NEW RELEASES
Gnanalingam's last two novels have been short-listed for the Acorn Prize in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In his new novel, Kavita is stuck in a dead-end marriage. A parent of two small kids, she is the family’s main breadwinner. An old flame unexpectedly offers her a week away in Waiheke. If she were to go, she’s not sure when — or if — she’d come back. Gnanalingam's novels are notable for their authentic texture and insight into the lives of others.
>>Sprigs.
"A story is never an answer. A story is always a question." Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Ali Smith follows her wonderful 'Seasons' quartet, written in 'real time', with this further novel. Few writers can manage to be at the same time as angry and as playful as Ali Smith, and few can directly face the most depressing aspects of our present moment and find such hope in humanity. Lovely in hardback.
"A lockdown story of wayward genius. Lyrical visions alternate with fables and farce, history with Covid, in the scheme-busting fifth part of Smith's seasonal quartet." —The Guardian
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan $38
Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens $30
We Still Have the Telephone by Erica Van Horn $36
Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing (translated from Danish by Denise Newman) $28
Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin $36
The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw $37
The Very Last Interview by David Shields $38
Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl $38
The Man Who Tasted Words: Inside the strange and startling world of the senses by Guy Leschziner $38
Quarantine by Philippa Werry $20
all about love: new visions by bell hooks $30
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) $21
The British Surrealists by Desmond Morris $55
500 Chess Questions Answered by Andrew Soltis $35
"Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now." —Observer
Seasons by William Direen $20
Bill Direen's poetry diary spans a year on a strath an hour’s drive from Dunedin. It is written with a sharp eye for landscape, and a musician’s ear for the sounds of the Strath region, as it changes dramatically from drought to flood to extreme frosts and snow-bound winter. Begun after Direen returned to New Zealand from France, the poem is in three parts. It runs from autumn to autumn, blending description with personal micronarrative. Each copy of the book has a unique download code, offering the text combined with music by six New Zealand musicians.
Other listening:
>>World of the Winds (2021).
>>Moderation (1983).
Imagine a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others. Such a technology would seduce multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are 'counters' who track and exploit desires and there are 'eluders', those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. The Candy House is a bold imagining of a world that is moments away.
>>Everything was fine.
>>How much sharing is too much sharing?
“Jennifer Egan’s radiant new novel explores what role the imagination can still play in a world overwhelmed by technology." —Slate
>>What the forest remembers. >>Everything was fine.
>>How much sharing is too much sharing?
Down from Upland is a kitchen sink, domestic novel that opens at the precise moment the first Millennials find themselves raising a teenager. While flirting with an open marriage, Jacqui and Scott nudge their son on a more moderate course as he begins at a new high school and makes new friends. Skewering the best and worst of Wellington’s leafy middle class, the novel features public servants with varying degrees of integrity, precocious Wellington High students and a foreign lover at the end of a working holiday visa. Stephens's writing, as always, defies gravity as the present moment really gets away on us.
>>Read Stella's review of Rat King Landlord.
>>Read Stella's review of Rat King Landlord.
"My mother and I have been writing her obituary. We have been working on it for several years now. Before we started, she had already begun the project with my older sister. She wants to get it right." Assembling fragments of past and present Erica Van Horn describes a life laid out in detail, quietly registering the fuzziness of the line between eccentricity and madness. In this mosaic portrait, a singular everywoman emerges, whose immutable rituals exist on a par with an irrepressible anarchy. This delightful book suggests that the very details that never make it into obituaries are the ones that tell us the most about the person concerned.
>>Some words for living locally.
>>Some words for living locally.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, often noted as the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Following on from Wittgenstein 100 years later, Signe Gjessing updates and reimagines the Tractatus, marrying poetry with philosophy to test the boundaries of reality. This is poetry which exacts the logical consequence of philosophy, while locating beauty and significance in the 'nonsense' of the world.
"Signe Gjessing’s highly original reconfiguration of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus unfolds at once logically and lyrically on the trembling cusp where philosophy and poetry intersect. Her witty, haunting propositions shimmer between the profound and the puzzling, and beautifully enact Wallace Stevens’s assertion that ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation'." –Mark Ford
A tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene. One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family's crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in serious ways.
>>How do we stop repeating ourselves?
>>How do we stop repeating ourselves?
>>Blame game.
Ruth Shaw didn't exactly intend to become a bookseller, but she found herself the proprietor of two tiny bookshops in the tiny settlement of Manapouri. In this charming volume, Shaw weaves together accounts of characters who visit her bookshop, musings on her favourite books, and bittersweet stories from her remarkable and varied life before she became a bookseller. She has sailed through the Pacific for years, was held up by pirates, worked at Sydney's King's Cross with drug addicts and prostitutes, campaigned on numerous environmental issues, and worked the yacht Breaksea Girl as an expedition/tourist boat with her husband, Lance.
"An extraordinary story." —Shaun Bythell
>>How to open a bookshop.
>>How to open a bookshop.
