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Vol. 26 No. 1 February 2019
Photo by Ben Guthrie
EVENTS
The 2019 events programme begins 2nd of Feb. Start booking now! 1
Australian Poetry
Keeper of the Ritual by Shey Marque ($23, PB) Shey Marque’s debut full collection is wonderfully responsive to the complexity & sensuality of ocean, bush, animals, art & human relationships. The poems are always wryly intelligent, self-aware & carefully crafted, across an impressive variety of forms. She brings to this rich collection the forensic eye, curiosity & insight of both the scientist and the artist, revealing how much they have in common. A William Maidment Garland by John Watson ($25, PB)
This is a collection of poems and prose pieces which celebrate and memorialize the life of Bill Maidment (1924– 2005), a former teacher in the English Department at the USyd who influenced a couple of generations of writers, thinkers & intellectuals. There’s a birthday poem, a Golden Wedding, a celebratory lament, two discursions designed to beguile the fever room, and a chapter by chapter synopsis (with limericks) of Thomas Love Peacock’s late, late, last & most lyrical novel. In each instance the presence of Bill Maidment as mentor is orchestrated in Watson’s allusive manner—’from beautifully poised meditations in the manner of Wallace Stevens through to light-hearted satire.’
Windfall by Greg McLaren ($25, PB)
In his 6th book, Greg McLaren finds his stories in those of others, and others’ in his. These poems seek, suspect & deepen connection; they nod, wink & pay, in nearly equal parts, homage & fromage. Windfall includes responses & asides to, and satires of, contemporary writers, & also sees McLaren further exploring his interest in classical Chinese poetry. He takes these poets for a drive through new contexts, reimagining their poems, eking out connection across culture, history, experience & space into a voice that is shared & his own.
Neat Snakes by Martin Langford ($25, PB)
Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The ‘neat snakes’ collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem’s elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea.
Autobiochemistry by Tricia Dearborn ($23, PB)
‘Dearborn’s trademark finely balanced, masterfully honed poems are vitally engaged with the world, and with our cycles of love & loss within it. Fans of hers will be delighted to find here the full-length versions of both her 22-poem sequence for the elements, Autobiochemistry, and the shorter but no less fabulous sequence on perimenopause, The change: some notes from the field. Dearborn understands that even a bald fact (scientific, medical, biographical), held & tilted just so in the right light, can sing with the resonance of dream. There are also nightmares, as she deals deftly & devastatingly with childhood sexual trauma & the never-ending work of healing. A crucial & timely book.’—Melinda Smith
A little book of unspoken history by Elif Sezen ($25, PB)
Australian-Turkish poet & visual artist, Elif Sezen navigates physical & metaphysical spheres, conjuring multilayered historical & imaginative narratives. Memories of domestic disruption act as a point of departure in these poems, as she charts an ethereal personal odyssey—travelling through time, greeting souls in existential landscapes, illuminating extremity in inner and outer worlds, pivoting between vulnerability and strength, the sayable and the unsayable.
The short story of you and I Richard J Allen
From long narrative lines to fine-boned, lyrical loops & ties that bind these poems into place, Richard James Allen has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date—his subject is being itself, and the way our biological and mental dimensions interact, with human intelligence and love being the unifying forces for this interaction. ($23, PB)
Towards Light & Other Poems by Sarah Day ($25, PB)
Light, as a physical and metaphorical entity recurs in many of the poems in this new collection by Sarah Day. Light makes its presence felt in these poems as a source of illumination and grace, it is also the means by which the flaws and discrepancies of the present and past are highlighted: ‘Sarah Day is a poet of wonderful attentiveness. She notices everything, persuading us, as readers, that she has seen and heard the living 2 world truly.’— Christopher Wallace-Crabbe.
Zebra & Other Stories by Debra Adelaide ($30, PB)
A body buried in a suburban backyard. A suicide pack worthy of Chekhov. A love affair born in a bookshop. The last days of Bennelong. And a very strange gift for a most unusual Prime Minister... Tantalising, poignant, wry, and just a little fantastical, this subversive collection of short fiction—and one singular novella—from bestselling author Debra Adelaide reminds us what twists of fate may be lurking just beneath the surface of the everyday.
The Rosie Result by Graeme Simsion ($30, PB)
Don & Rosie Tillman are back in Melbourne after a decade in The Big Apple, and they’re about to face their most important project. Their son, Hudson, is having trouble at school—his teachers say he isn’t fitting in with the other kids. Meanwhile, Rosie is battling Judas at work, and Don is in hot water after the Genetics Lecture Outrage. The life-contentment graph, recently at its highest point, is curving downwards. For Don Tillman, geneticist and World’s Best Problem-Solver, learning to be a good parent as well as a good partner will require the help of friends old and new. It will mean letting Hudson make his way in the world, and grappling with awkward truths about his own identity. And opening a cocktail bar. Hilarious and thought-provoking, with a brilliant cast of characters and an ending that will have you cheering for joy.
A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane ($40, HB)
Lost to the world for more than & decades, this is the essential link between two of Gerald Murnane’s masterpieces—the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. A Season on Earth is Murnane’s 2nd novel as it was intended to be—the first two sections were published as A Lifetime on Clouds in 1976 & the last 2 sections have never been in print. A hilarious tale of a lustful teenager in 1950s Melbourne, A Lifetime on Clouds has been considered an outlier in Murnane’s fiction, because, as Murnane writes in his foreword, it is ‘only half a book & Adrian Sherd only half a character’. Here, at last, is 16 year-old Adrian’s journey in full, from fantasies about orgies with American film stars & idealised visions of suburban marital bliss to his struggles as a Catholic novice, and finally a burgeoning sense of the boundless imaginative possibilities to be found in literature & landscapes—a revelatory portrait of the artist as a young man.
The Last Days Of The Romanov Dancers by Kerri Turner ($30, PB)
Petrograd, 1914. Valentina Yershova’s position in the Romanovs’ Imperial Russian Ballet is the only thing that keeps her from the clutches of poverty—clawing her way through the ranks, relying not only on her talent but her alliances with influential men. Then Luka Zhirkov—the gifted son of a factory worker—joins the company, and suddenly everything she has built is put at risk .For Luka, being accepted into the company fulfils a lifelong dream. But in the eyes of his proletariat father, it makes him a traitor. As civil war tightens its grip & the country starves, and the Imperial Russian Ballet becomes the ultimate symbol of Romanov indulgence—and Luka & Valentina are forced to choose: their country, their art or each other. A powerful debut novel of passion & revolution.
Driving into the Sun by Marcella Polain ($30, PB)
For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm & powerful presence fills her world. But after his sudden death, Orla, her mother & her sister are left in a no-man’s land—a place where the certainties & protections of the nuclear family suddenly & mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl & woman must be navigated alone. Marcia Polain’s first novel, The Edge of the World, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
The Heart of the Grass Tree by Molly Murn
When Pearl’s grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl & her mother Diana & sister Lucy return to Kangaroo Island to mourn & farewell her. Each woman must reckon with Nell’s passing in her own way—but Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana & Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind—her stories, poems, paintings— and unearths a connection to the island’s early history, of the early European sealers & their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people. Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her & brings the women back to each other. ($33, PB)
Year of the Beast by Steven Carroll ($30, PB)
Melbourne, 1917: the times are tumultuous, the city is in the grip of a kind of madness. The Great War is raging, and it is the time of the hotly contested 2nd conscription referendum. Fights are raging on the streets, rallies for ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ facing off against each other on opposing corners. Men, women & children, jostling, brawling, fighting & spitting. Through these streets walks Maryanne, 40 years old, unmarried & 7 months pregnant. These are uncertain, dangerous times for a woman in her position. And she is facing a difficult choice—a choice which gets more urgent by the day—whether to give her child up for adoption as the Church insists she does, or to keep her child & face an uncertain future. Steven Carroll brings his sweeping Glenroy series to a magnificent close.
Australian Literature The Orchardist’s Daughter by Karen Viggers
16 year-old Mikaela has grown up isolated & homeschooled on an apple orchard in southeastern Tasmania, until an unexpected event shatters her family. 18 months later, she & her older brother Kurt are running a small business in a timber town. Miki is kept a virtual prisoner by Kurt, who leads a secret life of his own. When Miki meets Leon, another outsider, things slowly begin to change—and Miki has to fight to uncover the truth of her past. Set in the oldgrowth eucalypt forests & vast rugged mountains of southern Tasmania, Karen Viggers’ book is an uplifting story about friendship, resilience and finding the courage to break free. ($30, PB)
ISINGLASS by Martin Edmond ($27, PB)
An unknown man comes ashore at a remote beach on the NSW coast. He is taken into detention & sent, ultimately, to Darwin. His captors call him Thursday after the day upon which he was found. Thursday doesn’t speak, but instead paints an enigmatic mural on the wall of his donga in the detention centre. It is a city, a dream city, and when he finishes he says a single word: Isinglass. This latest offering from author Martin Edmond is a beautifully written portrayal of the shameful practices of the Australian gulag archipelago, and a compelling story of a man adrift in an unkind world.
Southerly 78–1: Festschrift: David Brooks
This issue of Southerly pays tribute to David Brooks, who is retiring as editor after 2 decades’ stewardship. It includes poetry, fiction, essays & memoir that interweave readings of David’s work with accounts of the various literary communities that David has worked in over 4 decades from Canberra to North America, Perth, Slovenia, Sydney & now, Katoomba. This is a tribute shows a remarkable textual practice that weaves through the literary page & daily life to community & culture, including this journal. ($26.95, PB)
The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth ($30, PB)
From the moment Lucy met Diana, she was kept at arm’s length. Diana is exquisitely polite, but Lucy knows, even after marrying Oliver, that they’ll never have the closeness she’d been hoping for. But who could fault Diana? She was a pillar of the community, an advocate for social justice, the matriarch of a loving family. Lucy had wanted so much to please her new mother-in-law. That was 10 years ago. Now, Diana has been found dead, leaving a suicide note. But the autopsy reveals evidence of suffocation. And everyone in the family is hiding something.
