NEW RELEASES
Joanna Paul was intensely responsive to the world around her, she depicted her surroundings, constantly reworking the conventions of drawing and watercolour painting to capture something of inward experience. Paul also documented her environment in photographs and experimental short films, and published poetry, criticism and non-fiction. Her impulse was towards complexity in honouring the mystery she perceived in her subject, whether it was a domestic still life, the view from her kitchen window, or one of her children. She brought an innovative interdisciplinary approach to her practice, often blurring the boundaries between media. This beautiful book illuminates the whole of Paul's career.
A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio. In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas. What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos.
“In the middle ages, human skin was seen as a blanket stretched to cover a secret, inner life, writes Ayşegül Savaş. Reading White on White for me is like an outer skin which you open layer by layer as you read; gentle, mysterious and profound.” —Marina Abramović
“Ayşegül Savaş’s White on White is marvellous, as elegant as an opaque sheet of ice that belies the swift and turbulent waters beneath.” —Lauren Groff
“The story at the heart of Ayşegül Savaş’s White on White is— like the title— subtly camouflaged. Savaş’s characters watch each other as they avoid themselves, in a slow, acute and obliterating double portrait." —Leanne Shapton
A boy witnesses a violent confrontation in a remote part of town in the state of Cauca, Colombia. Minutes later, someone arrives at the scene to clear up all trace of the incident. No one in town claims to have heard or seen anything, and yet an anonymous accusation launches a dangerous investigation that unfolds within the corrupt world of the Christian churches of Latin America. The story reveals the inequality and violence that seem to govern an entire country,
Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story. Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.
"Impressive. I ended Learwife feeling utterly involved: moved and exhausted." —Guardian
From Catholic Ireland in the '70s, '80s and '90s to sparkling Auckland in the first years of the new millennium, Grand is a story of the invisible ties that bind us, of bitter legacies handed down through the generations, and of the leap of faith it takes to change them.
"Never satisfied to simply tell a story, Wideman continues to push form, with stories within stories, sentences that rise like a jazz solo with every connecting clause, voices that reflect who he is and where he's from, and an exploration of time that entangles past and present. Whether historical or contemporary, intimate or expansive, the stories here represent a pioneering American writer whose innovation and imagination know no bounds. Undoubtedly the foremost chronicler of the urban African-American experience. A master storyteller, Wideman is both a witness and a prophet." —Caryl Phillips
"Wideman's stories have a wary, brooding spirit, a lonely intelligence. They carry a real but atrophied affection for America. He airs the problems of consciousness, including the fragile contingency of our existence." —Dwight Garner
Whimsical and sinister, each story by Silvina Ocampo is like a knife of spun sugar that can still pierce between your ribs. A thief breaks into the house of a psychic with disastrous results, a bride has her personality subsumed by the previous occupant of her home, and two men switch destinies for a change of pace. The Impostor offers a comprehensive collection from one of the twentieth century's great forgotten writers. Here are tales of doubles and living dolls, angels and demons, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death.
A tender Greek modern classic of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a ramshackle old house with their divorced mother are flirtatious, hot-headed Maria, beautiful but distant Infanta, and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to understand the strange ways of adults and decide what kind of adults they hope to become.
Magritte: A life by Alex Danchev $65
I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke $25
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield $38
Night Race to Kawau by Tessa Duder $20
The Illustrated Etymologicon: A circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language by Mark Forsyth $45
Making Numbers Count: The art and science of communicating numbers by Karla Starr and Chip Heath $37
How to Read a Dress: A guide to changing fashion from the 16th to the 21st century by Lydia Edwards $55
On Democracy by Robert A. Dahl $36
The Islands by Emily Brugman $33
Formica by Maggie Rainey-Smith $25
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei $55
Gale's seventeenth novel is his first fully historical one since A Place Called Winter. It is based around the known facts of the boyhood and youth of the great Cornish poet, Charles Causley and the life of the mother who raised him singlehandedly. Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius. As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work. Mother's Boy is the story of a man who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past.
>>Charles Causley, poet.
>>Charles Causley, poet.
