VOLUME FOCUS : Rooms
A selection of books from our shelves.
Friday, 18 November 2022
Saturday, 12 November 2022
Kiwi Christmas Books. If you can't imagine the festive season without a pile of good books, remember that there are children whose whānau are experiencing hardship and who have little to look forward to at Christmas. If you would like to give books to needy children in our community, either 1. Make a donation and we will choose books on your behalf; or 2. Choose books from our website yourself and just put "Kiwi Christmas Books" in the 'notes' field as you check out. Thank you for making a difference! >>Find out more about the Kiwi Christmas Books scheme.
>>Not a closed book.
>>Protest fiction for a new generation.
>>Protest fiction for a new generation.
>>Against the dogmatism of single-voiced fiction.
>>The urge to write in solidarity.
>>Art, life, and fiction.
>>Fifty years of state fiction.
>>The Last Colony by Philippe Sands tells of the injustices committed on Chagossians.
>>What can be done about half a century of unlawful administration?
>>Your copy.
>>Read the other books on the Goldsmiths short list.
>>The urge to write in solidarity.
>>Art, life, and fiction.
>>Fifty years of state fiction.
>>The Last Colony by Philippe Sands tells of the injustices committed on Chagossians.
>>What can be done about half a century of unlawful administration?
>>Your copy.
>>Read the other books on the Goldsmiths short list.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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Tamara Shopsin has written a personal and lively memoir about growing up in New York in the 1970s, specifically, about growing up in Greenwich Village in the shadow, or more precisely in the arms, of The Store. The Store was famous in spite of itself, and still is an iconic New York institution. What started solely as a grocer became a restaurant of repute in the 1970s, a place with its very own style and culture and a centre of the conversation, happenings and relationships of a neighbourhood. Tamara’s father Kenny Shopsin was a New York personality running The Store with his partner Eve. The five children grew up on the street and in the restaurant - on the sawdust floor, beside the freezer that gave electric shocks, in the arms of regulars, and under the feet of customers. Each had their shop chores and all chipped in as needed. Tamara Shopsin’s memoir is a homage to New York City, a New York that she sees as under threat from developers, increased housing prices and homogenised culture. It’s a homage to her eccentric father who had his own style, constantly changing the vast menu (especially if a dish became too popular) and making crazy customer rules - rules that made his place even more attractive to some and completely repellent to others: no phones, parties of no more than four people (don’t even try to sneak in with a three and a two and then pretend it is a coincidence), and no copying what someone else has just ordered. You could be a friend for life or blacklisted by putting a foot wrong with Kenny. The book is a homage to friends, family, and the importance of neighbourhood. Shopsin recalls the famous and the ordinary, drawing out the stories of those closest to her, particularly her father’s friend Willy, who in his unusual way sees them all through some sticky situations. There is a fascinating account of the development of the crossword puzzle and Margaret Petherbridge’s role in this at the New York Times. Kenny sometimes submitted puzzles and kept up a correspondence with Margaret over numerous years. There are numerous asides and insights making reading this memoir a delight. Arbitrary Stupid Goal is arranged as small pieces loosely connected, pieces that scoot from present day to a Tamara of age five and back, into times before her birth and retold stories. Over the course of the book she shapes a conversation that gives you an insight to her and her siblings’ childhood, the bohemian nature of The Village, the quirks of her father's cooking practices and temperament, the significance of the seemingly ordinary, and the importance of place. The Store was a meeting place that attracted celebrities, eccentrics and local, a place that accepted people for who they were but brokered no quarter for fakes or demanding clientele. In fact, Kenny feared success (and having to work too hard) and shrugged off reviewers and interviews, even going as far as to tell guidebook publishers that the restaurant had closed or that The Store was now a shoe shop. Tamara Shopsin’s writing style is quirky and idiosyncratic. She writes from the point of view a middle child, a keen observer with an agile mind, the point of view of a woman still very much connected to the place that made such an impact on her. Tamara Shopsin cooks weekends at The Store and is passionate about its legacy and the New York City she believes in. Touchingly personal and endlessly fascinating, this is a memoir which moves from hilarious to tragic and back again in a half a breath. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
