NEW RELEASES (19.4.24)
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100 Years of Darkness: Poems about films and film music by Bill Direen $30
The 76 poems of 100 Years of Darkness pays homage to a century of cinema and its music. The films are drawn from Japan, U.S.A., France, Germany, Russia/Ukraine, Vietnam, Sweden, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, Lebanon and other places. Since only a few of them have been released in all countries, the chosen films are itemised by means of a detailed index of sources at the close. This makes it easy for film and music lovers to find the directors and years of first appearance — to eventually see the films for themselves. The book’s cover design represents aspect ratios used worldwide between 1888 and the present.
The Sky is Falling by Lorenza Mazzetti (translated from Italian by Livia Franchini) $38
First published in 1961, Lorenza Mazzetti's The Sky is Falling (Il cielo cade) is an impressionistic, idiosyncratic, and uniquely funny look at the writer's childhood after she and her sister are sent to live with their Jewish relatives following the death of their parents. Bright and bucolic, vivid and mournful, and brimming with saints, martyrdom, ideals, wrong-doing and self-imposed torments, the novel describes the loss of innocence and family under the Fascist regime in Italy during World War II through the eyes of Mazzetti's fictional alter ego, Penny, in sharp, witty (and sometimes petulant) prose. First translated into English as The Sky Falls by Marguerite Waldman in 1962, with several pages missing due to censorship, the novel has been out of print in the anglophone world for many years. Livia Franchini's beautiful new translation carries over the playfulness and perverse naivete of the original Italian. Recommended!
Amma by Saraid de Silva $38
Singapore, 1951. When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed. What happens next will determine the course of her life for generations to come. New Zealand, 1984. Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything. London, 2018. Arriving on her uncle Suri's doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect — all she knows is that Suri was cast out by his amma for being gay, like she is. Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it's too late.
Ticknor by Sheila Heti $40
On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, now one of the leading intellectual lights of their generation. Reviewing a life of petty humiliations, and his friend's brilliant career, Ticknor sets out for the dinner party-a party at which he'd just as soon never arrive. Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, Ticknor is a witty, fantastical study in resentment. It recalls such modern masterpieces of obsession as Thomas Bernhard's The Loser and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and, when first published in 2006, announced the arrival of a charming and original novelist, one whose novels and other writings have earned her a passionate international following.
"A perceptive act of ventriloquism, Ticknor rewards thought and rereading, and offers a finely cadenced voice, intelligence and moody beauty." —The Globe and Mail
"Confoundedly strange and fascinating." —Quill & Quire
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft $40
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets - and deceptions - of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself. This hilarious, thought-provoking debut by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
”Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity.” —Olga Tokarczuk
”Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists.“ —Megha Majumdar
”Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three.” —Alexandra Kleeman
Six-Legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa by Lily Duval $55
Why isn’t Aotearoa famous for its insects? We have wētā that can survive being frozen, weevils with ‘snouts’ almost as long as their bodies, and the world’s only alpine cicadas. There is mounting evidence that insect numbers are plummeting all over the world. But the insect apocalypse isn’t just a faraway problem – it’s also happening here in Aotearoa. In recent years, we have lost a number of our native insects to extinction and many more are teetering on the brink. Without insects, the world is in trouble. Insects are our pollinators, waste removers and ecosystem engineers – they are vital for a healthy planet. So why don’t more people care about the fate of the tiny but mighty six- legged beings that shape our world? Richly illustrated, and including more than 100 original paintings by the author, Six-legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa examines the art, language, stories and science of insects in Aotearoa and around the world. From te ao Māori to the medieval art world, from museum displays to stories of the insect apocalypse, extinction and conservation, Lily Duval explores the lives of insects not only in Aotearoa’s natural environments, but in our cultures and histories as well.
Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) $30
Short-listed for the 2024 Ockham Book Awards, The poems in Talia are a critique of hometowns, an analysis of whakapapa, and a reclamation of tongue. It is an ode to the earth the poet stands on, and to a sister she lost to the skies. It is a manifesto for a future full of aunties and islands and light.
”This is a collection so movingly steeped in aroha, in the power and reach and traffic of love. It is a poetry collection to put on repeat, to lose and find your way in. I love it.” —Paula Green
Ninth Street Women — Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art by Mary Gabriel $40
Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting — not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation.
A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros $25
By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frederic Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B-the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble-and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other. New edition.
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four women who wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff $38
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry - a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman — about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles.
Champ by Payam Ebrahimi and Reza Dalvand $35
Abtin is nothing like the rest of his family. The Moleskis are fiercely competitive sports champions, and they expect Abtin to become a great athlete too. But Abtin is a reader, an artist, and has his own way of doing things. Despite his family's best efforts, Abtin remains stubbornly himself. Wanting his family to be proud of him, he comes up with a plan to make them happy: a plan that doesn't go quite as expected.
Heresy: Jesus Christ and the other Sons of God by Catherine Nixey $40
“In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel of John. This sentence — and the words of all four gospels — is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind. Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled those who opposed him, the Jesus who sold his twin into slavery and the Jesus who had someone crucified in his stead. Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviours, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable — even heretical — and they faded from view. Now, in Heretic, Catherine Nixey tells their extraordinary story, one of contingency, chance and plurality. It is a story about what might have been.
"How on earth could an ancient Greek word meaning 'choice' come to be used exclusively negatively to mean heresy? Catherine Nixey, expert in the darkening age of Late Antique religiosity, has all the answers, brilliantly resurrecting a teeming plurality of non-canonical, non-orthodox, and above all allegedly non-Christian ideas and practices with cool intellectual clarity and vivid literary skill.” —Paul Cartledge
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories by Amitav Ghosh $38
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, ‘The Ibis Trilogy’, ten years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in the making of our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
”Ghosh has reinvented himself as a superlative commodity historian. In his new role, he has surpassed many seasoned historians in his ability to synthesise a wealth of research with remarkable intellectual clarity and suggestive simplicity. There's a quietly subversive element to Smoke and Ashes for which Ghosh deserves to be commended.” —The Times
Māori Made Easy Pocket Guide: Essential greetings, phrases and tikanga for every day by Scotty Morrison $24
This little book that really will fit into your pocket is your guide to using te reo Māori in every day situations, from introductions to conversations, online and in person. Carry the essentials with you, and develop confidence in: * Basic pronunciation * Greetings * Dates and times * Pepeha * Whakataukī * Karakia * Iwi names * and much more.
All Through the Night: Why our lives depend on dark skies by Dani Robertson $40
Why darkness is so important – to plants, to animals, and to ourselves – and why we must protect it all costs. Darkness is the first thing we know in our human existence. Safe and warm inside the bubble of the womb, we are comfortable in that embracing dark. But as soon as we are bought into the light, we learn to fear the dark. Why? Some 99 per cent of Western Europeans live under light polluted skies, but what is this doing to our health? Our wellbeing? Our connection to the cycles of nature? Our wildlife, too, has been cast into the harsh glare of our light addiction, with devastating impacts.
In this book Dani shares with you the excitement and adventure she has found when everyone else is tucked up in bed. She explores constellations and cultures, enjoys environmental escapades, all whilst learning why we are addicted to light and why it is ruining our lives. She’ll show you why the darkness is so important and why we must protect it all costs.