NEW RELEASES
Green explores New Zealand poetry as if it were a house, moving from room to room and through time, releasing historical female poets from definition or exclusion by traditional male gatekeepers, bringing literary pioneers such as Jessie Mackay, Blanche Baughan Lola Ridge and Eileen Duggan out of the shadows to stand with contemporary literary provocateurs such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble. Includes biographies of 195 poets. Illustrated by Sarah Laing.
>>Have a look inside.
The future’s a disaster. Everyone knows it’s time to get proofing. But you, you’re out of energy to bolt down the bookshelf. You can’t afford a carbon-neutral kitchen. Balance the math & trash the books: you won’t ever have a house. You little worm. Do you really think you deserve your own bedroom? Fear not! If you can’t afford to be part of the problem, you can still buy into the compromise. La Belle Dame avec les mains vertes offers a solution for your every civic grievance. Set down in writing, made in New Zealand, one last blast of arts & crafts. La Belle Dame sees your plaint, & raises it. Would you like to register a charge, or a lamentation?
A green and grumpy, very funny ode to life in contemporary Tāmaki-makau-rau, in the form of a double sestina.
>>Read Thomas's review of Evangeline Riddiford Graham's Ginesthoi. Evangeline read at VOLUME in 2017.
A beautiful picture book, with recipes from all the various people that live in the apartment building.
>>Visit Sala's website!
Where are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form. The poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ — Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.
"The paired allegorical poetry tales in BACK Before You Know take on history and the perky fatalised body—as ‘The Fancier Pigeon’ sprightly-deathly observes, “The world is fixed / in ice and fire” and symmetry and entropy “go together / like two girls in a bar.” Edmond writes with a wry deliciousness in a pace from which one can’t turn away – we stop in the heart and we can’t stop anything in these forward cantering loops through fabled destiny." —Lisa Samuels
"Murray Edmond joins the rich tradition of late modernist folk poetry, which also includes Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger and Tom Pickard’s The Ballad of Jamie Allan. Wistful and riotous by turns, these two startling fables radiate with human warmth. They ring beautifully true." —Steven Toussaint
Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonised peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
>>The author changes the mind-set.
A sampler of interesting emerging poets.
Duggan wrote two collections of short stories but never presented them for publication. These appear here for the first time, with a substantial introduction by John Weir.
>> Duggan's Selected Poems has/have just been reprinted.
It unexpectedly arrived. It brushed past someone in the street. It weaves its way in and out of people on the street. It catches people completely unaware. But what is this It? A beautiful, quirky large-format book.
[Answer: happiness!]
Fear of Music, the third album by Talking Heads, was recorded and released in 1979. Edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky, and fun — with Brian Eno's production, it's a record that bursts out of the downtown scene that birthed the band, and hints at the directions (positive and negative) they'd take in the near future. Here, Jonathan Lethem takes us back to the late 1970s in New York City and situates Talking Heads as one of the most remarkable and enigmatic American bands.
>>'Heaven'.
For Maresi, like so many other girls, the Red Abbey was a haven of safety in a world ruled by brutal men. But now she is a young woman and it is time for her to leave. She must take all that she has learned from her sisters and return to her childhood home to share the knowledge she has gained. But when Maresi returns to her village, she realises all is not well - the people are struggling under the rule of the oppressive Earl, and people are too busy trying to survive to see the value of her teachings. Maresi finds she must use all the terrible force of the Crone's magic to protect her people, but can she find the strength to do so when her heart is weakening with love for the first time?
>>This is an excellent YA series.
Having fled to Paris in January 1933, on the day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth wrote a series of articles in that 'hour before the end of the world', that he foresaw was coming and which would see the full horror of Nazism, the Second World War, and, most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness.
When fox kits Mia and Uly are separated from their litters, they quickly learn that the world is a dangerous place filled with monsters. As the young foxes travel across field and forest in search of a home, they'll face a zombie who hungers for their tender flesh, a witch who wants to wear their skins, a ghost who haunts and hunts them, and so much more.
Welcome to the coalface of poetry: a unique combination of poems & polemics by David Merritt, the "people's laureate" (often seen hawking his words on the streets of Nelson and elsewhere), fused together for the first time. Concerning influence both literary & otherwise, the history of the desktop publishing revolution, best practices for making rich compost out of brute materialist society. Two lyrical essays paint a world where there's no good reason to see DIY printing & gardening as significantly separate skill sets.
The Way Through the Woods: Of mushrooms and mourning by Long Litt Woon $40
A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing - hunting for mushrooms. Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after arriving in Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student. They fell in love, married, and settled into domestic bliss. Then Eiolf's unexpected death at fifty-four left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been her partner and anchor for thirty-two years. Adrift in grief, she signed up for a beginner's course on mushrooming—a course the two of them had planned to take together—and found, to her surprise, that the pursuit of mushrooms rekindled her zest for life.
How can other people like the books we don't like? What benefit can we get from rereading a work? Can we read better? If so, how? These and many other questions, ranging from the field of writing to that of reading and translation, are addressed by the always incisive Tim Parks.
Printer, typographer, publisher, boxer, sailor, drinker, scholar, satirist, wit — and poet. New edition.
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Wiffen's discovery of therapod bones in Hawke's Bay in 1975 proved that dinosaurs featured in New Zealand prehistory — overturning what was thought at that time.
Excellent analysis of the blights of the autocracy, neoliberalism and international interference that led to economic collapse, famine and civil war.
The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Bastani claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Gosh.
"They demolish our houses while we build theirs." This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian 'stone men', using some of the best-quality limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, have built almost every state in the Middle East except one of their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabricating, and dressing is the Occupied Territories' largest private employer and generator of revenue, and supplies the construction industry in Israel, along with other countries in the region and overseas.
Thirteen stories set in Rio's largest favela, gravitating around the lives of boys and men who struggle with the violence involved in growing up on the less favoured side of the 'Broken City'.
Everyone knows that rockets are just toys, the stuff of cranks and pulp magazines. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, an engineering student named Frank Malina set out to prove the doubters wrong. With the help of his friend Jack Parsons, a grandiose and occult-obsessed explosives enthusiast, Malina embarked on a journey that took him from junk yards and desert lots to the heights of the military-industrial complex. Malina designed the first American rocket to reach space and established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But trouble soon found him: the FBI suspected Malina of being a communist.
John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. Thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, the novel was freed for publication.
Duncan Blake is a New Zealand filmmaker whose move to LA has not gone to plan. After a series of setbacks, he's working at a chain restaurant, his marriage is on shaky ground after a porn-related faux pas and his son won't stop watching Aladdin. When Duncan gets the chance to scout locations for a fated director's biopic of Saint Joseph of Copertino, it's the lifeline he's been searching for. But in Italy, in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century levitator, he must confront miracles, madness and the realities of modern movie making.
>>"It's bad for your health" (recommended viewing!)
