BOOKS @ VOLUME #269 (11.3.22)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER, find out what we've been reading, and about new and interesting books.
Saturday, 12 March 2022
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Looking for ghosts.
>>An eternity of looking for keys.
>>Humour, with a little darkness.
>>Do you believe in ghosts?
>>We can send a copy to anyone!
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | There's a Ghost in this House by Oliver Jeffers {Reviewed by STELLA} From the wrap-around translucent tracing paper dust-jacket to the hand-lettered font, to the wonderfully apt dimensions and quality of the paper, There’s a Ghost in this House will immediately draw you in. And this is even before you get to the best bits. This delightful ghostly tale of a girl determined to discover the ghost in her house is another standout from illustrator and author Oliver Jeffers. I loved the muted tones in this picture book, and how Jeffers has integrated his drawings and characters in a collage style with black-and-white images of furniture and interiors gleaned from old books and catalogues — predominately photographic. Add to this the clever use of tracing paper to expose the ghosts who are hiding in plain sight, small detail drawings, and the simple evocative text, and the appeal of this picture book is complete. The young girl who lives in the supposedly haunted house spends her days wandering the large old house looking in all the usual places where ghosts might be: in the attic, in the cupboard under the stairs, in the hall — where she may have heard them rattling their chains, under the bed, and up the chimney, and of course, in the rooms where the lights are off. Alas, to no avail. She wonders what they look like. She’s heard “some say they are white with holes for eyes”. The joy of this picture book lies in the ‘appearance’ of the ghosts as you turn the tracing paper pages. At first, they are quiet and hardly noticeable, but after a while, they become bolder and the relationship between the reader and ghosts, who are still invisible to the young girl, becomes a shared secret. There's plenty of quirky fun here, and Jeffers’s humour comes to the fore: the baby ghost, complete with a dummy, peeping over the edge of the cot. The ghosts under the table — one looking directly out of the page to the reader with a 'shh' finger raised to its lips. Ghosts that swing from chandeliers, ghosts that stop for a cup of tea and a chat, ghosts reading in the library and jumping on the bed. The ghosts are watching our brightly coloured girl and following her every move as she tours the house in her never-ending search, sure that someone is watching her. But where is the ghost? And the more you look, the more you see! Irresistible. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute (translated by Maria Jolas) {Reviewed by THOMAS} In biology, the directional response of a plant’s growth either towards or away from an external stimulus that either benefits or harms it is termed tropism. Nathalie Sarraute, in this subtly astounding book, first published in 1939, applies the term to her brief studies of ways in which humans are affected by other humans beneath the level of cognitive thought. In these twenty-four pieces she is interested in describing “certain inner ‘movements’, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives. These movements, of which we are hardly cognisant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness, in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak. They constitute the secret source of our existence.” We are either attracted or repulsed by the presence of others, though attraction and repulsion are indistinguishable at least in the degree of connection they effect, we are either benefitted or harmed by others, or both at once (which is much more harmful), but we cannot act upon or even acknowledge our impulses without making intolerable the life we have striven so hard to make tolerable in order to survive. Neurosis may be a sub-optimal functional mode, but it is a functional mode all the same. We wish to destroy but we fear, rightly, being also destroyed. We sublimate that which would overwhelm us, preferring inaction to action for fear of the reaction that action would attract, but we cannot be cognisant of the extent to which this process forms the basis of our existence for such awareness would be intolerable. We must deceive ourselves if we are to make the intolerable tolerable, and we must not be aware that we so deceive ourselves. Such devices as character and plot, which we both apply to ‘real life’ and practise in the reading and writing of novels, are “nothing but a conventional code that we apply to life” to make it liveable. Sarraute’s brilliance in this book, which is the key to her other novels, and which constitutes an object lesson for any writer, is to observe and convey the impulses “constantly emerging up to the surface of the appearances that both conceal and reveal them.” Subliminal both in its observations and in its effects, the book suggests the urges and responses that form the understructure of relationships, unseen beneath the effectively compulsive conventions, expectations and obligations that comprise our conscious quotidian lives. Many of the pieces suggest how children are subsumed, overwhelmed and harmed by adults: “They had