BOOKS @ VOLUME #79 (16.6.18).
Our latest NEWSLETTER. Read our reviews and recommendations. Find out what's new.
Saturday, 16 June 2018
 | Luggage by Susan Harlan {Reviewed by STELLA} If you have a fascination for watching the bags on the carousel at the airport and wondering what is inside each and which belongs to whom, then you will find Susan Harlan’s Luggage a delight to read. Harlan, an English Literature associate professor at Wake Forest University, splices her accounts of travel, luggage and packing with cultural references from literature and film (the bizarre and poignant) to discuss our relationship with suitcases, bags, carry-alls, carry-ons, etc. Consider Jane Austen’s woes about the whereabouts of her trunk; Orhan Pamuk’s encounter with his father’s suitcase (filled with notebooks of writing), which reveals his father’s other self and of which they never spoke, revealing the schism between father and son; and Katherine Mansfield’s likening of humans to portmanteaux. Mary Poppins makes an appearance with her mysterious and infinitely producing carpet-bag from which anything one desires can emerge, while Anne of Green Gables’ similar-style bag (almost as physically empty) holds all in the world she owns. Harlan discusses what luggage is: does it include baggage, and at what stage do bags fall outside luggage or cargo? She looks at the origins of the various words that describe objects we pitch together and haul with us. Intriguing, thoughtful and littered with facts, Harlan's book looks at luggage through a variety of lenses. In the chapter 'Packing', she explores the industry - the numerous magazine articles, the books, the self-help videos - that will aid you to be or become the perfect packer. In 'My Luggage', she reveals her penchant for collecting bags and her love of vintage luggage. Her description of the clasps and the linings will make you look at your own suitcases with her observer’s eye, and may have you scouring the op shops for that special something. Finding a painting (now framed and hanging on her wall) in one suitcase, complete with a baggage label with name and address, gives her a piece of someone else’s history. Harlan looks at the meaning of luggage and historical happenings - what is left behind after disasters, what is abandoned, what can’t be taken, and what little might come with you when you are travelling unexpectedly - the absence of luggage when crisis impels people to flee with a perhaps only a cell phone and what they up stand in. Harlan takes a journey to Alabama to visit the Unclaimed Baggage Centre (a tourist attraction) - the place where all unclaimed lost luggage in America finally rests (ironically, the building neighbours a cemetery) and is sorted to saleable, good-enough-for-charity, or trashed. The lost luggage is purchased by the UBC sight-unseen, and bags are opened at 2:30 pm every day - 7000 new items daily. The bizarre and curious are kept in 'the museum', while the rest is sent to the appropriate department for display and sale. Only three laptops per visitors please - and lines of wedding dresses five deep make you wonder why these bags (0.5%) were never claimed from Lost Luggage departments of hotels, airports and bus stations. Harlan explores the meaning of objects that reside in our luggage, the physical objects and the weight these carry, but also those invisible burdens - our baggage. Neatly interspersed between the chapters is Harlan's account of her road journey with her orange suitcase and her dog cross-state to a Shakespeare conference - four days on the road and four at the hotel - what she packs, uses and returns with.Luggage is part of the 'Object Lessons' series from Bloomsbury. These are intelligent, amusing and thought-provoking long-form essays about the hidden lives of everyday things. Highly recommended. |
 | Yes by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} With its pages-long sentences, fugue-like structure, claustrophobic physical and mental space and relentlessly tightening interiority, Yes is the (disconcertingly pleasurable) literary equivalent of a Chinese burn. In the first of the novel's two paragraphs, the narrator, who has moved (twenty years ago) to an unappealing rural district to write a work on antibodies (what else?) that he will never accomplish, is 'saved' from his hopelessness and depression, which have brought him at last to the point of suicide, by meeting a Persian woman, the partner of a Swiss engineer, at the house of a local real estate agent, and taking a walk with her in the forest, during which no actual conversation takes place but in which the narrator develops a feeling of deep affinity with the Persian woman. In the second paragraph, which I increasingly came to read as taking place entirely within the narrator's head, we 'learn' of the 'entirely upright' dealing of the real estate agent in selling the Swiss a piece of long-unsaleable waterlogged meadow for a high price, of the developing relationship between the narrator and the Persian woman, first into obsession and then disgust (a masterfully rendered portrayal of projection (we, and the narrator (if I read correctly) actually know nothing of the Persian woman)), the history of the Swiss/Persian couple which has led the Swiss to build an oppressive house in an oppressive place as an act of spite, and of the eventual suicide of the Persian woman (to which the Yes of the title refers) as a sort of surrogate for the narrator. As the narrator states on page 65: “If such a thought is present, it must be thought through to the end.” |
>> An extract of Fish Soup.