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You’re soaking in it, he said when I asked him how he was getting on with the review of Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat, the review he was supposedly writing for the newsletter that his bookshop issued each week. You’re soaking in it, he said, but he did not elaborate further, and it was unclear to me what he meant. He was referring, perhaps, to the decades-old advertisement for a dishwashing liquid that softens your hands while you do the dishes, if we are to believe the advertisement, a liquid that undoes the effects of work upon the worker, a liquid that leaves a person who commits a certain act seeming less like a person who would commit that act than they seemed before they committed that act, in this case washing the dishes but presumably the principle could apply to anything, providing that the appropriate liquid could be found. You’re soaking in it, he repeated, and, yes, I thought that perhaps he was right, we are immersed always in something that undoes the effects upon ourselves of our own intentions, something that Adler alludes to when she writes, “For a while I thought that I had no real interests, only ambitions and ties to certain people, of a certain intensity. Now the ambitions have drifted after the interests, I have lost my sense of the whole. I wait for events to take a form.” But there is an uneasy relationship between the narrating mind and the world in which it soaks, in which it is softened as it does its work, he might think. “Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind,” wrote Adler. The world in which we soak is comprised of random events, or at least of events sufficiently complex as to appear random or to be treated without fear of correction as random, he might think, a world of discontinuity, of agglomeration and dissolution, of fragmentations, collisions and tessellations, he might think, a world in which the one who is soaking in it instinctively, or, perhaps, instinctually, it’s hard to tell which, searches for meaning even while acknowledging its impossibility, for this, he probably is thinking, is the nature of thought, or the nature of language, if that is not the same thing. We cannot help but narrate, narrate and describe, observe and relate. There is no meaning, I suppose he is thinking as he contemplates, or as I suppose he contemplates, the review he could be writing of the book that he has read, or claims to have read, may well have read, no meaning other than the pattern we impose by telling. Stories both create and consume their subjects, he thinks, I think, or he might as well think. Writing and reading, the so-called literary acts, are concerned with form and not with content, or, he might say, more precisely, concerned primarily with form and only incidentally with content, so to call them, he might think, the literary acts are patterning acts and it is only the patterning that has meaning. Renata Adler writes beautiful sentences, he thinks, and this you can tell by the small pleasant noises he makes while reading them, she turns her sentences upon the sharpest commas. The comma is the way in which life, so to call it, impresses itself upon us. Each assertion Adler makes is mediated by the realisation that it could be otherwise, either in point of fact, or in change of context, perspective, or scope. There is no progress without hesitation: no progress. Each comma is a rotation. There is humour in precision: “Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, sitting, immense, in his black bikini, on a cinder-block in the steam-filled cubicle, did not deign immediately to answer.” Speedboat is filled with such perfect sentences arrayed on commas. Sentences in paragraphs, often brief, filled with the jumble, so to call it, of the life of its ostensible narrator, Jen Fain, but, perhaps, of the life of Renata Adler, if such a distinction can sensibly be made, the narrator does not observe herself but those around her, she is a space in what she observes, she is an outline in the snippets that attach themselves to her. The real subject of the book, though, is language, others’ language and her own. The book might be a novel, it is almost a novel, it is a novel if you don’t expect a novel to do what a novel is generally expected to do, it is information is caught in a sieve, the nearest to a novel that life can resemble, or vice-versa, if this is of any importance. All novels, even the most fantastic, are comprised predominantly of facts, he is probably thinking, if he is in fact thinking, and it is only the arrangement of facts that comprises fiction. Adler’s narrator is entirely extrospective. She reports. She dissolves the distinctions between novelist, gossip columnist, journalist, and spy, the distinctions that were always only conceptual distinctions in any case and not distinctions of practice. Fain wonders what several of her friends actually do who have become spies. “I guess what these spies — if they are spies, and I’m sure they are — are paid to do is to observe trends.” Fain as a journalist cannot conduct an interview, she cannot impose herself to seek an answer, she has no programme, she can only observe. At one point she “receives communications almost every day from an institution called the Centre for Short-Lived Phenomena”. Her news, and it is news, is her own life, but not herself within it. She knows the risks: “The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you will miss