always known how to possess him entirely, without leaving him an inch of breathing space, without a moment’s respite, how to devour him down to the last crumb.” Sarraute is not interested here in character or plot, but in the unacknowledged impulses and responses that underlie our habits, attitudes and actions. Each thing emerges from, or tends towards, its opposite. All that is beautiful moves towards the hideous. Against what is hideous, something inextinguishable moves to rebel, to survive. ‘Tropism’ also suggests the word ‘trop’ in French, in the sense of ‘too much’. The ideas we have of ourselves are flotsam on surging unconscious depths in which there is no individuality, only impulse and response. Sarraute’s tropisms give insight into the patterns, or clustering tendencies, of these impulses and responses, and are written in remarkable, beautiful sentences. “And he sensed, percolating from the kitchen, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we’ve taken our breath away.” |
NEW RELEASES
In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, we last see Dr Frankenstein’s Creature shunned by human society and crossing the Arctic wasteland. What if he were rescued by an eccentric English expedition intent on sailing from pole to pole and back – only to be cast away again in a remote fiord in Aotearoa’s deep south? This intriguing speculation ignites the novella that lies at the heart of Vincent O’Sullivan’s electrifying new story collection. Elsewhere, O’Sullivan takes us deep into other times and minds. Two siblings relive a sinister memory of their childhood, an isolated young man learns to walk around the city alone, a Victorian adventurer purchases a human head, and always there is memory, like ‘Stonehenge from a choice of angles’.
"A bold and unnerving book full of mischief and wonder. O’Sullivan’s eye for why people want the wrong things is wincingly good. And always there’s the striking move from the senses and the physical world to a kind of philosophical tussle. You finish an O’Sullivan story feeling implicated and enlivened." —Damien Wilkins
In this fable-like novel from the author of (most famously) Mister Pip and (most recently) The Cage, the narrator's sister gives birth to a very different sort of child, who reveals the family's capacities for both love and shame, and attracts the opprobrium of small-town small-minded New Zealand in the 1960s. Just what is Fish's relationship with the sea beside which he was born, and what bearing might this have on the Wahine disaster? And what is the relationship between the narrator writing this account and the events that are contained within it?
Our mother's clouds and insects fly to embrace your clouds and insects. Her architecture, roads, bridges and infrastructure rush to greet yours. Her molecules on their upward trajectory entwine with yours, the colour of her eyes, hair and skin. Her language, with its past participles, figures of speech, the sounds and tremors which are its flesh and bones these words go out to greet your words and to greet you - these words which will never leave her.
House & Contents is a meditation on earthquakes and uncertainties, parents and hats, through Gregory O'Brien's remarkable poetry and paintings.
Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a beautifully written meditation on being present. It conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena—the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety—we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. A remarkable book.
In her essay 'On Being Ill', Virginia Woolf asks whether illness should not receive more literary attention, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of "love, battle and jealousy". In this collaborative volume, authors, translators and illustrators have come together to represent past, present and future thinking about illness. Includes work by Audre Lorde and Sinead Gleeson.
Through readings of one hundred poems — from Catullus to Alice Oswald, Shakespeare to Hera Lindsay Bird — this is an engaging introduction to how poetry works. Ten chapters look at simplicity and resonance, imagery and form, letters and odes, and much more. In Actions & Travels Anna Jackson explains how we can all read (and even write) poetry.
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son's nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom. First published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is as urgent and necessary an account today of the experience of the female body and of a woman's right to self-determination.
Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni $30
"Woman Running in the Mountains captures the private intensity of early motherhood like none other. Everyone should read Tsushima, a fierce marvel of a writer, who seems to write to us at once from the past and the future." —Rivka Galchen
This book bridges two anniversaries. Ulysses by James Joyce was published in 1922. Venice was founded in 421. The title Breach of All Size is Joyce’s pun on Venice landmark Bridge of Sighs but could as easily describe his sprawling modernist classic, which clocks in at 265,222 words. To celebrate both anniversaries, 36 Aotearoa writers were asked to write love stories set in Venice and inspired by words from Ulysses, but to steer the opposite course and keep them short. How short? 421 words, of course.