>> Charlotte Coombe on translating Margarita García Robayo's work. (>>Find out more about the translator.)
>> 'Orchids'.
>> The author reads (in Spanish).
>> The book is published by Charco Press, a tiny press based in Edinburgh, bringing Latin American authors into English.
>> The cover is designed by Pablo Font. See some more of his work.
>> Carolina Orloff of Charco Press on Latin American literature.
>> Other Charco Press books at VOLUME.
>> Also published by Charco Press, Ariana Harwicz's indelible Die, My Love was long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Read Thomas's review.
Friday, 15 June 2018
NEW RELEASES
Some excellent books await your attention.
Two novellas and a swathe of short stories from this exciting Colombian writer. Each of the stories portrays characters grappling with, or pushing against, the limitations of their situation, drawn to whatever it is they lack, seemingly oblivious of the consequences (until it is too late (at least for them)).
>> Extract of Fish Soup.
Murnane writes beautiful, exquisitely pedantic, sad, subtly barbed and often very funny sentences. His ability to take a few brief experiences, or a location on the inland plains of Victoria, Australia, or a childhood memory, or the image of a person or a textual phrase, and to wring from these a seemingly endless depth and subtlety, gives him a rare Proustian quality.
>> "Intricately strange."
>> Mental places.
>> Words in Order.
Cusk brings her masterly 'Faye' trilogy (following Outline and Transit) to a close by finally activating Faye herself, recording her aeroplane journey and the conversations she has, pushing at the form of the novel and forcing tectonic shifts in the reader's preconceptions.
>> "Perhaps the cruellest novelist at work today."
If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint, even paucity, and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
Somewhere in the North African desert, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. Elsewhere, four westerners are murdered in a hippy commune and a suitcase full of worthless currency goes missing. Enter a pair of very unenthusiastic detectives, a paranoid spy whose sanity has baked away in the sun, and an American woman with a talent for being underestimated.
"Part Pynchon, part Beckett, a crime story told by Lewis Carroll in a particularly nihilistic mood." - Spectator
"Brilliant, anarchic, darkly comic." - Irish Times
The first part of Helen Heath's new collection is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, fences and buildings, a meditation on Theo Jansen's animal sculptures, and the lives of birds in cities. A series of speculative poems further explores questions of how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In these poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost. How might our experiences of grieving and remembering be altered?
>> Helen Heath - Standing room only.
>> Ask Gary Numan.
A never-before-published-in-English collection of six stories (1931-1963) from this Russian émigré modernist master.
>> "Much much more than a publishing event."
On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area were abandoned to their fate. The blast put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, contaminating over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. Plokhy draws on recently opened archives to recreate these events in all their drama, telling the stories of the scientists, workers, soldiers, and police who found themselves caught in a nuclear nightmare.
A novel of loss and the reconstruction of lives, set at the Salvation Army rehabilitation centre for alcoholics on Rotoroa Island in the Hauraki Gulf.
"This daring novel doesn’t shout at you. It makes its moves with such care and concealment that it’s a total surprise to find it has pressed such a weight against your chest. Beguiling and brilliant!" —Damien Wilkins
>> The drinkless isle: "Why I set my novel at the rehab centre on Rotoroa Island."
Atheism is as old and rich and diverse as religion, and as riven between its sects. Gray, a modern-day Schopenhauer and author of Straw Dogs and Black Mass, brings his misanthropy to bear on, changes the scope of, and brings to a whole new level, the tiresome religion vs science debate.
Florida by Lauren Groff $37
Storms, snakes, sinkholes, secrets. A savage collection of tooth-sharp stories from the author of the devastating Fates and Furies.
"A superlative book." - Boston Globe
"Gorgeously weird and limber." - New Yorker
"Brooding, inventive and often moving." - NPR
"Eerie and exquisite." - Vox
"Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." - Washington Post
>> Groff speaks.
Nguyen is in his element as the 'Street Food King', eating and exploring his way through traditional noodle soups and sweet sticky meats, to more adventurous dishes like Stir-fried Embryo Egg with Tamarind and Duck and Banana Blossom Salad. Venturing out at dawn and late into the night to discover street vendors, stallholders and roaming food carts, Nguyen captures the energy of each place at their busiest times of the day.
