Friday 31 March 2017


NEW BOOKS FOR A NEW MONTH
Choose from this array of new releases


Some Things to Place in a Coffin by Bill Manhire      $25
Language dances as death presses at it from behind, agency flees into objects, images draw themselves together on the brink of their own dissolution, small things become final containers for the large. Manhire's first collection for seven years takes its title, and many of its themes, from the elegy he wrote for his friend Ralph Hotere.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin        $23
A young woman lies dying in hospital. The boy at her bedside asks some questions which unleash the most terrifying of stories. 
Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
"Terrifying but brilliant, this dangerously addictive novel in which a woman’s life speeds towards doom is haunted by the bleak landscape of rural Argentina. Schweblin remorselessly cranks up the tension until every sentence seems to tremble with threat. Fever Dream’s ambiguities, and the intricate psychologies with which Schweblin invests her characters, mean that rereading proves rewarding even when the suspense is removed. Wherever you decide the truth lies, aspects of Amanda’s story will continue to puzzle and haunt you long after she stops being able to tell it." - Guardian

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell       $38
32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen, who like her brother is Korean and was adopted by the same white Milwaukee couple, is shaken by the news and books a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. But what starts as a detective’s hunt for clues soon becomes Helen’s confrontation of her own place in the world and her estrangement from her past. 
“Patty Yumi Cottrell’s adoption of the rambling and specific absurd will and must delight. This is a graceful claim not just about writing but about a way of being in the world, an always new and necessary way to contend with this garbage that surrounds us, these false portraits of our hearts and minds. This book is not a diversion—it’s a lifeline.” —Jesse Ball
The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, expats and ex-countries by Jessa Crispin      $45
In her memoir of leaving settled life in search of a way of existing not based solely on either struggle or surrender, Crispin (author of Why I Am Not a Feminist) finds solidarity with Nora Barnacle, William James, Maude Gonne and Igor Stravinsky, fellow refusers of the stable caught always in the borderlands between dependence and independence. 




Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg     $28
Steeped in the author's own experiences, this novel protrays the life of a girl growing up in rural Southern Poland in the 1970s where the edges of reality are always assailed by Catholicism, Communism and folklore.
"Enchantingly elliptical. Greg moves back and forth across time with a poet’s panache. It is refreshing to find a fiction writer so free of stylistic pomp, so and finely attuned to the truth of her material, a novel so sensually saturated." - Kapka Kassabova, Guardian

This book has just been long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize

The Abundance by Annie Dillard         $25
A selection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize-winner's various collections of essays. 
"Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event." - Marilynne Robinson
"Spirited and gale-force. She raps out her opinions; lyrical, gleeful, cymbal-clashing, peppery. The best thing is her glee, a pied-piperish glee at being in the world, which she evokes better than anyone else." - Robert MAcfarlane
"Annie Dillard is among the greatest nature writers who have ever lived. Like Thoreau, like Gilbert White, she combines a naturalist's sharp eye with a philosopher's curiosity and a poet's magical gift for language. Keen, urgent and impassioned, her subject is life itself, in all its teeming and marvellous forms." - Olivia Laing
Bright Air Black by David Vann         $37
A deeply poetic and dark novel set in the 13th century BC and telling of Medea's journey with Jason across the Mediterranean on board the Argo bringing the Golden Fleece from Colchis. Vann has an almost uncanny ability to probe the furthest corners of his characters' motivations, weaknesses and strengths, and this is a nuanced treatment of an often maligned character. 
"David Vann is surely one of the most powerful writers working today." - New Zealand Herald
>> Euripides attempted something similar
>> As did Lars Trier
>> Beware of centaurs.
Who Lost Russia? How the world entered a new Cold War by Peter Conradi       $40
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed possible that a new age of openness and co-operation with the West was possible. But the vacuum of the 1990s proved the ideal conditions for the growth of a worrying new nationalism with international repercussions led by Vladimir Putin. 
"Nuanced yet fast-paced, this is the essential guide to our rocky relationship with a country we ignore at our peril." - Peter Pomerantsev
A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare      $27
When a woman is found dead with a signed copy of Rudian Stefa's latest book in her possession, the author finds himself summoned for an interview by the Party Committee. He has never met the woman in question but he remembers signing the book. As the influence of a paranoid regime steals up on him, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to the mysterious woman to whom he wrote the dedication.
"A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make - as Kadare himself had to do." - John Banville 
The Burrow, And other stories by Franz Kafka       $30
A much-anticipated new translation of some of Kafka's most interesting (but sometimes lesser-known) stories by the luminous Michael Hofman. Includes 'Building the Great Wall of China' and 'Investigations of a Dog'. 
>> Hofman stands, speaks and reads
>> Meet Franz K.
>> What makes something Kafkaesque?
>> Will Self finds K's dust.