Featuring stories by: Anita Arlov • Ben Brown • Diane Brown • Gina Cole • Rijula Das • Lynley Edmeades • Alison Glenny • Trish Gribben • Jordan Hamel • Jenna Heller • Lloyd Jones • Anne Kennedy • Erik Kennedy • Fiona Kidman • Kerry Lane • Wes Lee • Renee Liang • Emer Lyons • Becky Manawatu • S J Mannion • Selina Tusitala Marsh • Paula Morris • Emma Neale • James Norcliffe • Karen Phillips • Patrick Pink • Sudha Rao • Renée • Harry Ricketts • Jack Ross • Tracey Slaughter • Apirana Taylor • Catherine Trundle • Hester Ullyart • Ian Wedde • Sophia Wilson
An amazing resource: 80 interviews published mostly in Artforum across a 13-year span. Interviewees include Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agn s Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Rockburne, Sarah Crowner, Lucy Skaer, Sophie Calle, Mary Beth Edelson, W.A.G.E., Mary Heilmann, Pauline Oliveros, Kathryn Andrews, Jessamyn Fiore, Aura Rosenberg, Lucy McKenzie, Rhonda Lieberman, Lucy Dodd, Hong-Kai Wang, Sakiko Sugawa, Beverly Semmes, Virginia Dwan, Jeanine Oleson, Tauba Auerbach, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Donna J. Haraway, and more.
From making boys cry with the power of poetry to hitting back against microaggressions and sucker punches, these irreverent and tender poems dive head first into race and sexuality with rage and wit, while embracing everyday moments of joy to fortify the soul.
Aotearoa's longest-running poetry journal, first published in 1951 and still a vital barometer of the year's poetic activity. #56 features 130 new poems, including by this year's featured poet, Wes Lee, and by David Eggleton, Janet Newman, Amber Esau, Elizabeth Morton, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Alistair Paterson, essa may ranapiri, Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Iain Britton, Jordan Hamel, Jack Ross, Dominic Hoey, Owen Bullock, Semira Davis, Rata Gordon, Adrienne Jansen, Olivia Macassey, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Kerrin P Sharpe — along with essays and reviews of new poetry collections.
Eight remarkable stories that use language as a weapon against political and social 'dismemory'. Roig's striking prose allows the important stories of those silenced by the brutal Franco regime to come to the fore.
"Montserrat Roig, before her untimely death, was a shining light of Catalan literature. The stories in The Song of Youth show her at her most urgent, energetic and inventive. While most of the stories are clearly set in the Catalonia of the 1970s and 1980s, they also have the quality of timeless fable." — Colm Toibin
"Montserrat Roig is one of far too many women authors whose work has taken far too long to be translated into English. These stories, in this excellent translation, will introduce readers to a remarkable writer, who, though not always comfortable to read, is always searingly honest." —Margaret Jull Costa
There are birds everywhere! Some of them live by the sea, some of them in the savannah, and some might live in your roof.
Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time. Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words." —Judges' citation
A visit to Te Papa launches a boy and his whānau on a magical adventure to find Pāpā after he gets lost. He has gone missing inside one of the museum's taonga, but which one? Will they find Pāpā before the museum closes? Searching with the help of a museum host, the family encounters moa, paddles a vaka, flees war-time Hong Kong and rides the famous Britten Bike.
Short-listed for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
"Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch. Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry." —Judges' citation
Completing the project begun in Volume One, fifty biographies bring Ngai Tahu history into the present. The people in the book have contributed to their iwi, hapu and whanau in myriad ways: here are wahine toa, rangatira and tohunga, community leaders, activists and scholars, social workers, politicians, fishermen and farmers, sportspeople, adventurers, weavers, performers, and many more. With a special emphasis on mana wahine, more than half of the biographies in Volume Two celebrate the stories of Ngai Tahu women. The book is illustrated with photographs sourced from the Ngai Tahu archive, external institutions and whanau collections.