>> Luke in Saigon.
Whose stories deserve to be told? And whose words should do the telling? A book entirely made from lines sieved out of 100 other works of literature, assembled into a new form. A writer is on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the frozen north. But in searching for the boy's story, will he lose his own?
>> An excerpt.
A quietly vivid fictional evocation of life in the Shetlands, a society mixed of natives, incomers and returnees, abraded by land and sea.
A new translation of this endlessly inventive and sneakily disconcerting collection of surreal stories, first published in Italian in 1965. Buzzati falls somewhere between Borges and Calvino, both in time and in literary genetics.
"Much of Catastrophe is about the construction of paranoia and fear."
Raised by her grandparents in the USA, Verzemnieks grew up among expatiates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she hand never visited. Verzemnieks pieces together the lives of her refugee grandmother, of her grandmother's sister, exiled to Siberia under Stalin, and of her grandfather, conscripted by the Nazis.
"A world in which poetic mythology coexists with sophisticated modernity, the dead mingle with the living, and the hardships of a traumatic past are countered by the strength of memory and of lasting attachments." - Eva Hoffman
A well written novel treating the lives of step-sisters and lovers Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, their early life in Nantes, their escape from the provinces to Paris, their reinvention of themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore respectively, pushing the frontiers of both art and gender at the time of the Surrealists, and their flight from the Nazis.
"Arrestingly accomplished." - The Guardian
>> Cahun.
Not since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has the Middle East been convulsed by so many events in such a short period of time. Uprisings, coups, and wars have seen governments overthrown, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced. Bubalo argues that the current turmoil is the result of the irrevocable decay of the nizam - the system by which most states in the modern region are ruled. But if you look hard enough, it is possible to spot 'green shoots' of change that could remake the Middle East in ways that are more inclusive, more democratic, less corrupt, and less violent.
A beautifully presented and very appealing book of delectable and authentic dishes from western India, all absolutely at home in New Zealand.
An insightful study of mental illness in young British women: anxiety, self-harm, borderline personality disorder, OCD, binge eating disorder, PTSD and dissociative identity disorder.
>> Case studies.
Evel Knievel jumped his motorcycle over 14 Greyhound buses. The Iceman is the most well-preserved human, found in the ice after 5,300 years. Sam Patch jumped Niagara Falls for $75. Helen Thayer walked to the North Pole alone. Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning 7 times. How are you interesting?
The natural world is a text wee can learn to read. From the author of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Inner Life of Animals.
Kenji Tanabe finds maps easier to read than people. At the elite Tokyo gallery where he works, he sells antique maps by selling the stories that he sees within their traces: their contribution to progress, their dramatic illustrations, their exquisite compasses. But no compass or cartography can guide him through the events that will follow the sudden and unexpected offer of a job in America. There, Theodora Appel runs a company that is more like a family. Brilliantly successful, beguilingly secretive, she gradually initiates Kenji into her rarefied world. Only someone like him - quiet, intensely committed and discreet - could be allowed to see beneath the surface to what his employer is hiding. Theodora has never recovered from the death of her lover, and her obsession to reclaim the past threatens them all. Moving across countries and cultures, The Consolation of Maps charts an attempt to understand the tide of history, the geography of people and the boundless territory of loss.
From the common starling to the many-coloured rush tyrant, the names we have given to birds are some of the most vivid and evocative words in the English language.
>> Birds calling each other by name.
Opportunists and self-seekers had an effect on the often unofficial history of the Pacific. This rollicking and often tragic book follows those who followed the European explorers and sought to benefit from what was to them a new world.
A beautifully presented large-format book, with stunning diagrams and very clear step-by-step photographs.
Simon is miffed that his little brother is growing faster than he is. What does it mean to be a big brother?
>> The other Simon books.
Tuesday, 12 June 2018
VOLUME has just been awarded the People's Choice Award for BEST N.Z. PROVINCIAL RETAILER at the 2018 Retail Hotlist Awards. Many thanks to all our customers and fellow travellers, our colleagues in the book trade, Retail New Zealand, and everyone else working to build interesting communities and make retail more dynamic.