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l l i H ’ D n O
Oh dear—it’s all over isn’t it? I’m not bemoaning the passing of the Festive season so much as the lovely long summer holidays that follow—for some! I had two weeks off during which I saw some fantastic movies, watched the final season of The Americans, went to the beach a few times, joined the decluttering frenzy (one linen closet!), got bitten by a dog and read some great books. I love nothing more than discovering a new writer—new to me, anyway—and was bowled over by Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican writer who lives in New York and whose latest book is the utterly astonishing Lost Children Archive. In it Luiselli counterpoints two journeys—that of a couple, both sound archivists who, with their two precocious but funny and lovable children, drive from New York City to Arizona. The husband and father (no-one is named for reasons that don’t escape me but do annoy me) is researching the last of the Apache (much interesting history here) while the woman, a Mexican like the author, is trying to find her way in to a project about the thousands of children who travel alone, through dreadful hardship and uncertainty, from Central America through Mexico to the United States. A deeply intelligent, politically prescient and topical book, it is also one in which the prose swoops and soars and holds you in its thrall. In her skewering of the human condition, Luiselli reminds me of Siri Hustvedt, that other brainiac New Yorker. Lost Children Archive is out this month and I can’t wait for you all to read it. Also out this month and highly recommended is the sixth and last book in Steven Carroll’s Glenroy series which chronicle a suburban Melbourne family from the early 20th, to the early 21st Century. In The Year of the Beast, WW1 and the rise of the suffragette movement provide the background to the story of the brave and resilient Maryanne who defies social mores to keep her illegitimate baby Vic—father of Michael, who the central character of the rest of the Glenroy series. Beautifully written, the book circles back and around the other novels and characters in the series but can be read on its own. The six books in the Glenroy series, along with his four books based on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, is a remarkable body of work—which, despite several literary awards and shortlistings, has not wide enough a readership. Let’s remedy that this year. This February it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the new children’s buyer at Dulwich Hill. Naomi Mamolis will be known to many of you as she has been the Director of the Dulwich Hill preschool for many years. Serendipitously, Naomi was looking for a new challenge (and challenge it will be) just as we needed to fill Mandy’s shoes, and so we snapped her up. All of us at gleebooks are looking forward to working with Naomi and I’m sure you’ll join us in making her welcome. See you on D’Hill, Morgan
Half Moon Lake by Kirsten Alexander ($33, PB) NEW COURSE Electric Words with Pip Smith 10am – 4pm, Saturday 9 March 2019 NOW OPEN FOR BOOKING: The Secret Life of Getting Published with Annette Barlow 10am – 4pm, Saturday 6 April 2019
For more information: Talk to us: (02) 8425 0171 Email us: faberwritingacademy@allenandunwin.com.au Visit us: www.faberwritingacademy.com.au
In 1913, on a summer’s day at Half Moon Lake, Louisiana, 14-old Sonny Davenport walks into the woods & never returns. His parents are wealthy & influential, and will do anything to find their son. For 2 years, they search across the South, offer increasingly large rewards & struggle not to give in to despair. Then, at the moment when all hope seems lost, the boy is found in the company of a tramp. But is he truly Sonny Davenport? And when Grace Mill, an unwed farm worker, travels from Alabama to lay claim to the child, newspapers, townsfolk, even the Davenports’ own friends, take sides. As the tramp’s kidnapping trial begins, and two desperate mothers fight for ownership of the boy, the people of Opelousas discover that truth is more complicated than they’d ever dreamed.
Fusion by Kate Richards ($33, PB)
Forever entwined, Sea & Serene live isolated in the Australian alpine wilderness, together with Wren—the young man who helps care for them. Each have found peace in this wild, fierce landscape, and they live in harmony, largely self-sufficient. One day Wren discovers a woman on the road nearby, badly injured & unconscious. He brings her back to the cottage, and he & the twins nurse her back to health. But the arrival of this outsider shatters the dynamic within, with unforeseen consequences. Richards’ debut novel is a haunting modern-gothic tale about selfhood, dependency & love.
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International Literature
The Wall by John Lanchester ($30, PB)
Discover your next favourite
Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he’s lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he only has two years of this, 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives & gets off the Wall & never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else. He will soon find out what Defenders do and who the Others are. Along with the rest of his squad, he will endure cold & fear day after day, night after night. But somewhere, in the dark cave of his mind, he thinks: wouldn’t it be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if you had to fight for your life? John Lanchester’s thrilling, hypnotic new novel is about why the young are right to hate the old. It’s about a broken world you will recognise as your own—and about what might be found when all is lost.
Jokes for the Gunmen by Mazen Maarouf ($23, PB)
Mazen Maarouf was born in Beirut in 1978. He is a Palestinian-Icelandic writer, poet, translator & journalist. This collection of stories looks at the world from a child’s pure but sometimes vengeful or muddled perspective. These are stories of life in a war zone, life peppered by surreal mistakes, tragic accidents & painful encounters—fantasist matadors, lost limbs and voyeuristic dwarfs. This is a collection about sex, death and the all-important skill of making life into a joke.
Granta 146: The Politics of Feeling (ed) Sigrid Rausing ($25, PB)
The Demon in the Machine Paul Davies How does life create order from chaos? And just what is life, anyway? Leading physicist Paul Davies argues that to find the answers, we must first ask a deeper question: ‘What is information?
Ben Quilty A celebration of the last two decades of work from Australian artist Ben Quilty, to coincide with a major retrospective of his work. With a foreword by Richard Flanagan.
Out 19 February
When people predicate their politics only on what they feel and can no longer be swayed by expertise, reason or facts, what results would seem the most unfeeling sort of politics. Adam Phillips analyses politics in the consulting room, Roxane Gay considers ‘unfeeling’, Peter Pomerantsev unearths his data profile to conduct sentiment analysis, Margie Orford explores shame in South Africa, Joff Winterhart graphically imagines road rage, Pankaj Mishra reflects on bodily decadence, Josh Cohen inspects his own apathy, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor witnesses devastation, David Baddiel probes the outrage of life online. With new fiction from Olga Tokarczuk, Ben Markovits, Deborah Levy, Hanif Kureishi and new poetry from Nick Laird & Alissa Quart.
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan ($25, PB)
In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie & the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents 28 linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage & escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live 12 years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert.
The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer ($30, PB)
Out 5 February
Lee Miller has left behind a successful modelling career at Vogue to pursue her dream of being an artist in 1929 Paris. There she catches the eye of the famous Surrealist artist Man Ray. An egotistical, charismatic force, Lee is drawn to him immediately. Though he initially wants to use her as a model, Lee is determined to become Man’s photography assistant instead. As their personal & professional lives become further entwined, Lee is consumed by two desires: to become a famous photographer & to have a healthy & loving relationship. But as she asserts herself & moves from being a muse to an artist, Man’s jealousy spirals out of control, and their mutual betrayals threaten to destroy them both.
99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai ($30, PB)
Heart of the Grass Tree Molly Murn
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Jeremy DronField
Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history.
The inspiring true story of a father and son’s fight to stay together and to survive the Holocaust.
Out 5 February
Out 5 February
Read more at penguin.com.au
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It is 2005 in Logar, Afghanistan, and 12 year-old Marwand has returned from America with his family for the summer. He loses the tip of his finger to the village dog, Budabash, who then escapes. Marwand’s quest to find Budabash, over 99 nights, begins. The resulting search is an exuberantly told adventure, one that takes Marwand & his cousins across Logar, through mazes, into floods and unexpected confrontations with American soldiers. Moving between celebrations & tragedies, Marwand must confront family secrets & his own identity as he returns to a home he’s missed for six years. A humourous and tender coming-of-age novel, and a portrait of Afghanistan like no other, from an unforgettable new voice
Cherry by Nico Walker ($33, HB)
Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee & ecstasy & fall hard & fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school & joins the army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And die. He & Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, & the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. Soon he & Emily are hooked on heroin. With their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at—robbing banks.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James ($33, PB)
Tracker is known far & wide for his skills as a hunter—and he always works alone. But when he is engaged to find a child who disappeared three years ago, he must break his own rules, joining a group of 8 very different mercenaries working together to find the boy. Following the lost boy’s scent from one ancient city to another, into dense forests and across deep rivers, Tracker starts to wonder: Who is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And most important of all, who is telling the truth & who is lying? Drawing from vivid African history & mythology, Marlon James weaves a mesmerising, unique meditation on the nature of truth & power. Book 1 in The Dark Star trilogy.
Shadow Child by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto ($35, HB)
Twin sisters Hana & Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s & 60s, so close they shared the same nickname. Raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving but unstable mother, they were fatherless, mixed-race & utterly inseparable, devoted to one another. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent, nearly fatal betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever—until Kei arrives on Hana’s lonely Manhattan doorstep with a secret that will change everything. Told in interwoven narratives that glide between the gritty streets of NY, the lush landscape of Hawaii, and the horrors of the Japanese internment camps and the bombing of Hiroshima.
The Way of a Pilgrim: Candid Tales of a Wanderer to All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski ($31, PB) In East Prussia, January 1945, a wealthy family tries—and His Spiritual Father ($23, PB)
In 1884 a slim volume containing 4 short tales appeared in Russia. They told of a pilgrim, a lone wanderer, led by his quiet curiosity & a deep spiritual longing to undertake a lifelong journey across the land. The story of this gentle figure & his travels—through forests, fields & steppes, encountering priests & professors, nuns & convicts on the way—became a beloved spiritual guide around the world, immortalized in the pages of JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey as the ‘small pea-green cloth-bound book’ that Franny keeps close in her handbag. At its heart, it is a paean to peace, prayer, consolation and silent contemplation.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez ($23, PB)
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend & mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatised by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. She becomes isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind & fathom its heart—but while troubles abound, surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.
Beside Myself by Sasha Marianna Salzmann ($33, PB)
When her twin brother Anton goes missing and the only clue is a postcard sent from Istanbul, Alissa leaves her life in Berlin to find him. Without her twin, the sharer of her memories and the mirror of her own self, Ali is lost. In a city steeped in political & social changes, where you can buy gender-changing drugs on the street, Ali’s search—for her missing brother, for her identity—will take her on a journey for connection and belonging. Award-winning German playwright Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s debut novel is a pan-European saga that plays with genre, gender & Jewish identity.
Among the Lost by Emiliano Monge ($33, PB)
Estela & Epitafio, were trafficked—they grew together in a brutal orphanage, fell in love, but were ripped apart. They have played an ugly role in the very system that abused them, and done the bidding of the brutal old priest for too long. They have traded in migrants, put children to work as slaves, hacked off limbs & lives without a thought, though they have never forgotten the memory of their own shackles. Like the immigrants whose hopes they extinguish, they long to be free; free to be together & alone. Here in an unnamed land that could be a Mexico reimagined by Breughel & Dante, on the border between purgatory & inferno, where Paradise is the mouth of hell & cruelty the only currency, lives are spent, bartered & indentured for it. Must all be bankrupt among the lost?