the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.” Is meaning a hostage to circumstance, or is it the other way round? When the narrator starts to think about the world in terms of hostages it is because she has what she sees as a hostage inside her, a pregnancy she has not told her partner about, all things are hostages to other things, this is perhaps a sort of meaning. Hostages are produced by grammar; grammar cannot do other than make hostages. There he sits, hostage, I suppose, to his intention to write a review, or at least to the set of circumstances, odd though they may be, that contrived to expect of him this review, the review he will not write, disinclined as he is to write, though he will say, I am sure, if you ask him, that he enjoyed the book Speedboat very much. He makes no presumption upon you. As Jen Fain or Adler writes, “You are very busy. I am very busy. We at this rest home, this switchboard, this courthouse, this race track, this theatre, this lighthouse, this studio, are all extremely busy. So there is pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say but to justify its claim on our time.” |
NEW RELEASES
Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981—1988 by Matthew Goody $70
Stupendously well documented and illustrated, this book takes a clear and generous look at the over 140 records produced by Flying Nun during its prime years in the 1980s, when it was based in Christchurch and was an effective catalyst for homegrown music that rejected the ethos of the corporate labels. The book is packed with information about the bands that were central to an Aotearoan cultural resurgence, and also about bands that you have never heard of or had (sometimes justly) forgotten. Goody's discographic history provides a clear view from a distance, and is even better than you might have hoped it would be.
>>See some of the many, many pages.
>>The best and most interesting period.
>>A faraway fanatic.
>>Somewhere in the room.
>>Our (nonrepresentative) playlist of sorts: Pin Group; The Builders; The Clean; Tall Dwarfs; Sneaky Feelings; Look Blue Go Purple; 25Cents; Victor Dimisich Band; Gordons; DoubleHappys; The Bats; Scorched Earth Policy; All Fall Down; The Fall; Marie and the Atom; The Terminals; &c, &c.
>>See some of the many, many pages.
>>The best and most interesting period.
>>A faraway fanatic.
>>Somewhere in the room.
>>Our (nonrepresentative) playlist of sorts: Pin Group; The Builders; The Clean; Tall Dwarfs; Sneaky Feelings; Look Blue Go Purple; 25Cents; Victor Dimisich Band; Gordons; DoubleHappys; The Bats; Scorched Earth Policy; All Fall Down; The Fall; Marie and the Atom; The Terminals; &c, &c.
Saunders's fist short story collection in ten years explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose — funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned — Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of nine stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
"The world's best short story writer." —Telegraph
"The world's best short story writer." —Telegraph
The animal world is endlessly varied, fascinating and inspiring, and needs to be preserved both for its own sake and for the richness it adds to human experience and thought. Rundell considers 22 animals (including the human) whose existence is endangered by humans, and reveals the depths of wonder embodied in these animals. Did you know that the Golden Mole is luminescent, but blind and therefore unable to see its own radiance? This hardback book is beautifully presented (the book even has gilt edges), and illustrated by Tayla Baldwin.
"A rare and magical book. I didn't want it to end." —Bill Bryson
>>Startling astonishments.
>>Startling astonishments.
Playful and unsettling, teeming with the energy of barely contained violence, the stories in Seven Empty Houses dismantle the neat appearance of domesticity to expose the darkness and discomfort that lies beneath. A neighbour looks on as a couple grieve the loss of their son. A young girl makes an unwelcome acquaintance in a hospital waiting room. A woman prepares for death with ruthless precision.
'The Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin loves Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Strout. It's hard to conceive of two more different writers. But imagine a fusion between their styles — dreamlike surrealism and taut domestic drama — and you'll have some idea of Schweblin's uniquely weird storyscapes. What does it mean to inhabit a house, or a body, and what do those spaces become when we're no longer fully there? Haunting, elemental questions that run right through this bold writer's eerie, mysterious oeuvre." —The Sunday Times
"Starting a story by Samanta Schweblin is like tumbling into a dark hole with no idea where you'll end up." —Chris Power
Tauhou envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa, two lands that now sit side by side in the ocean. Each chapter in this innovative hybrid novel is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards the cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On the rainforest beaches or the grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past—all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores. In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.
