Friday 7 May 2021

 NEW RELEASES

No-One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood           $33
Lockwood's remarkable novel is both clever and moving, both painfully funny and deeply sad, it is about the bodilessness of the internet and about bodies in the world, about both isolation and intimacy, and about the burden that language bears connecting all these. One of the most anticipated books of the year. 
Everybody: A book about freedom by Olivia Laing              $50
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
The 1960s was a period of radical conflict, when the desire for a new, socially defiant freedom affected every aspect of NZ culture: theatre, the visual arts, Maori activism, rock 'n roll, literature, feminism, NZ film, direct action, culminating in a series of bombings that rocked Auckland at the end of the decade. Featuring figures such as Janet Frame, Tim Shadbolt, Barry Crump, Jean Watson, Hone Tuwhare, Carmen, Bob Lowry, Molly Macalister, Ronald Barker, Anna Hoffmann and the Bower Brothers, Time to Make a Song and Dance captures a spirit of revolt that swept over Auckland and Aotearoa, creating lasting changes to the boundaries of what was permissible. Murray Edmond has written a richly detailed history of the volatile events and personalities at the heart of the time.
>>Auckland was revolting
Mouthpieces by Eimear McBride            $13
Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Samuel Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride's three short, intense rather Beckettsian texts each convey a fragment of what could be called 'female experience'. In 'The Adminicle Exists', we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; in 'An Act of Violence', a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man's death; in 'The Eye Machine', the character 'Eye' tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes.
>>Eimear McBride's writing method
>>Where to begin? 
>>McBride on Beckett. 
We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida              $33
The beautifully written new novel from the author of The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. Teenage Eulabee and her alluring best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy, oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know the ins and outs of the homes and beaches, Sea Cliff's hidden corners and eccentric characters-as well as the swanky all-girls' school they attend. Their lives move along uneventfully, with afternoon walks by the ocean and weekend sleepovers. Then everything changes. Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a disagreement about what they did or didn't witness on the way to school one morning, and this creates a schism in their friendship. The rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.
Ghosts by Siobhan Harvey            $28
Harvey's latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories. It begins in a contemporary inner-city suburb where a poet starts to chart the regeneration she witnesses, its difficulties and opportunities. Along the way, the collection moves across time-zones, oceans and continents, breaking down personal and political walls, and unleashing ghosts everywhere. Ultimately, Ghosts is a work concerned with dislocation, rejection, homelessness, family trauma and how we can give voice to the lost souls inside us all.
>>If Befriending Ghosts.
Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn           $26
Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: "rokuro-kubi," whose heads separate from their bodies at night; "jikininki," or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless "mujina" who haunt lonely neighborhoods. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create the chilling tales in Japanese Ghost Stories. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller            $37
Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance. But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother's secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.
My Rock 'n' Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn              $33
An exploration of female friendship and women in music, from the singer-songwriter and author of Another Planet and Bedsit Disco Queen. In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey's music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock 'n' roll love affairs. Morrison — a headstrong heroine blazing her way through a male-dominated industry — came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn. They shared the joy and the struggle of being women in a band, trying to outwit and face down a chauvinist music media. In My Rock 'n' Roll Friend Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. 
>>Tracey Thorn and Everything But the Girl
Toymaker: My journey from war to wonder by Tom Karen        $45
From his early life in Czechoslovakia, his journey fleeing Nazi Germany across continental Europe, and his formative years in the UK as a penniless Jewish immigrant; through to his ascent to the top of the design tree, becoming the 'man who designed the 1970s' (he designed the Chopper bike!), and his later years as a creative polymath and design mentor. In Toymaker Tom Karen presents some of the most cherished items that tell a story of not just an extraordinary life, but show the importance of nurturing one's own imagination.

Pain: The science of the feeling brain by Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen          $33
Pain is part of human existence but we understand very little of the mechanics of it. We damage ourselves, we feel pain, we seek help from a professional or learn not to do that bad thing again. But the story of what goes on in our body is not this simple. Even medical practitioners themselves often fail to grasp the complexities of our minds and bodies and how they interact when dealing with pain stimulus. Throughout history we've tried to prevent it and mediate its affects, resulting in the current situation we find ourselves; highly medicated with a booming opiates industry. Common conception still equates pain with tissue damage but that is only a very small part of the story. pain is a complex mix of nerve endings, psychological state, social preconceptions and situational awareness.
Hold the Line: The Springbok tour of '81, A family, a love affair, a nation at war by Kerry Harrison        $30
A novel. It's 1981 and New Zealand is about to host the Springboks from apartheid South Africa for a national rugby tour. The well-supported protest movement pitches against a nation of die-hard rugby supporters. Despite growing public protest, the Government and Rugby Union are adamant the tour will proceed. Beth returns from London. Her World War 2 veteran father is a rugby fanatic, her brother becomes a protestor embroiled in street violence. She studies law and meets Viktor who, unknown to her, is a member of the notorious Police Red Squad. What will happen to their polarised relationship in a country where the very survival of civil order is at risk?

Walking in the Woods by Yoshifumi Miyazaki         $28
"It is clear that our bodies still recognize nature as our home." —Yoshifumi Miyazaki. 'Forest bathing' or Shinrin-yoku is a way of walking in the woods that was developed in Japan in the 1980s. It brings together ancient traditions with cutting edge environmental health science.
Woven in Moonlight by Isabel Ibanez             $20
A lush tapestry of magic, romance, and revolución, drawing inspiration from Bolivian politics and history. Ximena is the decoy Condesa, a stand-in for the last remaining Illustrian royal. Her people lost everything when the usurper, Atoc, used an ancient relic to summon ghosts and drive the Illustrians from La Ciudad. Now Ximena's motivated by her insatiable thirst for revenge, and her rare ability to spin thread from moonlight. Senior fiction.

Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing discontent and resistance by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone            $37
"Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Everything depends on the actions that people take into their own hands." How does politics shape our world, our lives and our perceptions? How much of 'common sense' is actually driven by the ruling classes' needs and interests? And how are we to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet?
This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The cyber weapons arms race by Nicole Perlroth            $33
'Zero Day' — a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world's computer networks invisibly until discovered. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to tap into any iPhone, dismantle safety controls at a chemical plant and shut down the power in an entire nation. Zero days are the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation states, defense contractors, cybercriminals, and security defenders alike. In this market, governments aren't regulators; they are clients paying huge sums to hackers willing to turn over gaps in the Internet, and stay silent about them. Do you want to know this?

The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter            $38
“War marches on under cover of euphemism.” Naïma has always known that her family came from Algeria — but up until now, that meant very little to her. Born and raised in France, her knowledge of that foreign country is limited to what she's learned from her grandparents' tiny flat in a crumbling French sink estate. When she starts to find out more about her family's involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, new dimensions to her family history start to reveal themselves. 
Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding our origins and rediscovering our common humanity by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods           $40

For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about 'evolutionary fitness', the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. 
"Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time." —Cass R. Sunstein

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Anna Brett and Nick Hayes        $40
Evolution clearly explained for younger readers—and well illustrated. 
Beyond the Vines: The changing landscape of wine in Aotearoa New Zealand by Jules van Costello         $40
Profiles 65 of the country's most exciting and innovative producers and explores the wine regions and various grapes we've made our own, and looks at the strengths and struggles of the New Zealand wine industry and a discusses some of the challenges it will face in years to come.









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