Empty tables, closed doors, Open Looks
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 […]
Other countries, other stories
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 […]
Words and pictures
“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 […]
Blow it up and start again
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 […]
An escalator to the New York art world
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 […]
Give a man a fish
Awa Press has spent 2014 collecting honours for Rebecca Macfie’s essential Tragedy at Pike River Mine: a […]
Snaking and standing strong
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 […]
Books about politics
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 […]
What might have been
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 […]
Text-slash-artefacts
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 […]