We Must Be Brave by Frances Liardet ($30, PB)
December, 1940. As German bombs fall on Southampton, the city’s residents flee to the surrounding villages. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly-married Ellen Parr finds a girl sleeping, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone. Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped & the future she & her husband Selwyn had dreamed for themselves. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all. But with the end of the fighting comes the realization that Pamela was never theirs to keep
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
Chinonso, a young Nigerian poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside & hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall. The woman, Ndali, is moved by his sacrifice. Bonded by this strange night on the bridge, Chinonso & Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family, and when they officially object to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a small college in Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, he discovers that all is not what it seems—and he gets further & further away from his dream, from Ndali and the place he called home. In the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition Chigozie Obioma gives a contemporary twist to Homer’s Odyssey. ($33, PB)
fails—to seal themselves off from the chaos of post-World War II life as the German forces are in retreat & the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors—a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee. Yet in the main, life continues as banal, wondrous, and complicit as ever for the family, until their caution, their hedged bets, and their denial are answered by the wholly expected events they haven’t allowed themselves to imagine. Night Train by Thom Jones ($30, PB) Thom Jones’s stories are high-octane, prose-drunk entertainment. His characters are grifters and drifters, rogues and ne’erdo-wells—some lovable, some not—but each with a voice that never fails to grab you by the collar. They include Vietnam soldiers, amateur boxers, psych ward veterans & an unforgettable adolescent DJ radio host, among others. Perfectly capturing the essence of this icon of the American short story, Night Train showcases the sheer breadth and power of his inimitable stories. ‘Bleakly & outrageously comic—reading Thom Jones’s fiction is like speeding in an open car: the landscape blurs, the momentum becomes intoxicating—& then the brakes are applied, with no warning.’ Joyce Carol Oates.
Fox 8 by George Saunders ($22, PB)
Fox 8 has always been curious, and a bit of a daydreamer. And, by hiding outside houses at dusk and listening to children’s bedtime stories, he has learned to speak Yuman. The power of words & the stories built from them is intoxicating for a fox with a poetic soul, but there is danjur—on the horizon—a new shopping mall is being built, cutting off his pack’s food supply. To save himself and his fellow foxes, Fox 8 will have to set out on a harrowing quest from the wilds of nature deep into the dark heart of suburbia.
The Great Wide Open by Douglas Kennedy
It’s 1980s New York. Heady, excessive times. Alice Burns—a young book editor—is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations resonates, perhaps because she has just watched her own family implode. As she reads she wonders—When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice? Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school bullying, first love & sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970s Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan. But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers—how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others. ($33, PB)
Good Will Come From The Sea by Christos Ikonomou ($28, PB)
In a collection of blistering, darkly humorous stories a group of Athenian friends seek to escape the paralyzing effects of the Greek economic crisis & start over by moving to an Aegean island. Viewed with suspicion & disdain by the locals, they soon find themselves enmeshed in the same vicious cycle of money, power, and violence they thought they had left behind.
Birthday Girl by Haruki Murakami ($4, PB)
She waited on tables as usual that day, her twentieth birthday. She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress’s uneventful 20th birthday takes a strange & fateful turn when she’s asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant’s reclusive owner. Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami’s 70th birthday.
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Crime Fiction
Man at the Window by Robert Jeffreys ($30, PB)
When a boarding master at an exclusive boys’ school is shot dead, it is deemed accidental. A lazy & usually drunk detective is sent to write up the report. Cardilini unexpectedly does not co-operate, as he becomes riled by the privileged arrogance of those at the school. He used to have instincts. Perhaps he should follow them now. With no real evidence he declares the shooting a murder & puts himself on a collision course with the powerful & elite of Perth. As he peels back layers, the school’s dark secrets being to emerge. But is his dogged pursuit of justice helping or harming those most affected by the dead? This is the first in the Detective Cardilini series, set in 1960s Western Australia.
The Boy in the Headlights by Samuel Bjork ($33, PB)
Winter 1999. An old man is driving home when his headlights catch an animal on the empty road up ahead. He stamps hard on the brakes. But it is not an animal at all. It is a young boy, frightened & alone, with a set of deer antlers strapped firmly to his head. 14 years later, a body is found in a mountain lake. Within weeks, 3 people have died. Each time, the killer has left a clue, inviting Special Investigations Detectives Munch & Krü ger to play a deadly game—a game they cannot possibly win. Against the most dangerous and terrifying kind of serial killer. One who chooses their victims completely at random.
The Promised Land by Barry Maitland ($30, PB)
A
t the Australian Museum, curator Gerard Krefft and
taxidermist Henry Barnes began to experiment with photography in the 1860s, preparing and staging their specimens — from whales and giant sunfish to lifelike lyre bird scenes and fossils — and capturing them in thousands of beautiful and arresting images. Capturing Nature by Vanessa Finney reveals this fascinating visual archive for the first time, profiling the remarkable partnership of Krefft and Barnes, their innovative work and the Australian Museum’s urgent quest to become more scientific in its practices.
A
fter the success of her bestselling The Australian
Schoolkids’ Guide to Debating and Public Speaking, Claire Duffy turns her hand to helping students write well. In this easy-to-use and fun guide to writing and grammar, children (aged 12+), their parents and teachers will learn all they need to know about the elements of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence construction. With practical tips and helpful step-bystep examples, this book will help students master everything from apostrophes to essay writing.
w w w. n ews o u t h p u b l i s h i n g .co m
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Newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Kathy Kolla investigates a series of brutal murders on Hampstead Heath. Under intense pressure to find answers, she arrests the unlikely figure of John Pettigrew, a failing London publisher who lives alone on the edge of the Heath. Pettigrew’s lawyer calls on recently retired David Brock for advice, and soon, unable to resist the pull of investigation, the old colleagues, Brock and Kolla, are at loggerheads. At the heart of the gripping mystery of the Hampstead murders lies a manuscript of an unknown novel by one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. Brock believes that its story will unlock the puzzle, but how?
The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke ($30, PB)
When Detective Dave Robicheaux first met Desmond Cormier on the streets of New Orleans, he was a young, undersized boy with dreams of becoming a Hollywood director. 25 years later, when Robicheaux knocks on Cormier’s door, it isn’t to congratulate him on his Golden Globe & Academy Award nominations, but to ask about a young woman who’s been crucified—last seen near Cormier’s Cyrpemort Point estate. As always, Clete Purcel & Davie’s daughter, Alafair, have Robicheaux’s back—but as they wade further into the investigation, they end up in the crosshairs of the mob, the deranged Chester Wimple, and the dark ghosts Robicheaux has been running from for years.
Evil Things by Katja Ivar ($18, PB)
Lapland, Finland, 1952—the height of the Cold War. Finland shares a long border with the Soviet Union & the country is engaged in a highwire act of protecting its independence. Hella Mauzer is the first female Inspector in the Helsinki Homicide Unit. But then she was deemed too ‘emotional’ for the job & reassigned to Lapland. When a man disappears from a remote village on the Soviet border, Hella jumps at the chance to investigate. Her boss is sceptical—people disappear in the snows of Finland all the time. Then a body is found. But the small village of Käärmela is harbouring a 2nd crime. A crime whose evil is of another magnitude.
The Suspect by Fiona Barton ($33, PB)
When two 18 year-old girls go missing on their gap year in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight- desperate, bereft and frantic with worry. Journalist Kate Waters always does everything she can to be first to the story, first with the exclusive, first to discover the truth - and this time is no exception. But she can’t help but think of her own son, who she hasn’t seen in two years, since he left home to go travelling. This time it’s personal.
The Overnight Kidnapper by Andrea Camilleri
After a hectic morning involving 2 rather irritating cases of mistaken identity, Inspector Montalbano finally arrives in his office ready find out that a woman on her way home from work has been held up at gunpoint, chloroformed & kidnapped, but then released unharmed just hours later into the open countryside. Later that day, Montalbano hears from Enzo, the owner of his favourite restaurant, that his niece has recently been the victim of the exact same crime. Before long, a third instance of this baffling overnight kidnapping has been reported. As far as Montalbano can tell, there is no link between the attacker & the victims. So what exactly is this mystery assailant gaining from these fleeting kidnappings? And what can he do to stop them? ($30, PB)
So Many Doors by Oakley Halls ($17, PB)
A man sits in a cell on death row, sentenced to die for the murder of the beautiful woman called V. But as we learn the story of her death — and of her troubled, torrid life — one question haunts us: why would any man kill the woman he craves more than life itself? ‘So Many Doors is a beautiful, powerful, even masterful novel by a writer whose work enriched American literature.’ — Michael Chabon
The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
1793, Stockholm. King Gustav of Sweden has been assassinated, years of foreign wars have emptied the treasuries, and the realm is governed by a self-interested elite, leaving its citizens to suffer. On the streets, malcontent and paranoia abound. A body is found in the city’s swamp by a watchman, Mickel Cardell, and the case is handed over to investigator Cecil Winge, who is dying of consumption. Together, Winge and Cardell become embroiled in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams, and one death will expose a city rotten with corruption beneath its powdered and painted veneer. ($33, PB)
Fen Country by Edmund Crispin ($20, PB)
Dandelions, hearing aids, a blood-stained cat, a Leonardo drawing & a corpse with an alibi...... Just some of the unusual clues that Professor Gervase Fen & his friend Inspector Humbleby are confronted with in this sparkling collection of short mystery stories. Employing a skilful balance of ingenuity & humour, Crispin lays out all the clues. Can you solve the case before Professor Fen? First-published posthumously in 1979, Fen Country is Edmund Crispin’s 2nd collection of stories.
The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths ($33, PB)
DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters telling him to ‘go to the stone circle and rescue the innocent who is buried there’. These letters read like the letters that first drew him into the case of The Crossing Places, and to Ruth Galloway. But the author of those letters is dead. Or are they? Meanwhile Ruth is working on a dig in the Saltmarsh— another henge, known by the archaeologists as the stone circle. Then bones are found on the site, and identified as those of Margaret Lacey, a 12 year-old girl who disappeared 30 years ago. As the Margaret Lacey case progresses, more & more aspects of it begin to hark back to that first case, and to Scarlett Henderson, the girl Nelson couldn’t save. The past is reaching out for Ruth & Nelson, and its grip is deadly.
