NEW RELEASES
Some excellent books await your attention.
Two novellas and a swathe of short stories from this exciting Colombian writer. Each of the stories portrays characters grappling with, or pushing against, the limitations of their situation, drawn to whatever it is they lack, seemingly oblivious of the consequences (until it is too late (at least for them)).
>> Extract of Fish Soup.
Murnane writes beautiful, exquisitely pedantic, sad, subtly barbed and often very funny sentences. His ability to take a few brief experiences, or a location on the inland plains of Victoria, Australia, or a childhood memory, or the image of a person or a textual phrase, and to wring from these a seemingly endless depth and subtlety, gives him a rare Proustian quality.
>> "Intricately strange."
>> Mental places.
>> Words in Order.
Cusk brings her masterly 'Faye' trilogy (following Outline and Transit) to a close by finally activating Faye herself, recording her aeroplane journey and the conversations she has, pushing at the form of the novel and forcing tectonic shifts in the reader's preconceptions.
>> "Perhaps the cruellest novelist at work today."
If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint, even paucity, and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
Somewhere in the North African desert, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. Elsewhere, four westerners are murdered in a hippy commune and a suitcase full of worthless currency goes missing. Enter a pair of very unenthusiastic detectives, a paranoid spy whose sanity has baked away in the sun, and an American woman with a talent for being underestimated.
"Part Pynchon, part Beckett, a crime story told by Lewis Carroll in a particularly nihilistic mood." - Spectator
"Brilliant, anarchic, darkly comic." - Irish Times
The first part of Helen Heath's new collection is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, fences and buildings, a meditation on Theo Jansen's animal sculptures, and the lives of birds in cities. A series of speculative poems further explores questions of how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In these poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost. How might our experiences of grieving and remembering be altered?
>> Helen Heath - Standing room only.
>> Ask Gary Numan.
A never-before-published-in-English collection of six stories (1931-1963) from this Russian émigré modernist master.
>> "Much much more than a publishing event."
On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area were abandoned to their fate. The blast put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, contaminating over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. Plokhy draws on recently opened archives to recreate these events in all their drama, telling the stories of the scientists, workers, soldiers, and police who found themselves caught in a nuclear nightmare.
A novel of loss and the reconstruction of lives, set at the Salvation Army rehabilitation centre for alcoholics on Rotoroa Island in the Hauraki Gulf.
"This daring novel doesn’t shout at you. It makes its moves with such care and concealment that it’s a total surprise to find it has pressed such a weight against your chest. Beguiling and brilliant!" —Damien Wilkins
>> The drinkless isle: "Why I set my novel at the rehab centre on Rotoroa Island."
Atheism is as old and rich and diverse as religion, and as riven between its sects. Gray, a modern-day Schopenhauer and author of Straw Dogs and Black Mass, brings his misanthropy to bear on, changes the scope of, and brings to a whole new level, the tiresome religion vs science debate.
Florida by Lauren Groff $37
Storms, snakes, sinkholes, secrets. A savage collection of tooth-sharp stories from the author of the devastating Fates and Furies.
"A superlative book." - Boston Globe
"Gorgeously weird and limber." - New Yorker
"Brooding, inventive and often moving." - NPR
"Eerie and exquisite." - Vox
"Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." - Washington Post
>> Groff speaks.
Nguyen is in his element as the 'Street Food King', eating and exploring his way through traditional noodle soups and sweet sticky meats, to more adventurous dishes like Stir-fried Embryo Egg with Tamarind and Duck and Banana Blossom Salad. Venturing out at dawn and late into the night to discover street vendors, stallholders and roaming food carts, Nguyen captures the energy of each place at their busiest times of the day.
>> Luke in Saigon.
Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling? A book entirely made from lines sieved out of 100 other works of literature, assembled into a new form. A writer is on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the frozen north. But in searching for the boy's story, will he lose his own?
>> An excerpt.
A quietly vivid fictional evocation of life in the Shetlands, a society mixed of natives, incomers and returnees, abraded by land and sea.
A new translation of this endlessly inventive and sneakily disconcerting collection of surreal stories, first published in Italian in 1965. Buzzati falls somewhere between Borges and Calvino, both in time and in literary genetics.
"Much of Catastrophe is about the construction of paranoia and fear."
Raised by her grandparents in the USA, Verzemnieks grew up among expatiates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she hand never visited. Verzemnieks pieces together the lives of her refugee grandmother, of her grandmother's sister, exiled to Siberia under Stalin, and of her grandfather, conscripted by the Nazis.
"A world in which poetic mythology coexists with sophisticated modernity, the dead mingle with the living, and the hardships of a traumatic past are countered by the strength of memory and of lasting attachments." - Eva Hoffman
A well written novel treating the lives of step-sisters and lovers Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, their early life in Nantes, their escape from the provinces to Paris, their reinvention of themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore respectively, pushing the frontiers of both art and gender at the time of the Surrealists, and their flight from the Nazis.
"Arrestingly accomplished." - The Guardian
>> Cahun.
Not since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has the Middle East been convulsed by so many events in such a short period of time. Uprisings, coups, and wars have seen governments overthrown, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced. Bubalo argues that the current turmoil is the result of the irrevocable decay of the nizam - the system by which most states in the modern region are ruled. But if you look hard enough, it is possible to spot 'green shoots' of change that could remake the Middle East in ways that are more inclusive, more democratic, less corrupt, and less violent.
A beautifully presented and very appealing book of delectable and authentic dishes from western India, all absolutely at home in New Zealand.
An insightful study of mental illness in young British women: anxiety, self-harm, borderline personality disorder, OCD, binge eating disorder, PTSD and dissociative identity disorder.
>> Case studies.
Evel Knievel jumped his motorcycle over 14 Greyhound buses. The Iceman is the most well-preserved human, found in the ice after 5,300 years. Sam Patch jumped Niagara Falls for $75. Helen Thayer walked to the North Pole alone. Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning 7 times. How are you interesting?
The natural world is a text wee can learn to read. From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals.
Kenji Tanabe finds maps easier to read than people. At the elite Tokyo gallery where he works, he sells antique maps by selling the stories that he sees within their traces: their contribution to progress, their dramatic illustrations, their exquisite compasses. But no compass or cartography can guide him through the events that will follow the sudden and unexpected offer of a job in America. There, Theodora Appel runs a company that is more like a family. Brilliantly successful, beguilingly secretive, she gradually initiates Kenji into her rarefied world. Only someone like him - quiet, intensely committed and discreet - could be allowed to see beneath the surface to what his employer is hiding. Theodora has never recovered from the death of her lover, and her obsession to reclaim the past threatens them all. Moving across countries and cultures, The Consolation of Maps charts an attempt to understand the tide of history, the geography of people and the boundless territory of loss.
From the common starling to the many-coloured rush tyrant, the names we have given to birds are some of the most vivid and evocative words in the English language.
>> Birds calling each other by name.
Opportunists and self-seekers had an effect on the often unofficial history of the Pacific. This rollicking and often tragic book follows those who followed the European explorers and sought to benefit from what was to them a new world.
A beautifully presented large-format book, with stunning diagrams and very clear step-by-step photographs.
Simon is miffed that his little brother is growing faster than he is. What does it mean to be a big brother?
>> The other Simon books.
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