The first quarter of 2015 was a mixed bag for local readers and booksellers. Quilters’ Dewey-defying treasure-tables displayed at last their naked surfaces, while the thrumming hive of ephemera atop Arty Bees’ Manners Street walk-in divulged drawn-on gems at quartered prices. Hopefully you made best friends with a dog-eared tome or two. Among the […]
The past, we’re often reminded, is another country. It’s still inaccessible to even the worldliest of 21st-century travellers; good luck working out the status of forces agreement necessary to traverse that hostile terrain. You’ll make better headway from your sofa. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “End of History” back when CDs were new and the Gulf […]
“Every girl goes through a photography phase,” suggests Scarlett Johannson’s character from Lost in Translation. A friend hated that line so much that when she got a DSLR and a Flickr account, “Photography Phase” was the name she gave her collected works. Was it “girl” that rankled? Were Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Suze Randall et […]
Last November, the Government tightened national security measures, citing an increasing global terror threat. Appropriately, that month marked 32 years since New Zealand’s only suicide bombing. Neil Roberts was what today might be called a crust-punk. He wore safety pins and found inspiration in the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. Roberts was 22 when he blew […]
There’s a scene early on in Janet Colson’s debut, The Shark Party, in which the female main character has sex with a man. This probably doesn’t constitute too dire a spoiler, but Colson says she was surprised at the responses to an early draft: “There was a very old guy in my writing class who […]
Awa Press has spent 2014 collecting honours for Rebecca Macfie’s essential Tragedy at Pike River Mine: a portrait of life and death at the intersection of industrial labour and international business. This year the imprint has followed up with another brave, gripping […]
Fables were once told to Wellington schoolchildren about a mythic city of hubristic civic bunglers in towers of glass. Our story bent these towers by seismic assault: fractured them into razor-sharp bullets, perforating the Golden Mile’s MPs and god-squad pamphleteers alike. This nightmare’s earth would crack and swallow hundreds, belching flaming clouds of immolation; electrified […]
If you lived in Auckland, you’d probably be sick of people talking about Jaffas and Shortland Street. Christchurch residents would once have tired of sheep-shagged jokes, having latterly moved onto huffing politely when asked if there’s any progress with the insurance. Among Wellingtonians, it’s done to nurture a feigned impatience with discussions re: Those Bloody […]
Seattle is the home of Amazon, Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson, and the Science Fiction Museum, among other bywords in speculative writing. So it came as some surprise, as I browsed the SF section in one of our city’s densely stocked bookstores, to be hailed by Maori, a thick volume from Alan Dean Foster, best […]
Somewhere in California or Tuvalu or Oregon or parts unknown, stacks upon whirring stacks of magnetic data storage pile e’er higher the records of our every social transaction and PDFs of the novels we swear we’re going to finish. We all know the Internet is Making Us Stupid and Killing Religion and slowly irradiating […]