The Rainbow Conspiracy by Stuart Hopps ($25, PB)
From a chance encounter with a handsome lifeguard on the beach in Cape Cod, attraction blooms for the young Clive Spoke. The US of the late 60s offers freedoms he has not yet tasted in Britain and ex-Marine Dennis Montrose is happy to oblige. Years later, and now a leading theatrical agent, Clive is devastated to learn of the early death of that first love. Rushing to the US to comfort Dennis’ partner he finds there is more to his demise than meets the eye. With his trusty PA Shirley Morris by his side, Clive sets out to investigate & uncovers a devastating & destructive conspiracy aimed at the burgeoning gay community.
A Tiding of Magpies by Steve Burrows ($20, PB) When his most celebrated case is suddenly reopened, DCI Domenic Jejeune’s long-buried secrets threaten to come to light. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Lindy, faces an unseen threat of her own—one which Jejeune may not be able to protect her from. Between fending off inquiries from the internal review & an open murder case to solve, more than ever Jejeune will have to rely on the help of the stalwart Sergeant Danny Maik. But Maik is learning things on his own that have caused him to question his DCI’s actions, both past & present. In the current case, and in the former one, the facts seem clear enough. But it is in the silent spaces between the facts that the truth is often found. All the Tears in China by Sulari Gentill ($33, PB)
Shanghai in 1935 is an expatriate playground where fortunes are made & lost, where East & West collide, and the stakes include life itself. Into this cultural melting pot, Rowland Sinclair arrives from Sydney to represent his brother at international wool negotiations. The black sheep of the family, Rowland is under strict instructions to commit to nothing—but a brutal murder makes that impossible. As suspicion falls on him, Rowland enters a desperate bid to find answers in a city ruled by taipans & tycoons, where politics & vice are entwined with commerce—and the only people he can truly trust are an artist, a poet & a free-spirited sculptress.
Blood Sisters by Caroline De Costa ($24.95, PB)
A young Asian woman lies in a pool of blood in a Cairns motel—and dies before she can tell her story. Was she part of a sex-trafficking ring? Soon it appears that many women may be missing. Detective Cass Diamond is on the case. Could their disappearance be linked to the brutal murder of a Cairns sex worker several years earlier? Meanwhile a group of Cairns schoolgirls are conducting an investigation of their own—one of them was witness to the discovery of the young woman in the motel. Will they pry too far? The 3rd Cass Diamond mystery explores sex trafficking & abortion, teenage emotions & adult mischief, in a story as densely branched as the rainforest surrounding Cairns.
The Count of 9 by Erle Stanley Gardner ($17, PB)
From the world-famous creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner comes another baffling case for the Cool & Lam detective agency. Return to the 1950s as Bertha Cool & Donald Lam investigate an impossible murder in a double-locked room—the theft of 2 precious jade & ruby Buddhas, and the intertwined fates of a globetrotting explorer, a neglected wife, and a beautiful nude art model. Will Donald go down for the count — or will he come up with a solution by the count of 9?
She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge ($33, PB)
On a hot July night in 1983, six school friends go camping in the forest. Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and young Aurora Jackson is dazzled to be allowed to tag along. Thirty years later, a body is discovered. DCI Sheens is called to the scene, but he already knows what’s waiting for him- Aurora Jackson, found at long last. But that’s not all. The friends have all maintained their innocence, but the body is found in a hideaway only the six of them knew about. It seems the killer has always lurked very close to home.
Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox ($33, PB)
On the 5th floor of the White Caps Hotel, 4 young friends are left alone while their parents dine downstairs. But when Sara Farrow checks on the children at midnight, her son is missing. Despite a thorough search, no trace of the child is found. Sara turns to Crimson Lake’s unlikeliest private investigators—disgraced cop Ted Conkaffey and convicted killer Amanda Pharrell. For Ted, the case couldn’t have come at a worse time. Two years ago a false accusation robbed him of his career, his reputation & most importantly his family. But now Lillian, the daughter he barely knows, is coming to stay in his ramshackle cottage by the lake.
Bye Bye Baby by Fiona McIntosh ($33, PB)
A spate of seemingly unconnected murders in southern England prompt a high-profile taskforce to be formed & led by DCI Jack Hawksworth, one of the Force’s new rising stars who combines modern methods with old-school instincts. The victims appear as disparate as their style of death; the only link that Hawk and his team can pull together is that the murdered are all men of an identical age. The taskforce has nothing but cold cases of decades past to comb through in the hope that they might find a clue to who is behind the savagery.
True Crime
Southern Justice by Colin McLaren ($33, PB)
Daybreak, Sandy Bay, Hobart, 27 January 2009. A yacht, the Four Winds, is seen listing low to the waterline. When police board the sinking vessel there is no sign of the owners, Bob Chappell & Sue Neill-Fraser but, they find blood & a knife. Bob Chappell is never seen again—the police believe he has been murdered. Sue Neill-Fraser is arrested, found guilty & sentenced to 26 years’ imprisonment. May, 2016—Colin McLaren begins a probe on this notorious cold case. What he discovers shocks him. No body, no motive, no witnesses, a puddle of unexplained DNA liquid, undisclosed police documents, insubstantial scenarios—all leading him to believe Sue Neill-Fraser was wrongly convicted. He is not alone, as lawyers line up to help her. August 2017. Sue Neill-Fraser remains in prison. When questions are asked of her conviction, new witnesses are charged, including a lawyer, and unbearable pressure is applied until, fearing for his own liberty, Colin McLaren flees the country. Southern Justice lays out the evidence that should force a Royal Commission to reopen the case and exonerate an innocent woman. The guilty are still out there! ‘. . . the worst miscarriage of justice in Australia’s history’ Robert Richter QC.
Breaking & Entering by Jeremy Smith
The hacker now known as Alien entered MIT in 1998, intending to major in aerospace engineering. Almost immediately, she was recruited to join a secret student group scaling walls, breaking into buildings, pulling elaborate pranks & exploring computer systems. Within a year, one of her hall mates was dead, two others were on trial, and three had been institutionalised. And Alien’s adventures were only beginning. This is a whirlwind history of the last 20 years of hacking & cybersecurity. As Alien develops from teenage novice to international expert, she joins the secret vanguard of our digitised world, and reveals the forces at work behind our everyday technology. ($33, PB)
Murder, Misadventure and Miserable Ends: Tales from a Colonial Coroner’s Court by Dr Catie Gilchrist ($35, PB)
Murder in colonial Sydney was a surprisingly rare occurrence, so when it did happen it caused a great sensation. People flocked to the scene of the crime, to the coroner’s court & to the criminal courts to catch a glimpse of the accused. Henry Shiell was the Sydney City Coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes & workplaces of colonial Sydneysiders. He learnt of envies, infidelities, passions, and loyalties, and just how short, sad & violent some lives were. But his court was also, at times, instrumental in calling for new laws & regulations to make life safer. Catie Gilchrist explores the 19th century city as a precarious place of bustling streets and rowdy hotels, harbourside wharves and dangerous industries.
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Biography
Possessed By Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism by Harold Bloom ($55, HB)
A W O M A N ; A WA R ; A C H I L D T H AT C H A N G E D E V E RY T H I N G
Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts—an inward journey from childhood to ninety—Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest & most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than 80 meditations on poems & prose which have haunted him since childhood & which he has possessed by memory—from the Psalms & Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare & Dr Johnson; Spenser & Milton to Wordsworth & Keats; Walt Whitman & Browning to James Joyce & Proust. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by ‘the freshness of last things ... one of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but for the voice I heard before the world was made’.
Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz, The by Jeremy Dronfield ($35, PB)
‘A RIPPING, RIVETING MURDER MYSTERY’ A. J. FINN
A moving memoir and a proud manifesto on disability and appearance diversity issues.
The Unwinding of the Miracle: A memoir of life, death and everything that comes after by Julie Yip-Williams ($33, PB)
Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia planned by her grandmother, only to have to flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at the age of thirty-seven, with two little girls still at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. This is her story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death.
King of the Air: The Turbulent Life of Charles Kingsford Smith by Ann Blainey ($44.99, HB)
Charles Kingsford Smith was the most commanding flyer of the golden age of aviation. In 3 short years, he broke records with his astounding & daring voyages—the first trans-Pacific flight from America to Australia, the first circumnavigation around the equator, the first non-stop crossing of the Australian mainland. A tickertape parade was held in his honour on New York’s Fifth Avenue. At home, he became a national hero, ‘Our Smithy’. Yet his achievements belied a traumatic past. He had witnessed the horror of WW I—first as a soldier at Gallipoli, later as a combat pilot with the Royal Flying Corps—and, like so many of his generation, he bore physical & emotional scars. The public saw the derring-do; only those close to him knew the anxious man who pushed himself to the edge of health & sanity. In November 1935, his plane crashed & he was lost at sea near Burma, his body never to be recovered. This new biography reveals the complicated, tumultuous life of a fascinating figure, who pursued his obsession to the greatest heights of fame & catastrophe.
Correspondence: Pablo Picasso & Gertrude Stein Through Picasso & Gertrude Stein’s casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early 20th century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings & paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats. ($60, PB)
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In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son, Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved & forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed & the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive—the love between father & son. Based on Gustav’s secret diary & meticulous archive research, this book tells his and Fritz’s story for the first time.
The Pianist of Yarmouk by Aeham Ahmad ($35, PB)
One morning on the outskirts of Damascus, two starving friends are walking through their desolate city & come across a familiar street that has been turned to rubble, concrete bridges towering above them like tombs & houses turned inside out. Aeham turns to the only comfort he has left & sits at his piano to play a song of hope to his fellow Syrians. It is a song that will reach far beyond the streets of his home & carry consequences he could never have dreamed of. This tender & poetic account of Aeham’s experiences, from losing his city, friends & family to leaving his country & finding safety is a raw & candid portrait of a man’s search for solace & of a country that has been fiercely torn apart.
Now in B Format Writer’s Luck: A Memoir: 1976-1991 by David Lodge, $25 We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World by Malala Yousafzai
Part memoir, part communal storytelling, Malala Yousafzai not only explores her own story of adjusting to a new life while longing for home, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her various journeys—girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they’ve ever known. In a time of immigration crises, war & border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world’s most prominent young activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person—often a young person—with hopes & dreams, and that everyone deserves universal human rights & a safe home. ($30, PB)
Leeward: A Memoir by Geoffrey Lehmann ($35, PB)
‘For my first ten years I grew up in Lavender Bay with the smell of salt water, in houses facing the grey curved eye of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was a distant rumble, like thunder, when trains went across.’ This is a lyrical & honest memoir of a poet’s life in Sydney. From Lavender Bay to Lindfield, Geoff Lehmann tells the story of his life as a poet, tax lawyer, member of the Sydney Push, single father to three small children & finally, a happily married man who returns to poetry writing & translation. His life & work crosses with some of the leading cultural figures of the 20th century & beyond—Les Murray, Judith Wright, Christopher Brennan, Clive James. In this book he traces the contours of his own life & his family history, and the contours of particular slice of Sydney.
