What do writers see when they pause from their work and look up and out into the world? Fifty writers from around the world (including Orhan Pamuk, Richard Flanagan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Nadine Gordemer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Andrea Levy, Sheila Heti, Elmore Leonard and Teju Cole) describe their relationship with their window, and Percoli provides a drawing of what they see when they look out of it. This is a wonderful book to give or to keep.
"A Spool of Blue Thread weaves the tale of an unremarkable family, the Whitshanks, across three generations within one house. It is a quiet window onto the changing priorities in life as we age: the misunderstandings and forgettings, the innocuous decisions that shape lives, the black sheep weaving in and out over the years. Less quirky than previous novels, A Spool of Blue Thread touches you with moments of empathy and recognition." - Maclean
"Dennison has been among the most challenging figures in our poetry for quite some time. He frankly takes on what most of us shy clear of, as he brings rare attention to what the formal demands of poetry still offer. His work lays claim to the Curnow tradition of ‘ordinary events’ doubling as philosophical occasions, to language experienced as adventure and aesthetic expanse." - Vincent O'Sullivan
Published simultaneously by Carcenet in the UK.
>> Samples!
>> Hear the poet read.
A new book from the author and illustrator of Watch Out, Snail!
The book introduces the Wellington green gecko and explores the challenges it faces as it forages for food in the New Zealand bush. Green Gecko feasts on a range of bush creatures until he too becomes a potential food source and has to make a daring escape from danger!
>> Gay Hay will be reading from this wonderful new book at the children's library, Elma Turner Library, Halifax Street on Wednesday 4 March at 3:30. See you there!
For ten years Geordie Greig was among a very small group of friends who regularly met the painter Lucian Freud for breakfast at Clarke's restaurant on Kensington Church Street. Over tea and the morning papers, Freud would recount stories of his past and discuss art. It was, in effect, Freud's private salon. This book is a kaleidoscope of Freud's stories: of death threats; escaping from Nazi Germany; falling out with his brother Clement; loathing his mother; painting David Hockney; sleeping with horses; escaping the Krays; painting the Queen; his controversial role as a father; and why Velazquez was the greatest painter.
Both in his poetry and in his support of other poets as editor of Landfall, Brasch was catalytic in the development of a distinctively New Zealand poetic idiom. This is a thoughtfully selected and beautifully presented collection.
"I discovered New Zealand because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language."
"Ausubel is sensitive to our precarious position between safety and peril — locked out of full access to one another’s inner lives, locked into the pitiless machinations of our own biological systems, left certain only of our uncertainties. Each story in this collection finds a way to record the tensions between the corporeal and the invisible, the forces that animate us but ultimately can’t be dissected, our anti-anatomies. The dismay of coming to the final page is easily combated by following the example of Ausubel’s characters and beginning all over again." - Helen Oyeyemi, The New York Times
"In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience — tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love — in staggering proportions. Only the reader who truly loves books — books full to brimming with imagery — will appreciate the magic Owuor has made of the classic nation-at-war novel. There’s a sort of lawless power at work in her text. This language sweats. It bleeds. Ultimately, the disjointed prose mirrors brilliantly the fragmented nature of both memory-keeping and nation-building. There are no conquering heroes in Dust, but there are unconquerable dreamers, Kenyans who share the author’s own hurt-hardened brand of hope." - The New York Times
Short-listed for the 2015 Folio Prize.
"The best thing written about Sontag." — Edmund White
"This detailed, nuanced account of the more private side of a complex, contradictory public figure is told with even-handed good humour and more than a little compassion. Utterly absorbing." — Lydia Davis
"Sempre Susan doesn't just evoke Susan Sontag, the person, with hard-won sympathy, insight, and cool; it contains (in a very tiny space) material for an entire novel of idealism and disillusionment." - The Paris Review
Webster arrived in the Hokianga as a young man and carved himself a fortune as a timber merchant. He fought alongside Tamati Waka Nene, was a friend of Frederick Maning, and hosted George Grey, Richard Seddon and others.
"This book is far more than a simple biography: it offers a different way of looking at the history of nineteenth-century New Zealand." – Hazel Petrie
Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Delightful.