Saturday, 5 March 2022
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly {Reviewed by STELLA} Greta and Valdin are siblings. They live together in central Auckland. Greta is working on her Master’s thesis in comparative literature, enamoured with fellow student Holly and navigating her queerness and her mixed cultural heritage. Valdin has thrown in his career in astrophysics at the University, and has found a new role as a TV presenter — something he is unexpectedly doing well at — and is pining for his ex-boyfriend, Xabi. Basically, he’s having a crisis. In Rebecca K Reilly’s assured debut novel the chapters move between the narratives of these two siblings, their voices distinct and compelling, as they live and love in Tāmaki Makaurau. The city itself, richly described and lively, is a character in itself. While some readers will fall into this novel with little effort — the dialogue and character interactions relatable and the cultural references (films, music and memes) relevant — others will ease in more slowly as they walk along with these 20-somethings in contemporary Aotearoa. For this is a story at first glance about being young, about finding your way and being in love. It has those Sally Rooney hooks. But Reilly has more going on here and you can take this as a sharp, funny and romantic escape or dig a little deeper. The Vladisavljevic family is a blend of Maori, Russian and Catalan, which makes for some great family conversations and interesting experiences for the characters. Here, Reilly, uses humour as well as anger to put the spotlight on racism and prejudice. From the outburst of Valdin on location in Queenstown to the more subtle undercurrents in Betty’s life, from Greta’s annoyance at being pigeonholed to Ell’s exclusion from her family. As we get a glimpse into the lives of other family members, Greta & Valdin becomes a richer novel — more assertive and nuanced. What is family? Why and how does circumstance dictate choices made, paths taken. And how can love be exhilarating, sad and wonderful simultaneously? Whether it is Reilly’s intention or not, Greta & Valdin sings from a similar song sheet as a Dickensian family saga or a Jane Austin classic. The novel opens with despair and ends with a wedding, and is an emotional rollercoaster in-between. There are the complex family interchanges, the tales of woe and happiness, and machinations between characters that lead to both misunderstanding and revelation and acceptance, hurt and forgiveness, romantic and familial love, and humour — complete with witty dialogue. And all set in a distinctly vibrant contemporary Aotearoa complete with all its flaws and charm. And who can resist a happy ending? Shortlisted for the Acorn Prize 2022. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | Mouthpieces by Eimear McBride {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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Friday, 4 March 2022
>>Read an extract.
>>Have a look inside the book.
>>Ten questions.
>>Collaboration at the core.
>>Something about light.
>>James Hackshaw's public buildings.
>>An interview with the author.
>>The McCahon House.
>>Your copy.
>>Some books about Colin McCahon.
>>Some books about Paul Dibble.
>>The short lists for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
NEW RELEASES
The unflinching new novel from the author of the acclaimed Hurricane Season. Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasises about seducing his neighbour—an attractive married woman and mother—while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener in the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Facing the impossibility of getting what they think they deserve, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Melchor is a thrilling writer, her electric prose charged with the power to transform the reader. Paradais explores the explosive nature of Mexico's brittle society, fractured by issues of race, class and violence-and confronts us with teenagers whose desires and hardships can tear life apart.
Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon by Mark McGurl $45
After Lockdown: A metamorphosis by Bruno Latour $36
Revolution: An intellectual history by Enzo Traverso $55
The Walker: On losing and finding yourself in the modern city by Matthew Beaumont $25
Cat Eyes and Dog Whistles: The seven senses of humans and other animals by Cathy Evans and Becky Thorne $35
Yellow Kayak by Nina Laden and Melissa Castrillon $30
"Fernanda Melchor has a powerful voice, and by powerful I mean unsparing, devastating, the voice of someone who writes with rage, and has the skill to pull it off." —Samanta Schweblin
"Fernanda Melchor explores violence and inequity in this brutal novel. She does it with dazzling technical prowess, a perfect pitch for orality, and a neurosurgeon's precision for cruelty. Paradais is a short inexorable descent into Hell." —Mariana Enriquez
What has happened to fiction in the age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorised as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. McGurl contests that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic has reorganised the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. As other standards of quality have been overwhelmed by pure 'customer satisfaction'—even in university literature courses—and literary culture has been subsumed by corporate culture in search of the 'perfect product', are we better off, or worse?
