NEW RELEASES
for a new year
"This collection of stories – a masterpiece of invention, utterly different from everything else – is hugely unsettling and affecting: to meet Krasznahorkai’s characters, to read his breathless, twisting sentences, is to feel altered." - The Guardian
"The narrators in The World Goes On find themselves wandering in a world of forgotten revelations and corrupted messages, blindly groping toward ineffable essences that forever remain out of reach." - Music & Literature
As a practicing mortician in a society that fears and seldom looks directly at death, Doughty is keenly curious about societies that have a greater intimacy with and acceptance of our inescapable fate. In this book she travels the world surveying the death practices, mourning rituals and attitudes to mortality of a wide range of cultures.
Do we overlook wonder in the modern world? This remarkable illustrated book reawakens our curiosity about the world we live in, and about our place in it.
"Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end.” - Benoit Mandelbrot
A fictional pseudobiography of Mandelbrot as he flees into deep mathematics to escape the rise of Hitler. Drawn into the infinite promulgations of formulae, he sinks into secret dimensions and unknown wonders.
>> Some pleasantly zoomable fractals.
In Victorian operating theatres, half the patients failed to survive the experience. This was an era when a broken leg could lead to amputation, when surgeons often lacked university degrees, and were still known to ransack cemeteries to find cadavers. While the discovery of anaesthesia somewhat lessened the misery for patients, it actually led to more deaths, as surgeons took greater risks. Doctors remained baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. Joseph Lister, a young Quaker surgeon made the claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be treated with antiseptics.
A 200th anniversary edition, fully and imaginatively illustrated.
>> Visit the illustrator's website (recommended).
>> Plunkert animation.
More than thirty young and passionate ceramicists in New York, London, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Sydney and Sao Paulo introduce us to their work, their studios and their inspiration. Beautifully photographed and presented.
A compilation of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics and genreless pieces selected by US high-school students and notable for its range and liveliness.
"One wonders how the world might be different if works in The Best American Nonrequired Reading were indeed required." - USA Today
Geography is in greater flux than ever, with what qualifies as a place being redefined with every artificial island, hidden settlement, proto-state and micro-nation. Bonnett takes us just beyond the reach of maps, and considers the emergence of new trends in geographic thinking.
The awful inevitability with which Italy stumbled its way into a war for which they were ill prepared and largely unenthusiastic is documented here by one of the twentieth century's great diarists.
Menaced on all sides by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Vichy France and Francoist Spain, Gibraltar had to let thousands of people cross its frontier to work every day. Among them came spies and saboteurs, attempting to blow up its 25 miles of secret tunnels. In 1942, Gibraltar became US General Eisenhower's HQ for the invasion of North Africa, the campaign that led to Allied victory in the Mediterranean.
This insightful book studies the impact of the closure of the General Motors factory in Janesville, Wisconsin, upon the workers, families, communities, educators, support workers and local businesses, and reveals a wider variety of responses than we might assume.
"Moving and magnificently well-researched. Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis." - The New York Times
Seventeen-year-old Alex Byrd is about to have the worst day of her life, and the best. A routine blood test that will reveal her leukaemia has returned, but she also meets Jamie Orange. A well-written YA novel from the NZ author of Pieces of You about finding love on the borders of life and death.
"Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with love and the loss of love, with memory and pain. Full of scenes that are rendered with exquisite accuracy and care, allowing the most detailed physical descriptions to be placed against the possibility of a rich spiritual life, this is a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers." - Colm Toibin
Where does writing come from? What is the relationship between the writer and her source of inspiration? In this series of incisive critical and personal essays, Oates examines her own writing practice and that of Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and many others.
"Oates's writing has always seemed effortless: urgent, unafraid, torrential. She writes like a woman who walks into rough country and doesn't look back." - The New York Times
A very helpful and affirming book written by the parent of an autistic girl to help other parents and professionals better understand the needs and gifts of autistic children.
>> The author's website.
>> Other books about autism at VOLUME.
Why are sailors seven times more likely to suffer from mental illness than the rest of the population? Interesting.
Notable for its range of writing exercises devised specifically for those writing for children.
Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. In 1944 the arrive at Auschwitz and become part the experimental population of twins known as 'Mengele's Zoo'. What happens when one of twins disappears?
"Mischling is a paradox. It's a beautiful novel about the most odious of crimes, it's a deeply researched act of remembrance that somehow carries the lightness of a fairy tale, and it's a coming-of-age story about children who aren't allowed to come of age. If your soul can survive the journey, you'll be rewarded by one of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year." - Anthony Doerr
Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, and yet manages to induce great sympathy for the ways in which her characters desperately attempt to shore up their dissolving realities.
Now in paperback.
>> Williams’s essay on writing, ‘Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks’, has the same merciless sympathy as her stories.
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