In this 'non-coming of age tale', a young woman travels from Argentina to Germany under pressure of emotional conflicts. When she arrives, she is constantly exposed to all kinds of adventures and incidents, some funny, others tragic, but never fully understands her situation and never learns from her circumstances. The book is a wonderfully resonant exploration of displacement and the effects of political repression.
>>"No matter where I go, I'm still broken."
A nuanced and perceptive graphic novel biography of the nuanced and perceptive thinker.
"Incredible." - Deborah Levy
“Ken Krimstein's deeply moving graphic memoir about the life and thoughts of philosopher Hannah Arendt is not only about Hannah Arendt. It's also, through her words, about how to live in the world, the meaning of freedom, the perils of totalitarianism, and our power as human beings to think about things and not just act blindly. Krimstein explains Arendt's ideas with clarity, wit, and enormous erudition, and they still resonate.” – Roz Chast
>> Who was Hannah Arendt?
>> On drawing the graphic novel.
Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone. Tentacle plunges headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art.
>> Read an excerpt.
Thirty years ago, Waring's Counting for Nothing was acclaimed (and vilified) internationally for demonstrating how the global economy depended upon the unpaid work done by women world-wide. What is her take on the newly fashionable concept of well-being economics, whereby worth is calculated by its contributions to national well-being? Will this approach give value to women's work?
The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the Whanganui River. In Te Ahi Kā, photographer Martin Toft explores the deep physical and metaphysical relationships between the river and the Māori. In 1996 Toft spent six months in the middle and upper reaches of the Whanganui River in the King Country. Here he met Māori who were in the process of reversing the colonisation of their people and returning to their ancestral land, Mangapapapa, which is on the steep banks of the river inside Whanganui National Park. Returning twenty years later, Toft began to work on this book. Its narrative is situated within the context of the current Whanganui River Deed of Settlement, Ruruku Whakatupua and the projects led by local Māori to settle historical grievances with the government dating back to the 1870s. At the heart of it is the Whanganui tribes’ claim to the river, which is seen by them as both as an ancestor and as a source of both material and spiritual sustenance.
>> Look inside the book.
Mathias, a traveling watch salesman returns to the island of his youth with a desperate objective. As with many of Robbe-Grillet's novels, The Voyeur revolves around an apparent murder: throughout the novel, Mathias unfolds a newspaper clipping about the details of a young girl's murder and the discovery of her body among the seaside rocks. Mathias' relationship with a dead girl, possibly that hinted at in the story, is obliquely revealed in the course of the novel so that we are never actually sure if Mathias is a killer or simply a person who fantasises about killing.
In 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a West German journalist travels to East Prussia to cover the route of a car rally. There, surrounded by Nazi-era architecture in the area he was born in 1945, he confronts his own family complicity in the shameful past. From the author of All For Nothing.
A celebration of modern German home cooking from Anja Dunk’s young family kitchen. Strudel, Noodles and Dumplings is a long-awaited revival of this national cuisine, proving that there is more to German food than Bratwurst and Black Forest gateau. Anja Dunk’s German food is gently spiced, smoky and deeply savoury. From recipes such as whole-wheat buttermilk waffles to caraway roast pork and red cabbage, quince and apple slaw, her way of cooking is vibrant, quick and deeply intertwined with the seasons and the weather. Featuring over 200 recipes for the everyday family table, as well as for snacks and special occasions, Anja’s cook book is an essential guide to all the basics of German cuisine, providing inspiration for appetising and comforting meals throughout the year.
>> To live the good life.
The author of the remarkable The Silk Roads, which realigned world history to the vital importance of Central Asia, extends his assessment and speculates on the importance of these routes of flow today. "All roads used to lead to Rome. Today, they lead to Beijing."
>>There is also a beautifully illustrated children's edition of The Silk Roads.
Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. "Far from dragging politics into art," he wrote in 1953, "art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017. Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger's development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s to Berger's reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left.
>> Ali Smith on John Berger.