The Greatest Story Ever Told... So Far: Why are we here? by Lawrence M. Krauss        $38
How did we arrive at the current favoured model of physical reality? Why is the Standard Model of Particle Physics the best tool we have at the moment to understand the unseen forces that shape our everyday realities? 
"A Homeric tale of science, history and philosophy revealing how we learned so much about the universe and its tiniest parts." - Sheldon Glashow (Nobel laureate in physics)



The Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart      $18
When Reuben discovers an old pocket watch, he soon realizes it holds an incredible power: it can turn you invisible for fifteen minutes. He can't resist the lure of disappearance: for a time, he can vanish from the despotic regime of New Umbra. But the watch's power is even more extraordinary than he imagines. Soon, he's on the run from New Umbra's ruler, The Smoke, who's determined to possess it for himself...
From the author of the rather wonderful 'Mysterious Benedict Society' series. 


Kruso by Lutz Seiler      $37
At the end of the 80s a young literature student travels to the Baltic Island of Hiddensee, a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state. Although he tries to remain on the edges he feels himself drawn to charismatic Kruso, unofficial leader of the seasonal workers. What is Kruso's mission? What will happen as the wave of change in Germany hits the island?
"The first worthy successor to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to appear in contemporary German literature.”  - Der Spiegel

>> Read an extract here
Empires in the Sun: The struggle for the mastery of Africa by Lawrence James        $40
Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States impressed their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems upon Africa. What was the result? 

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi      $40
Teffi writes with superimposed sympathy, wit and clarity of her 1918-1920 journey by cart, freight train and steamer into exile during the Russian Civil War and of the ordinary and 'unheroic' people she encountered, many of them refugees. 
"Like Nabokov, Platonov, and many other great Russian prose writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet's sensitivity to tone and rhythm. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy, and a remarkable capacity for observation; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding." - Robert Chandler, New Yorker
"I never imagined such a memoir could be possible, especially about the Russian Civil War. Teffi wears her wisdom lightly, observing farce and foible amid the looming tragedy, in this enthralling book." - Antony Beevor 
Coastline: The food of Mediterranean Italy, France and Spain by Lucio Galletto and David Dale     $70
Accessible, enjoyable, authentic. 



The Folded Clock: A diary by Heidi Julavits     $35
"Exquisite. This diary is a diary in the way that Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a confession, or that Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is a journal, or that Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a pillow book. Witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous, a work so artful that it appears to be without artifice. This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose. It is a work in which a self is both lost and found, but above all made." - New York Times
A lovely hardback edition. 
Landskipping by Anna Pavord      $22
A deeply poetic and thoughtful consideration of the British landscape and the effect of place on the people who live there. 
"Rangy, deeply felt and sometimes luminous. Like the raking light that exposes ancient lynchets at sunset, such knowledge brings out new detail in the one particular view over a gate which Pavord has loved in all seasons, and which she now evokes for us as it changes through a full year. From the vantage point of this ending, I look back and find that the mixed landscape of the whole book is cast in a very beautiful light." - Alexandra Harris, Guardian
Now in paperback.
Green Kitchen at Home: Quick and healthy vegetarian food for every day by David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl     $45
>> They've got a blog
>> They've got a YouTube channel
The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson       $40
1775 of them. 
[But did Dickinson consider any of her poems "complete"?]
>> Try this (Herman Melville-inflected) Emily Dickinson poetry generator.