After Emily by Julie Dobrow ($39.95, HB)
Emily Dickinson may be the most widely read American poet but the story behind her work’s publication in 1890 is barely known. Julie Dobrow recounts the extraordinary lives of Mabel Loomis Todd & her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham & the powerful literary legacy they shared. Mabel’s complicated relationships with the Dickinsons—including her 13-year extramarital affair with Emily’s brother, Austin— roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Dobrow has unearthed hundreds of primary sources to tell this compelling story and reveal the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the Emily Dickinson we know today.
Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook by Jacqueline Kent ($29.95, HB)
In 1985 Jacqueline Kent had a satisfying career as a freelance book editor, and was emerging as a writer. Living & working alone, she relished her independence. But then she met Kenneth Cook, author of the Australian classic Wake in Fright, and they fell in love. With bewildering speed Jacqueline found herself in alien territory—with a man almost 20 years older, whose life experience could not have been more different from her own. She had to come to terms with complicated finances & expectations, and to negotiate relationships with Cook’s children, four people almost her own age. But with this man of contradictions— funny & sad, headstrong & tender—she found real & sustaining companionship. Until one devastating evening. But even when a story is over that doesn’t mean it has come to an end.
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW
ZEBRA: AND OTHER STORIES
‘Hepworth turns up the tension in her latest Australian-set domestic suspense novel. A masterful depiction of how much is said in the silences...’
Tantalising, poignant, wry, and just a little fantastical, this subversive collection of short fiction reminds us what twists of fate may be lurking just beneath the surface of the everyday.
SALLY HEPWORTH
Booklist, starred review
DEBRA ADELAIDE
Australia’s Sweetheart: The amazing story of forgotten Hollywood star Mary Maguire by Michael Adams ($33, PB)
Mary Maguire was Australia’s first teenage movie star, working in both Hollywood and the UK. Her life was lived in parallel with seminal incidents of the 20th century: the Spanish Flu; the Great Depression; the Bodyline series; Australia’s early radio, talkies; Hollywood’s Golden Era; the British aristocracy’s embrace of European fascism; London’s Blitz; and post-war American culture & politics. She knew everyone, from Douglas Jardine, Don Bradman, Errol Flynn & Ronald Reagan, to William Randolph Hearst, Maureen O’Sullivan & Judy Garland. Her story captures the glamour of Hollywood & the turbulent times of the 20th century, with a young woman at its centre.
The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death & Life of a Fighter by George Szirtes ($30, PB)
In July 1975, Magda Szirtes died in the ambulance on the way to hospital after she had tried to take her own life. She was 51 years old. The Photographer at Sixteen spools into the past, through her exile in England, her flight with her husband & 2 young boys from Hungary in 1956 & her time in 2 concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer, and the unknowable fate of her vanished family in Transylvania. In a tender & yet unsparing autobiographical journey, poet, George Szirtes’ memoir of his mother flows backwards through time, and through a tumultuous period of European history.
Travel Writing
Salt On Your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie ($33, PB)
Charlotte Runcie has always felt pulled to the sea, and this book she explores what the sea means to us, and particularly what it has meant to women through the ages. Her book is a walk on the beach with Turner, with Shakespeare, with the Romantic Poets & shanty-singers. It’s an ode to our oceans—to the sailors who brave their treacherous waters, to the women who lost their loved ones to the waves, to the creatures that dwell in their depths, to beach trawlers, swimmers, seabirds & mermaids. She explores how the sea has inspired, fascinated & terrified us, and how she herself fell in love with the deep blue. Navigating through ancient Greek myths, poetry, shipwrecks & Scottish folktales, Salt On Your Tongue is about how the wild untameable waves can help us understand what it means to be human.
Go Your Own Way: Hacks, Tips and Tricks to Travel the World Solo by Ben Groundwater
Ben Groundwater will help you take your first bold steps into solo travel, with tips on preparation, planning and safety, as well as funny and useful stories from travel writer Groundwater’s own experiences. He gives details on all the best travel destinations for solo travellers, including the 10 best cities to visit, the 5 most amazing journeys, and also a few places that you may want to avoid on your own. This guide will help you meet people and make friends, but it will also enable you to do all the things you love, in your own company. ($35, PB)
Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life by Alasdair McGregor ($40, PB)
Photographer, filmmaker, writer, adventurer. Controversial, passionate, audacious. Frank Hurley was an extraordinary Australian, possibly most famous for his Antarctic photographs captured alongside expeditioners Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton. For Hurley, image-making and exploration went hand-in-hand and he sought out experiences as a pioneer documentary film-maker, official photographer in two world wars, early aviator, and adventure and story-seeker in both the natural environment and in rapidly disappearing non-western worlds. Hurley kept diaries throughout his life & in this biography Alasdair McGregor uses these insights to give a picture of a truly complex & driven man.
THE RUIN OF KINGS JENN LYONS
‘Literary magic. Epic fantasy fans looking for a virtually un-put-down-able read should look no further’ Kirkus, starred review
MENTORS: HOW TO HELP AND BE HELPED RUSSELL BRAND
Bestselling author Russell Brand explores the idea of mentoring and shares what he’s learned from the guidance of his own helpers, heroes and mentors.
Journey Through Indonesia: An Unforgettable Journey from Sumatra to Papua by Tim Hannigan
Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest nation, a place of endless contrasts and myriad cultures. Supported by hundreds of full-colour photographs, Tim Hannigan takes a tour of the world’s greatest archipelago—a vast island nation with all the diversity of an entire continent. This is the perfect introduction to this most colourful of countries, for both Indonesian history enthusiasts, armchair travellers, and those planning their own explorations & adventures in Indonesia. The book features over 400 stunning photographs, nine detailed maps, and insightful descriptions of the country’s geography, culture, history, arts, crafts & wildlife species. ($35, HB)
I Built No Schools in Kenya: A Year of Unmitigated Madness by Kirsten Drysdale
In September 2010, Kirsten Drysdale was offered a job too curious to refuse—a cruisey-gig as a dementia carer for a rich old man in Kenya. All expenses-paid, plenty of free time to travel or do some freelance reporting. Too good to refuse. But on arrival in Nairobi that she discovered the rich old man’s family was fighting a war around him, and she was caught in the crossfire. She had to spy on his wife, keep his daughter placated, rebuff his marriage proposals, hide the car keys & clip his toenails, all while trying to retain her own sanity in the colonial time warp of his home. Meanwhile, the Kenyan army was invading Somalia, Al-Shabaab was threatening terror attacks, the East African bodybuilding scene beckoned, and Kirsten discovered she had long-lost cousins running a bar on the other side of the city. This is a travelogue-tragedy-farce about race, wealth, love, death, family, nationhood, sanity, benzodiazepines, monkeys & whisky. ($35, PB)
Rediscovering Travel: A Guide for the Globally Curious by Seth Kugel ($41.95, HB)
New York Times’s ‘Frugal Traveler’, Seth Kugel’s famously unassuming journeys around the globe have forged a signature philosophy of whimsy & practicality, and have also revealed the seemingly infinite booby traps of on-thegrid tourism. Kugel takes the modern travel industry to task, determined to reignite humanity’s age-old sense of adventure that has virtually been vanquished by the spontaneity-obliterating likes of Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and Starwood points. Woven throughout with vivid tales of his perfectly imperfect adventures, his book explains how to make the most of new digital technologies without being shackled to them. For the tight-belted tourist and the first-class flyer, the eager student and the comfort-seeking retiree, Kugel shows how we too can rediscover the joy of discovery. 9
books for kids to young adults
compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent
Thank you to all our customers, established and new, who supported us - a wholly Australian independent business - over Christmas. We hope you will join us again in 2019 for another year crammed with reading and discovering new authors, illustrators and genres. Lynndy
When an Elephant Falls in Love by Davide Cali (ill) Alice Lotti ($27, HB)
Do you remember all the crazy, funny and romantic things you did when you first fell in love? Such as staring at the clouds for hours and hours? Writing letters that you will never send? Leaving flowers at the doorstep of your beloved… and running away before the door is opened? Well, in this delightful picture book, our romantic Elephant does all these, more. He tries to be healthy, but succumbs to the cheesecake in the fridge every time. He bathes every day (and even washes behind his ears!). He keeps a melancholy vigil on a mountain top—‘If only she knew I existed!’. Alice Lotti’s illustrations had me smiling at every page. She includes a little yellow bird in each one—as a cheery companion to our lovelorn pachyderm. Love Conquers All in the end, to conclude an utterly charming book. Stephen (NB: Regrettably this book is out of print but we can snaffle a couple of copies. LB).