The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealised. The Xenofeminist Manifesto calls for the scaling up of feminism. Contemporary feminism, it contends, is limited by its predominant investment in local and micropolitical action. What is needed is a feminism capable of systemic intervention. The Xenofeminist Manifesto proposes that such a feminism must start from a new universal - one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male - with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform. Drawing on queer and transfeminist theory, as well as philosophical rationalism, against nature and biological essentialism, the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks instead invest in alienation and the anti-natural, in seizing technology and in embracing the desire for an alien future. "If nature is unjust, change nature."
>> Visit the Xenofeminist website.
>> The question of will.
45 exemplary houses are featured, with excellent photographs and floor plans. Full of good ideas, design solutions and Scandinavian aesthetic.
A stunning visual autobiography, revealing a breadth and depth of talent and thinking even beyond what you had already suspected. Unprecedented and intimate.
>> Typo talk.
>> Visit Oliver Jeffers World.
The world has been shown / to be upside down, / and now it's about / to turn inside out.
At last, in stable form, the first two cantos to follow the Prologue written to mark the millennium.
The Michelin star chef shares his gastronomic vision, springing from the area at meeting of France and Italy on the shores of the Mediterranean. Meet the local suppliers of Mauro's ingredients, try the recipes, drool over the photography.
Virginia Barkeley is a nice, well brought-up girl. So what is she doing wandering through a snow storm in the middle of the night, blind drunk and covered in someone else’s blood? When Claude Margolis’s body is found a quarter of a mile away with half-a-dozen stab wounds to the neck, suddenly Virginia doesn’t seem such a nice girl after all. Her only hope is Meecham, the cynical small-town lawyer hired as her defence. But how can he believe in Virginia’s innocence when even she can’t be sure what happened that night? And when the answer seems to fall into his lap, why won’t he just walk away?
"One of the most original and vital voices in all of American crime fiction." - Laura Lippman
Exhaustion and anxiety begin to take their toll on the parents of a young child. Emma's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and when she suddenly disappears, Apollo sets off through a bizarrely mutated New York searching for a wife and child he can no longer even recognise. The novel explores issues of race, anxiety, parenthood, abandonment and trust.
Winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award
The first Polynesian and European settlers both came to New Zealand by sea, and the sea has continued to dominate our cultural history. Nowhere in New Zealand is far from the sea, and every aspect of our lives is lived in relation to it.
>> Sarah Ell in the radio.
Do termites hold the key to restoring nature's order, saving our rivers and oceans from toxicity and curing cancer?
The coast is a scribble. Stars are stored in a wooden box on my shelf. It is more black than white here. Like algebra but colder.
The hut's walls are a ghetto of mice. Those I catch become whiskers of smoke in the firebox.
I attend to the scratching radio.
This is not my dream.
Pope's new collection of poems is informed by the human history of New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands.
"These taut, sparely written poems trust the reader to engage with their carefully reconstructed and re-imagined histories histories, incidents and characters." - Harry Ricketts
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. An eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself were all involved. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled – and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. Written in the early 1940s, this historical study is the last major work of the Hungarian Jewish writer before he was taken to Balf concentration camp, where he was beaten to death in 1945.
For Alain Bertho, the mounting chaos we see today is driven by the weakening of states’ legitimacy under the pressure of globalisation, and by the hypocrisy of the elites who beat the drum of 'security measures,' even as they sow the seeds of violence around the world. Today’s youth are the lost children of neoliberal globalisation, the inheritors of the political and human chaos it produces. When they find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, their revolt tends to take the paths of martyrdom and despair. The answer, Bertho argues, is a new radicalism, able to inspire a collective hope in the future.
Collected lyrics, with an introduction by David Mitchell.
>> Remember?
Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Chernaik sheds new light on Schumann's life and music, his sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the true facts behind his courtship of his wife Clara and the opposition of her monstrous father, and the ways in which the crises of his life, his dreams and fantasies, entered his music.
>> 'Träumerei' for cello and piano.
Down the Bay: A natural and cultural history of the Abel Tasman National Park by Philip Simpson $80
A huge amount of fun (and inadvertent learning) will be had from these madcap activities based around works in the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.
No comments:
Post a Comment