Cooking is thinking! The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook's subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought. In this innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world — and to the revolutionary potential of the small fires burning in every kitchen.
"One of the most original food books I've ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious, a radical feast of flavours and ideas." —Olivia Laing
A beautifully drawn subtle and insightful graphic novel, from the author of It's Not What You Thought It Would Be. Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes convention and her working-class Dorset roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies. As the thrill of bohemian romance leads inevitably to disappointment, Alison begins to find her own path — through art, friendship and love.
"This book is a testament to the right to choose your own life. It is a tender, heartbreaking meditation on the bonds between women, the dazzle of the city, the struggle to become a female artist within the bounds of patriarchy, and the desire to make a mark on the world." —Jessica Andrews
In Jordan Castro's inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind. The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor's embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability. The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.
>>Just one more click. 
This essay collection subtly uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.
This is a ‘look and find’ book for all children who want to learn about New Zealand’s wildlife, focusing on wildlife that Kiwi children will encounter in town. Each page illustrates a different urban environment, including a garden both in the daytime and at night, the local botanic gardens, a creek, the sea below a wharf, in long grass and the trees above, and in the country on the edge of town.
One woman’s journey to her moko kauae as an expression of her Kāi Tahu identity. Ariana Tikao grew up in suburban Christchurch in the 1970s and ’80s surrounded by te ao Pākehā. This book tells the story of Ariana exploring her whakapapa, her whānau history and her language. This is one woman’s story, but it is interwoven with the revival of language, tikanga and identity among Kāi Tahu whānau over the last thirty years. Ariana’s journey culminates in her decision to take on Mokorua – her moko kauae – from tā moko artist Christine Harvey. After an emotionally charged ceremony that brought together whānau, young and old, for songs and tautoko, hugs and tears, Ariana writes: "Our whānau had reached another milestone in the decolonisation process – or, rather, in our journey of reindigenising ourselves, becoming who we always were."
>>Look inside.
Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, after a brief romance finds herself pregnant. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend and they move to his village in the south. Her relationship with Cenzo Rena is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism — and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief. At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.
"I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style — her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear." —Maggie Nelson
"This is a perfect novel." —Sally Rooney
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria—the (fictional) twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca, or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader, Sheikh H, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And the sultan's expert is murdered. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans dooms the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingeria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is set more than one hundred years ago but has themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
"Pamuk's lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingeria is a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace. The effect is daringly vertiginous, at once floatingly postmodern and solidly realistic. Nights of Plague is a big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant." —James Wood, The New Yorker
The Tyree Studio Collection, now held in the Nelson Provincial Museum, comprises one of the most important photographic records of life in New Zealand from 1882—1947. The Tyree Studios were founded by brothers William and Frederick Tyree but were largely operated by Rose Frank, and McCarthy's impressively detailed book celebrates Frank's importance to New Zealand photographic history and Nelson provincial culture.
The present can loom very large in a child's mind: all the crises and challenges of the modern world can feel overwhelming and at times dispiriting. This book is a big history of the world, from the beginnings of the universe to now, which places the reader at its centre. It encourages them to think about how and why they experience the world as they do and offers a helpful perspective by placing their thoughts and feelings in the context of our history and evolution.
>>Look inside.
Gaylene Preston has always sought out the stories that have not yet been told, and in this book she reveals the challenges and sometimes heartbreak that have come with that ambition. In both wide lens and close-up, she writes of formative experiences: her childhood in Greymouth in the 1950s, working in a psychiatric institution near Cambridge, England in the 70s, interviewing her tight-lipped father about his life in the war, and a mysterious story of her great-grandfather chiselling a biblical text off a gravestone in the dead of night. Along the way she takes us behind the scenes and into the shadows of some of the most enduring popular classics of New Zealand cinema, including Mr Wrong, Ruby & Rata, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, and My Year With Helen, and how she has worked to realise her vision, come what may.
