NEW RELEASES
Written when Revueltas, a life-long political dissident, was himself a prisoner in the infamous Palacio de Lecomberri prison in Mexico City in 1969, this novella, written in a single, torrential paragraph, concerns three prison inmates who plan to have heroin smuggled in to the prison. The book, now available in English for the first time, is an indictment of the deforming impact of institutions upon individuals.
"A whirlwind: one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century writing." - Álvaro Enrigue
"It is impossible to understand contemporary Latin American literature without Revuelta's masterpiece The Hole. Its current invisibility in the English language places works like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and César Aira's political novellas in a bibliographic vacuum." - Valeria Luiselli
>> Read an extract.
Who better to explore the uneasy relationship between the Renaissance Italy and the Muslim world than Mathias Enard, who won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for Compass, a work calibrating experience across Europe and the Middle East? Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants pivots on Michelangelo's invitation to visit Constantinople at the behest of the Sultan, who wishes to commission a bridge. It is a novel about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.
"Necessary – no one writes like Mathias Enard." — Francine Prose
"All of Enard’s books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings. He’s the composer of a discomposing age." — Joshua Cohen, New York Times
>> Read an extract.
Bill Manhire interviewed by Anna Smaill, plus six poems; ‘My Ten Guitars’, a comic by Barry Linton, with a note by Tim Bollinger; Essays by Pip Adam, Geoff Cochrane, Lynn Davidson, Lynn Jenner, Dean Parker, Giovanni Tiso, Rose Lu; Fiction by Antonia Bale, Airini Beautrais, Zoë Higgins, Anthony Lapwood, Eamonn Marra, Hannah Mettner, Clare Moleta, Rachel O’Neill, Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Maria Samuela, Michelle Tayler; Poetry by Jane Arthur, Morgan Bach, Sarah Jane Barnett, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Jenny Bornholdt, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Ruth Corkill, Uther Dean, Lynley Edmeades, Rata Gordon, Rebecca Hawkes, Andrew Johnston, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Eleanor Rose King Merton, Emma Neale, Gregory O’Brien, Claire Orchard, Justin Paton, essa may ranapiri, Freya Daly Sadgrove, Frances Samuel, Kerrin P. Sharpe, Steven Toussaint, Oscar Upperton, Louise Wallace, Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Ashleigh Young; Cover by Elliot Elam.
>>This Sporting Life.
Thoughtful interviews with Patricia Grace, Tessa Duder, Owen Marshall, Philip Temple, David Hill, Joy Cowley, Vincent O'Sullivan, Albert Wendt, Marilyn Duckworth, Chris Else, Fiona Kidman and Witi Ihimaera, and excellent portraits and (even better) photographs of writing spaces by John McDermott.
Knausgaard writes "to erode his own notions of the world," but also, by exhausting his preconceptions through writing them, to allow himself stumble inadvertently upon knowledge that they had been concealing.
As a group of islands in the far south-west Pacific Ocean, New Zealand has a history that is steeped in the sea. Its people have encountered the sea in many different ways: along the coast, in port, on ships, beneath the waves, behind a camera, and in the realm of the imagination. While New Zealanders have continually altered their marine environments, the ocean, too, has influenced their lives. A multi-disciplinary work encompassing history, marine science, archaeology and visual culture, New Zealand and the Sea explores New Zealand's varied relationship with the sea, challenging the conventional view that history unfolds on land. Atholl Anderson; Damon Salesa; Ben Maddison; Angela McCarthy; Tony Ballantyne; Peter Gilderdale; Alison MacDiarmid; Michael Stevens; David Haines; Jonathan West; Grace Millar; Chris Brickell; Douglas Booth; Susann Liebich; Julie Benjamin; Jonathan Scott. Well presented.
Len Howard, the daughter of a poet, and a successful concert violinist, was forty years old when she decided to devote the rest of her life to her true love: birds. She bought a small cottage in Sussex, where she wrote two international bestsellers, astonishing the world with her observations on the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived in and around her house, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed. This novel is based on her life.
What work is referred to in a work of art? How can art explore the meaning of work, both economically and in a wider social context?
We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories. Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. He explores the relationship between sickness and structure, and between art, architecture, social planning and health, taking plenty of detours along the way.
"A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving. Stories weave and unweave over the book's course, patterning thought into a complex built environment, at once disorientating and illuminating." - Robert Macfarlane
An insightful account of the life and importance of the émigré artist who, from his arrival in New Zealand in 1939, became an aperture through which international and indigenous heritages entered art discourse and practice.
A boy finds that with some help from his nana and a costume that gives him the confidence to be himself, he is at last able to make the perfect bomb into the water.
The same in te Reo.
The state of New Zealand's fresh water has become a pressing public issue in recent years. From across the political spectrum, concern is growing about the pollution of New Zealand's rivers and streams.
Mr Kinfolk introduces us to the unseen shapers of visual culture: Dries van Noten, Kris Van Assche, Spike Jonze, Melina Matsoukas, Grace Coddington, Linda Rodin and many more. Excellent photography and production inside.
>>Look inside.
Lees began this book with the intention of swimming in natural outdoor water in New Zealand every day for a year. Around her account of this she has written what amounts to a history of wild swimming in New Zealand and the social history surrounding it.
>>Immersive reading.
A new edition with new women, in a pleasing smaller format. 200 women from around the world, famous or unknown, answer the same five questions, such as “What really matters to you?” and “What would you change in the world if you could?” New Zealand interviewees include, Jacinda Ardern, Louise Nicholas, Marilyn Waring, Damaris Coulter, Kimbra Johnson, Lydia Ko, Marama Fox, Eva McGauley and Karen Walker.
Chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, the myth of recovery. Is this everyone's story?
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.” — Cheryl Strayed
Can the upwelling of dissenting energy be shaped into a collective political force or party? Can politics come to be seen as an expression of the people rather than a disempowering force?
Seminal works of psycho-geography, first published at the turn of the twentieth century (but only now in English), from a pioneer of urban sociology and precursor the the Frankfurt School.
When an American pilot crashes in the desert he must seek refuge in the very camp it had been his mission to bomb.
"Red Birds is an incisive, unsparing critique of war and of America’s role in the destruction of the Middle East. It combines modern and ancient farcical traditions in thrilling ways." - Guardian
A rejection of received norms and practices and the creation of new forms of connection and creation reach a quantum intensity in New York during the 1960s and early 1970s.
A sharply satirical and fantastical collection of stories revealing the depth and breadth of racism in contemporary US.
"An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny." -George Saunders
Koirala has that knack of creating depth with a simple few lines — she creates images that seem to arise without effort, ideas that quietly lift off the page to settle in the mind of the reader. A new collection from the poet of Tear Water Tea.
In 1621, fifty-six English women crossed the Atlantic in response to the Virginia Company of London's call for maids 'young and uncorrupt' to make wives for the planters of its new colony in Virginia. The English had settled there just fourteen years previously and the company hoped to root its unruly menfolk to the land with ties of family and children. While the women travelled of their own accord, the company was in effect selling them at a profit for a bride price of 150 lbs of tobacco for each woman sold. The rewards would flow to investors in the near-bankrupt company. But what did the women want from the enterprise? Why did they agree to make the dangerous crossing to a wild and dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within their first few years - from dysentery, typhoid, salt water poisoning and periodic skirmishes with the native population? What happened to them in the end?
