Te Araroa: Walking New Zealand's 3000 kilometre trail photography by Mark Watson $49.99
Starting in January 2015, Watson walked from Reinga to Bluff along New Zealand’s national walkway, Te Araroa. The journey took him six months and has resulted in this remarkable, evocative book of photographs.
Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Perec's long-lost first novel prefigures many of the directions he took in later works, but is quite different from any of them.
"Intellectually rewarding - and essential for anyone remotely interested in this most original of writers." - The Times
Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That's when the hallucinations begin...
"Memory Theatre is a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind game occupying a strange frontier between philosophy, memoir and fiction. Simon Critchley beguiles as he illuminates." - David Mitchell
An interesting conflation of truth, fiction and just plain (and not-so-plain) lies, anchored (sort of) in the story of a man who wants to replace all his teeth.
"The Story of My Teeth is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. It’s Walter Benjamin without tears — sunnier, more casual and more nimble. Luiselli is an exciting writer to watch, not only for this book, but also for the fresh approach she brings to fiction, one that invites participation and reaction, even skepticism — a living, breathing map." - The New York Times
Beard manages to be both authoritative and provocative, and is a delight to read. Her history of the city of luxury and filth that dominated the western world is broad and inclusive, demonstrating the ongoing struggle between democracy and autocracy, and giving voice to the previously overlooked: women, slaves, the conquered.
Between the Big Bang and tomorrow a lot of changes have taken place on our planet. This wonderful large-format book gives a graphic representation of the great pageant of time: dinosaurs, Vikings, Aztecs, wars, disasters, artists, explorers, spaceships. There is so much to look at and to learn!
e.g.s:
>> Gloria
>> Changing of the Guards
>> Hey Joe
(You will want this)
Killing and Dying is a showcase of the possibilities of the graphic novel medium and a wry exploration of loss, creative ambition, identity, and family dynamics. With this work, Adrian Tomine reaffirms his place as one of the most significant creators of contemporary comics. His gift for capturing emotion and intellect resonates here: the weight of love and its absence, the pride and disappointment of family, the anxiety and hopefulness of being alive in the twenty-first century.
>> Have a look through the book.
Traces Shakespeare's life and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it into his most searing tragedy, King Lear. 1606 proved to be an especially grim year for England, which witnessed the bloody aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, divisions over the Union of England and Scotland, and an outbreak of plague. But it turned out to be an exceptional one for Shakespeare, unrivalled at identifying the fault-lines of his cultural moment, who before the year was out went on to complete two other tragedies that spoke directly to these fraught times: Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
A mind at work on a life and on literature.
"A monumental, novelistic examination of Joan Didion's life and career. Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor. This landmark work renders a nuanced analysis of a literary life, lauds Didion's indelible contributions to American literature and journalism (especially New Journalism), and documents a 'style that has become the music of our time." - Publishers' Weekly
"Isabel Allende is partial to strong women, courtly manners and leftist politics. In her latest novel, The Japanese Lover, she delivers all three in a stirring romance about a passionate love affair between a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland and a Japanese-American gardener. she is a dazzling storyteller, with a wry, sometimes dark, wit and a great eye for society's changing fashions. She may be writing a fairy tale for adults, but like the best of the genre, it's almost irresistible." - New Zealand Herald
When a wanted war criminal, masquerading as a healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell.
"The great Edna O'Brien has written her masterpiece." - Philip Roth
"An extraordinary triumph. This is storytelling of the highest order, resounding with the empathy and authority we yearn for in fine writing. Edna O'Brien is one of the greatest Irish writers, of this or any era." - Joseph O'Connor, Independent
Brent Kininmont’s first collection of poetry musters scenes from antiquity, a life in Japan, and a preoccupation with flight in its varied forms. Islands are stepping stones far below; plains are bused, hiked, cycled across. At any moment a colossus might appear. A child’s assessment of her own terrain keeps company with poems tracing a mother’s decline. Throughout these beautifully voiced and distilled pages, loud and faint thuds can be detected.
