NEW RELEASES (23.6.23)
New books — just out of the carton! Click through for your copies now.
Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai (translated from Japanese by Polly Barton) $38
Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes on trips to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens. With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante and Lucy Ellmann, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist and critic Mieko Kanai – whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan – is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.
”I began to wonder whether I had always thought this way, whether this book was making me aware of the true nature of my mind for the first time. Such is the mesmerizing wonder of Kanai’s prose, as translated by Polly Barton.” — Claire Oshetsky, New York Times
”In the vertigo lurking at the depths of a very ordinary life, Mieko Kanai succeeds in uncovering the tranquillity and cruelty that exist side by side.’” —Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
”Mild Vertigo is an immersive, uncanny narrative held taut over eight chapters that contrasts existing and living, seeing and viewing. An enthralling horror story about tedium that pushes the reader tight up against the unmanageable moments of everyday life and the domestic.” — David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights On
>>Detective anguish.
>>Browse our other translated fiction.
Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon (translated by John Taylor) $38
”As far back as Plotinus, who warned against that ugly custom of leaving an image of one’s appearance behind us, we have ceaselessly given ourselves over to the urge to parry death with the image.” —Jean Frémon. Fables, memories, things he’s read, things he’s seen, transposed or made up, the stories gathered in this slim volume have the portrait, portraitists and the portraitees as common themes. Frémon takes the reader around the world, hopping through art history, as facts and personal memories are retold with imaginative flair for the telling detail: from an impossible portrait of Jesus in 50 AD, which somehow brings J.L. Godard into the picture, to the 14th c. Ottoman Empire, to China’s Qing Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance, French Rococo, and Louise Bourgeois’s mirrors, these historiettes expound the paradoxes, the necessity, and the dangers of seeking truthfulness in art. With gentle but unmistakable irony, they highlight the intricate connexion between art and power.
”Jean Frémon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.” —Paul Auster
The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende $40
Allende’s powerful new novel draws parallels between the experiences of refugees almost a century apart, and asking what sacrifices parents will make to save their children. Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is six years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht the night their family loses everything. As her child's safety seems ever-harder to guarantee, Samuel's mother secures a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin. Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Duran, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita's mother.
>>History repeates itself.
>>From black list to front list.
The Plague: Living death in our times by Jacqueline Rose $38
What do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind? How do you live with death or rather how do you ‘live death’ when death comes too close, seeming to enter the very air you breathe? The Plague is a collection of essays guiding us from the Covid-19 pandemic through to the war in Ukraine in order to imagine a world in which a radical respect for death might exist alongside a fairer distribution of the earth’s wealth. ‘Living death’ will appear as something of a refrain, a reminder that to think of death as an avoidable intruder into how we order our lives, especially in the West, is an act of defiance that is doomed to fail. In the thought of the philosopher Simone Weil, who plays a key role in the book, only if we admit the limits of the human, will we stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power. Insightful and important.
”A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.” —Ali Smith
“One of the most original and intellectually sophisticated minds at work today.” —Eimear McBride
”As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems.” —Merve Emre
>>To die one’s own death.
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to station by Redmer Yska $50
Guided by Mansfield's journals and letters, Redmer Yska traces her restless journey in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe. In Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, Yska takes us to the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, churches, towns, beaches and cities where Mansfield wrote some of her finest stories. Hauntingly, these are also places where she suffered from piercing loneliness and homesickness, rooms in which she endured illness and extreme physical hardship, windows from which she gazed as she grappled with her mortality. With maps and stunning photography, this engaging and well-researched book richly illuminates Katherine Mansfield’s time in Europe and reveals her enduring presence in the places she frequented.
”Redmer Yska, once again, brings his sharp eye, his wry personal take, to the facts and legends of Katherine Mansfield. In A Strange Beautiful Excitement, he showed how we can no longer truly understand her apart from the city that was first hers, and then his own. Now, with her stories and legends in hand, he traces how in Europe she survives in places that were deeply important to her, and where still she trails devotees and alternative facts. This book is a delight — never solemn, always alert to even the faintest whispers, among buildings and memories and her swathes of slightly evangelical 'true believers.'“ —Vincent O’Sullivan
>>Other books by or on Mansfield.
>>Leave All Fair.
Summer in the City of Roses by Michelle Ruiz Keil $24
All her life, seventeen-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it's time for fifteen-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father's betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr. Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism — and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever.
"Michelle Ruiz Keil's writing is achingly beautiful, her books deep, thought-provoking, and magical. She doesn't flinch from the raw pain of teens coping with rough stuff-from abuse and neglect to identity issues and neurodivergence-but transforms them (sometimes literally) through magical realism, into haunting and luscious modern fables that are still grounded and gritty in all the best ways. A mosaic of Greek tragedy, punk rock, Shakespeare, social conscience, folklore, and mysticism, Summer in the City of Roses glitters even as its sharp edges cut and draw blood." —Laini Taylor
Kai: Food stories and recipes from my family table by Christall Lowe $60
The gathering of food and the gathering of people to share a meal are at the heart of Māori family life. Award-winning food photographer Christall Lowe invites us to join her whanau table and experience for ourselves an abundance of mouthwatering dishes, a veritable feast for the eyes and for the stomach. Kai is a passionate homage to a life deeply rooted in food, where exquisite flavours weave seamlessly with cherished food memories. Winner of the Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction (best first book) in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
>>Look inside!
>>See other Ockham winners.
>>Browse other cookbooks.
Africana: An encyclopedia of an amazing continent by Kim Chakanetsa $40
Learn about the astonishing history of the continent, as the birthplace of the very first human beings, through rich historical civilisations such as the ancient Egyptians, the Benin Empire and the Kingdom of Kush, up to the development of the dynamic cities of the modern day. Africana explores: the visual cultures and artwork from across Africa, including the the printed cottons of Guinea and the mud cloth of Mali; figures from African history and modern-day change makers; the landscapes and wildlife of the continent, ranging from the deserts of the north, the rainforests of the central regions and the savannahs of the south. Beautifully presented, with a stunning copper foil-detailed cover, this large-format book is packed with maps, timelines and much, much more to open your eyes to the beauty and brilliance of this diverse continent.
>>Look inside!
Air by Monica Roe $20
Twelve-year-old Emmie is working to raise money for a tricked-out wheelchair to get serious about WCMX, when a mishap on a poorly designed ramp at school throws her plans into a tailspin. Instead of replacing the ramp, her school provides her with a kind but unwelcome aide — and, seeing a golden media opportunity, launches a public fundraiser for her new wheels. Emmie loves her close-knit rural town, but she can't shake the feeling that her goals — and her choices — suddenly aren't hers anymore. With the help of her best friends, Emmie makes a plan to get her dreams off the ground — and show her community what she wants, what she has to give, and how ready she is to do it on her own terms.
The Snakehead: An epic tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe $40
Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the inner workings of Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping's complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and an exploration of the ironies of immigration in America. From the author of the revelatory Empire of Pain.
>>Hell and high water.
Romans Magnified by David Long $33
Zoom in to discover what life was like for Ancient Romans in this innovative and interactive illustrated title that takes you right into their fascinating world! Learn how the Romans lived — from the seven hills to the Colosseum and beyond. Using the free magnifying glass, seek out incredible facts about ancient Rome in this search-and-find adventure, packed with over 200 things to spot. Children will love discovering a typical Roman market, meeting fearsome gladiators and seeing what a temple, school and villa were like, with authentic detail and cutaway scenes. The artwork bursts with hidden detail and bustles with action, and detailed factual text will tell you everything you need to know about the different areas of Roman life. Come with a magnifying glass.
>>Look inside.