — to enter that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality." But, of course, the relation of her experience is in itself a feat of language: perhaps it is through the failure of language to reach further that the edges of experience that the shape of experience may be conveyed. "Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. ... The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language." After slowing time down with great austerity in the first two thirds of the novel, Lispector has her narrator progress into a delirium of religious and metaphorical ravings, which, for me, demonstrates how 'profundity' (as so precisely and compellingly delineated in the first part) has no certain point of delineation from madness (though I am not entirely sure that this was the author's intention (and I must say that the novel lost my unreserved admiration at this point)). The novel, and the narrator's identification with the cockroach, culminates in the narrator taking into her mouth, as a kind of communion, some of the crushed insect's innards.
Which of these six excellent books will be awarded the Booker Prize this year?
Read them all, and let us know what you think!
JAMES by Percival Everett
What the judges said: “A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.
ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey
What the judges said: “Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”
CREATION LAKE by Rachel Kushner
What the judges said: “Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.”
HELD by Anne Michaels
What the judges said: “The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.
THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden
What the judges said: “Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.”
STONE YARD DEVOTIONAL by Charlotte Wood
What the judges said: “Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.”
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13 September 2024