Read our latest newsletter: BOOKS @ VOLUME #310 (23.12.22)
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Friday, 23 December 2022
Saturday, 17 December 2022
THE VOL
UME GIFT SELECTOR — THE PERFECT BOOKS FOR BOOK-LOVERSIf you're not sure what to give this season, choose from our 100 recommendations! If the perfect gift isn't there, browse the rest of our website (we have thousands of interesting titles) — or just e-mail us or phone us and we will help you choose. If you like, just send us a list of recipients and we will find the perfect books. Let us know if you'd like them gift-wrapped (and choose a card!). We will courier them anywhere. There's still time!
Give someone a reading boost! VOLUME Reading Subscriptions are chosen to fulfill individual reading preferences. Subscriptions can be for any number of books, from a one-off pick-me-up to an indefinite course of literary nutrition, administered at whatever frequency you like. You can either take out a full subscription at once, or pay as you go. >>Click through to see how the subscriptions work — or let us know how you would like them to work. 
Give the gift of choice. VOLUME VOUCHERS can be made out for any amount, and can be used on our website or by just e-mailing or phoning us. Our personalised digital vouchers can be e-mailed to you or to the recipient, and can be used bit-by-bit or all-at-once. Either use our website to order or e-mail us with your requirements. 
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
      | [Not a review by STELLA.] Anticipation is a good thing. I’m currently reading Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, but you’ll have to wait for the review as I’m still mid-stride. When the craziness of the next week is over, I’ll be looking to my stack of books — the ones I didn’t quite get to in 2022 — as well as some fresh tomes. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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1. I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway. |
NEW RELEASES
Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle 'Entering the Madness of Others' and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixes of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office"), which itself is just one aspect of his also being "constantly conscious of his connectedness" to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the "drunkard Cowley" and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to "a Serene Paradise of Knowledge." Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but "people must be told the truth" THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be "realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." —Publishers Weekly
"Breathtaking and hypnotic, this unorthodox novella boldly merges fiction, travelogue and literary criticism into one 96-page sentence." —Thúy Ðinh, NPR
>>A Box built in the abyss.
Bill Direen's latest book of poems begins with his life in Dunedin after his shift there from the small rural town of Middlemarch (described in companion volume Seasons. He then takes us on a read through the suburbs and CBD of Dunedin ('Skirting'), with visits to regional Otago and Canterbury (Oamaru, Tekapo, Cave and Pukaki). But behind much of the book lies the city both Direen and artist Scott Flanagan once called home — Christchurch. Flanagan's strangely vivid domestic artworks were completed after his recovery from cancer and its treatment. Both Direen and Flanagan have more than estrangement from their home cities to deal with. Their works deal with grief and the steady accumulation of bereavement the longer one lives, the passage of time, illness and treatment, not forgetting health and, as with Seasons, rhythms of nature and the effects of local light.
>>Christchurch, 1982.
Yoko Tawada takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street in these three stories. In 'Kollwitzstrasse', as the narrator muses on former East Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar's still sugar--but why lecture him, since he's already dead? Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt 'Majakowskiring': the narrator who reveres Mayakovsky's work is delighted to meet his ghost. And finally, in 'Pushkin Allee', a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life. Each of these stories opens up into new dimensions the work of this writer.
"Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within." —The New York Times
"Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman." —Rivka Galchen
Permanent homes and occasional retreats, small houses on compact urban sites and larger ones in remote landscapes, new builds and extensive alterations are captured by New Zealand's leading architectural photographers and written about in a thought-provoking way.
On February 27, 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana) launched a massive rebellion. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries fought for an entire year, and came very close to succeeding. Kars reconstructs this pivotal event, drawing on over nine hundred interrogation transcripts and other documents collected by the Dutch when the rebellion finally collapsed, which were subsequently buried in archives. Blood on the River provides a rare in-depth look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution.
At age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialised music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a "clerk of small human sins"—a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor—and the police file contains unexpected information about the already-solved murder of Dalia Shushan, a celebrated singer and songwriter—Elish's curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the ghost of Dalia, a true artist with a transformative voice whose dark brilliance Elish was one of the first to recognize, he must face the long-buried trauma of his own past in order to unravel the intertwining threads of two lives, and their ends.
A collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv. Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion.
What stories are told, and by whom, who should be celebrated, and what rewritten, are questions that have been asked recently not just within the history world, but by all of us. Featuring a diverse mix of writers, this book covers topics such as the history of racism and anti-racism, queer history, the history of faith, the history of disability, environmental history, escaping imperial nostalgia, hearing women's voices and 'rewriting' the past.