The judges said: "There’s something about independent bookstores that inspires intense passion in their customers. Many of New Zealand’s best-loved indies are venerable institutions that have served their shoppers for decades, but at a little over one year old, Volume is the upstart little sister to this kind of bookstore. Co-founders Stella Chrysostomou and Thomas Koed haven’t let their combined 35 years of experience in the book trade stop them from moving fast and taking risks." And many thanks, everybody, for your kind words, cakes, chocolates, coffees, champagne, flowers, cards, &c, but, especially, thank you for supporting your independent bookshop and sharing our enthusiasm for interesting books.
Saturday, 9 June 2018
BOOKS @ VOLUME #78 (9.6.18).
Find out what we've been reading and the latest news and new releases in our weekly newsletter. Subscribe at right if you are not already subscribed.
 | Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie {Reviewed by STELLA} Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is a powerful and affecting novel about what it means to be Muslim in contemporary Britain. It’s a tale of loyalty, betrayal, politics, and the deeply personal. The book opens with Isma in airport security, travelling to America to study. The older sister of twins, Aneeka and Pasvaiz, Isma has had responsibility for their parenting and for the economic stability of the family unit since her mother and grandmother died within weeks of the other. Their father, a jihadist fighter, remembered only by Isma, is only a shadowy legacy - one that paints a picture of violent death at the hands of allied forces. Aneeka and Pasvaiz, now out from the protective umbrella of their sister, become increasingly independent. Aneeka, studying law and often out with friends, is beautiful and enigmatic, devout in her own way. Pasvaiz, with no scholarship to attend university, is at a loose end, working at the local greengrocer with dreams of being a revolutionary sound engineer. While Isma is busy with her studies, meeting a privileged man, Eamonn (son of a Muslim British politician) and Aneeka is living her life to the full, Pasvaiz becomes increasingly isolated and secretive. He meets Farooq, a recruiter for Isis, who tells him heroic tales about his father and points out the injustices in the system. Offered a job in Syria, he leaves under the pretence of visiting family in Pakistan. Pasvaiz is young, naive, and craving a father figure he has never had. Once in the Middle East, he realises his mistake. His passport is taken from him, his cell phone destroyed, and all contact with anyone outside the organisation is highly monitored or non-existent. Eamonn returns to the UK and meets Aneeka. A love affair develops between them, a relationship that Aneeka hopes will pave the way to the door of the Home Secretary - Eamonn’s father. Shamsie builds a perfect framework of family, faith and love, impinged on by politics and ambition. Home Fire is a modern rendition of the play, Antigone, the story of a young woman torn between what is expected and her love for her outcast brother. The story starts quietly with Isma’s viewpoint. Isma is sensible, clever and prepared to underplay her cultural difference for a safe and non-confrontational life, yet there is a barbed edge to her actions just under the surface. In Aneeka, this edge is front and centre and she will do anything for her twin, even deceive those she loves the most. As the story progresses, the tension mounts, and the attitudes of the family, the community and the politicians are exposed, accumulating in a terrifying breaking point. Shamsie won the Woman’s Prize for Fiction this week in the UK, with the judges pronouncing it ‘the story of our times’.Home Fire is a breathtaking work which hits hard and is tender at its heart. |
 | Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977 - September 15, 1979 by Roland Barthes {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes.” Does a series of notes on how a work might come to be written itself constitute a work? The day after his mother’s death in 1977, Barthes began writing observations on his mourning for her on small slips of paper. The fact that he isolated this accumulation from his other work (Camera Lucida, also addressing loss and memory, but via consideration of photography, specifically a photograph of his mother, was also written in this period) as well as intimations that making these notes into a book would bring the process of mourning to a close, rather than writing a book for posterity, as, he admits, has been the case for his previous books, suggests that had Barthes not had an unfortunate encounter with a laundry van in 1980, he might have used these notes to write a book. These notes are not that book, but it could be the case that these notes, for all their inconsistencies, vaguenesses and banalities, make a rawer and more compelling book than if they had been made into the book that Barthes had perhaps intended (this might also not be the case, of course), for the notes sketch nebulae from which diamonds might be compressed (if that was Barthes’s creative process) and demonstrate that his more rigorously intellectual works have emotional bases that they are perhaps constructed to conceal. Of his mother’s recent death (he had shared an apartment with her for 60 years), Barthes writes, “I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it, although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.” Instead, he observes himself and his mourning: “In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.” His loss alters the way he sees both life and literature, emphasising the significance of the seemingly banal and diminishing the importance of the seemingly profound. “Everywhere, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die. And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.” “My suffering is inexpressible but all the same utterable,” he notes. It is the very shortcomings of language, the necessity of labelling his suffering as intolerable, that makes his suffering tolerable. “The indescribableness of my mourning results from my failure to hystericise it. Maman’s death is perhaps the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not been hysterical; doubtless, more hysterically parading my depression, I would have been less unhappy. I see that the non-neurotic is not good.” “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering,” writes Barthes, and, despite his assurances that this will not happen (“my mourning does not wear away, because it is not continuous” (“I waver between the observation that I’m unhappy only by moments, and the conviction that in actual fact I am continually, all the time, unhappy.”)), his mourning does in fact wear away, “gradually narcissism gives way to a sad egoism.” Narcissism being a literary mode; egoism not, the diary becomes sporadic and less focused as this process advances. Early on, Barthes states, “I live in my suffering, and that makes me happy,” but eventually he has trouble maintaining his identification with his mother (“henceforth and forever I am my own mother,” he had said), and his unhappiness changes its texture: “I left a place where I was unhappy and it did not make me happy to leave it.” Eventually, observing the exhaustion of grief in the maintenance of its referents, he concludes, “we don’t forget, but something vacant settles in.” |
>> The "low-brow high art world of Tony de Lautour".