David Shields (author of Reality Hunger) decided to gather every interview he's ever given, going back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he transcribed it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn't interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him—approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood, Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author—in this case, a late-middle-aged white man—is strangely, thrillingly absent.
The Poem: Lyric, sign, metre by Don Paterson $45
New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East, AD395—700 by Paul Stephenson $55
Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in AD 476, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of a late antique empire, the glittering Constantinople: New Rome. In this magisterial work, Stephenson charts the centuries surrounding this epic shift of power. He traces the cultural, social and political forces that led to the empire being ruled from a city straddling Europe and Asia, placing all into a rich natural and environmental context informed by the latest scientific research.
“Remixing and reimagining 2,000 of the most annoying questions he’s been asked during his 40-year writing life, David Shields’s The Very Last Interview is an often hilarious, operatically tragic sojourn across American cultural life. What do we expect of our writers, of intellectual history, of fame, of celebrity? All the answers are in the questions. Shields turns inside out whatever glamour remains attached to an artistic life in this book that’s at once charming and damning.” —Chris Kraus
“The moment I started reading this book, the hair went up on my neck. I blasted through it in a night, thrilled by the energy. Shields doesn’t wear out the form; it keeps doing remarkable tricks on the reader’s brain right to the finish. Stunning.” —Jonathan Lethem
In illuminating and engaging prose, Paterson offers his treatise on the making and the philosophy of 'the poem', unpicking the process of verse composition, exploring the mechanics of how a poem works and, essentially, what a poem is. His findings take the form of three essays that make up the three sections of the book: 'Lyric' attends to the sound of the poem; 'Sign' envisages ideas of poetic meaning; while 'Metre' studies its underlying rhythms.
"Both remarkable and irresistible." —Scottish Review of Books
>>Metre readings.
>>A word in your ear.
"Both remarkable and irresistible." —Scottish Review of Books
>>Metre readings.
>>A word in your ear.
Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in AD 476, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of a late antique empire, the glittering Constantinople: New Rome. In this magisterial work, Stephenson charts the centuries surrounding this epic shift of power. He traces the cultural, social and political forces that led to the empire being ruled from a city straddling Europe and Asia, placing all into a rich natural and environmental context informed by the latest scientific research.
On Valentine’s Day, after a night of red wine and pasta and planning for their future, Natasha Sholl and her partner Rob went to bed. A few hours later, at the age of 27, his heart stopped. Found, Wanting tells the story of Natasha’s attempt to rebuild her life in the wake of Rob’s sudden death, stumbling through the grief landscape and colliding with the cultural assumptions about the ‘right way’ to grieve.
>>What not to say to someone who's grieving.
>>What not to say to someone who's grieving.
The information you receive from your senses makes up your world. But that world does not exist. What we perceive to be the absolute truth of the world around us is a complex reconstruction, a virtual reality created by the complex machinations of our minds in tandem with the wiring of our nervous systems.
But what happens if that wiring goes awry? What happens if connections falter, or new and unexpected connections are made? Tiny shifts in the microbiology of our nervous systems can cause the world around us to shift and mutate, to become alien and unfamiliar.
New Zealand in 1936–37 is facing a pandemic of infantile paralysis, or polio, and nobody knows where it will strike next. When even the adults are afraid, Tom finds refuge in his dream—to run in the Olympics like his hero, Jack Lovelock. But it's the strength of some people closer to home that provides his biggest inspiration.
At her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance.
Two girls: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend and the only one who loves her selflessly, planning to leave, but not without Eve. Two boys: Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, deeply in love with Eve; Clélio, the neighbourhood tough, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France. All are desperate to escape the cycle of fear and violence in which they are trapped. A powerful young adult novel set in Mauritius.
"The most vivid novel I’ve read in ages, magnificently translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The gorgeous, profoundly poetic writing is completely mesmerizing and viscerally affecting: it gave me goose bumps several times. The narrative slowly escalates through brilliant and memorable scenes, as well as haunting inner monologues, to its glorious conclusion. There is something so triumphant and so powerful in the structure of Eve, and something so real and touching in these characters, each consistent, unexpected, thought-provoking and wonderful. A work of profound sympathy and deep desire." —Jennifer Croft, translator of Flights, 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>Read Thomas's review.
Fêted for their idiosyncratic and imaginative works, the surrealists marked a pivotal moment in the history of modern British art. Many banded together to form the British Surrealist Group, while others carved their own, independent paths. Here, author and surrealist artist Desmond Morris — one of the last surviving members of this art movement — draws on his memories and experiences to present the lives of this curious set of artists. From the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the 'brilliant' Ceri Richards, Morris's vivid account is profusely illustrated by images of the artists and their artworks.
From learning how to train your mind with chess information to choosing the best chess opening, dip in and out of this invaluable guide to improve your chess in a minutes. Chess questions answered in this book include: Is there a best way to study chess? How do I know if I have a natural talent? How important is chess memory and how can I train mine? How long should I think before choosing a move? Is there a proper way to think? Can I think like a chess computer? How do I develop chess intuition?
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