Thrust by Lydia Yuknavitch $40
"I had no idea Gaylene was so hilarious. I adored this brilliant memoir: part liar, part cowgirl, mouthy and determined Gaylene grows up in Greymouth and migrates into the wild 70s, ending up in the tough-as-gumboots world of New Zealand film. Her book is irresistible." —Jane Campion
It is 2085 and Laisve is learning to use the ancient waterways to travel through water and time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as The Brook, she discovers a talisman that will connect her with people from the past two centuries, including a squad of labourers at work on a huge, national monument to liberty. As waters rise and a police state encroaches, Laisve must find her way back to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a bond that might save all their lives — and their shared dream of freedom.
The Poverty of Ethics by Anat Matar $40
"Brilliant and incendiary." —Jeff Vandermeer
The Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual primacy of political discourse that rescues ethics from its poverty. Our ethical convictions receive their substance from historical narratives, political analyses, empirical facts, literary-educational models, political activity and personal experience. Yet morality, essentially, doesn't leave room for relativity: not every ethos deserves to be titled 'moral'. Hence the book argues further, it is the left ethos, as it has evolved over years, which forms the basis for ethics: morality is left-wing!
Vanishing Ice: Stories of New Zealand's glaciers by Lynley Hargreaves $60
"It is rare that one sees such a combination of progressive political engagement and deepest philosophical reflection as in The Poverty of Ethics. Matar's book is a guide for all those who are trying to survive with dignity in a topsy-turvy world that is our own." —Slavoj Zizek
Glaciation has had a huge impact on the shape of the New Zealand landscape. Enormous rivers of ice once flowed out onto the Canterbury Plains, stretched beyond the current West Coast shore of Te Waipounamu/ South Island, and spread down the slopes of the volcanoes in central Te Ika-a-Maui/North Island. These glaciers of past ice-ages built plains and vast rocky moraines, sculpted fiords and valleys, and carved out deep lakes. This book tells the stories of our glaciers though the lens of human interaction, with chapters moving through time from first Maori discoverers to colonial explorers, mountaineers and modern glaciologists. In the process, the book investigates the way nature, science and culture interact and sometimes collide, while providing a fascinating insight into the way New Zealand's glaciers work. As the world warms, our glaciers are disappearing at an unprecedented rate.
Faber & Faber Poetry Diary 2023 $28
Our most popular diary! Every week there is either a poem to read or a poetry book cover design to admire, drawn from Faber's incomparable list. We have only limited stock of this sturdy, well produced handbook to the year ahead, so be fast to order.
Saturday, 5 November 2022
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
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| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
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Friday, 4 November 2022
Our Book of the Week is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. The judges said, "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida takes readers on a journey at once horrific and humorous — beyond life and beyond death, to the world’s dark heart. There, astonishingly and encouragingly, we find tenderness, laughter, loyalty and love." The novel addresses the trauma of the civil war in Sri Lanka, but is funny, audacious, and full of verve and compassion. Now back in stock!
>>Read an extract.
>>Jokes rob the tyrants of power.
>>A coping mechanism.
NEW RELEASES
Click through to our website to get your copies!
Te Wehenga: The separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku by Mat Tait $37
Before the world as we know it could come into being, space had to be made between the Sky and the Earth; their children had somehow to force them apart. Tait's stunning dark illustrations and seamlessly bilingual, typographically exciting text bring this foundation myth alive for a new generation.
>>Just look at these illustrations!
>>Visit Mat Tait's website.
Acting Class by Nick Drnaso $45
"Every single person has something unique to them which is impossible to re-create, without exception." —John Smith, acting coach
Nick Drnaso's graphic novel Acting Class creates a tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation. Ten strangers are brought together under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: they are out of step with their surroundings and desperate for change. A husband and wife, four years into their marriage and simmering in boredom. A single mother, her young son showing disturbing signs of mental instability. A peculiar woman with few if any friends and only her menial job keeping her grounded. A figure model, comfortable in his body and ready for a creative challenge. A worried grandmother and her adult granddaughter; a hulking laborer and gym nut; a physical therapist; an ex-con. With thrumming unease, the class sinks deeper into their lessons as the process demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group's deepest fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters' masks and takes us through an unsettling journey. From the author of Sabrina.