"Explains the place of culture in a neoliberal economy." —New York Times
After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to 'the world as it was before the pandemic'. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis — that brought about by climate change. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we — inhabitants of the Earth — live, what kind of place 'Earth' is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible — a freedom differently situated and differently understood.
August by Christa Wolf (translated by Katy Derbyshire) $23
Life As We Made It: How 50,000 years of human interventon refined — and redefined — nature by Beth Shapiro $43
"You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye." August is Christa Wolf's last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as a gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, her fictional perspective is very different. The story unfolds through the eyes of August, a young patient who has lost both his parents to the war. He adores an older girl, Lilo, a rebellious teenager who controls the wards. Sixty years later, August reflects on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf's work.
Virus-free mosquitoes, resurrected dinosaurs, designer humans — such is the power of the science of tomorrow. But the idea that we have only recently begun to manipulate the natural world is false. We've been meddling with nature since the last ice age. It's just that we're getting better at it. Shapiro reveals the surprisingly long history of human intervention in evolution through hunting, domesticating, polluting, hybridising, conserving and genetically modifying life on Earth. Looking ahead to the future, she casts aside the scaremongering myths on the dangers of interference, and outlines the true risks and opportunities that new biotechnologies will offer us in the years ahead.
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of dialectical images: Marx's locomotives of history, Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals—from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jos Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South—as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
"Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it.” –China Miéville
A fascinating literary history of walking—would we have literature without it? From Charles Dickens's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
Drilling through Hard Boards by Alexander Kluge (translated by Wieland Hoban) $35
Max Weber described politics as "a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment." Weber's metaphorical drill certainly embodies intelligent tenacity as a precondition for political change. But what is a hammer in the business of politics, Kluge wonders, and what is a subtle touch? What is political in the first place? In the book, Kluge unspools more than one hundred vignettes, through which it becomes clear that the political is more often than not personal. Politics are everywhere in our everyday lives, so along with the stories of major political figures, we also find here the small, mostly unknown ones: Elfriede Eilers alongside Pericles, Chilean miners next to Napoleon, a three-month-old baby beside Alexander the Great.
Highly sensitive receptor cells in our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin relay messages to the brain and allow us to interpret the things going on around us, creating our sense of reality. But how do our senses work? And how do they differ from the senses of other animals? Did you know that, unlike the other senses, smells are delivered directly to the parts of our brain that are responsible for memory and emotion, meaning that smells can trigger feelings in a way that sight or sound can't? Did you know that a cow has about 250,000 tastebuds, compared to 5,000 of a human, and a mere 30 of a chicken? Or that earwax is 80% dead skin? A well-illustrated large-format hardback.
You just never know what a new day will hold if you are brave enough to find out. On one quiet afternoon, a boy and his special friend's unexpected adventure bring joy and excitement and sights never imagined. And the best part of any adventure is returning home with stories to tell and you best friend at your side. From the creators of If I Had a Little Dream.
"Castrillon's beautifully surreal artwork is captivating. Each scene is full of imaginative sea creatures, crashing waves, blue-green tendrils of rain, and moonlit skies, all rendered in swirling organic shapes and lines and a dense palette of saturated tones." —Booklist
A corrective to the many 'required reading' lists dominated by white men, this book gives excerpts from a great diversity of work and is an excellent way to broaden your reading and discover authors previously unknown to you.
Sometimes the monsters take us. Sometimes we become the monsters. Mirabelle has always known she is a monster. When the glamour protecting her unusual family from the human world is torn and an orphaned brother and sister stumble upon Rookhaven, Mirabelle soon discovers that friendship can be found in the outside world. But as something far more sinister comes to threaten them all, it quickly becomes clear that the true monsters aren't necessarily the ones you can see.