>> Also in stock: the very lovely Envelope Poems


A Land Without Borders: My journey around East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Nir Baram        $40
Baram navigates the conflict-ridden regions and hostile terrain to speak with a wide range of people, among them Palestinian-Israeli citizens trapped behind the separation wall in Jerusalem, Jewish settlers determined to forge new lives on the West Bank, children on Kibbutz Nirim who lived through the war in Gaza, and ex-prisoners from Fatah who, after spending years detained in Israeli jails, are now promoting a peace initiative. 
"Written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity. It expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes." - Amos Oz
"A book that is a fascinating and charged document about the meaning of home, security and freedom, on both sides of the divide." - NRG 
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos        $33
An interrogation of relationships, idolisation, and how the author's past intertwines with cultural history. Though the book explores bonds that Febos has with others—lovers, friends, lost and found family members—the relationship it ultimately depicts is the one that she builds with herself. It is also an origin story about creating the life of an activist, artist, teacher, and cultural theorist. 
>> Read an interview with Febos here


The Dog's Last Walk (And other pieces) by Howard Jacobson        $27
A collection of his witty and iconoclastic columns for the Independent on everything from racism to darts. 
"Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise. He is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish." - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 



Utopia for Realists, And how we can get there by Rutger Bregman      $24
Hopeful.
"Brennan is part of a new generation of thinks who are suggesting exciting alternatives to the orthodoxies of the last forty years. In this surprising, accessible and often counterintuitive book Bregman explores some simple but brilliant ideas for making a better world." - Brian Eno


Rogues' Gallery: The history of art and its dealers by Philip Hook      $45
Who controls the exchange between artists and their collectors? A tale of brilliance, cunning and greed spanning centuries. 
A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work by Bernadette Brennan      $40
Brennan considers forty years of work by this revered and admired author. Garner often writes herself into her non-fiction, but just who is this 'I' of which she speaks? Insightful. 
Junket is Nice by Dorothy Kunhardt         $35
An old man with a red beard and red slippers is eating an endless bowl of junket. He says he will give something nice to whoever can guess what he is thinking about. The wildest guesses are wrong, but a small boy knows and the junket comes to an end. First published in 1932, this is a very silly book indeed. 
>>> ("If you don't know what junket is, ask your nana about it.")



Saturday 25 March 2017



http://us14.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b73ade55081e976809c69c8fe&id=ec3d15bf6f&e=5c9c135883


Read our latest bulletin of news, reviews and new releases.

BOOKS @ VOLUME (#16), 25.3.17





This week's Book of the Week is Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and apricot cocktails, a chatty guide to mid-twentieth century Continental philosophy and the intellectuals who ignited social revolution from their café tables.

>> Read Thomas's review

>> An excellent series of enjoyable videos about existentialist and related philosophers

>> A guide to Simone de Beauvoir.

>> A guide to Jean-Paul Sartre

>> A crash course in existentialism

>> Sartre and Beauvoir "screener".

>> Beauvoir interview

>> Still being judged on her looks.

>> Camus vs. Sartre.

>> Jean-Paul's flower truck

>> Existentialist apricot cocktail recipes.  

>> The phenomenology of the cocktail

>> Are you experienced?








The Nelson City Council's Works & Infrastructure Committee will be considering a plan to upgrade Church Street to make it more pedestrian-friendly. Have a look at the concept plan and consider making a submission before the meeting on Thursday 30th March. If you'd like to speak at the meeting let them know.
 