"Charming illustrations and sheer linguistic delight." - Brain Pickings
>> Have a peek.
When eleven-year-old Annie first started lying, she had been taught by an expert: Gran. "If you're going to do something, make sure you do it with excellence," Gran would say.
An escaped fugitive upends everything two siblings think they know about their family, their past, and themselves.
"Gewirtz’s emotionally intense novel about the complications of families offers a perceptive heroine and poetic, impressive prose." - Kirkus
>> The author speaks quietly in a noisy room.
How do we inhabit spaces, both physically and mentally? What meanings can space convey or contain? Bachelard's profound work, which has influenced architects, philosophers, writers and theorists world-wide since it appeared in 1958, appears in a new edition.
Two dovetailed novellas exploring the narcissism of spiritual questers.
"As much as The Empty Chair is about the impossibility of true and thorough 'enlightenment', it is also about the power of voice and storytelling. Stories are the thing, Wagner is saying, they are the redemptive piece when all that’s gained from the Big Search are emptiness, loss, and death." - Boston Globe
"Wagner possesses a fluent ability to move back and forth between the satiric and the sympathetic, the scabrous and the tender." - The New York Times
Twenty years of marriage, from the brutal beauty of the Zambezi to the mountains of Wyoming, by the author of the wonderfully written Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
“Ms. Fuller writes with ferocity and precision, and she turns the story of her marriage and its disintegration into a resonant parable about a couple’s mismatched views of the world.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“This clear-eyed chronicle is perhaps one of the best memoirs ever written about divorce.” —Boston Globe
Two men and their quite different designs dominated the fashion arc at the turn of the 21st century. Suddenly they both crashed. What happened and why?
One woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Vienna, and an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory.
"Intimate and mesmerising.' - Publishers' Weekly
A bearded lady and her friends run away from the circus for a life in the outside world. But fitting in can be difficult if you are a little bit different...
Saunders' wistful, lively illustrations are reminiscent of Anita Lobel.
A culinary journey through the Italian regions of Puglia and Basilicata, featuring more than 50 simple and authentic recipes from the Silver Spoon kitchen.
A unique account of the millions of colonial troops who fought in the First World War, and why the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of non-white troops were later air-brushed out of history.
Amid the turmoil of the financial crisis, high debt levels, and an ever-growing gap between the richest and the rest, the ultimate victim could be democracy itself. Revisiting the assumptions on which it is founded, he asks, what exactly is democracy? Why should we value it?
"Like an episode of Star Trek written by J.M. Coetzee." - Guardian
Was Eichmann 'only following orders'? (not that that would have been any excuse). An absorbing, chilling reassessment.
Monumental in scope but lucid in style, this book will prove invaluable to anyone - student or enthusiast - who wants to comprehend the overwhelmingly rich and sometimes complex evolution of Western classical music.
Set at flashpoints in 1975, 1984, 1992 and the present day, in Delhi and Manhattan, The Way Things Were shows how our most deeply personal stories are shaped by ancient history and volatile politics; how the life of a country and the life of an individual are irrevocably entwined.
Welcome to the world of the sharp-suited 'faces'. The Italianistas. The scooter-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a very British phenomenon. Mod began life as the quintessential working-class movement of a newly affluent nation - a uniquely British amalgam of American music and European fashions that mixed modern jazz with modernist design in an attempt to escape the drab conformity, snobbery and prudery of life in 1950s Britain. But what started as a popular cult became a mainstream culture, and a style became a revolution.
"In case you're wondering, this is not a love story. My name is Tori Spring. I like to sleep and I like to blog. Last year - before all that stuff with Charlie and before I had to face the harsh realities of A-Levels and university applications and the fact that one day I really will have to start talking to people - I had friends. Things were very different, I guess, but that's all over now."
Essays on writing and writers, including Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark,Alan Bennett, Anthony Trollope and H.G.Wells.
Seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures and countless ordinary and often uncredited acts lead to most astounding breakthroughs.
Are we outsourcing the determining aspects of our lives to software? What risks do we expose ourselves and out futures to by doing so? If we surrender our capabilities to machines, how quickly do we render ourselves incapable?
Banks' poetry (all written before publication of The Wasp Factory) gives great insight into his imagination and creative processes.
