NEW RELEASES
Release these books and, with them, yourself.
At once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, a thrilling police procedural, a philosophical meditation on liberty, and a counter-culture bildungsroman, The Fountain in the Forest takes a traditional crime narrative and undermines its every preconception, resulting in a head-spinning multi-leveled metaphysical wonder that loses none of the pace and intrigue of the pulp form upon which it is based.
>> Chat.
Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.
"Murmur is a profound meditation on what machine consciousness might mean, the implications of AI, where it will all lead. It’s one of the big stories of our time, though no one else has treated it with such depth and originality." – Peter Blegvad
>> You can enthuse about this book in the snow.
>> Thomas reviews Will Eaves' The Absent Therapist.
A hugely enjoyable, unstoppable and unconstrained excitation both of language itself and of its referents, social mores and particularities.
"I'm besotted with this beguiling, hilarious, rollocking, language-metamorphosing novel. The future of the queer avant-garde is safe with Isabel Waidner." - Olivia Laing
Short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> The author reads an extract.
>> Read an extract yourself.
>> Interview.
"In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past, those that are lost and those, fewer, that remain: on what, in a late work, Beckett beautifully reduced to 'time and grief and self, so-called'. Retracing his steps through his own life and the lives of the family in the midst of which he grew up, Brian Dillon takes for guides some of the great connoisseurs of melancholy, from St Augustine to W. G. Sebald, by way of Sir Thomas Browne and Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. The result is a deeply moving testament, free of sentimentality and evasion, to life's intricacies and the pleasures and the inevitable pains they entail. In defiance of so much that is ephemeral, this is a book that will live." - John Banville,
Can relationships be understood in terms of set theory? How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop and skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator's attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
"Bicecci's experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political repression, and epistemological crises." - Publisher's Weekly
>> "A visual artist who also writes."
>> The author's website.
"In this memoir of a translator’s adventures, Mireille Gansel shows us what it means to enter another language through its culture, and to enter the life of another culture through its language. A sensitive and insightful book, which illuminates the difficult, and often underestimated task of translation—and the role of literature in making for a more interconnected and humane world." – Eva Hoffman
"A history not just of twentieth century poetry but of that dark century itself, from the rise of the Nazis to the American bombing of North Vietnam, and yields too a rare insight into the nature of language and the splendours and limitations of translation." – Gabriel Josipovici
"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea." Ruefle, despite this, provides an most approachable primer to her natural element.
After reading only Beckett for three years, Coffey splices together his ruminations on the writer and his works with media accounts of torture and terrorism, occurrences in his own life and speculations on the nature of literary fame to create a fractured but prismatic work in which casts light in all directions and demonstrates how Beckett's work continues to be a useful thinking tool for the ailments of modern life. The work is structured according to a sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes to the unpublished 'The Long Observation of the Ray'.
"Coffey’s book speaks to how contemporary writers might stage an unmaking and remaking of form, serving as an ethical reminder of authorial limitations and of the porousness between the worlds we create and the political reality in which we live. By breaking rules of genre and narrative, by embracing experimental form, Coffey’s work raises questions about how contemporary artists might work to resist the status quo through a subversive, fragmentary style that makes it impossible for us to look away from our political reality. Now, more than ever, we have much to learn from Beckett." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"All the slipshod magnificence and crazy wonder of the late, venerated American writer are present in this posthumous collection of short stories." - Observer
A lively novel exploring the complex interplay of grief, race and gender, national and individual identities, and the struggle to personhood in a society whose currency is labels.
"Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life - wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons's novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored." - Paul Beatty
"Luminescent. Sometimes fierce and angry, other times quiet and tender." - Independent
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter). Herman, the other novella in this book, was written earlier in Krasznahorkai’s career, yet deals with many of the same themes. The two versions, reminiscent at times of Kafka, tell of a master trapper whose disgust at his calling is turned upon his own species as the compounding of his exterminations creates a momentum from which neither he nor others can be released. What remains but the consequential force of past actions when their rationale has proven spurious?
>> Also available: lovely hardback.