Danchev makes a compelling case for Magritte as the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world. Magritte's surreal sensibility, deadpan melodrama, and fine-tuned outrageousness have become an inescapable part of our visual landscape.
The Poet Laurate of Punk's autobiography suitably displays his acerbic wit, encyclopedic knowledge of both the subtleties and unsubtleties of twentieth cenutry popular culture, and his agile writing style. Enjoyable and insightful, and now in paperback.
>>The hardback is still available, too.
Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland $33
Esther's Notebooks: Tales from my twelve-year-old life by Riad Satouf (translated by Sam Taylor) $28
Speculative short stories set in an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Robots used as human proxies in a war become driven by all-too-human desires; Kill Parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on inter-breeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity. Through transfigured bodies and impossible encounters, Newland brings a sharp, fresh eye to age-old themes of the human capacity for greed, ambition and self-destruction, strength and resilience.
A fun and accessible look at numbers, filled with great facts and fascinating insights into numbers, their history and the mathematicians who made key breakthroughs in their fields. From how long it would take to count to a billion, to why bubbles are always round, to what the ham sandwich theorem is, this book answers all these questions and many many more.
Every week, the Parisian comic book artist Riad Sattouf has a chat with his friend's daughter, Esther. She tells him about her life, about school, her friends, her hopes, dreams and fears, and then he works it up into a comic strip. This book consists of 52 of those strips, telling between them the story of a year in the life of this sharp, spirited and hilarious child. The result is a moving, insightful and utterly addictive glimpse into the real lives of children growing up in today's world.
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. To have the woman she loves back should mean a return to normal life, but Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realise that the life that they had might be gone.
What started as an exciting challenge turns into a nightmare when a gale unexpectedly blows up during the night race to Kawau Island. Sam and her mother suddenly find themselves in charge of their yacht with a dangerous task ahead of them. Will Sam be able to save her family? A new edition of this classic story.
A good overview of Noam Chomsky's political thought. In sixteen extended talks with Alternative Radio's David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky explains why the 'war on drugs' is really a war on poor people; how attacks on political correctness are attacks on independent thought; how historical revisionism has recast the United States as the victim in the Vietnam War.
The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? Nice illustrated hardback 10th anniversary edition.
"Witty and erudite. Stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless." —Independent
Until recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five. While the numbers in our world have become increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. Yet the ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more. So how can we effectively translate numbers and statistics so that the data comes alive?
With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is a useful guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history - as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This new edition includes additional styles to illustrate and explain the journey between one style and another; larger images to allow closer investigation of details of dress; examples of lower and working-class, as well as middle-class, clothing; and a completely new chapter covering the 1980s to 2020.
Arising from his studies of decision-making structures in institutions, cities and nations, Dahl delineates what constitutes a democracy and details the mechanisms by which competing interests may approach this ideal.
There are few places wilder than Little Rat, a small island in an archipelago off the coast of Western Australia. Beautiful, harsh and lonely, the landscape is still haunted by the many ships that have wrecked on its reefs across the centuries. Yet it is here that the Saari family try to build their future, thousands of miles from the cold lowlands of Finland. A crayfishing family, Onni and his wife Alva work hard. Against this spectacular and brutal backdrop, small tragedies and immense joys are shared by the fishing families of Little Rat: Alva makes a perilous journey across rough seas with a tiny newborn baby, where, against all odds, she feels safe; their young daughter Hilda watches as a small boy tumbles from a jetty and very nearly drowns; an old story of shipwreck and mutiny intrigues two adolescent boys; a mysterious and tortured fisherman rows into the eye of a storm; and Hilda, on the brink of womanhood, comes to know the cruelty and the ecstasy of desire, while distances expand between her and her migrant parents.
A memoir in poems. Formica begins in 1950s Richmond with the author’s family struggling in the aftermath of a war that took her father to Crete to fight and then Poland as a prisoner of war. At the Formica kitchen table, Maggie’s mother is reciting poems while chopping the veggies for tea. Maggie listens while tying her boots for marching practice. Poems follow her as she makes her way in the world – working as a typist, doing her OE, becoming a wife, a mother and grandmother.
The artist's memoir both presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years and illuminates his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as 'Little Siberia', where poet Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labour cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol.
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