NEW RELEASES
If you know of any children who are curious, discerning, up for anything, and ready for some stimulating stories, intriguing illustrations and very amusing amusements (or if you are yourself any or all of these things), you won't be able to do better than give them (or yourself) a copy of this wonderful book. Alongside familiar names (Paul Beavis, Giselle Clarkson, Ant Sang, Gavin Bishop, Kimberly Andrews, Tim Denee, Johanna Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Josh Morgan), you’ll find welcome surprises: a new song from Troy Kingi, gothic fiction by Airini Beautrais, a te reo Māori crossword from Ben Brown, an adaptation of Maurice Gee’s 'The Champion' presented in comic format, and work from emerging talents J. Wiremu Kane and Austin Milne. Annual 3 is playful and smart and packed with content – a book for the whole family. Where else would you fnd a poem about not kissing in church, a pattern for a knitted brain, a kākāpō in a kimono for colouring, an essay about Harry Potter, and a comic about head lice? Not to mention the board game Camp Kūkū and 'The Traditional Big Spread of Aotearoa NZ'.
>>See some sample pages on our website.
>>See some sample pages on our website.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain - a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'. This arresting personal narrative disguises the truth of a woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona. Written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, Girl Online takes in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism. It is an (anti) user manifesto, exploding the terms and conditions of appearing online under the sign of 'girl'. A philosophical investigation into the online experience of women as everyday users, it asks, is the personal internet a trap, or can it also be an opportunity for survival, and resistance?
"This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualisation." —Anne Boyer
"A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn't miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is "good to think" with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era." —Lauren Elkin
"Walsh skilfully captures the fragmentary nature of online existence, the slippery nature of our online selves and their endless interpretations, and both the connections and the alienation that come with it. This is a deep and yet beautifully light meditation on what the internet is doing to our brains." —Juliet Jacques
Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight.
"Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things." —Sara Baume
Peninsula by Sharron Came $30
Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig $38
Against Disappearance: Essays on memory edited by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez $35
Rilke: The last inward nan by Lesley Chamberlain $45
The Story of Art (Without Men) by Katy Hessel $65
You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The biography of Nico by Jennifer Otter-Bickerdike $45
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (translated by Eugene Ostahevsky) $23
Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson $23
Oxblood by Tom Benn $33
Water Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge by Erica Gies $43
Bi: The hidden culture, history and culture of bisexuality by Julia Shaw $37
Love and the Novel: Life after reading by Christina Lupton $40
"Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things." —Sara Baume
Loosely centred on three generations of the Carlton family and told with restrained lyricism, Peninsula is a set of ten interwoven stories about the lives of an ordinary rural Northland farming community over decades of change. It's a community populated with stoic, fierce characters who brim with feeling, embroiled in rich and complex relationships with the land, and with one another.
"This stunning book casts an unusual spell. At first blush it all seems as New Zealandy as sheep dogs, septic tanks and muting the TV when visitors arrive. Then you notice the creeping poetry of lives coping with change and how this vividly imagined world of tramping huts, bush runs and squash clubs contains other worlds. Sharron Came is writing from deep intimacy with the rural community she summons on the page. Her terse, funny and hugely poignant stories restore a sense of possibility to the future without turning away from its terrors." —Damien Wilkins
"This superbly crafted collection reaches deep into the heart of family, community and place. It is a measure of Sharron Came's skill that the rural Northland landscape and the complex, deeply human characters co-exist in perfect equilibrium. I loved this book." —Laurence Fearnley
A complex, urgent, and fascinatings novel about walking, memory, and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney, Australia cafe to return a manuscript by a recently deceased writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbors, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations, and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance, and her struggle with religion and anorexia. A remarkable evocation of the processes of thought intersected with those of literature. Photographs by Bettina Kaiser.
>>Haze.
How do we write or hold our former selves, our ancestries? How does where we come from connect to where we are headed? How do we tell the stories of those who have been diminished or ignored in the writing of history? How do we do justice to the lives they lived, or to the people they were? From the intricacies of trans becoming, to violences inflicted on stateless peoples, to complex inheritances and the intertwining of tradition, politics and place, this prescient collection challenges singular narratives about the past, offering testimony and prophecy alike. Essays by Andre Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tu'ng Vy Nguy'n, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie.