Slipping between verse and prose but maintaining perfect cadence, Jenner's poems are steeped in the ethos of the Classical Greece of which he is a scholar, but address the contemporary, the personal and the particular with a tenderness and an intimacy from which pathos and tragedy are never far distant.
"It is a labyrinthine house of language with many rooms that Jenner inhabits and what he finds there is never less than (ordinarily) surprising and provocative." - Michael Harlow
Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf: 'outsiders', 'outlaws', 'outcasts'. A woman's reputation was her security and each of these five lost it (to the benefit of posterity).
"Cooking plants is a uniquely different art from cooking meat or fish - it requires not only a solid grounding in traditional cooking techniques, but also a deeper understanding of new techniques specific to plant based cookery." Nicely presented.
As children in Calcutta, Ashim and Abhay made a small mistake that split their family forever. Thirty years later, Ashim has re-entered his brother's life, with blame and retribution on his mind. It seems nothing short of smashing Abhay's happy home in New Zealand will make good the damage from the past. At least, this is what Abhay and his wife Lena are certain is happening.
"In his fifth novel, Indian-born, New Zealand-based author Rajorshi Chakraborti skilfully amps up the tension, showing how easily fear can shove reason out the window, even in smart, seemingly self-aware people.It's an absorbing, gripping read that is ultimately about the importance of family and the emotional labour required to create deep, honest connections." - New Zealand Listener
"A compelling book about the dislocation of belonging, geography, culture and, ultimately, memory." - Dominion Post
>> Read an extract.
>> An interview with the author.
Psychoanalysis: The impossible profession by Janet Malcolm $25
What is psychoanalysis? Why do people become analysts? Why do people visit analysts? Can psychoanalysis help anyone? What risks does it pose to both patient and analyst?
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum-Cleaner, A family memoir by Meir Shalev $30
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
The King is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón $23
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Rāwāhi by Briar Wood $25
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a new astronomy at the South Pole by Mark Bowen $37
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
Trajectory by Richard Russo $37
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone $20
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
Flora Magnifica: The art of flowers in four seasons by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki $70
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
Peonies by Jane Eastoe $45
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
Look What You Made Me Do by Helen Walmsley-Johnson $38
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg $28
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
The End of Epidemics by Jonathan D. Quick $38
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
Tomorrow by Elisabeth Russell Taylor $23
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Song of the Dolphin Boy by Elizabeth Laird $20
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
A charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev's birth, where her Jewish grandmother settled when moving from Russia to Palestine in 1923.
An affecting collection of stories, all concerning the results of forced migration and the convergence of fates in New York.
Short-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (poetry section).
Since 2010, at the geographic South Pole, 'IceCube', a cubic kilometer of clear ice a couple of kilometers below the surface has been used to detect extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos and provide new data about the universe. Neutrino astronomy is an exciting field, still in its infancy.
A collection of short stories, extending the range of the author of Everybody's Fool (and, indeed, Nobody's Fool).
"Thoughtful and soulful. Trajectory will abruptly break your heart. That's what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again." - New York Times
A story about an eagle huntress, an inventor and an organ made of icicles, but also a story about belonging, even at the very edges of our world.
A stunning, luscious book of unusual flower arrangements, a collaboration between a flower artist and a botanical photographer. Come and see this book.
We like peonies. There are over 50 varieties photographed and described in this book.
A book that will do much to raise awareness of psychological abuse within relationships.
First published in 1824, this novel is not only a savage psychological portrayal of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism but, in its exploration of identity-supplanting doubles, unreliable narrators and embedded narratives, prefigured many of the concerns of the post-modern novel. Memorable.
Dr Quick considers looming epidemics to be the greatest current threat to humanity, but he prescribes a way they can be avoided.
A Jewish refugee living in London returns every year to the Danish island of Møn where her family once had idyllic holiday homes and where, absorbed in their own happiness, for too long they ignored the gathering storm of antisemitism in their German home town. A subtly affecting and nicely structured novel.
Finn feels a much stronger affinity with the dolphins off Stromhead than with his fellow humans. Can he help both, and find a place for himself?
Albert's life is very constrained and, well, boring, until his Grandmother Z whisks him off on her motorcycle on a wonderful adventure.
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