A dynamic group has emerged in Auckland whose members refer to themselves as the Tribe. Mainly Polynesian, they grow up together, rise from poverty and become successful professionals, bound by love and fierce loyalty. At the centre is Aaron, who lives at the edge of danger, shady dealings and self-destruction. When Daniel, receives a call in Hawaii telling him that Aaron has been killed, he returns to New Zealand, and steps into the most dangerous crisis the Tribe has faced. They must confront the truth about who Aaron is and what they, as the Tribe, have become, while facing the infidelity and greed that threatens to tear the group apart.
Much that our lives contain is strange to us, but not for long. This book’s wonderful blueprint diagrams and straight-forward text explain everything from a biro to a nuclear bomb. It’s good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but much more fascinating to know what they do!
The complete plates of 'the Raphael of Flowers' (1759-1840). This lavish, large-format book would make an exquisite gift. Be quick.
"About as Southern and as gothic as Southern gothic can get - superstition, ignorance and violence in backwoods Kentucky. Excellent writing makes it scarily believable." - Listener '100 Best Books, 2015'
The very act of reading and the choice of reading material endow individuals with an identity that possesses great symbolic significance. Already in ancient Rome, Cicero was busy drawing up a hierarchy of different types of readers. Since that time people have been divided into a variety of categories - literates and illiterates, intensive and extensive readers, or vulgo and discreet readers. In the 19th Century, accomplished readers were praised as 'men of letters' while their moral opposites were described as 'unlettered'. Today distinctions are made between cultural and instrumental readers and scorn is communicated towards the infamous 'tabloid reader'. The purpose of this book is to explore the changing meanings attributed to the act of reading.
From the arrival of his first ancestor in Dublin in 1560, Simon Loftus traces the fascinating story of his family's heritage in Ireland - piecing together fragments of legend and biography that span over 350 years of Irish history. The background is the colonial conquest of Ireland and the clash of religious and national identity, but the focus is close at hand, familial. The passions and eccentricities, the daily concerns and relationships, the rich dramas and anecdotes of individuals in this Ascendancy family- over eight generations - combine to form an enthralling memoir of shifting viewpoints and entertainingly inconsistent accounts of a shared past.
The year is 14,647 AD. Humankind has changed, fractured, prismed into a dozen breeds of fairy-tale grotesques, the chaos of expansion, war and ruin flinging humanity like bouncing sparks around the blackness of space. Humanity has been resculpted in a hundred different places, and the world as we knew it—this world—is gone for ever.
"To call The Promise of the Child one of the most accomplished debuts of 2015 so far is to understate its weight—instead, let me moot that is among the most significant works of science fiction released in recent years. Granted, you’ve got to give it your all, but give it that and you’ll get all that and more besides back." - Tor
Sophie Stark makes films said to be 'more like life than life itself'. But her genius comes at a terrible cost: to her husband, to the brother she left behind, and to the actress she can't forget.
"I read The Life and Death of Sophie Stark with my heart in my mouth. Not only a dissection of genius and the havoc it can wreak, but also a thunderously good story." - Emma Donoghue
Beautifully done.
Te reo edition also available.
60 artists, 220 pages of colour.
The coat. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was so close that he could have reached out and touched it. And it was unquestionably his. A Neverwhere short story from "one of the best fabulists of our age". - Financial Times
Another collection of anecdotal gems from the Nelson backblocks by a master raconteur. Many of these (true!) events are hilarious in themselves; others achieve this distinction by the quality of Ellis’s vernacular narration.
During the years they spent together, few people outside of Dylan's immediate family were closer than Victor Maymudes, who was Dylan's tour manager, personal friend, and travelling companion from the early days in 1960s Greenwich Village through the late 90's. Another Side of Bob Dylan recounts landmark events including Dylan's infamous motorcycle crash; meeting the Beatles on their first US tour; his marriage to Sara Lownds, his romances with Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, and others; fellow travelers Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Wavy Gravy, Dennis Hopper, The Band, The Traveling Wilburys, and more.