The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami  {Reviewed by STELLA}
A few years ago, I read Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami. Like the amazing Japanese food described throughout that book, the love story that between Tsukiko and her former teacher is careful, precise and beautiful. Kawakami's most recent novel is The Nakano Thrift Shop. Here the setting is a second-hand shop, one filled with curios, odds and ends, and the occasional antique. Hitomi, a slightly awkward young woman, works as a cashier at the shop. She is fascinated by Takeo, her fellow employee, who drives and collects for Mr Nakano, the shop owner. Mr Nakano is an eccentric character with his past three wives, a mistress, and his joy in getting the best deal when he’s bartering for goods. The other player in this quartet is Nakano’s sister, Mayaso, an unconventional artist, who plays ‘advisor’ to the naïve cashier. Hitomi is obsessed with developing a relationship with Takeo, who initially isn’t interested in anything beyond companionship. While the characters are slightly quirky, this is a novel about the ordinary texture of love and the relationships people form. Kawakami’s gift comes in her ability to slow you down as a reader, to observe and appreciate the obvious, surprising you with subtle nuances that are almost unseen.







Bruno: Some of the more interesting days in my life so far by Catharina Valckx and Nicolas Hubesch       {Reviewed by STELLA}
I like Bruno. He’s a kind cat with a checkered cap. Bruno: Some of the More Interesting Days in my Life So Far is written by Catharina Valckx and illustrated by comic artist Nicolas Hubesch. It’s a funny and charming picture book for junior readers, and a great read-aloud for younger children, too! The drawings are delightful, with plenty to look at in the wonderful street scenes and subtle elements in the pictures that children will like to find. Mostly, it is the characters that will win you over. Bruno is thoughtful, curious and kind, and you’ll enjoy meeting his friends as he takes you through six days – that is six of the more interesting days in his life so far. The day that everything was topsy-turvy, the day it rained and the day the power went out to mention a few. Enjoyable stories about friendship and the small moments in life that can make you smile. Another charmer from Gecko Press.



















At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and apricot cocktails by Sarah Bakewell  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Not only a chatty and enjoyable introduction to mid-century Continental philosophy from phenomenalism to existentialism and beyond but also a source of anecdotal gossip about the personalities, relationships, foibles, diets, hairstyles and other eccentricities of the group of writers and philosophers clustered either physically or thematically around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Parisian café table (or should that read: Not only a source of anecdotal gossip about the personalities, relationships, foibles, diets, hairstyles and other eccentricities of the group of writers and philosophers clustered either physically or thematically around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Parisian café table but also a chatty and enjoyable introduction to mid-century Continental philosophy from phenomenalism to existentialism and beyond), At the Existentialist Café is pointy-headed enough to satisfy your curiosity about what these thinkers thought and pointy-nosed enough to satisfy your curiosity about how these thinkers lived. Indeed, either integral or coincidental to the existentialist project was the drawing closer of life-as-lived and life-as-thought-about, and Sarah Bakewell manages to pleasantly reassert the importance of whichever half of the equation you may have neglected (with respect to your knowledge of the existentialists, anyway) or to advance both halves for your general education and amusement. She seems to know when to linger in the company of one intellectual so as to grasp the fundamentals of her or his thinking and when to stand up and move on to the table of another, and she demonstrates the ongoing relevance of phenominalist and existentialist approaches to the ordinary lives of ordinary people (who may or may not have realised that they are adopting phenominalist or existentialist approaches). By the time you have read this book you will be on chatting terms with (or at least about) Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (though you may not wish to sit at his table), Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, and you will certainly have enhanced your rating as a conversationalist in whatever café you frequent.
>> This is this week's Book of the Week. Click here for information, links and amusements.  












Solaris by Stanislaw Lem  {Reviewed by THOMAS}
A psychologist, Kelvin, is sent to a station on the ocean-covered planet Solaris to determine whether to terminate the mission because of lack of progress and a high rate of insanity. The station is beset by strange occurrences and appearances, including, eventually, the presence of Kelvin’s dead wife. As the scientists futilely attempt to observe the planet, the sentient planet is seemingly probing their psyches, giving form to their fears and desires. Ultimately, no communication is possible: all interaction with the Other is nothing but reflection, all observation reveals nothing but the observer. Containing passages of weird beauty and compelling philosophical speculation, this science fiction novel makes provocative points about the insularity of our (largely illusionary) realities and the impossibility of experiencing anything beyond ourselves.