>>Look inside!
Demon Copperhead is born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon takes us along on his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labour, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses, in a contemporary rural America riddled with poverty and opioids. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Inspired by the unflinching truth-telling of David Copperfield, Kingsolver enlists Dickens's anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of story.
>>Dickens has always been Kingsolver's ancestor.
With little boxes of liquorice, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, Rafa arrives at the remote Alpine town of Strega to work at the grand Olympic Hotel. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff uniforms of seasonal workers and are taught to iron, cook, and make the beds by austere matrons. In spare moments between tasks, the girls start to enjoy each other’s company as they pick herbs in the garden, read in the library, and take in the scenery. But when the hotel suddenly fills with people for a raucous party, one of the girls disappears. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths young women are told, what they are raised to expect from the world, the violence they are made to endure, and, ultimately, the question of whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.
"A work of mythic reinvention about the power of girls coming of age in a world hellbent on containing their passions and imaginations. Strega left me breathless, angry, and then thrilled by the dare it leaves in the reader's lap. —Lidia Yuknavitch
"If Fleur Jaeggy and Shirley Jackson had ever spent the night together in The Shining Hotel, their love child might have been Strega. As it was, this Strega came into the world through a different yet equally miraculous union: that of a writer and a translator of extraordinary talent. Its hypnotic, off-kilter prose dances the reader into a state of gloried frenzy, pressing the sometimes-nightmarish buttons of imagined memory as it probes the essence of being young, searching, and exploited." —Polly Barton
"As uncompromising and brilliant as it is disturbing." —Olga Ravn
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers. This fierce debut from indigenous Bundjalung writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled Australian nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.
Bernhard began his writing career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Under the Iron of the Moon. Bernhard's early poetry, bearing the influence of Georg Trakl, begins with a deep connection to his Austrian homeland. As his poems saw publication and recognition, Bernhard seemed always on the verge of joining the ranks of Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and other young post-war poets writing in German. During this time, however, his poems became increasingly obsessive, filled with an undulant self-pity, counterpointed by a defamatory, bardic voice utterly estranged from his country, all of which resulted in a magisterial work of anti-poetry—one that represents Bernhard's own harrowing experience, with the leitmotif of success-failure, that makes his fiction such a pleasure. For all of these reasons, Bernhard's Collected Poems, translated into English for the first time by James Reidel, is a key to understanding the irascible black comedy found in virtually all of Bernhard's writings.
In spring 2020, Julia Blackburn travelled to the Karoo region of South Africa. She had long been fascinated by the indigenous group called the /Xam, who were brutally forced from their ancestral lands by European settlers in the nineteenth century. Facing extinction and the death of their language, several of the /Xam people related their stories to a European philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his English sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd. In 12,000 pages of notebooks, Lloyd and Bleek meticulously recorded their words - their dreams, memories, hopes, history and beliefs - creating an extraordinary archive of this now extinct people.
Blackburn's journey to the Karoo was cut short by the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. As the world is plunged into a bewildering new state, she immerses herself in the stories of the /Xam. The /Xam saw themselves as just one small part of the complexity of nature. Their belief system gave voice and dignity to everything that surrounded them, the dead and the living, birds and animals, the wind and the rain, the moon and the stars. All things were once people, they said - everything was speaking to you, if you only knew how to listen. This is a haunting book about loss, colonialism, nature, and about how we live in the world and what we leave behind.
"An astounding, disarming book, full of grief and beauty. It's a requiem for a lost world, but also a powerful dream of an alternative to our own age of extinction."—Olivia Laing
"When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology..." It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.