"Not written for white readers or to industry specifications, uncompromising, non-pandering, filled with love, awash with talent, this collection of sovereign essays sets blisteringly high standards of integrity and originality." —Maria Tumarkin
>>Liminal.
When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, as too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together insights on Rilke's life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke's inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality.
Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. Well illustrated and wide ranging.
"In this astounding, generous book, Katy Hessel has given us such a gift. Her research is profound, scholarly and wide-ranging, her writing authoritative yet accessible. I found so much to surprise and delight in these pages, so many works of art pulsating with life and intelligence, beauty and power. This book is a long-overdue corrective, and Hessel has executed it to perfection, echoing the passion and skill of the very artists she writes about. An astonishing achievement." —Jessie Burton
Over the course of her life, Nico was an ever-evolving myth, an enigma that escaped definition. Though she is remembered for contributions to The Velvet Underground & Nico, her artistry and influence are often overlooked, whilst Lou Reed and John Cale are hailed as icons. Defying the sexist casting of Nico's life as the tragedy of a beautiful woman losing her looks, youth and fame, You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone cements her legacy as one of the most vital artists of her time, inspiring a generation of luminaries including Henry Rollins, Bjork, Morrissey and Iggy Pop.
"Here is the biography of Nico, oracle to the giants and losers." —Iggy Pop
"Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of 'the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies of everyday life' and richly evokes the fatalistic humour of her marginalised characters, one of whom observes, 'If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.'" —The New Yorker
Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, cardplayers, a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; another sits down on International Women’s Day and can no longer stand up. With a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound irony reminiscent of Gogol, Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with twenty-three photographs that form a narrative in lyrical and historical counterpoint.
"Belorusets is interested in the histories of the defeated, of the unseen and unheard, and above all in the experiences of eastern Ukrainian women in wartime. Her willingness to exist between document and fiction is daring, even provocative. This is a moment when facts are both utterly compromised and vastly overvalued—asked to do all the work of politics, to justify whole worldviews with single data points. Belorusets, by contrast, is for plurality, subjectivity, a kind of narrative democracy. She wants us to remember that even documentary photographs and factual narratives are determined, and sometimes distorted, by the worldview that shaped them.” —The Baffler
D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial — and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him. History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexual liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how — one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love — can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work.
"No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man." —Ferdinand Mount
"No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man." —Ferdinand Mount
Wythenshawe, South Manchester. 1985. The Dodds family once ruled Manchester's underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby. Matriarch Nedra presides over the household, which bustles with activity as she prepares the welcome feast for her grandson Kelly's return from prison. Her grieving daughter-in-law Carol is visited by both the welcome, intimate ghost of her murdered lover, and by Mac, an ageing criminal enforcer, a man who may just offer her a real and possible future. And then there is Jan - the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby. Over the course of a few days, the Dodds women must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good.
"With a brutal yet compassionate honesty, Oxblood confronts the past as it was and how it shapes who we are now, and confirms Tom Benn as one of the most powerful and urgent writers of our times." —David Peace
Trouble with water increasingly frequent: extreme floods and droughts are the first obvious signs of climate change.
"Reveals the mysteries of water's journey from source to sea, and shows how working with nature can help save us from the ravages of climate change. Through fascinating stories and detailed research, Gies challenges modern societies to relinquish some control, and let water go where it wants to go. This eye-opening book is filled with brilliant insights, creativity, inspiration, and honest hope." —Sandra Postel
Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world and the least well understood. This book sets out to answer some of the questions that many people have about bisexuality. In Bi Julia Shaw explores how people have defined and measured bisexuality during its long and important history. She looks at behavioural bisexuality in animals, and investigates whether there is a bi gene. She introduces some famous bi activists and scholars whom everyone should know. She examines the latest research on bisexual kids, parents and grandparents, and explores bisexual identities across the lifespan. She asks why so few bisexual people are out, and examines the mental and physical health consequences of this. She also questions societal reactions to bisexuality (are bi people more promiscuous? No). She explains the visual language of bisexuality, about bi visibility on screen and the colourful world of bisexual communities. This book aims to demystify bisexuality and celebrate it. Today, most bisexual activists and researchers define bisexuality as attraction to more than one gender, and this is a book for anyone whether they identify as bisexual, plurisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, fluid, unlabelled, any related label or who just wants to know more.