Friday 24 March 2017


A SCROLLABLE SELECTION OF NEW RELEASES
These books are all on the shelf now at VOLUME.

The Fire Horse: Children's poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mendelstam and Daniil Kharms, illustrated by Lidia Popova, Boris Ender and Vladimir Konashevich       $37
Three classic Soviet-era children's books by leading avant-garde writers and illustrators, newly translated. 



White Tears by Hari Kunzru        $37
Starting as a coming-of-age story, developing as a love story and ending as a ghost story, Kunzru's novel is also the story of black lives and black music stolen by the a mainstream culture eager to absorb the identities of its components. 
"Part thriller, part literary horror novel; completely impossible to put down." - NPR
Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper arsenic in the Victorian home by Lucinda Hawksley             $70
What price beauty? The nineteenth century chemical processes enabled a leap in the range of intense pigments available for both dress and decor. Unfortunately, many of these pigments were highly toxic. Scheele's green and Schweinfurt green, pigments created using arsenic, were used to produce millions of rolls of vibrant wallpaper, which had a devastating effect on the inhabitants of the rooms they decorated, to say nothing of the factory workers. Hawksley's fascinating account is accompanied by the most stunning reproductions of ansenical wallpaper (not printed with arsenic (though that would be interesting)). 
>> Was Jane Austen poisoned by arsenic 
Atlas of Another America: An architectural fiction by Keith Krumweide       $110
This stupendously illustrated piece of speculative examines the suburban family home as an economic and environmental calamity and extrapolates a series of scenarios which highlight issues already at play, both in 'McMansions' and ordinary homes. The fictiontakes the form of a series of plans and interventions in iconic bucolic artworks.

>> See more here
Tell Me My Name by Bill Manhire, with Hannah Griffin and Peter Peryer       $30
Thirteen poetic riddles as only Manhire could write them, with a CD of music by Griffin and photographs by Peryer. 
>> An interview with Manhire.

Blood Ties: New and selected poems, 1963-2016 by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman       $25
"Blood Ties is a journey through a lifetime that is a parable of settlement, one man’s response to the challenge of living responsibly and with sensitivity to the question of where we are and what we must be. There are strong ancestors throughout, but, at the same time and very distinctively, the urgent sound of this river of poetry is all this fine poet’s own." - Patrick Evans



Problems by Jade Sharma       $35
Events and addictions conspire to send Maya's life into a chaotic spiral.

"The problem with Jade Sharma's novel is that it ends. The narrator, Maya, is a hot mess with zero percent of her shit together, and yet as I got to know her through the Sharma's inventive narrative voice, I saw her as - or perhaps wanted her to be - my friend." - The Rumpus


Schadenfreude: A love story by Rebecca Schuman       $40
Lured to Germany by her crush on two young men (one of whom, Franz Kafka, wasn't even German), Schuman learned a lot about the language and the people, but (possibly) even more about herself through her experiences both personal and literary. 
Breuer by Robert McCarter        $210
The definitive book on this important brutalist architect and designer. 
>> Preview the book here (or come into the shop).
>> Glance through his work here
Himself by Jess Kidd       $33
When Mahony returns to Mulderrig, a speck on Ireland's west coast, he brings only a photograph of his long-lost mother and a determination to do battle with the lies of his past. No one - living or dead - will tell Mahony what happened to the teenage mother who abandoned him as a baby, despite his certainty that more than one of the villagers knows the sinister truth. 
"A sort of Under Milk Wood meets The Third Policeman meets Agatha Christie. Lushly imagined, delightfully original and very, very funny." - M.L. Stedman
>> Find out more
Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao     $35
Unimaginable loss is treated in prose of delicate poetic texture in this subtle novel. 
"This journey across the boundaries of form and genre, to write about what is un-write-aboutable, is a smart maneuver - it permits the reader to experience what has been written about over and over in a way that is fresh and absorbing in its difference." - NPR
Ithaca by Alan McMonagle       $38
How does a lonely teenager in recession Ireland with a crazed alcoholic mother cope with reality? He escapes to the Swamp, a mysterious rising pool of water on the outskirts of town and befriends a girl as lost as himself but with even less regard for reality. 
"Fast and urgent and full of feeling and savage humour and all kinds of tenderness." - Kevin Barry


Curiosity by Alberto Manguel       $38
Manguel tags along with Dante and converses with Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson and Socrates as he investigates the quality that drives the expansion of human knowledge but has also been the death of cats. Why have we evolved this faculty?
>> Manguel talks at our London branch.


