Friday, 3 December 2021

 NEW RELEASES

Some Answers Without Questions by Lavinia Greenlaw          $28
Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of what enables anyone — but a woman and an artist in particular — to create and record even when not invited to do so. Some Answers Without Questions is the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter - and not being asked the ones that do.

The Ladies' Home Haiku Book by Elizabeth McNaughtan Williams, illustrated by John Helle-Nielsen                $25
Is it the case that repetitive tasks of quotidian cleaning better distill our existential predicaments than the loftiest theoretical musings? Possibly, but, be that as it may, this little book of delightfully sprightly, concisely insightful verse, matched with equally amusing illustrations, will improve the mood of anyone who reads it. 
>>And there are cards!! 

Byobu by Ida Vitale (translated by Sean Manning)            $34
a story's existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations.
Byobu's every interaction trembles with possibility and faint menace. A crack in the walls of his house, marring it forever, means he must burn it down. A stoplight asks what the value of obedience is, what hopefulness it contains, and what insensible anarchy it defies. In brief episodes, aphorisms, and moments of spiritual turbulence and gentle scrutiny, reside a wealth of habits, worries, curiosities, pleasures, peculiarities, and efforts to understand. Representative of the modesty and complexity of Ida Vitale's poetic universe, Byobu flushes the world with meaning and playfully offers another way of inhabiting the everyday.
The Latin American Cookbook by Virgilio Martínez            $70
Strong on regional cuisines and variations, this book brings together 600 remarkable recipes expressing the vibrancy of Latin America and its myriad influences — indigenous, European, Asian and beyond. 
Excavate! The wonderful and frightening world of The Fall by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley       $55
Over the course of their prolific forty-year career The Fall were consistently one of the most influential and idiosyncratic groups in Britain, with frontman Mark E. Smith hailed as one of the sharpest lyricists. Following Smith's death in January 2018, there was an outpouring of tributes from a surprising spectrum of admirers. With contributions from Adelle Stripe, Dan Fox, Elain Harwood, Mark Fisher, Ian Penman and others, alongside never-before seen artwork, photographs, and hand-written material from Smith and the band, Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton book unpack and make sense of the strangely fascinating landscape of The Fall.
Something Out of Place: Women and disgust by Eimear McBride       $23
McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. She asks, —Are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? —How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? —In this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward?
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett          $33
Essays exploring family, friendship, marriage, failure, success — and how all these forces have shaped her as a writer.
>>What matters most? 
Landfall 242 edited by Linley Edmeades          $30
Results from the Landfall Essay Competition 2021, Caselburg Trust International Poetry Prize 2021 and the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2021. Art: Conor Clarke, Zina Swanson, et al. Non-fiction: Justine Whitfield, Diane Comer, Andrew Dean, Melody Nixon, Sarah Natalie Webster. Poetry:
Ruth Arnison, Wanda Barker, Owen Bullock, Nathaniel Calhoun, Medb Charleton, Ruth Corkill, Molly Crighton, Mark Edgecombe, David Eggleton, Summer Gooding, Michael Hall, Trevor Hayes, Jenna Heller, Bronte Heron, Hayley Rata Heyes, Zoë Higgins, Lily Holloway, Erik Kennedy, Megan Kitching, Wes Lee, Mary Macpherson, Frankie McMillan, Vana Manasiadis, Cilla McQueen, Rebecca Nash, Janet Newman, Claire Orchard, Robyn Maree Pickens, Hayden Pyke, Derek Schulz, Antonia Smith, Elizabeth Smither, Nicola Thorstensen, Richard von Sturmer, Sophia Wilson, E Wen Wong, Sebastien Woolf, Nicholas Wright. Fiction: Joanna Cho, Olly Clifton, Isabel Haarhaus, Bree Huntley, Eileen Kennedy, Scott Menzies, Airana Ngarewa, James Pasley, Fergus Porteous, Anna Reed, J.D. Robertson.
The Coward by Jarred McGinnis          $33
After a car accident Jarred discovers he'll never walk again. Confined to a 'giant roller-skate', he finds himself with neither money nor job. Worse still, he's forced to live back home with the father he hasn't spoken to in ten years. Add in a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and the fact that total strangers now treat him like he's an idiot, it's a recipe for self-destruction. How can he stop himself careering out of control? As he tries to piece his life together again, he looks back over his past - the tragedy that blasted his family apart, why he ran away, the damage he's caused himself and others - and starts to wonder whether, maybe, things don't always have to stay broken after all.
Huia Short Stories 14: Contemporary Māori fiction        $25
An exciting collection of emerging writers in te reo Māori and English. 




Secret Selves: A history of our inner space by Stephen Prickett        $44
Our inner sense of self seems a natural and permanent part of being human, but it is in fact surprisingly new. Whilst confessional religious writings, from Augustine to Jane Austen, or even diaries of 20th-century Holocaust victims, have explored inwards as part of a path to self-discovery, our inner space has expanded beyond any possible personal experience. This development has enhanced our capacity not merely to write about what we have never seen, but even to create fantasies and impossible fictions around them. Yet our secret selves can also be a source of terror. The fringes of our inner worlds are often porous, ill-defined and susceptible to frightening forms of external control.
Murakami T: The shirts I love by Haruki Murakami           $38
The literary icon opens his eclectic closet. Here are photographs of Murakami's extensive and personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public.


The Night Life of Trees by Bhajju Shayam, Durga Bai, and Ramsingh Urveti         $70
An exquisite hand-bound and screen-printed book of paintings by three of the finest artists of the Gond tribal art tradition. The Gonds, a tribe of central India, are traditionally forest dwellers. They believe that trees are hard at work during the day providing shelter and nourishment to all. Only when night falls can they finally rest, and their spirits reveal themselves. These luminous spirits are captured in The Night Life of Trees, a fascinating and haunting foray into the Gond imagination. Each painting is accompanied by its own poetic tale, myth or lore, narrated by the artists themselves, which recreate the familiarity and awe with which the Gond people view the natural world. Screen-printed by hand on black paper, every page of this limited-edition book is an original print. 
>>How the book was printed
Hogarth: Life in progress by Jacqueline Riding         $45
A major new biography of the artist who represents the texture of Georgian London in the popular imagination. 

Class of '37: Growing up before the war by Claire Langhamer and Hester Barron        $40
It is 1937 in a northern mill-town and a class of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are writing about their lives, their world, and the things that matter to them. They tell of cobbled streets and crowded homes; the Coronation festivities and holidays to Blackpool; laughter and fun alongside poverty and hardship. They are destined for the cotton mill but they dream of being film stars. Class of '37 uses the writing of these girls, as collected by the research organisation Mass Observation, to rediscover this lost world, transporting readers back in time to a smoky industrial town in an era before the introduction of a Welfare State.





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