>> Standing room only (with image gallery).
>> From earthquakes to fatherhood.
>> Real Art.
>> At CAC: "De Lautour’s early works drew from wide-ranging sources including seedy underground street culture, tattoos, post-punk music and comic books as well as fine English porcelain and antiques. De Lautour was awarded a New Zealand Arts Laureate in 2012, and over the past decade his painting has developed into a unique take on geometric abstraction."
>> High on the wall (timelapse).
>> About the cover image.
>> The thought part of the act.
Friday, 8 June 2018
NEW RELEASES
These books have just arrived at VOLUME.
The first retrospective collection of this savagely interesting artist sprung from Christchurch's itching cultural underbelly.
>> The "low-brow high art world of Tony de Lautour".
>> From earthquakes to fatherhood.
>> The thought part of the act.
"The woman artist had no place in New Zealand at the turn of the century." Living in Hokitika before leaving first for Sydney and then California, Ridge became both a modernist poet and a painter, and a tireless advocate for the working class. Comparisons are made with Mansfield, Bethell and Mander: "Short story writer Katherine Mansfield was the only contemporary New Zealander with international ambition equal to Ridge's," and, "Ridge's main competitor for 'New Zealand's best woman poet of the early 20th century' is another modernist, Ursula Bethell."
>> American anarchist with a West Coast connection.
>> Some poems and a bio.
You couldn't hope for a more stimulating and surprising collection of architectural forms from around the world.
Motherhood is the place in our culture where we bury the reality of our own conflicts. When treated as either idols or scapegoats, mothers become inaccessible as individuals and become a mechanism that prevents the resolution of personal and societal difficulties.
What happens when a mother's love for her country outweighs her love for her family? After his mother's death, Forgách started to discover evidence that she was an informant for Hungary's Kadar regime. This novel tells her story.
>> Mother knows best. Mother knows everything.
>> "My mother was a Cold War spy."
Hockney's illustrations, a mix of etching, aquatint and drypoint, are remarkable and individual, injecting new energy into these tales.
>> Look at some of the illustrations here.
This book is not written by humans but by insects. Zhu Yingchun left ink pools in his garden and collated the marks made by crawling insects into this unique book, in equal parts rigorous science and conceptual art.
>> Writers at work.
The world's oldest literary epic is now a graphic novel! Follow Gilgamesh and his buddy Enkidu as they battle golds, monsters, mortality and the blurred edges of their own humanity.
What are feathers made of? Why do birds have so many of them? How do they help birds fly? And what other purpose do they serve? All these questions and many more are answered in this book bursting with the most beautiful illustrations.
A companion for The Egg.
The Hellenistic period was one of fragmentation, violent antagonism between large states, and struggles by small polities to retain an illusion of independence. Yet it was also a period of growth, prosperity, and intellectual achievement.
John Yeon (1910-1994) was a pioneering figure in architecture, who paved the way for the Northwest Regional style of modernism. Known for a series of exceptionally beautiful houses - including the Watzek House, a National Historic Landmark - Yeon's architecture was celebrated for its subtle relationship to site and place, and its sensitive deployment of local materials. His innovations in construction and early sustainable design, and his stylistic freedom, anticipated several later movements, ranging from ecological modernism to postmodern eclecticism.
>> A few examples.
>> A tour of Watzek House (1937).