Romantic love was born alongside the novel, and books have been shaping how we experience and think about our most intimate stories ever since. But what do novels give us when our own lives diverge from the usual narrative paths? Christina Lupton is a professor used to examining stories with a critical eye; until one day in middle age she finds herself falling in love and leaving her marriage for a romance with another woman. This involves a familiar enough tale, but when her new partner suffers a stroke, Lupton begins to reflect on the sorts of love that novels rarely capture. A heady mix of memoir, criticism and storytelling that draws on novels ranging from Pride and Prejudice to Price of Salt, Anna Karenina to Conversations with Friends, to illuminate the ways love and novels work, and show how some types of love, which don't race to a narrative end-point, might be the most important of all.
"In the cause of fathoming how to live life to the full, she spares neither herself, nor anyone she has ever read, no matter how brilliant." —Guardian
A fictional journey through Western political philosophy. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.
"This book is a box of delights, often wonderfully funny and always deliciously clever, a contemporary political satire to set among the best." —New Statesman
Exploring the delight to be found in small everyday interactions and chance observations, Look Here charts an emotional map of London, navigating ideas of anonymity and identity, freedom and space (and who has access to these things), and community, while reflecting on whether the never-ending carousel of clothing we see on strangers holds some deeper meaning.
"I loved strolling through London with Ana Kinsella, noticing all the things she notices, what people are wearing on the Tube or at the Tate Modern, listening in on her chats with the locals, reading about the history of Embankment, the privatization of public spaces, or the pandemic passeggiata. And the shoes! A whole anthropology of London through its footwear. Look Here renewed my desire to get up and out into the streets of the city I now call home, but not without first practising that other great and under-appreciated act of joy and self-determination: deciding what to wear when I hit the pavement." —Lauren Elkin
Set in a walled garden, whose inhabitants live an eternal and unblemished life, eden opens with a summons. The gardeners of eden are called by their masters, the angels, to see a dead body. It is that of a bird, a creature who has strayed beyond the garden walls. Outside, where there is poverty and sickness and death, this bird has met a fate that couldn’t have befallen it within the safe haven of the garden. And why would anyone want to leave? eden is a place of immortality and plenty – bountiful fields and orchards and lakes, a place where the lord’s bidding is done. But really this summons is a warning. Because something is wrong in eden. Years after Adam and Eve left the garden, someone has escaped – Tabi – one of the sisters of the congregation, and the angels fear further rebellion. They know there are two in eden, gardener Ebon and Jamin, the angel with the broken wing, who would follow Tabi anywhere, who would risk the world outside if only they can find her. Perhaps a fall is coming. Is this paradise a prison and a labour camp?
"This intriguing, fabular novel speaks to a truth about power and authority." —Irish Times
A new novel from the author of the outstanding memoir In the Days of Rain. AD 500. An island in the Thames. Isla has a secret: she has learned her father's sophisticated sword-making skills at a time when even entering a forge is forbidden to women. Her sister, Blue, has a secret, too: at low tide on the night of each new moon, she visits the bones of the mud woman, drowned by the elders of her tribe who wanted to make a lesson of someone who wouldn't hold her tongue. When the local Seax overlord discovers Isla's secret there is nowhere for the sisters to hide, except across the water to the walled ghost city, Londinium. Here Blue and Isla find sanctuary in an underworld community of squatters, emigrants, travellers and looters, led by the mysterious Crowther, living in an abandoned brothel and bathhouse. But trouble pursues them even into the haunted city. Dark Earth takes us back to the founding of Britain to explore the experience of women trying to find kin in a world ruled by blood ties, feuds and men in quest of a nation.
Far Out: Encounters with extremists by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson $45
"Superb. Radically new and beautiful. This is a book that seeks to do for British myth what Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller have done so brilliantly for classical literature: uncovering stories of feminine power that have been occluded by the male hand of history." —Observer
We meet eight people from across religious, ideological, and national divides who found themselves drawn to radical beliefs, including a young man who became the face of white supremacy in Trump-era America, a Norwegian woman sucked into a revolutionary conspiracy in the 1980s, a schoolboy who left Britain to fight in Syria, and an Australian from the far-left Antifa movement.
"Far Out is an excellent mix of investigative journalism, entertaining storytelling and intelligent analysis. Its individual stories are like pieces of a puzzle that McDonald-Gibson assembles to offer deeply human insights into the drivers of radicalisation and extremism." —Julia Eber, author of Going Dark
1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey, from Oamaru, is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.
