NEW RELEASES
Dirt is an experimental cookbook that digs into the relationship between food and words. Twelve earthy recipes from chef Gemma Walsh are accompanied by a collection of stories, poems and conversations from some of New Zealand’s contemporary writers. Contributors include Courtney Sina Meredith, Lana Lopesi, Rosabel Tan, Dominic Huey, Vanessa Crofskey, Natasha Matila-Smith, Owen Connors, Liam Jacobson, Amy Weng, Reem Musa, Gabi Lardies and Sam Walsh.
>>Preview here.
Inspired by a series of domestic still lifes by photographer Laura Letinsky, Dutton (author of Margaret the First and Dorothy Project publisher) creates her own trenchant series of tableaux, attentive to the surfaces of the suburbs and the ways in which life there is willfully, almost desperately, on display. In locating the language of sprawl itself—engrossing, unremitting, ever expansive—Dutton has written a work of fiction that takes us deep into the familiar and to its very edge: nothing is ever the same under such close inspection.
"Reads as if Gertrude Stein channelled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia." - The Believer
Two novellas that revisit the question of "doubles" (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. `Arthur and Isabella' is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Year's Eve - a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The second story, `Pupi' - a strange mirror of the first - centres on the life of a man who ends up on the street.
"The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past - and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us - is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic." - Paris Review
Listed for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
>> Also available as a lovely hardback.
Ten stories from this unsparing and deeply perceptive Japanese author whose characters are moved by unacknowledgeable but wholly convincing desires.
"Disturbing and exceptional." - Publishers Weekly
"A completely individual writer, who described the intricacies of sexual relationships boldly, committedly, utterly fearlessly. And yet her writing is writing that doesn't actually 'bare all', but rather hints at what lies underneath - at things deep, quiet, and mysterious." - Yoko Tawada
"Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction. Each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary." —Kirkus
Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humours released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them. The city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes. Gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships. A floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In these stories, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
“Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” - Financial Times
"This translation will change the way the poem is read in English." - The Guardian
"Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianising (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean." - NPR
Zeran uses the three characters in her novel to demonstrate the way in which the trauma of the Pinochet regime continues to distort the lives and memories of a second generation of Chileans.
"The Remainder controls a remarkable range of registers (it is, by turns, lyrical, elegiac, sensual, funny, tragic). The author, like her characters, is obsessed with words, those`cracks in language' that house our particular ways of understanding things. Thanks, among other things, to the meticulous, obsessive attention to detail of her language, this novel is sure to endure." - Edmundo Paz Soldan
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist. Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection.
Winner of the 2018 Pen Translation Prize.
"To read Power's stories is to take a journey through a landscape familiar enough to console, yet strange enough to unsettle. The thrills and dangers of such a journey lie with the unexpectedness of life's undercurrents and our uncertain, unknowable selves. Chris Power's quiet yet compelling touch is reminiscent of Alice Munro and Peter Stamm." - Yiyun Li
In 1946, one-time world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found dead in his hotel room in Portugal. His death is usually explained as a heart attack or from choking on poorly-chewed meat, but speculation abounds that his collaboration with the Nazis during World War 2 made him a target for the Soviet or French secret services. With the pace of a thriller and the acuity of a chess match, this novel brings to life this 'sadist of the chess world', both on the board and in the most unusual circumstances of his life.
>> Ruthless Alekhine dispatched the elegant Capablanca to become World Chess Champion in 1927.
A funny and sharp graphic novel about how women's bodies have been a battleground for power throughout history.
"How I loved reading Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge. Mostly, this was down to its sheer, punchy brilliance. Strömquist’s strips are clever, angry, funny and righteous, they’re also informative to an eye-popping degree. Every page is fantastically acute." - Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
As surreal and "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (to use words written in anticipation by le Comte de Lautréamont (with particular emphasis with reference to this collection upon the sewing machine)), Grodova's stories, full of baroque detail worn via patina to a thinness that makes them dangerously sharp to handle, take place in a world governed by strange customs, where significance is found in odd conjunctions, where obsessions assume the fatal ordinariness of custom, where only misfits approach normal, and where childhood is the conduit of immense threat, to children, parents and to wider society. All that is riven will henceforth continue to diverge, but Grodova's stories, lying on an axis of mitteleuropean flavour somewhere between Grimm's tales and accounts of Soviet privations, and on another axis somewhere between the stories of Angela Carter (pleasantly close to these) and those of Ben Marcus, have as much delight (and even hope) in them as they do despair, for, after all, with an imagination as fertile (and a hand as steady) as Grudova's, anything could happen (not only the dreadful).
"That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams." — Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
>> Read 'Unstitching'.
>> The author's playlist for the book.
>> Posing.
>> An interview with Grudova.
A beautifully written journey through the phenomena (both objective and subjective) and frozen histories of the Arctic an the Antarctic via the holdings of remarkable museums (including the world's northernmost museum at Upernavik in Greenland). A subtle exploration of the relationship between humans and habitats that are both harsh and fragile.
"A wonderful book. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow - I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth. " - Dan Richards (author of Climbing Days)
As Vivian, a self-described 'changeling', travels around Dublin, following her very own brand of logic, the reader is invited to reconsider their own attitudes towards 'misfits' and to broaden their acceptance of human individuality.
"Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving." - Guardian
"Wildly funny." - The New York Times
In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions ... a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.
Wynflæd was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who owned male slaves and badger-skin gowns; Egeria a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire was collapsing; Gudrid an Icelandic explorer and the first woman to give birth to a European child on American soil; Mary Astell a philosopher who out-thought John Locke. Max Adam gives considerable breadth to our understanding of women's lives in the so-called Dark and so-called Middle Ages.
Required reading for understanding the relationship between identity politics and the sort of group identity that can either justify atrocity or throw off oppression. How can the will of the people blur into unthinking populism?
A leading astrophysicist clearly and entertainingly discusses the universe, and our place in it, from the basics to the latest research. Does the universe get stranger the more me know about it?
>>Reach for the stars.
For more than two thousand years the people of St Kilda remained remote from the world. Their Hebridean society was viable, utopian even; but in the nineteenth century the islands were discovered by missionaries, do-gooders and tourists, who brought with them money, disease and despotism. In 1930, the few remaining islanders were evacuated, no longer able to support themselves.
Ari has left school and wants to move to another city with his band. Among the applicants to take his place in the family bakery is Hector, who loves baking as much as Ari wants to escape it. The two grow closer, but will their love bloom or be derailed? YA graphic novel.
Mila and her sisters live with their brother Oskar in a small forest cabin in the snow. One night, a fur-clad stranger arrives seeking shelter for himself and his men. But by the next morning, they've gone - taking Oskar with them. Fearful for his safety, Mila and her sisters set out to bring Oskar back - even it means going north, crossing frozen wild-lands to find a way past an eternal winter.
90 plant-based, veganised versions of traditional Asian recipes inspired by the cuisine of India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and China.
A attractively presented guide to heroes and heroines of world mythology.
Set in Auckland in 1942, in an area of the city known as Chinatown where the descendants of the Chinese miners and market gardeners gathered together to maintain their culture and provide a sense of community. New Zealand is at war when Silvey starts her diary, but for Silvey this is just a backdrop to the main issues of her world: the closure of her school and the arrival of Chinese-American soldiers.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary in this graphic novel of a journey through the in-between places of the landscape to the bleak coast. Kingdom follows a family on their holiday to a small caravan park, where teenager Andrew explores the dunes, and half-remembered stories from the past are shared.
An alphabet book comprised entirely of words that don't sound as if they start with their initial letter. English is a confusing language - this book celebrates that confusion.
>> Whacky.
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