activities
Leonard is friends with everyone—and boy can he sing! But will his singing talents impress the one friend he really wants? In a story about friendship, bravery and being yourself, join this charismatic bird as he searches for the song that will change his life… Set in the NSW Blue Mountains, and including a bunyip amongst other characters, this story features local references, and illustrations by artist and textile designer Eloise Short. Ta da! Featuring the enchanting landscapes of the Blue Mountains, this artful book has also been reimagined as a classical music performance composed by award-winning composer Ian Munro and produced by Mountain Concerts. It will premiere at Scenic World Blue Mountains on Saturday 23 February. Book tickets at www.eventbrite.com.au
The Pre-Raphaelites: An Art Activity Book by Helena Perez Garcia ($13, PB)
Catch Me: A Seek-&-Find Book by Anders Arho ($33, HB)
Danish designer Arhoj’s puzzle book has dogs and cats running amok, chasing each other amongst colourfully detailed scenes and providing an engaging challenge for the reader. Cover art reflects the different animals: from one end we embark on the chase from the dog’s perspective; reverse the book and read the cat’s version of the twists and turns. Increasing both the level of difficulty and visual interest, the animals change colour with each hide-and-seek location. Great fun for anyone 5+. Lynndy
Timed nicely for the Love and Desire exhibition at the National Gallery gallery in Canberra, this is a really fun, informative art activity book for children of primary school age. The Pre-Raphaelite wives and girlfriends also feature heavily, which is good to see. There are lots of ideas for artworks, and making things, some more ambitious than others—eg make your own wallpaper! The Pre-Raphaelite paintings and designs were rich in narrative and imagery, which makes it a perfect subject for this type of activity book. Recommended for 8–12 year olds. Louise
fiction
classics
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (ill) Mariachiara Di Giorgio ($20, HB)
To Night Owl from Dogfish by Holly Goldberg Sloan & Meg Wolitzer
For very different reasons from the multi-sensory tensions of D’Ath’s novel (see below) I loved this book. Equally realistic, it sweeps up the reader in a progression of emails and letters between two tremendously likeable girls who are determined to thwart their respective fathers’ plans. Publishers Weekly summarises it perfectly: ‘Peeking at her father’s emails, 12-year-old Californian Bett learns two pieces of upsetting information: her father has fallen in love with a man she’s never met, and the two of them are scheming to send Bett and the man’s 12-year-old daughter, Avery, away to summer camp together. Furious, Bett finds Avery’s email address to break the horrible news. The girls vow not to speak to each other during the summer, but despite their differences (Bett is spontaneous and adventurous; Avery is bookish and fearful), they form a strong bond. When their fathers part ways during a disastrous trip to China, the girls, who had been looking forward to being sisters, are determined to find a way to reunite them. Featuring a dramatic climax and a host of surprising twists, the novel affirms that families conventional and unconventional are families just the same.’ An emotional workout and a sheer delight! 10+. ($17, PB) Lynndy
The Last: Book 1 Endling Trilogy by Katherine Applegate
Wow! This first instalment of Applegate’s new trilogy exhibits the compelling skill that won her the Newbery Medal for The One and Only Ivan. ‘Byx has always thought of herself as last: last-born sibling, the youngest in her whole family, and least adept at all the skills valued by the caninelike dairnes. But when her family, the last-known group of dairnes in Nedarra, is hunted down and murdered by humans, she believes she is the last—an Endling, the sole survivor of a species. Byx sets out on a desperate but hopeful journey in search of Dairneholm, a mythical settlement of dairnes. Along the way she is joined by an unlikely group including Khala the human, whose true identity and past are masked in secrets; Tobble, the small and fiercely loyal wobbyk whose life Byx saved; and a scholar’s apprentice. Their mission becomes more dangerous as they discover the true machinations behind the dairnes’s eradication.’ In a world where the six governing species—humans, dairnes, felivets, natites, terramants, and raptidons—avoid or prey upon one another, Byx’s quest is unusual in its alliances with other species who distrust humans. The novel sustains a breakneck pace that scoops you up and bundles you along on Byx’s emotional adventure. With humour, magic, loyal friendship, and conservation offset by mystery, betrayal, and sinister machinations by humans, this is truly an epic series opener. I was entranced. Some darker elements might disturb readers younger than age 9. ($17, PB) Lynndy
your space
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picture books
Leonard the Lyrebird by Jodie McLeod (ill) Eloise Short ($25, HB)
We welcome readers’ recommendations, so feel free to email me with any favourites you want to share.Who knows, you might initiate a groundswell response towards a bestseller… lynndy@gleebooks.com.au
I am so delighted by Mariachiara Di Giorgio’s illustrations in The Secret Garden—they are full of colour and movement, quite magical and slightly surreal. I see that it has been ‘inspired by the masterpiece by Frances Hodgson Burnett’, which means it has been rewritten. Fiddling around with a perfectly good classic seems a shame to me, but despite nothing being as good as the original, this version certainly makes it accessible to the modern child, and a younger reader. We always have several editions of this classic, so I am going to give this one to a certain six year old, as well as the lovely Bath Treasury of Classics version, with its bright pink cover and bookmark, lime green fore edge, and black and white silhouette illustrations with a few full colour, full page pictures. I know she will enjoy it when she’s a bit older. Louise
47 Degrees by Justin D’Ath ($17, PB) In this breathlessly compelling novel D’Ath—himself a fortunate survivor of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria—writes with terrifying immediacy, allowing us to experience through 12-year-old Zeelie’s eyes the progress of an all too familiar disaster. All her father’s painstaking preparations fall victim to Nature’s ferocity, finally rendering the concept of stay and defend far too hazardous and forcing him and Zeelie to seek refuge in a nearby town. You can almost feel the searing heat, struggle to breathe in the eclipsing smoke and smell the burning countryside—as well as sharing Zeelie’s panic that her mother and younger brother are out of communication range and the family’s animals might not all escape. A realistic glimpse of tragedy, 47 Degrees explores family and survival, the resilient strength of community with a shared fate, and our way of dealing with uncertainty in emergencies. Surely no-one reading this can remain unmoved. Lynndy
vale John burningham . . . ... one of the best ever picture book creators, whose gentle and imaginative picture books continue among childhood favourites. When Gleebooks was still in its original location we were fortunate to be blessed with a personal visit, and I have an abiding memory of lanky John folded onto one of the wee chairs, sharing a tea party with some of Australia’s greatest children’s authors and illustrators. His legacy includes generations of readers enriched by his wonderful books.
Food, Health & Garden
Crumb by Richard Bertinet ($40, HB)
Baker Richard Bertinet shows how to make everything from classic & rustic breads to sourdough. With step-by-step photography he offers a range of delicious sweet & savoury recipes from Cornbread with Manchego Cheese & Chorizo, Saffron & Seaweed Buns & Green Pea Flatbreads to Chocolate, Pistachio & Orange Loaf & Cinnamon Knots. There are also options for gluten-free breads & the best bakes to improve your gut-health by experimenting with different types of flour & ferments. He also shares ideas for cooking with bread for delicious tartines or mouthwatering Brioche Ice Cream.
The Truth About Fat by Anthony Warner ($30, PB)
We are getting fat & sick in increasing numbers and it’s placing a devastating burden on our healthcare systems. Scientists in every field are desperate to explain this epidemic & stave off a modern health disaster. But what’s to blame? Carbs, fat or sugar? Gut microbes or genes? Laziness or poverty? Anthony Warner scrutinises the explanations of academics, doctors, researchers & journalists. As he lays out the best evidence available, he rails against quack theories preying on the desperate & considers whether we are blaming our own bodies for other people’s ignorance & cruelty. What remains is the unvarnished truth about one of the great preoccupations of our age.
The Beauty Chef Gut Guide by Carla Oates ($40, HB)
This practical companion to Carla Oates’, The Beauty Chef offers an 8-week program including information on the importance of gut functionality, weekly meal plans for repairing & reprogramming your gut, with more than 90 recipes across breakfast, lunch & dinner: Coconut Crêpes; Chicken, Flaked Almond & Sage Buckwheat Risotto; Lemongrass & Kaffir Lime Salmon Cakes; Panfried Cauliflower Gnocchi; Swedish Meatballs; Tamarind Fish Curry; and Vanilla & Cardamom Chia Puddings. Plus broader advice for wellbeing, from the importance of cleaning products to mindfulness & yoga.
Whole by Harriet Birrell ($50, HB)
From nourishing brekkies, salads & bowls to wholesome main dishes & divine desserts, Whole contains more than 100 plant-based wholefood recipes. Refined white sugar is replaced with whole vitamin— and mineral—rich ingredients such as mejdool dates, banana & maple syrup. Refined flours are replaced with minimally processed whole grains. Only a few recipes contain gluten & these are accompanied by gluten-free alternatives in the notes.
16:8 Intermittent Fasting by Jaime R. Chambers
Dietician Jaime Rose Chambers prescribes intermittent fasting to her patients as a matter of course, as it’s by far the easiest & most effective tool for healthy weight control that she’s seen. Her handbook has everything you need to know about intermittent fasting, including: the latest science on 16:8 and 5:2, showing how intermittent fasting can help you control your weight, lower cholesterol, reduce blood pressure & protect against heart disease; 40 delicious, nutritionally replete recipes; advice on how to set up a personalised fasting program that suits your lifestyle & individual health needs; meal plans to help you incorporate fasting into your week. ($30, PB)
Easy Keto by Pete Evans ($25, PB)
The ketogenic diet—a style of eating that is low in carbs & rich in healthy fats—is a powerful way to transform your health, lose weight & find relief from common health problems. In this practical, onestop guide, Pete Evans gives you the essential information you’ll need to transition to this way of eating, including: The benefits of a keto diet; Guidelines on carbohydrates found in common foods; Eating, shopping and pantry tips; More than 70 simple recipes—Try Italian sausages with grilled greens, bacon & egg fat bombs, pan-fried snapper fillets with broccomole, crackling chicken with cucumber & carrot salad, braised lamb shoulder with parsnip mash or choc-mint slice. First-time Vegan by Leah Vanderveldt ($20, HB) Choosing a vegan lifestyle can be good for your health & good for the planet, but many people dive straight in without proper understanding of how to get a nutritionally balanced diet. This book show to ensure your plant-based diet ticks all the right nutritional boxes. Learn how to make the daily essentials you can’t live without: from dairy-free milks to plant-based condiments—which can be costly to buy readymade and/or full of additives you don’t need. Finally, master the easy recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner & snacks that will underpin your vegan diet & allow it to be sustainable & enjoyable.
Home Cheese Making, 4th Edition by Ricki Carroll ($35, PB)
First published in 1982, with over 400,000 copies in print, this completely updated 4th edition of ‘Cheese Queen’ Ricki Carroll’s classic features 35 new cheese recipes, colour photography of stepby-step techniques, and new profiles of contemporary cheese makers. The additions to this comprehensive volume reflect the broader selection of cheeses available in specialty food stores & groceries, including burrata, stracchino, Brillat-Savarin, D’Affinois, Cambrales, Drunk Gouda, Pecorino Pepato, goat milk’s gouda, and more. Companion recipes are included for cheese plate condiments and classic cheese dishes.
Fridays with my Folks: Stories on ageing, illness and life by Amal Awad ($35, PB)
Amal Awad’s experiences with her ageing parents prompted her to explore how Australians are ageing, how sickness affects the afflicted & those around them, and what solutions exist when hope seems lost. So many people are similarly navigating a new reality—weeks dotted with doctor appointments and reshaped family relationships. Awad speaks with doctors, nurses, an aged care psychologist, specialists, politicians, ageing people living alone & others in a retirement village, to gain insights & to consider solutions. At a time when ageism and health is high on the public’s radar, what we’re not always talking about is how to deal with the anxiety, depression & overall challenges that come with someone you love facing their mortality & a decline in health. Awad’s book stems from personal experiences, but it expands to a much wider, more universal discussion about life, suffering, coping & hope.