Alone with himself, even among his flock, a young bird finds an unexpected connection in the eyes of a little girl. He begins to wonder about the nature of life: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a bird? Swept up in his exploration of the human world, he doesn't notice that his flock has already migrated south for the season.
This book is a collaboration of knowledge and insight from a wide range of Māori researchers from all over Aotearoa and across multiple disciplines. The authors explore childrearing approaches and models grounded in kaupapa Māori and Māori knowledge that encourage wellbeing outcomes for children and incorporate ancestral knowledge into practices for the contemporary world.
The Passenger: California $33
A fascinating assemblage of writing, photography and reportage conveying contemporary life and issues in California.
During Peat's fifty-year writing career, he visited many of the islands within Aotearoa’s marine realm, from the tropics to Antarctica. This insightful book, part memoir, part adventure travel, history and nature conservation, is about these islands, including Stewart Island/Rakiura, Anchor Island in Tamatea/Dusky Sound, Kāpiti Island and Tiritiri Matangi in the Hauraki Gulf. Further afield, the book also covers Ross Island in Antarctica, Enderby Island in the subantarctic Auckland Islands, the Chatham Islands and the New Zealand dependency of Tokelau.
In New Mexico, she is a young mother. Stuck in a marriage that's deteriorating, unable to shake the feeling that her house and belongings are trapping her, she is increasingly drawn to reflect on who she was before: when she worked as an editor in New York, rarely in her own apartment, always seeking new places to call home. As she folds time, seeking to inhabit her past, she begins to encounter ghosts. Time and again, a solitary man appears — Gilberto Owen — a lesser known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and an obsession of her youth. He is living on the edge of Harlem's social scene at the beginning of the Great Depression, anticipating death, and tracing spectral visions of his own - among them, a young woman, travelling alone, on the subway. A meditation on time, hauntings, and the elusive, transitory identities we assume.
Losing Ourselves: Learning to live without a self by J.L. Garfield $45
Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self--and why it actually makes no sense at all and is even dangerous. He explains why shedding the illusion that you have a self can make you a better person.
The Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Richard Fidler $45
Classic Paperbacks Jigsaw Puzzle by Richard Baker $40
When Richard Fidler came across the account of Ibn Fadlan — a tenth-century Arab diplomat who travelled all the way from Baghdad to the cold riverlands of modern-day Russia — he was struck by how modern his voice was, like that of a twenty-first century time-traveller dropped into a medieval wilderness. On further investigation, Fidler discovered this was just one of countless reports from Arab and Persian travellers of their adventures in medieval China, India, Africa and Byzantium. This book tells the story of the medieval wanderers who travelled out to the edges of the known world during Islam's Golden Age; an era when the caliphs of Baghdad presided over a dominion greater than the Roman Empire at its peak, stretching from North Africa to India. Imperial Baghdad, founded as the 'City of Peace', quickly became the biggest and richest metropolis in the world. In a flourishing culture of science, literature and philosophy, the citizens of Baghdad were fascinated by the world and everything in it. Inspired by their Prophet's commandment to seek knowledge all over the world, these traders, diplomats, soldiers and scientists left behind the cosmopolitan pleasures of Baghdad to venture by camel, horse and boat into the unknown. Those who returned from these distant foreign lands wrote accounts of their adventures, both realistic and fantastical.
A 1,000-piece puzzle featuring favourite editions of modern classics.
Saturday, 10 December 2022
UME GIFT SELECTOR — THE PERFECT BOOKS FOR BOOK-LOVERSIf you're not sure what to give this season, choose from our 100 recommendations! If the perfect gift isn't there, browse the rest of our website (we have thousands of interesting titles) — or just e-mail us or phone us and we will help you choose. Let us know if you'd like the books gift-wrapped (and choose a card!). We'll send them anywhere.
>>Or consider giving a Volume Reading Subscription!
Our favourite books of the year! We have been asked which books we have enjoyed the most in 2022.
Stella: 1. Looking, Writing, Reading, Looking edited by Georgi Gospodinov; 2. The Bird Within Me by Sara Lundberg; 3. The Touch System by Alejandra Costamagna (translated by Lisa Dillman).
Thomas: 1. Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig; 2. Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi; 3. We Still Have the Telephone by Erica van Horn.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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Friday, 9 December 2022
NEW RELEASES
Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other's deathbed for unknown reasons by a 'relatively short' nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian's Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.