Fully Clothed and So Forgetful by Hannah Mettner       $25
I uproot one
of the ladies and use her to beat back a
path through the others, until they look
almost young again in the freshness
of their bruises. When I get back to the
pond most of the spinsters have frosted
in the ground. The children are there
wearing new fur coats. One is putting logs
on a fire, while the other pulls dinner
from the snow.

"This book will push you down a marble staircase, and then cheerfully bring you a couple of aspirin." — Hera Lindsay Bird
Everyone is Watching by Megan Bradbury      $25
An innovative novelistic picture of New York through the creative minds of Walt Whitman, Robert Moses, Robert Mapplethorpe and Edmund White. Now in softcover.
"Beautiful, kaleidoscopic. Everyone should be watching Megan Bradbury from now on." - Eimear McBride
"Megan Bradbury's daring, urgent novel is a thrilling act of psychic and historical excavation, a profound examination of the relationship between urban spaces and the making of art. A moving portrait of lives linked across time, Everyone is Watching is an important addition to the literature of New York." - Garth Greenwell
>>> We have the lovely hardback edition still available
The Book of Bees by Piotr Socha      $40
Not only does this large-format picture book contain a large amount of information about bees (some useful; some curious), it is irresistibly illustrated. 
Border: A journey to the edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova        $40
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees. Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks - and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. 
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar       $35
Alone in space on a derailed mission to Venus from which he was never expected to return, a Czech cosmonaut comes to doubt his marriage, his memory, his heroism, his family history and his sanity. 
>> Shades of Omon Ra?


Hit & Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson         $35

An expose of the killing of civilians in Afghanistan by the New Zealand SAS, and of a cover-up that implicates the highest levels of government.



The Sad Part Was by Prabha Yoon     $28
Multifaceted short short stories riffing in all sorts of ways on life in modern Bangkok. 
"Evocative, erudite and often very funny." - Guardian


Direct Action: Protest and the reinvention of American radicalism by L.A. Kauffman       $22
A wide survey of disruptive protest in the US in the last forty years, drawing parallels between the efforts of environmentalists, black and indigenous activist, feminists and radical queers. What effect has protest had on shaping society, and what are the potentials for protest now?
The Yid by Paul Goldberg       $25
Moscow, 1953. Three secret policemen arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of Stalin (no less). While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. 
"Darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape." - The Washington Post
"A brilliant novel that is at once surreally comic, suspenseful if slightly cracked and punctuated with eruptions of violence, but with a poignant ending . An extraordinary, rich and surprising tale of intrigue Paul Goldberg has been aptly compared to a whole constellation of Jewish literary geniuses Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon and even the Coen brothers. Goldberg possesses a voice and vision that are entirely and uniquely his own." - The Jewish Journal
Ferment, Pickle, Dry: Ancient methods, modern meals by Simon Poffley and Gaba Smolinska-Poffley      $45
Not only shows you how to ferment, pickle and dry all manner of ingredients but shows you how ingredients so preserved can be used in all manner of delicious dishes. 


Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and creating change in education by Welby Engs    $35
Is productive disobedience necessary to avoid academic straightjacketing and overassessment, and to enable positive outcomes for students?  
>> The case for disobedience in schools
The Clown Egg Register by Luke Stephenson and Helen Champion       $40
The world's oldest clowning organisation, Clowns International, has long kept an archive of eggs upon which clowns have registered their identity and make-up. This unusual and fascinating book accompanies images of the egg register with the professional and life stories of the clowns to whom the eggs refer. 
>>> Bring in the eggs!