In 1945, Europe lay in ruins - its cities and towns destroyed by conflict, its economies crippled, its societies ripped apart by war and violence. In the wake of the physical devastation came profound moral questions: how could Europe - once proudly confident of its place at the heart of the 'civilised world' - have done this to itself? And what did it mean that it had? In the years that followed, Europeans - from politicians to refugees, poets to campaigners, religious leaders to communist revolutionaries - tried to make sense of what had happened, and to forge a new understanding of civilisation that would bring peace and progress to a broken continent. As they wrestled with questions great and small - from the legacy of colonialism to workplace etiquette - institutions and shared ideals emerged which still shape our world today.
"Marvellously subtle and wide-ranging. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the world of today." —Margaret MacMillan
Seventeen-year-old Julie has her future all planned out-move out of her small town with her boyfriend Sam, attend college in the city, spend a summer in Japan. But then Sam dies. And everything changes. Heartbroken, Julie skips his funeral, throws out his things, and tries everything to forget him and the tragic way he died. But a message Sam left behind in her yearbook forces back memories. Desperate to hear his voice one more time, Julie calls Sam's cellphone just to listen to his voicemail. And Sam picks up the phone. In a miraculous turn of events, Julie's been given a second chance at goodbye. The connection is temporary. But hearing Sam's voice makes her fall for him all over again and, with each call, it becomes harder to let him go. However, keeping her otherworldly calls with Sam a secret isn't easy, especially when Julie witnesses the suffering Sam's family is going through.
The seas are filled with drowning migrants; Europe is awash with xenophobia and fear. In the cities and towns, in the schools and shops, strange children are starting to appear: enigmatic and unnerving, they disappear like ghosts, causing uproar. Amid mounting paranoia, Khaled, a young teenager, by chance meets Karolina in a discount store in Brussels. She buys him a red suitcase, and they part ways: Karolina to both mourn and search for her missing son, whose laptop betrays his entanglement with extremist groups; Khaled to head south, against the flow of other Syrian refugees — travelling with urgent intent, desperately protecting the contents of his suitcase.
In my case, reading has always served a dual purpose. In a positive sense, it offers sustenance, enlightenment, the bliss of fascination. In a negative sense, it is a means of withdrawal, of inhabiting a reality quarantined from one that often comes across painful, alarming or downright distasteful. In the former sense, reading is like food; in the latter, it is like drugs or alcohol. Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two of his favourite books.
Told in the willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, The Long Song is at once a defiant, funny, and shocking novel of life on a nineteenth century Jamaican slave plantation. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her "Marguerite." Resourceful and mischievous, July soon becomes indispensable to her mistress. Together they live through the bloody Baptist war, followed by the chaotic end of slavery. Taught to read and write so that she can help her mistress run the business, July remains bound to the plantation despite her "freedom." It is the arrival of a young English overseer, Robert Goodwin, that will dramatically change life in the great house for both July and her mistress. Short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
Wrapping stories within stories, Rian Hughes's XX unleashes the full narrative potential of graphic design. It uses the visual culture of the twenty-first century to ask us who we think we are - and where we may be headed next. At Jodrell Bank Observatory a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin has been detected. Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert and on the autistic spectrum, thinks he can decode it. But when he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia find a way to step into the alien realm the signal encodes, they discover that it's already occupied - by ghostly entities that may come from our own past. Have these 'DMEn' (Digital Memetic Entities) been created by persons unknown for just such an eventuality? Are they our first line of defence in a coming war, not for territory, but for our minds? Including transcripts from NASA debriefs, newspaper and magazine articles, fictitious Wikipedia pages, a seventeenth-century treatise called Cometographia by Johannis Hevelius, and a spread on the so far undeciphered written language of Easter Island, Rongorongo, from a book called Language Lost: Undeciphered Scripts of the Ancient World. The battle for your mind has already begun. Also by Rian Hughes: The Black Locomotive.