Landfall 244: Aotearoa New Zealand arts and letters edited by Linley Edmeades $30
"In sinuous, recursive sentences infused with equal parts reverence and venom, Haber constructs a darkly parodic portrait of aesthetic devotion and intellectual friendship, in which the redemptive practice of collaborative interpretation becomes a cage that two egos relentlessly rattle." —Nathan Goldman, Jewish Currents
"A delightful and dizzying excursion into the relationship between art and criticism, and all the ways that we often deceive ourselves about the things and people we love. Concise and deftly rendered, it moves forward like a rocket-or more accurately, like the transatlantic flight his unnamed American narrator takes to visit his friend and nemesis Schmidt in Berlin. In each of their lives, the painting has become a kind of mirror, reflecting their ideas and their assertions back upon themselves." —David L. Ulin, Alta Journal
"A brilliantly sustained performance: clever, droll and entrancing. Mark Haber creates something entirely new, and greatly impressive, within the Bernhardian universe." —Chloe Aridjis
Poetry: Rebecca Ball, Victor Billot, Peter Bland, Cindy Botha, Liz Breslin, Diana Bridge, Rachel Connor, John Dennison, Erin Donohue, David Eggleton, Jan FitzGerald, Miriama Gemmell, Michael Hall, Ruth Hanover, Claudia Jardine, Tim Jones, Erik Kennedy, Lyndsey Knight, Claire Lacey, Jessica Le Bas, Michele Leggott, Mary Macpherson, Cilla McQueen, Anuja Mitra, Margaret Moores, Janet Newman, Mikaela Nyman, Claire Orchard, Richard Reeve, Madeline Reid, Harry Ricketts, Ruth Russ, Harriet Salmon, Elizabeth Smither, Yvette Thomas, Tim Upperton, Sophia Wilson.
Fiction: Lucinda Birch, Joanna Cho, Jana Grohnert, Kirsty Gunn, Isabel Haarhaus, Jonathan Mahon-Heap, Frankie McMillan, Zoë Meager, S. A. Muse, Gerard O’Brien, Rebecca Reader, Angela Trolove.
Non-fiction: Tina Makereti, Jess Richards, Maggie Sturgess.
Art: Neil Pardington, Madison Kelly, Sam Kelly.
Review: Airini Beautrais, Kate Duignan, Emma Gattey, Lawrence Patchett, Laura Toailoa.
>>The winner of the 2022 Landfall Essay Competition. 
This Place / That Place by Nandita Dinesh $37
Nevada by Imogen Binnie $25
The Making of the Modern Middle East by Jeremy Bowen $40
The Book of Dirt: A smelly history of dirt, disease and human hygiene by Monika Utnik-Strugala, Piotr Socha $55
Millions of people on Earth start their day the same way: we get out of bed, go to the toilet and wash ourselves. But this hasn't always been the standard routine. Ancient Greeks and Romans were happy to splash about in public baths, but by the time the plague struck 14th-century Europe, many people believed that water spread diseases. It was not until the 18th century that Louis Pasteur proved that dangerous germs actually lurk in dirt. Even when hygienic habits began to be taught in schools, lessons were limited to washing faces and hands, because those were the parts that everyone could see. Dive deep into the history and science of dirt, discovering how people around the world (and out in space!) keep themselves and their surroundings free from filth, how our ideas of what's clean and what's not have changed and developed over the centuries, and why a little dirt can sometimes be a good thing.
In a nameless country under military occupation, two friends prepare to attend a wedding. The young man is from the occupied region ('This Place'), the woman is from the occupying nation-state ('That Place'). The complicated relationship between these two protagonists with unusual professions--he is a Protest Designer and she is a De-programmer--is tested when, on the eve of the wedding, the occupying power, That Place, formally annexes This Place and declares a curfew. Suddenly finding themselves confined to the same isolated space, the young woman and man try to kill time but inevitably wind up talking about the ways in which the war between their homelands pervades the unexplored and undeniable attraction between them. Will their relationship become another casualty of war?
Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters. After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip. Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognizes elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both. This hilarious, groundbreaking cult classic inspired a whole literary movement, and is now available outside the US for the first time.
Why Climate Breakdown Matters by Rupert Read $44
"I've told people that Nevada is the On the Road of trans literature, but that's glib and unfair to Imogen Binnie, who is a lot smarter than Jack Kerouac. Nevada crept in under cover of night in 2013 and assumed its position as a classic while everyone's attention was elsewhere." —Lucy Sante
Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. As people come together to mourn the loss of the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness looks to the new communities created around climate activism. Together, our collective mourning enables us to become human in ways previously unknown.
Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control. With his deep understanding of the political, cultural and religious differences between countries as diverse as Erdogan’s Turkey, Assad’s Syria and Netanyahu’s Israel and his long experience of covering events in the region, Bowen offers readers a gripping and invaluable guide to the modern Middle East, how it came to be and what its future might hold.