The discovery of a woman's body in the canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow by a drifter and the bargeman he is working for supercharges the claustrophobic intensity of this book in which the narrator seduces the bargeman's wife and begins to betray the fact that he knows more about the woman's death than he will admit. First published in 1954.
"The plotless beauty of Trocchi's writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put 'the Scottish Beat' on a par with Kafka and Camus. Asked to name the best existential literature, most of us would probably say Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Franz Kafka. But Trocchi actually takes the reader one step further into the philosophical world of existential angst than any of them." - Guardian
>> The book was made into a film.
Hope travels through South Africa and asks what happened to the dream of a egalitarian post-Apartheid future?
When Alice Mistlethwaite is shipped off to boarding school in Scotland it's nothing like she imagines. There are no punishments and the students are more likely to be taught about body painting or extreme survival than maths or English. When Alice's father goes missing and she must run away to find him, can she persuade her new friends to help? An exciting Highlands adventure.
Can this depressive, razor-tongued essayist, poet, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, lexicographer, the son of a bookseller show us how to address (or avoid) the pitfalls, vulnerabilities, tediums and hazards of quotidian life? Possibly he can.
How can art be made following a cultural trauma such as that experienced by Europe during World War 2? This important new book includes some 400 works by 150 artists, bringing together for the first time post-war art from both Western and Eastern Europe. The book studies how Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Henry Moore, Renato Guttuso, Fernand Leger, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud and many others worked through the trauma of 1940-1945 and the Cold War.
An enjoyable, page-turning adventure with clues, mysteries, strange consequences and extremely likeable characters. Can Tess, Theo and Jamie solve the notorious century-old cipher set by the brilliant inventors the Morningstarr twins and save their building from destruction at the hands of developers?
>> Read Stella's review.
When Conley, the son of a small-town Arkansas Baptist pastor, was nineteen, he was outed to his parents and was forced to make a decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality, or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.
Deep in an overgrown Estonian forest, two women, one young, one old, are hiding. Zara, a murderer and a victim of sex-trafficking, is on the run from brutal captors. Aliide, a communist sympathizer and a blood traitor, has endured a life of abuse and the country's brutal Soviet years. Their survival now depends on exposing the one thing that kept them hidden: the truth.
An idiosyncratic YA graphic novel. Claudia Jones is missing. Her classmates are thinking the worst, or at least the weirdest. It couldn't be an alien abduction, could it? None of Claudia's classmates at Blithedale High know why she vanished - and they're dealing with their own issues. Emily's trying to handle a life-changing surprise. Paula's hoping to step out of Emily's shadow. Nigel just wants to meet a girl who will laugh at his jokes. And Brett hardly lets himself get close to anybody.
>> Meet MariNaomi.
Culture and counterculture had a moment of confluence in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love and LSD, the Monterey Pop Festival and Black Power, Muhammad Ali's conviction for draft avoidance and Martin Luther King Jr's public opposition to war in Vietnam, as well as of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Why 1967?
>> Jimi Hendrix live, (1967)
>> The 'Summer of Love'.
Kiefer wrestles with the darkness of German history, unearthing the taboos that underlie the collective past and interweaving them with Teutonic mythology, cosmology, and meditations on the nature of belief. His works have a disconcerting tactility, at once emerging from the picture plane and decaying into it.
All children like to thoroughly investigate a hole. This beautifully illustrated book surveys all the different sorts of natural and human-made holes, from animal homes to conceptual voids.
From traditional tapas like crispy patatas bravas and bacon-wrapped dates to classic favorites like garlicky sauteed shrimp, pork meatballs, and saffron-spiced seafood paella, Boqueria introduces us to both the food and culinary culture of Barcelona.
Why did the radicals of the sixties turn to Marx, Lenin, Mao and Che Guavara? Are there parallels to the world political situation today?
Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose place in history has been overshadowed by the giant figure of Newton, were pioneering scientists within their own right, and instrumental in establishing the Royal Society.
A search for a family's killers in 1880s Queensland is set against the actions of the Queensland Native Police, the arm of colonial power whose sole purpose is the 'dispersal' of Indigenous Australians in protection of settler 'rights'.
Well illustrated, attractively presented and full of clear and useful information on how to make a variety of delicious breads.
>> It is not as difficult or as time-consuming as you might think.
Essays, interviews, illustrations, songs and consciousness raising for young people, from a wide range of contributors.
Count to 20 and back with these eager animals at their very own Olympic Games. Useful.
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