"He brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary—an original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms." —Colm Toibin
Preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions, a group of friends look back on their childhood. Their dreams circle their old classmate Estrella Gonzlez Jepsen. They catch glimpses of her braids, hear echoes of her voice, read old letters. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances and a trip to the beach. It soon transpires that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in Chile's Pinochet regime and after she simply disappeared, question of what became of her haunts her former friends. Growing up, they were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them but powerless to resist or confront it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the 'ghostly green bullets' they fired in their favourite video game. Fernndez summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
"A small jewel of a book. Fernndez's picturesque language and dream-like atmosphere is well worth being invaded by. A book to slip in the pocket to read and reread." —Patti Smith
McCarthy's first novel in over a decade shows his prose even sharper and his late style even tauter. In 1980 Bobby Western dives to a sunken jet near Mississippi, only to find no black box and the bodies of only nine of the ten passengers. A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister. As he is drawn across, or rather through, the American South, Western confronts the ethical harms of the United States, and of the human predicament more generally.
"What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic. McCarthy started out as the laureate of American manifest destiny, spinning his hard-bitten accounts of rapacious white men. He ends his journey, perhaps, as the era’s jaundiced undertaker." —Guardian
COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognises that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of author, activist (and founder of human rights organisation Al-Haq) Raja. In this memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resisted under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja failed to recognise his father's courage and, in turn, his father did not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz was murdered in 1985, it changed Raja irrevocably.
"Raja Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness." —Rachel Kushner
The world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We urgently need to avert war between the United States and China, catastrophic climate change, and other global public harms. We must do so, however, in a world in which sovereign states remain in command. The opportunity for self-interested cooperation among nations is immense. Unger shows how different types of coalitions among states can seize on this opportunity and avoid the greatest dangers that we face.
Are they paying you extra for this? You'd better be getting something. We'd better be getting something. For the inconvenience I mean. The machine's here for the whole weekend is what they said. What if we had guests? They never asked. And in any case what are the dangers? Being tested like lab-rats we are. Did they even try to provide any assurance it was all perfectly safe? This is the prototype. The first step to a new future. A future that will be easy and abundant. A future in which distance is no longer a barrier to human contact. And all it takes is a simple transport unit, in every home, every street, every town. Quick. Clean. Easy. A future driven by data, not emotion. And so begins the journey of a new technology that will soon change the world and everyone in it - the sceptics and the converts, the innocents and the evangelists. A scientific wonder that quickly becomes an everyday aspect of life. But what of our inherent messiness? In a world preoccupied with progress, what will happen to the things that make us human - the memories, the fears, the loves, the contradictions, the mortality? As we push for a sense of perfection, what do we stand to lose? Questioning, innovative and shot through with a rich humanity, Appliance is a novel that examines our faith in technology, our constant hunger for new things and the rapid changes affecting all our lives. It challenges us to stop and reflect on the future we want, the systems we trust... and what really matters to us.
Red Valkyries: Feminist lessons from five revolutionary women by Kristen Ghodsee $29
Short-listed for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Through a series of lively biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism by examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Alexandra Kollontai, the aristocratic Bolshevik
- Nadezhda Krupskaya, the radical pedagogue
- Inessa Armand, the polyamorous firebrand
- Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadly sniper
- Elena Lagadinova, the partisan turned scientist turned global women's rights activist
None of these women were 'perfect' leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. In brief conversational chapters Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women and renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of left feminist movements around the globe.
My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body just like the water in the walls of the house…
Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.
"Tremendous; the transition from pity to fear, as we warily circle Aoileann’s brutalised psyche, is brilliantly done." —Guardian
"This is a truly different Irish novel. One that entwines Irish myth, the reality of human bodies, life and death, and traditional gothic horror in a macabrely beautiful and, in the end, redemptive dance." —Irish Independent
Everyone has something that makes them feel self-conscious. It might be the smell of your breath, the size of your nose, or the way your shirt sleeves bunch up under your jumper. At the centre of this story is a little boy who has a small but embarrassing problem: every time he pees, a few drops dribble on to his underpants. Curious, he asks other children if they have the same issue. He soon discovers a simple life lesson: everyone is battling some kind of irritation.
Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity.
>>Other interesting books in the 'Object Lessons' series.
>>Other interesting books in the 'Object Lessons' series.
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