The sea provides more than half the oxygen we breathe, food for billions of people and livelihoods for hundreds of millions. But giant corporations are plundering the world's oceans, aided by global finance and complicit states, following the neoliberal maxim of Blue Growth. The situation is dire: rampant exploitation and corruption now drive all aspects of the ocean economy, destroying communities, intensifying inequalities, and driving fish populations and other ocean life towards extinction. The Blue Commons is an urgent call for change, from a campaigning economist responsible for some of the most innovative solutions to inequality of recent times.
"In this landmark book, Guy Standing not only documents how state-corporate collusion is destroying fragile ocean ecosystems, fisheries, and coastal communities. He explains how degrowth economics and fishery commons could restore the 'Blue Commons-Wealth' that belongs to all of us. The Blue Commons is at once a brilliant synthesis, a searing analysis, and an inspiring call to action." —David Bollier
What can class tell us about gentrification, precarious work, the role of elites in society, or access to education? How have thinkers explored class in the past, and how does it affect us today? How does class inform activism and change? Class: A Graphic Guide challenges simplistic and stigmatising ideas about working-class people, discusses colonialist roots of class systems, and looks at how class intersects with race, sexuality, gender, disability and age.
A thought-provoking set of Maori, Pasifika, and tangata Tiriti writers combine in this celebration of some of the best writing from E-Tangata. Traverse a landscape of contemporary and historical issues through the lens of a mother's loss, a man's hard-won expertise, a homesick student abroad and with the knowledge that all good things begin with ten guitars. These writings exemplify that grief and hope go hand-in-hand in the pursuit of justice and the reclaiming of identities in Aotearoa and the Pacific. Contributors Becky Manawatu, Maui Solomon, Max Harris, Andrew Robb, Joanna Kidman, Joe Williams, Moana Maniapoto, Kingi Snelgar, Emmaline Pickering-Martin, Moana Jackson, Rangi Matamua, Dale Husband, Patrick Thomsen, Shelley Burne-Field, Tainui Stephens, Connie Buchanan, Simone Kaho, and Christine Ammunson.
This book is about the weird and wonderful endangered species in Aotearoa, those lesser-known creatures that don't regularly make the news. But they are just as important as the 'stars' like kakapo and kiwi, for they are the foundation of our unique biodiversity. Tiaki includes such exotic animals as the Smeagol gravel maggot, a sea slug found on the south coast of Wellington; the moko kakariki, a gecko with a bright blue mouth; the kowaro/Canterbury mudfish, which can survive out of water for up to several months; and the tiny, critically endangered pekapeka-tou-roa/long-tailed bat.
>>Look inside.
The story of humankind is usually told as one of technological innovation and economic influence, arrowheads and atomic bombs, settlers and stock markets. But behind it all, there is an even more fundamental driver: food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments-from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide-and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people. Even so, Bittman refuses to concede that the battle is lost, pointing to activists, workers, and governments around the world who are choosing well-being over corporate greed and gluttony and fighting to free society from Big Food's grip. Sweeping, impassioned, and ultimately full of hope, Animal, Vegetable, Junk reveals not only how food has shaped our past, but also how we can transform it to reclaim our future.
In this collection of 50 texts, which range from essays to poems, a wide range of authors, from diplomats and students to politicians, academics and businesspeople, reflect on their experiences of and in China over the last half century.
Petra Pena wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra's world is ending. Earth will soon be destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children — among them Petra and her family — have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet — and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity's past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard — or purged them altogether. Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again? A multi-award winning and bestselling novel, blending science fiction and Mexican folklore to explore the power of storytelling.
"Gripping in its twists and turns, and moving in its themes — truly a beautiful cuento." —New York Times
One morning, after a fierce storm, the people of the harbour come down to find a strange ship called the Neversink stuck fast on top of the sand dunes. Inside is only a small boy with a big cap - The Little Captain. He and his ship stay marooned on top of the dunes until one day a giant wave sweeps the Neversink to freedom. And so The Little Captain sets sail once more, this time with three of the town's children, Podgy, Marinka and Thomas, as his crew mates. Together they are determined to find the island of Evertaller, where legend has it children turn into grown-ups overnight and never have to go to school again.
Robertson introduces us to the recipes that made her, as much as she made them. From feasts in her French holiday cottage to the Turkish-inspired weeknight dinners created with ingredients from her local Hackney high street, her recipes encapsulate the comfort to be found in the everyday.
Writing from memory, family recollections, and the goldmine of poet Lauris Edmond's correspondence and diaries, Frances Edmond details how her life intersected with, and often diverged from, her mothers. As creative collaborator, sole literary executor, and a frequent sounding board and confidante, Frances was privy to details known to very few. She learned about the wounds her mother carried and her inability to manage, or influence, the shifting tides of grief and resentment within their family.
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