Friday 7 February 2020

NEW RELEASES

Te Reo Māori: The basics explained by David Kārena-Holmes        $35
The use of te reo Māori in daily New Zealand life is snowballing, as is demand for resources to make learning the language efficient and enjoyable. This book helps answer that demand. Here in simple terms is a thorough guide to the building blocks of grammar in te reo, showing how to create phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The book employs real-life examples to illustrate how Māori grammar works day to day, and draws on David Kārena-Holmes's decades of experience teaching and writing about Māori language. 
>>Hear David talk at 2 PM this Saturday (8 February) at the Nelson Public Library Te Whare Mātauranga o Whakatū in Halifax Street
Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman        $35
Triggered by her reading of Woolf's Orlando, Aline, an academic and Proust specialist, finds herself suddenly transferred into the body of a young man sitting opposite her at a cafe. From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men, the novel is a subtle, insightful and funny exploration of androgyny, projection, and psychological and literary doubles.
"Jacqueline Harpman displays incredible confidence in juggling identities and meshing together yearnings and phobias, fantasies and frustrations." —l'Express
>>Read Stella's review of I Who Have Never Known Men.
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell            $35
A compelling novel exploring the emotional life of an American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria.
"An unbearably wonderful, eloquently sexual, thoughtful, emotional delight of a novel — Garth Greenwell writes like no one else." —Eimear McBride
"Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth." —Lisa Taddeo
"Garth Greenwell is an intensely beautiful and gorgeous writer. I can think of no contemporary author who brings as much reality and honesty to the description of sex-locating in it the sublime, as well as our deepest degradations, our sweetness, confusion, and rage." —Sheila Heti
Greenwood by Michael Christie           $37
A multigenerational family story in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.


Flèche by Mary Jean Chan          $28
Much like the fencer who must constantly read and respond to her opponent's tactics during a fencing bout, this debut collection by Mary Jean Chan deftly examines relationships at once conflictual and tender. Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in epee, a competitive sport of the poet's teenage and young adult years. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') in public and private spaces.
Winner of the 2019 Costa Award for Poetry. 
>>Parry riposte
>>Fleche attack!
Every Anxious Wave by Mo Daviau          $28
If you could go back in time and see any band play, what would you choose? This novel provides it characters with the opportunity to do just that, but when the time machine delivers one of its clients a thousand years too early, things begin to get complicated. 
Here in the Real World by Sara Pennypacker         $17
An introverted boy and a tough, secretive girl fight to save an abandoned section from being sold in this children's novel from the author of Pax
Big Mamma's Cucina Popolare: Contemporary Italian recipes        $60
Fresh and exciting Italian cuisine. 
The Plays of Bruce Mason by John Smythe        $40
The first comprehensive survey of the work of this outstanding playwright, whose plays are packed with socio-political insight. 
 The Gorse Blooms Pale: Southland stories and The General and the Nightingale: War stories by Dan Davin         $45 each
The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting Davin's experiences while growing up in an Irish-New Zealand farming family in Southland.
Davin was also the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin's 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as a wartime scholar-soldier and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies. They yield insight into the experiences of the ANZAC soldier at war during the Mediterranean and African desert campaigns of World War II. 
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld          $37
A rock off the coast of Scotland stands witness to the lives of three women over the centuries in this suitably angry novel. 
"A modern gothic triumph. Spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel." —Max Porter
>>The terror of men's violence against women
A Delayed Life: The powerful memoir of the Librarian of Auschwitz by Dita Kraus           $28
Kraus's experiences as the custodian of books smuggled in by the concentration camp's inmates is retold by Antonio Iturbe as The Librarian of Auschwitz
Agency by William Gibson            $37
San Francisco, 2017. In an alternate time track, Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump's political ambitions were thwarted.
London, 22nd century. Decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 per cent of humanity. A shadowy start-up hires a young woman named Verity to test a new product: a 'cross-platform personal avatar' that was developed by the military as a form of artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, characters in the distant future are using technological time travel to interfere with the election unfolding in 2017. Will they succeed? 


The Hidden Girl, And other stories by Ken Liu            $35
16 new science fiction and fantasy stories.
"Ken Liu has done more than anyone to bridge the gap between Chinese science fiction and Western readers." — New York Times


Dreamers: When the writers took power, Germany, 1919 by Volker Weidermann          $28

At the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed. But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved.
19 Love Songs by David Levithan           $24
Levithan has written a short story for his friends each Valentine's Day; this book presents them all. 


Universal Love by Alexander Weinstein           $26
A boy and his father find music in a drowned city. A lonely twenty-something gets addicted to comfort porn. A man is given a choice to have his trauma surgically removed. A mourning daughter brings her dead mother back to life as a hologram—but the source material isn't quite right. Inventive stories about the human thirst for connection amid rapid technological advancement. 
>>Read Stella's review of Children of the New World
Le Corbusier Paper Models          $40
10 kirigami buildings to cut and fold. Fun. 












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