NEW RELEASES
New books for a new year
A darkly comic fable from the 2017 Man Booker winner. Fox 8 has learned 'Yuman' by listening under the windows of children's rooms to their bedtime stories. In language falling somewhere between that of The BFG and Riddley Walker, Fox 8 tells of his quest to save his fellow foxes when their habitat is threatened by development. Charming.
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.
In 1814, Hokusai's sketches were published in a handbook of some 4000 images. It surpassed expectations as a student reference book, and became a bestseller. Here, in a three-volume package, an expansive selection of these works is revealed, presenting all of the themes, motifs and drawing techniques found in Hokusai's art. The caricatures, satirical drawings, multi-panel illustrations and narrative depictions found in the book can clearly be seen as the basis for manga as it is understood today.
Structured to impede the progress of the middle-aged love affair that it describes, this novel charts the steps two people take towards each other and asks what it means if the two people have taken those steps before.
"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life." Codrescu uses an imagined chess game in 1916 between Tristan Tzara and V.I. Lenin to discuss the sometimes-shared and sometimes-opposed approaches of the the arts and politics to assail the status quo and enact a new way of being.
"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny." - Vladimir Tismaneanu
"Highly original, beautifully written, and charming." - Marjory Perloff
A lovesick kraken slowly drags the object of its desire - a ship of sailors - into the sea; a group of cantankerous saints materialise in a well-appointed parlour, and must unravel the mystery of how they got there; ageing fathers are sunk to the bottom of the ocean in pressure-sealed crates in a time-honoured ritual. Andreasen romps through the lunatic and surreal with a tender generous ease; there is a joyous absurdity to each premise. Just because a sister is born without a head doesn't mean her brother won't love and protect her; just because an adulterous tryst ends in alien abduction doesn't mean the man doesn't miss his wife.
For centuries, art has documented the atrocities of wars, participated in propaganda campaigns, and served as an advocate for peace and social justice around the world. How can art assist in creating dialogue and bridges across cultures? 100 leading and emerging architects, artists, curators, choreographers, composers, and directors of art institutions around the globe explore the potentially constructive role of the arts in resolving conflicts or building bridges among opposing groups. Interesting, and beautifully presented.
A tale of two philosophical journeys: one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen; the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.
Unanticipated reading pleasures (with great maps).
A fascinating exploration of Chinese bapo paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which messages, often politically or socially critical, were encoded in seemingly realistic depictions of historical documents and fragments.
A gripping and perceptive account of the 1819 St Peter’s Field massacre, in which an assembly of 60000 campaigners for parliamentary and suffrage reform were charged by the 15th regiment of hussars and the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries, leaving fifteen dead and 650 injured, is a reminder of the role of class conflict in political change.
"Quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down." - The Guardian
>> Of course, Mike Leigh made a film of it.
Quietly unassuming and full of subtle ways in which a few simple ingredients can be transformed into classic Italian dishes (and some of his own creation). One of The Guardian's 'Best Food Books of 2018'.
Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in art, architecture and film by Giuliana Bruno $65
How is our understanding or art, film and architecture predicated on the experience of the body? What is the connection between sight and site? Between motion and emotion? A fascinating history of the spacio-visual arts.
"One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author's imagination." - Marina Warner, Guardian
The narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother. Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies. Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go.
"Unusual and absorbing. The novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power." - The New Yorker
Restaurants in Wanaka, Dunedin, Christchurch and Timaru.
Identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges including energy and financial crises, climate change, and hunger.
A beautifully presented menu notebook, evoking the ways in which mood and place can be reflected in cuisine.
"This is an extraordinary piece of food writing, pitch perfect in every way." - Nigella Lawson
Visit the studios of Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Gauguin, Keith Haring, and many other artists. Find the magnifying glass that got left behind on Claude Monet's desk. Spot the owls in Pablo Picasso's paintings. Play with Andy Warhol's flowers. Find the apples in Paul Cézanne's studio. Colour in Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog. Identify the silhouette of a sculpture by Brancusi. An enjoyable introduction to a range of interesting artists, ideal for 6-to-12-year-olds.
As a girl climbs the stairs top her apartment she imagines who might live behind each of the other doors in the building - and what an imagination she has!
>> Book trailer (in Dutch).
Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as is poverty.
The first articulation of democracy in Britain was made in 1747 in a series of debates between the Levellers and Oliver Cromwell. Human rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robinson shows the importance of this argument to political situations today.
In this classic work, Rodney argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today. Introduction by Angela Davis.
Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, obsessed with a single line from Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to "Exterminate all the brutes". His account of his experiences moves in parallel with a historical investigation, revealing what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's people over the course of the preceding two centuries. A new edition of this classic, jaw-dropping work.
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, a traveller and a lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. The first woman to climb Vignemale in the treacherous Pyrenees, she journeyed as far as Azerbaijan and slept with a pistol under her pillow. She also kept a diary, written in a code that has now been cracked.
Once the centre of Palestinian modernity, Jaffa was the country's cultural and political capital. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together. Even after 1948, Jews and Arabs gathered at the Jewish-owned spice shop Tiv and the Arab Abulafia family's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and memoirs, letters, and diaries, LeBor gives a crucial insight into the human lives behind the apparently intractable story of national conflict and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change. LeBor weaves the personal stories of six families, three Jewish and three Arab, into a rich and complex history of Israel and Palestine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
"Bleakly and outrageously comic. Reading Thom Jones's fiction is like speeding in an open car: the landscape blurs, the momentum becomes intoxicating - and then the brakes are applied, with no warning." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Jones was a master of the short story. Night Train will be an amazing discovery for anyone who cares about literature." - Philipp Meyer
Omrani follows the routes of the invading Romans and tells the story of the Gallic Wars and how the Celtic culture was first destroyed and then transformed by the invaders.
Authoritarian governments, elite populists, and 'freextremists' are exploiting our digital information infrastructure and the vulnerabilities in the democratic system to distort and undermine politics and elections.
A posthumous collection of poems, excerpts from his notebooks, lyrics, hand-drawn self-portraits.
>> 1967
>> 1968
>> 1972
>> 1979
>> 1993
>> 2013
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