9 Months ($35, PB) by Ruby Matley & Dr David Addenbrooke
Obstetrician & father, Dr David Addenbrooke & health scientist & mother, Ruby Matley combine forces to tell you: What is going on in each trimester, for both you and your baby. All you need to know about screening, ultrasounds & tests in pregnancy, and your options for labour & birth. How to cope with common symptoms, from nausea & fatigue to heartburn and back pain. 40 recipes for ensuring optimum health for both you & your baby, plus the lowdown on which foods are in & which are out. Reassuring information on weight gain, dealing with mood swings, connecting with your partner & bonding with your bump. Tips for buying maternity clothes, preparing the nursery, budgeting for a baby & packing the hospital bag.
Kids, Sex & Screens: Raising Strong, Resilient Children in the Sexualized Digital Age by Jillian Roberts ($30, PB)
Weaving eye-opening accounts from her own counselling practice with up-to-date psychological science, Dr Jillian Roberts gives a full-fledged accounting of our sexualized society. Our kids are being exposed to sexual content at a younger and younger age, whether through the Internet, advertisements, or interactions with their peers. When children are exposed to this sexual information without context, or images of a graphic nature, they can experience lasting psychological effects with deep-seated ramifications. Kids, Sex & Screens explains in easy-to-understand language what exactly the psychological effects of that exposure can look like, and offers parents the tools and expert advice on how to handle it appropriately. .
Super Organic Gardener by Matthew Appleby ($45, PB)
If you care about what you eat, you should care about how you grow it. Gardeners can demonstrate that by going beyond organics to veganics—growing without animal inputs—they are a driving force in saving the environment. Matthew Appleby’s book gives you the tools to grow without harming the planet & animals, and explains why moving beyond organics towards super organic vegan gardening is the way to show you are genuinely concerned about environmental issues & the industrial commodification of living, sentient creatures. From advice about how to make & buy natural fertilisers & compost, to putting nutritional values on what you grow, and to how to cook it, and how to share your plot with wildlife, this book covers all the bases.
The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy by Steven R. Gundry ($30, PB)
Lectins—a type of protein found in fruits, vegetables, legumes, dairy, and grains—wreak havoc on the gut, creating systemic inflammation & laying the groundwork for disease & weight gain. Avoiding lectins offers incredible health benefits but requires a significant lifestyle change. In this book Steven Gundry makes it simpler than ever to go lectin free with a 30-day challenge that offers incentives, support & results. With grocery lists, meal plans, time-saving cooking strategies, all-new recipes & guidance for families and those following specialized diets
Fervor: A Journey Through Australian Native Food by Paul Iskov & Robert Wood
With a focus on local, native ingredients, Fervor gathers together the best recipes from Paul Iskov’s roving dining experience with stories by Robert Wood & photographs by Chris Gurney. Together, they paint a beautiful picture of the food, lifestyle & landscape from a celebrated & award-winning chef. Iskov has worked internationally at world leading restaurants Noma, DOM & Pujol. Now he has returned to Western Australia to craft a unique outlook on contemporary Australian cuisine. ($39, HB)
Also new this month: 12 Ways Your Child Can Get The Best Out Of School by Adrian Piccoli, $33
A jargon-free guide to your child’s education & how you can help them thrive and achieve their full potential in a rapidly changing world.
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events
Events r Calenda
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mber! get free Reme and eclub t our shops, e l G a he Join t events held with every o t entry dit accrued Gleaner e re c 10% hase, and th r door. c you pur red to delive
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Event—6 for 6.30 Lucinda Holdforth
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t! iss ou il! m t ’ Don ema or gle eekly f p u Sign ebooks w e. le at The g vents upd e m.au email eebooks.co @gl asims
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Leading Lines in conv. w. Tegan Bennett Daylight Using examples from history, literature & her 25-year career as a speechwriter, Lucinda Holdforth writes a compelling analysis of celebratory, rallying & explanatory speeches to show how to make speeches that seize the moment, advance your cause and lead the way.
Accidental Feminists in conv. with Richard Denniss This book is about how one generation became feminists—by accident, and also a plea for future generations to keep agitating for a better, fairer world.
Beyond A Year with K in conv. with C In 1985 Jacquelin isfying career as editor, and was em Then she met Kenn of the Australian Fright, and th
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Troll Hunting After being trolled online herself, Ginger Gorman spent 5 years investigating internet trolls and their world, gaining a window into not just the mindset of trolls, but also the profound changes in the way we live & work in a post-internet world.
The Fligh Launcher: Cathe This is a novel in compelled by an e the human & ani birds in these st same space as hum also apart, gliding novel explores wh the two wo
Tim Soutphommasane
On Hate How is hate shaping our society? With the troubling rise of nationalist populism and the return of race politics, it’s time to question the powers at play. On Hate is an urgent call for citizens to defend democracy against extremism.
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From Cradle to Launcher: Ro Lorraine Rose’s b pervasive anxiety world is going.— midst of uncertain back to basics to for liv
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February 2018
RSDAY
—6 for 6.30 ine Kent
All events listed are $12/$9 concession. Book Launches are free. Gleeclub members free entry to events at 49 Glebe Pt Rd
Events are held upstairs at #49 Glebe Point Road unless otherwise noted. Bookings—Phone: (02) 9660 2333, Email: events@gleebooks.com.au, Online: www.gleebooks.com.au/events
FRIDAY
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Launch—3.30 for 4 Sam Lee
SUNDAY 3
The Social Way Do you struggle to meet new people and make new friends? Do you find socialising difficult or even terrifying? Do you imagine how life might be different if you were surrounded with friends? Do you wish the world was a friendlier place? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this is the book for you.
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Words: Kenneth Cook Caroline Baum ne Kent had a sata freelance book merging as a writer. neth Cook, author n classic Wake in hey fell in love.
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ht of Birds erine McKinnon n 12 stories, each encounter between imal worlds. The tories inhabit the mans, but they are g above us. This hat happens when orlds meet..
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o Global Citizen obyn Williams book addresses the about where the —and how in the nty, we are forced o re-discover tools ving.
Launch—6 for 6.30
Jane Turner
Sue Dahman
Mindset for Authors
Tayta’s Lebanese and Joel Annesley Mediterranean Kitchen Quiet Confidence: Having grown up and lived on the Breaking Up with Shyness Mediterranean Sea. Sue Dahman is Learn writing strategies to overcome sharing her favourite dishes from perfectionism, procrastination, and these regions, all influenced by her self-doubt, and break up with shyLebanese background. ness and see life with new sight— and to live a life of Quiet Confidence
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Coming in March
Event: Wed 5th—Caro Llewellyn, Diving Into Glass Launch: Tue 12th—Richard Cooke, Tired of Winning Event: Wed 13th—Julienne Van Loon, The Thinking Woman Event: Thur 21st—Rebecca Huntley with Bridie Jabour, On Progress & Politics
Event: Tue 26th—Dominic Kelly with David Marr, Political Troglodytes & Economic Lunatics for more events go to: http://www.gleebooks.com.au/bookings
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Granny’s Good Reads with Sonia Lee Readers who want an intelligent suspense novel full of spills and chills but with an underlying serious message, will find The Budapest Job by Alice Spigelman a gripping read. Idealistic young architect Tom Gaspar is sent by his boss to Budapest to oversee the building of a block of apartments at a time (1989) when Communism is collapsing and Hungary needs western finance and expertise. It soon becomes obvious that Gaspar is the wrong man for the job. Not only does he have scruples about building a cheap concrete box on a compulsorily acquired site but he is obsessed with finding how his birth father died in 1953 during the Stalinist regime. He comes up against some hefty opposition, gets involved in a police operation, meets and loses the love of his life, unmasks his father’s betrayer and has to decide whether or not to denounce him. Expect a dramatic revelation in the final chapter. As a bonus, this novel has a very attractive cover. Sarah Perry’s dazzling, devastating new novel Melmoth is her version of Charles Maturin’s 1820 masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer. Maturin’s Wanderer does a Faustian deal with the devil for 150 more years on earth, which he spends turning up at disasters and scenes of suffering all over the world. Perry’s Melmoth is a woman who wanders on bleeding feet bearing witness to all of humanity’s violence and cruelty, and trying to lure people with guilty secrets into spending their lives wandering with her. Helen Franklin, a sad woman in her early 40s, is a translator living in Prague where she lives a self-denying life—eating meagre meals and sleeping on a bare mattress in the house of 91 year-old Albina Horakova, her only friends being Karel, a Czech whom she meets in the Library, and his partner Thea, an English woman. In the powerful chapter The Sin of Helen Franklin, she divulges the crime she committed when she was a 21 year-old in Manila—a crime which she has attempted to expiate in the past twenty years. Karel introduces her to the myth of Melmoth, giving her texts which speak of a tall, wraith-like figure with piercing eyes who appears at times of great sorrow beckoning ‘with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel’. The first document is that of Josef Hoffman who sees Melmoth when the Nazis first march into Prague and the Jews are sent to Theresienstadt, and again when he, as a German in post-war Prague, is himself marched off to the concentration camp. There is a letter from Sir David Ellerby to his wife in 1637 recounting his meeting with Alice Benet who has been a companion of Melmoth, and a searing document The Testimony of Nameless and Hassan which describes an Armenian slaughter. It is a heart-breaking novel full of moral complexity. Perry writes with great artistry, from Part 1 which begins with the word Look! and continues in lush, velvety prose describing Prague in winter, to the astonishing final page—also beginning with the word Look!—where Perry assumes the voice of Melmoth, begging the reader to accompany her on her wandering: ‘Oh my friend, my darling—won’t you take my hand? I’ve been so lonely!’ David Malouf in his latest poetry collection An Open Book reveals a poet at the peak of his craft. They are mainly short poems, many about the young boy who sits under the table listening to his elders’ conversations, the boy who, when his mother tells him she can read him like an open book, knows that ‘books like houses have their secrets’. In The Wolf at the Door he writes about the ‘Grimm decade’ of the Depression when the men went on the tramp while the women stayed Penelope-like at home ‘faithful to Patons and Baldwins, purl and plain’. At decade’s end the men had to tramp off to war leaving the women and children at home , ‘the wolf,/with flour-whitened paw, still lurking, ghostly/-insistent at the door’. On the Move, 1968 is an achingly beautiful poem about parting from a lover whom he still misses ‘And will/for the next how many breaths?’ The poems repay reading aloud. Try reading aloud Aubade.com to appreciate his mastery over word shifts. And don’t miss the poem on the inside front flap and the back cover. In Turmoil: Letters From the Brink Robyn Williams says ‘lots of what I cherish is under attack: science, public broadcasting, conservation, tolerance’. We are sleepwalking into disaster with poor political leadership in many countries, not excluding our own. He writes about his time performing in Monty Python and Dr Who and is blackly funny about his cancer treatment. He agrees with Julian Cribb in saying we need an Age of Women because it’s men who start wars, clear-fell forests, pollute the oceans, create deserts and slaughter wildlife. We need more ‘girlymen’ not Rambos. And so say all of us. Sonia
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Australian Studies
Rise of the Right: The war on Australia’s liberal values by Greg Barns ($25, PB)
To those who think of Australia as a highly successful democracy that has built a diverse society with respect for liberal values, a proposition that this is all at risk might seem alarmist. But the history of the past two decades in this country’s political and social narrative, and now the global trend towards isolation, protectionism and authoritarianism, as well as the ‘them and us’ fear-mongering happening around the world, ought to raise the question as to whether the foundations of Australian liberal democracy are so secure that we are immune to the threats without and within. Rise of the Right is a fascinating account from one of Australia’s leading political journalists.