"Vastly ambitious, XX is the most astonishing blend of narrative, meta-narratives and visuals. Real 'wow' moments and big ideas combine with brilliant typographical flourishes to create the Moby-Dick of sci-fi." —Daily Mail
The West seems unable to disentangle itself from the 'forever wars' in the Middle East. The US and its allies do not have the strength to win, but they do have the power to avoid defeat, protracting conflicts interminably in the process. Cockburn examines the causes of these endless wars and why reporting on them in the West has markedly deteriorated in recent years. Governments and the public know less and less about who is fighting and why; propaganda increasingly replaces well-informed reporting. The modern era in the Middle East is notable not only for failed states but for failed journalism.
In the 1850s it was a cart track with stumps that needed dodging but it soon took on the appearance of a settlement, defined at each end by hotels and gradually filling with homes, shops and service industries. There were stables and sawmills, bakeries and bootmakers, and as the wider district was cleared and developed the town of Motueka became a business hub for hop and tobacco farmers, orchardists and agriculturalists. It was also a transport hub linking Nelson, Richmond, Ngātimoti, Riwaka and Golden Bay by land and sea. Today High Street is more intensely concentrated, with three or four businesses where one used to be but it is as vibrant as ever. This book records old family names and businesses, fires, floods and parades and the development of industry, services and tourism. It also documents the strong sense of community which still exists in a district which has High Street as its heart. An exemplary photographic history.
Thursday, 3 March 2022
Read below what the judges have to say about each book, and click through to our website to read the books yourself (or to give them to your friends).
The category winners will be announced on 11 May.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (Text Publishing)
Word by word, inch by inch, Gigi Fenster immerses us in the increasingly unsettling psyche of her narrator. Olga lends a hand with her friend’s daughter, who has recently given birth, but the helpful old woman gradually takes on a more sinister role. It is an unnerving and absorbing reading experience as the darkness gradually closes in. Fenster creates an unforgettable voice, which at first seems so light and benign as — impeccably paced — the psychological tumult builds to a truly mesmerising crescendo.
Word by word, inch by inch, Gigi Fenster immerses us in the increasingly unsettling psyche of her narrator. Olga lends a hand with her friend’s daughter, who has recently given birth, but the helpful old woman gradually takes on a more sinister role. It is an unnerving and absorbing reading experience as the darkness gradually closes in. Fenster creates an unforgettable voice, which at first seems so light and benign as — impeccably paced — the psychological tumult builds to a truly mesmerising crescendo.
Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)
Dazzlingly intelligent and ambitious in scope, Entanglement spans decades and continents, explores the essence of time and delves into topics as complex as quantum physics. But at the heart of Bryan Walpert’s novel is the human psyche and all its intricacies. A writer plagued by two tragedies in his past reflects on where it all went wrong, and his desperation leads him back to Baltimore in 1977. A novel unafraid to ask difficult questions, and a novelist unwilling to patronise his readers.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
From the very first page, this novel has readers laughing out loud at the daily trials of these two Māori-Russian-Catalonian siblings. The titular characters navigate Auckland while dealing with heartbreak, OCD, family secrets, the costs of living, Tinder, public transport and more, and they do it all with massive amounts of heart. Greta & Valdin is gloriously queer, hilarious and relatable. Rebecca K. Reilly's debut novel is a modern classic.
Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishers)
Ten years ago, Whiti Hereaka decided to begin the task of rescuing Kurangaituku, the birdwoman ogress from the Māori myth, 'Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman'. In this extraordinary and richly imagined novel, Hereaka gives voice and form to Kurangaituku, allowing her to tell us not only her side of the story but also everything she knows about the newly made Māori world and after-life. Told in a way that embraces Māori oral traditions, Kurangaituku is poetic, intense, clever, and sexy as hell.
BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1840 to 1910 by Claire Regnault (Te Papa Press)
This beautiful and beguiling book will seduce a wide audience with its stunning images and informative text, focusing on our ancestors’ lives through the lens of their clothing. Elegantly designed and sumptuously presented, it covers the diversity of sartorial experience in 19th Century Aotearoa as it addresses simple questions such as: Who made this garment? Who wore it, and when? A valuable addition to our nation’s story, it will have wide cultural and educational reach, and is an outstanding example of illustrated non-fiction publishing.
NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women by Qiane Matata-Sipu (QIANE+co)
The strikingly successful outcome of an ambitious project to showcase indigenous women going about their daily lives, doing both ordinary and extraordinary things. The 100 varied examples of talent and triumph are presented in a simple magazine-style format that is as accessible as it is effective. The author gracefully presents her subjects in their own words, stepping aside in the text but being wonderfully present through her tremendous portrait photography, which works seamlessly with the elegant, unpretentious typography in a beautifully cohesive package.
Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Lucy Mackintosh (Bridget Williams Books)
A fresh and timely study that weaves multiple narratives across time and space into a highly readable story, revealing the deep histories and continuous remaking of selected landscapes across Tāmaki Makaurau. The clean presentation of both often startling historic images and contemporary photography, and the skilfully written text informed by serious scholarship, fill some of the gaps in the stories of Auckland. The inviting format and careful, uncluttered design will appeal to a wide audience. An impressive first book.
The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble by Bridget Hackshaw (Massey University Press)
A thorough and beautifully produced triangulation of creative practice that shows the value of collaboration in the arts, as evidenced in the collective projects of James Hackshaw, Colin McCahon and Paul Dibble. Archival material (including personal correspondence and sketches), informative and reflective text, and powerfully evocative photography are delivered cohesively through clean and lively design and typography. The author’s clear labour of love is reinforced by excellent external contributions, making for an enlightening and brilliant whole. Another impressive and assured first book.
GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
From the Centre: A Writer’s Life by Patricia Grace (Penguin Random House)
On one level this is a personal memoir of love and of family — Patricia Grace writes of her husband, her children and her extended family, of being schooled and of teaching — but her life is also played out in the context of social history, the time when many Māori began to move from rural to urban environments; Grace is always aware that she lives within a much larger community. Hers is a rare literary memoir, free of egotism.
The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change by Dave Lowe (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
In this wide-ranging autobiography, Dave Lowe follows New Zealand’s critical role in charting carbon emissions from the 1970s onwards. Writing of the methodical collection of critical data allows Lowe to convey major scientific concepts to the general reader in a very accessible way. The Alarmist has a rich texture of family and a clear awareness that members of the scientific community are not always in harmony. It is enlightening as well as very readable.
The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin Random House)
A writer of novels and short fiction turns to non-fiction with a memoir par excellence. In this book of trauma, recovery and self-discovery, the prose is exquisitely precise in its navigation of the complexity of the author’s family dynamics and its interrogation of how it has shaped the construction of her identity and influenced her writing. The Mirror Book combines the personal and the literary with the sociological. It has been — and deserves to be — widely read.
Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books)
An admirable work of historical scholarship drawing on many sources, Māori and Pākehā. Vincent O'Malley's craft lies in unpacking those sources in an eloquent and incisive way, and he helps readers to think critically as he presents balanced arguments about contested battles and other conflicts. In the process, he weaves a coherent history of the New Zealand Wars. Essential reading for New Zealanders, with the bonus of excellent book production by the publishers.
MARY AND PETER BIGGS AWARD FOR POETRY
Rangikura by Tayi Tibble (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
In Rangikura, Tayi Tibble further enhances her deserved reputation as a poet who writes with vibrant energy and talent. She has vision, and here sets out to combine vernacular with refined poetics, giving a voice to urban Māori. The result is dense and rich with life and language. These poems pay tribute to Millennial culture and use the power of humour, sexuality and friendship to create a collection that encapsulates this generation of Aotearoa.
Sleeping with Stones by Serie Barford (Anahera Press)
Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time. Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words.
The Sea Walks into a Wall by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press)
An up-to-the-minute contemporary collection that tests the very limits of what poetry can do. With her playful intellect and supreme confidence, Anne Kennedy creates poems that are consistently engaged with issues of the anthropocene, beneath which a constant, powerful tide flows and pulls. Worldly, and deeply in the world, The Sea Walks into a Wall bears witness to the grit and gravity of contemporary life.
Tumble by Joanna Preston (Otago University Press)
Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch. Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry.
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