>> It Ain't Me, Babe
Headstrong and independent, Rita Saunders is a successful hairdresser by day and a busy brothel madam by night. The only thing missing from her life is the love of a good woman. Istvan Ziegler is a Hungarian immigrant who has come to New Zealand to work on the brand new harbour bridge project. He is full of hope and dreams of a better life. Sixteen-year-old Judith Curran has come to Auckland for an abortion. With no money or family support, she finds herself at the mercy of strangers and simply has to hope they have her best interests at heart. Becoming bound into a desperate situation involving a group of orphan girls, Rita, Judith and Istvan find fortitude they never knew they possessed. But do they have enough of it to expose the menacing orphanage director and the slice of the heartless and seedy 1950s' underworld he inhabits?
The New Zealand Literary Fund was a small amount of public money skilfully dispensed over forty years to hundreds of writers and publishers. Unobtrusively but persistently, the fund and the dedicated men and women who allotted its largesse laid the foundations of the literary culture we enjoy today. From a small gesture of government patronage in the postwar world, it slowly grew, expanding its reach, enlarging its ambitions and acquiring partners. This is its story.
Despite the profound crisis of capitalism and the mass mobilizations of people around the world in response, there has been no successful contestation of neoliberalism's hegemony. Inventing the Future is a major new manifesto that argues for a novel set of alternatives for the future - alternatives which seek to rekindle a popular modernity. Against the confused understanding of the hi-tech and neoliberal world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future the authors envisage a post-capitalist economy which is capable of advancing living standards, liberating humanity from work, and developing technologies which free us from biological and environmental constraints.
Myshkin was born on a certain day and died on a certain day - and some things happened to him in between. These things presented him with ethical questions and this book is a record of his attempt to answer those questions. Discovered by his son after Myshkin's death, A Good Life is one man's reckoning with the life he has led and the choices he made. From the author of The Philosopher and the Wolf.
Acquiring contemporary art is about passion and lust, but it is also about branding, about the back story that comes with the art, about the relationship of money and status, and, sometimes, about celebrity.
From the Suffragettes to the Poll Tax protests.
A bittersweet, comic tale of what it means to grow old in a world you no longer recognise. It is also a gentle paean to New York, to fleeting beauty, and to holding on to what you love with all your might.
"Smart and funny and completely surprising. I've already bought a copy for everyone I know. I loved every page." - Ann Patchett
Jostling within that familiar map are countless vying maps, some founded on rock, or on the natural features of the land. But far more are built on dreams - on human activity, effort, and aspiration. From investigations of caves and megaliths to canals and airspace, Joanne Parker reveals a country with countless competing centres and ceaselessly shifting borders - a land where one person's sleepy, unexceptional province will always be the busy heart of another's map.
A memoir of a young woman's coming of age amongst the glamorous literati and intelligentsia of Manhattan (her father was Richard Simon, co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster), a reflection on a life begun amidst secrets and shame, and a story of the strength to leave that all behind and forge a path of art, music and love in the Golden Age of folk and rock.
>> Boys in the Trees (1978).
Admit us into the private worlds of 65 authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations.
Oliver Sacks died in August 2015, surrounded by his close friends and family. He was 82. He spent his final days doing what he loved: playing the piano, swimming, enjoying smoked salmon - and writing. In this series of meditations, Dr Sacks reflects on a life well lived, and expresses his thoughts on growing old, facing terminal cancer and reaching the end. "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written.
What is space? Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time: the ability of one particle to affect another instantly across the vastness of space in an almost magical way. Einstein grappled with this oddity and couldn't quite resolve it, describing it as "spooky action at a distance". But this strange occurrence has direct connections to black holes, particle collisions, and even the workings of gravity. If space isn't what we thought it was, then what is it? Highly unnerving.
