NEW RELEASES
These books have just arrived. Come and meet them.
Startling essays on addiction, infertility, feminism, depression, rape and other 'unmentionable' subjects from a remarkable new Irish writer.
"I’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question, each dilemma, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone, especially young women and men, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously." - Irish Times
"Do not read this book in public: it will make you cry." - Anne Enright
>> Emilie Pine on her father's alcoholism.
In the summer of 2008, Andrei Kaplan moves from New York to Moscow to look after his ageing grandmother, a woman who survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia’s violent capitalist transformation. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can’t always remember who he is. Andrei learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly – but surprisingly sharp! – grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a café to send emails, and eventually some friends, including an activist named Yulia. A Terrible Country is a compelling novel about ageing, radical politics, Russia at a crossroads, and the difficulty – or impossibility – of actually changing one’s life.
"By turns sad, funny, bewildering, revelatory, and then sad again, A Terrible Country recreates the historical-psychological experience of returning, for twenty-first-century reasons, to a country one’s parents left in the twentieth century. It’s at once an old-fashioned novel about the interplay between generational roles, family fates, and political ideology, and a kind of global detective mystery about neo-liberalism (plus a secret map of Moscow in terms of pickup hockey). Gessen is a master journalist and essayist, as well as a storyteller with a scary grasp on the human heartstrings, and A Terrible Country unites the personal and political as only the best novels do." — Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
"Like Primo Levi’s masterpiece If Not Now, When?, A Terrible Country makes the emotional case for an unfamiliar politics. Its critique of the Russian mafia state is balanced by a deeply humanistic attention to common decency. I would not hesitate to recommend this novel to a busy person who otherwise refuses to touch fiction. The only up-to-the-minute, topical, relevant, and necessary novel of 2018 that never has to mention Trump." — Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper
Hours after the 2011 Christchuch Earthquake, Kaikoura-based doctor Chris Henry crawled through the burning CTV building to rescue those who were trapped. Six years later, his daughter Chessie interviews him in an attempt to understand the trauma that led her father to burnout, in the process unravelling stories and memories from her own remarkable family history. A remarkable interrogation of the personal fractures wrought by trauma.
>> The other side of bravery.
How can a personal conviction build into a national campaign, and how can a campaign lead to a change in government policy?
>> Small steps.
The crimes of tyrants against their people have been well documented, but what of their crimes against literature? Theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry collections, memoirs and even romance novels - what relationship do these books have to their despotic authors' other spheres of action? Fascinating, surprisingly funny.
Toby Litt's ancestor, William Litt, was a champion Cumberland Wrestler but also almost certainly a smuggler - and definitely published poet and novelist. A huge and fascinating man, William was also troubling: he ended his life in poverty and exile. Using the nineteenth century as a guide, Wrestliana asks vital questions about modern-day masculinity, competition, and success.
>> Read an extract.
>> William Litt's Wrestliana (1860).
>> Podcast.
In an age when the only thing that spreads faster than information is misinformation, how should we think about and communicate about contentious issues? Berentson-Shaw has some advice.
Treasures of Tāne: Plants of Ngāi Tahu by Rob Tipa $50
A guide to the traditional uses of native plants in the South Island, and to the traditions, folklore, stories and histories surrounding their gathering and use.
Is nowhere a place we can get closer to? How does history prevent us from seeing the present? These poems are a fertile and dangerous confluence of cultural streams.
"Alice Miller looks hard at history's terrifying straight lines, yet time and again turns to the obsessive, sometimes redemptive circlings of art. She knows that in a universe ruled by time and death, words can both rescue and destroy us, sometimes in a single utterance." - Bill Manhire
This excellent book covers every aspect of paper: its history, composition, production, application, and trade. Beginning with the anatomy of paper and its earliest forms, this book looks at paper as a symbol of political and economic importance and as a carrier of ideas, from literature to art, design, and music. It looks at the different surfaces, opacities, weights and volumes of paper and how it is used for printing, typography, graphics, and maps as well as a vehicle for origami, architecture, and fashion.
A beautiful picture book telling of a Greek girl who loses the trunk containing her dress on arrival in a new country, and how, when the dress finally finds the girl again, although the girl is now to big for the dress, the dress is just the right size for her daughter.
Set in post-war Switzerland, Jaeggy's novel begins simply and innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell". But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. The narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy.
"Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy's pen is an engraver's needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness, growing in the splendid isolation of the small Swiss garden of knowledge into full leaf until it obscures every perspective. Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one's life." - Joseph Brodsky
>> The austere fiction of Fleur Jaeggy.>> Read Thomas's reviews of some of Jaeggy's other books.
Using over 200 circus-related artworks from the French National Library's collections, Pascal Jacob tells the story of travelling entertainers and their art and trade. From nomadic animal tamers of the Dark Ages to European jugglers and acrobats of the 1800s, from the use of the circus as Soviet propaganda to the 20th-century Chinese performance art renaissance, this is a fascinating and attractive book.
>> The horrific and the entertaining are never far apart.
"Those two mighty products of the land, the Canterbury lamb and the All Blacks, have made New Zealand what she is," wrote Dick Brittenden in 1954. To what extent was this true? Have things changed since then? How important is sport to New Zealanders' idea of themselves? Is there something suspect about professionalism? What role does sport play on a personal and social level? How has this changed and how is it changing?
Animals, however, are untroubled by such considerations: for them, sports are entirely about enthusiasm and participation.
Pathway of the Birds: The voyaging achievements of Maori and their Polynesian ancestors by Andrew Sharp $50
In the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial and political problems. Struggling with a single export - woollen cloth - a group of merchants formed arguably the world's first joint-stock company and set out to seek new markets and trading partners. It was a venture that relied on the very latest scientific innovations and required an extraordinary appetite for risk. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in history.
Year Ten begins with a jolt for best friends and neighbours Wren and Milo. Along with Hari, Juliet, Ben and Adie, they tell a story of friendship, family, wild crushes, bitter feuds, and the power of a portrait.
An interesting and well illustrated survey of ways in which fashion design has been influenced by the natural world.
Walsh considers the impact AI will have on work, war, economics, politics, everyday life and even death. Will automation take away most jobs? Will robots become conscious and take over? Will we become immortal machines ourselves, uploading our brains to the cloud? How will politics adjust to the post-truth, post-privacy digitised world? When we have succeeded in building intelligent machines, how will life on this planet unfold?
A family is subjected to pressures from within and from without in this novel set in McCarthy-era suburban Long Island.
>> On the road in 1980.
>> Catching the tide in 1988.
>> Ordinary People (2014).
Victoria University Press have re-issued four highlights from their list. Click through to find out more:
End of the Golden Weather by Bruce Mason $20
Lifted by Bill Manhire $20
Breakwater by Kate Duignan $25
Nga Uruora by Geoff Park $35
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