"A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece of scholarly historical research and true crime writing." —Hallie Rubenhold
>>Lydia's life.
Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing — a neutral space in hell where all stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organising books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materialising as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifyingly angelic Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil's Bible. The text of the Devil's Bible is a powerful weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell, so it falls to the librarians to find a book with the power to reshape the boundaries between Heaven, Hell...and Earth.
This exciting and inventive series continues with The Archive of the Forgotten and The God of Lost Words.
Colours of Art takes the reader on a journey through history by pairing 80 artworks with infographic palettes. For these pieces, colour is not only a tool (like a paintbrush or a canvas), but the fundamental secret to their success. Colour allows artists to express their individuality, evoke certain moods and portray positive or negative subliminal messages. And throughout history, the greatest of artists have experimented with new pigments and new technologies to lead movements and deliver masterpieces. But as something so cardinal, we sometimes forget how poignant colour palettes can be, and how much they can tell us. When Vermeer painted The Milkmaid, the amount of ultramarine he could use was written in the contract. How did that affect how he used it? When Turner experimented with Indian Yellow, he captured roaring flames that brought his paintings to life. If he had used a more ordinary yellow, would he have created something so extraordinary? And how did Warhol throw away the rulebook to change what colour could achieve?
>>See inside the book.
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty $33
Farm: The making of a climate activist by Nicola Harvey $37-575f5a59fae756755c70e16a3f1db7f4.jpg)
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness by Paul Gilroy $28
An online obituary writer. A young mother with a secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents. Separated by the thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing complex in the run-down Indiana town of Vacca Vale, these individual lives unfold. But Blandine is different. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, she shares an apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all of them like her products of the state foster system. Plagued by her past, let down by the very structures that were supposed to keep her safe, she spends her days reading Dante and dreaming of becoming a female mystic. Until, that is, one sweltering week in July culminates in an act of violence that will change everything, and finally offer her a chance to escape. Blandine is desperate to save a community that has been left behind, but that salvation will come at a terrible price.
"Dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing, a novel of impressive scope and specificity." —The New York Times
In 2018, Nicola Harvey and her husband, Pat, left their careers and inner-city Sydney life to farm cattle in rural New Zealand. They thought it would be exciting, even relaxing, but soon found themselves in the middle of heated arguments and deep divisions about food, farming, and climate change. Read about how Harvey made her farm into a site for climate activism, and about her attempts to find an alternative the destructive status quo of current food production.
Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Caribbean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality.
"It was in this book that Gilroy laid out his concept of the 'black Atlantic', the idea that black culture is essentially a hybrid, a product of centuries of exchange, slavery and movement across the Atlantic. Exploring everything from the lives and work of African American philosophers such as WEB Du Bios, to black popular music, Gilroy demonstrates that black culture is both 'local' and 'global', and cannot be constrained within any single national culture. It flows across the black Atlantic of the book's title." —David Olusoga
>>"Useful violence."
The Wondrous Prune by Ellie Clements $17
Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a warming planet by Matthew T. Huber $35
Magic comes from within! Uprooted by her single mum along with her troublesome older brother, eleven-year-old Prune Robinson is trying to settle in a new town. She figures she can't burden her hard-working mother with the fact she's being bullied. Or the fact that her drawings have started coming to life.But with her brother soon in danger, Prune comes to realise that she can't hide her power forever; in fact, it might just be the one thing that brings her family back together and saves them all.
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of 'believing science' or individual 'carbon footprints' it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society- the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we so need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.
The Book of Sisters: Biographies of incredible siblings through history by Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson $23
"The most powerful missile yet hurled against bourgeois climate politics. With a laser-sharp focus, it strikes at the central fortress: the sphere of production, where one class dominates another and wrecks the planet in the process. A book for every union organiser and every climate activist and everyone who wishes for the two to join forces - to be read, studied, debated, aimed and fired." —Andreas Malm
Queens. Warriors. Witches. Revolutionaries. History is full of sisters making their mark. Find out why Egyptian ruler Cleopatra went to war against her younger sister Arsinoë; how Native American sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief became America’s first star ballerinas; what made samurai sisters Nakano Takeko and Nakano Koko take on an entire army.
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