For Country, for Nation: An Illustrated History of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Military Service (eds) Grant & Bell ($40, PB)
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples have a longstanding tradition of fighting for Country, and they continue to serve with great honour in the ADF. This book tells the story of their service in the defence of Australia, dating back to before Federation. It includes service in all conflicts & operations in which the nation’s military forces have been involved. Richly illustrated with over 230 images, the book uses artworks, photographs & objects from the Memorial’s collection, combined with the voices of Indigenous men & women, to reveal their experiences of war. In doing so it also considers why so many volunteered to serve when faced with entrenched discrimination in wider society.
The Squatters: The story of Australia’s pastoral pioneers by Barry Stone ($30, PB)
For the early settlers who came from Britain’s crowded cities & tiny villages, it must have been extraordinarily liberating to pack their belongings onto a bullock dray & head beyond the reach of meddlesome authorities to claim new land for themselves. Settlers spread out across inland Australia constructing windmills & fences, drystone walls & storehouses, livestock yards & droving routes, the traces of which can still be seen today. The fortunate & indomitable succeeded, while countless others succumbed to drought & flood. Those who were successful became a class all their own: the scrub aristocrats. Barry Stone has scoured through diaries, journals & newspapers to tell the stories of pioneers whose vision & hard work built pastoral empires —a rural juggernaut that would lay the foundations of a prosperous nation.
Our Mob Served: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories of War & Defending Australia (eds) Allison Cadzow, Mary Anne Jebb ($39.95, PB) This book presents the moving & little-known history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander war time & defence service, told through the vivid oral histories & treasured family images of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people. These lively & compelling stories of war, defence service & the impact on individuals, families & communities show how they have not forgotten their involvement in the national histories of war & service.
Contesting Australian History: Essays in Honour of Marilyn Lake (eds) Joy Damousi & Judith Smart
Marilyn Lake forged a career that spanned several decades across a number of universities. Her books have significantly advanced our understandings, not only of Australian social, cultural & political history but also of the interdependence of that history with those of Britain, the US & the Asia–Pacific. She has made significant contribution to several fields including the impact of war & the history of Anzac, the history of feminism & women’s history, gender, postcolonialism, race relations & racial identities, transnationalism & internationalism, human rights, biography, labour history, progressivist social reform & settler colonialism. This volume is a tribute to her work and a recognition of her enduring influence & leadership in the profession. ($35, PB)
Breaking Point: The Future of Australian Cities by Peter Seamer ($33, PB)
Between 2017 and 2046 Australia’s population is projected to increase by 11.8 million, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Canberra each year for thirty years. Most of this growth will occur in the major cities, and already its effects are being felt—inner-city property prices are skyrocketing and the more affordable middle and outer suburbs lack essential services and infrastructure. The resulting inequality means wealthy inner-city dwellers enjoy access to government-subsidised services—public transport, cultural and sporting facilities—while new home buyers, are pushed further out, and pay the lion’s share of the costs. So how can we create affordable housing for everyone and still get them to work in the morning? What does sustainable urban development look like? In this timely critique of our nation’s urban development and planning culture, Peter Seamer argues that vested interests often distort rational thinking on our cities. Looking to the future, he sets out cogent new strategies to resolve congestion, transport and expenditure problems, offering a blueprint for multi-centred Australian cities that are more localised, urban and equitable in nature.
AFA5: Are we Asian Yet? History Vs Geography (ed) Jonathan Pearlman ($25, PB)
This latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s struggle to define its place in Asia as it balances its historic ties to the West with its geography. Are We Asian Yet? explores Australia’s changing population, outlook & identity as it adjusts to the Asian Century. David Walker: Great Australian divide—The Western outpost faces the Asian century; Linda Jaivin—As China rises, can its culture conquer the world? The view from Asia—Can Australia be one of us? Migrant flows—The new Australians and the nation’s changing identity; Plus six feature reviews by journalists, and correspondence on AFA4—Defending Australia
The Landing in the Dawn : Dissecting a Legend the Landing at ANZAC, Gallipoli, 25 April 1915 by James Hurst ($75, HB)
James Hurst re-examines & reconstructs the Anzac Landing by applying a new approach—using the aggregate experience of a single, first-wave battalion over a single day, primarily through the investigation of veteran’s letters & diaries, to create a body of evidence with which to construct a history of the battle. This approach might be expected to shed light on these men’s experiences only, but their accounts divulge sufficient detail to allow an unprecedented reconstruction & re-examination of the battle. Hurst uses detail extracted from an unprecedented range of primary & secondary sources, to reconstruct the history of the day, elevating participants’ accounts from anecdote to eye-witness testimony—complements Charles Bean’s account by providing new evidence & digging deeper than Bean had the opportunity to do.
Paddington: A history (ed) Greg Young ($70, PB)
This first major history of Paddington in 40 years provides a fresh and revealing perspective on this celebrated heritage suburb in Sydney—one of the largest & most intact Victorian enclaves in the world. Leading historians & specialists explore the makeup of Paddington’s diverse community—including its Indigenous, colonial, post-war migrant, bohemian & LGBTQ residents, and a succession of gentrifiers—and discuss the evolution of the suburb’s unique architecture and landscape. This book is an initiative of The Paddington Society to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the formation of one of Australia’s first resident groups.
Politics
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine ($33, PB)
Beginning as a surveillance tool developed by ARPA for the Vietnam War, the internet has become essential to our lives. Despite repeated revelations of hacks, malware, government surveillance & corporate corruption, however, few of us stop to consider that the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon. Now, ever more famous Silicon Valley companies (which we are encouraged to view as neutral, even idealistic businesses) are entering into partnerships with the US government. Clearly demonstrating how the same military objectives and control systems that drove the development of early internet technology are still at the heart of Silicon Valley (including as features of many so called ‘safe’ platforms like Tor or Signal) today, this revelatory and sweeping story will change the way you think about the most powerful, ubiquitous tool ever created.
The New Faces of Fascism: Populism & the Far Right by Enzo Traverso ($33, PB)
Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution by Jill Abramson ($35, PB)
Braving the most volatile years in news history Jill Abramson goes behind the scenes at 4 media titans: Maverick upstarts— BuzzFeed, the brain-child of virtuoso clickbait scientist Jonah Perretti, and VICE, led by the booze-fuelled anarcho-hipster Shane Smith use viral technology & a disregard for the longestablished standards of news journalism to allow them to build game-changing billion-dollar businesses out of the millennial taste for puppies & nudity; And the venerable New York Times, owned & run for generations by the Sulzberger dynasty, and The Washington Post, also family run, but soon to be bought by the world’s richest merchant of all, Jeff Bezos. Abramson reveals first-hand the seismic clashes that take place in the boardrooms & newsrooms as they are forced to choose between their cherished principles—objectivity & impartiality—and survival in a world where online advertising via Facebook and Google seems the only life-raft.
Seeking Justice in Cambodia: Human Rights Defenders Speak Out (ed) Sue Coffey ($35, PB)
Sue Coffey decided to compile this book following the period she spent working in Cambodia as an Australian Government volunteer. She was shocked by much of what she saw at the time—lack of transparency in government dealings; rampant deforestation; people being thrown off their land to make way for hydro schemes; freedom of speech & action blatantly under threat. She felt that unless the stories of these remarkable people were recorded, they might be lost to posterity. But this is not just a Cambodian problem—the lessons here can apply to many other countries struggling to achieve human rights. Seeking Justice in Cambodia tells a powerful tale of the struggle to bring human rights to all Cambodians from the early 1990s to the present day.
When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice by Jason Brennan ($56, HB)
Albert O. Hirschman famously argued that citizens of democracies have only 3 possible responses to injustice or wrongdoing by their government: we may leave, complain, or comply. However, Jason Brennan argues that there is 4th option. When governments violate our rights, we may resist. We may even have a moral duty to do so. For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow the government & its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can’t fight back. But Brennan makes the case that we have no duty to allow the state or its agents to commit injustice. We have every right to react with acts of uncivil disobedience. We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force in self-defense or to defend others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials behave unjustly or abuse their power.
Climate Justice by Mary Robinson ($30, PB)
Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. Her global mission, from Malawi to Mongolia, led her to believe that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers & grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the UN, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience & ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change.
The word Fascism conjures a dark between World Wars landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. Paradoxically, the contemporary fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against ‘Jihadist fascism’. But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakthese contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso’s historical gaze helps ening in China by Leta Hong Fincher ($30, PB) to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chipost-fascism a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something nese government jailed 5 feminist activists for 37 days. But completely different to define a set of heterogeneous & transitional movements, suspended the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist between an accomplished past still haunting our memories & an unknown future. movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance Living in Troubled Times: A New Political Era artists & online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s urban, educated women. Through by Thierry de Montbrial ($45, PB) For many observers, today’s world seems indecipherable. The Earth interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese is in such jeopardy that some scientists speak of a new accelerated activists, Lita Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges geological era. At the same time as a regressive resurgence of bar- Chinese feminists face and their joy of betraying Big Brother, barism & terrorism in the name of religion, waves of technological as Wei Tingting one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her innovations—sources of economic, ecological & social transforma- detention. This is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure tions—surge. Never has the present been subjected to such a tectonic China and the world. shock between its future & its past, the consequences of which seem Now in B Format difficult to foresee. Between naïve belief in the unlimited benefits of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the technology & resignation to the cycle of calamities, there is room to build a global governance aiming at organising a geopolitical order to derive the best of Age of Trump by David Neiwert, $23 the human experience. Thierry de Montbrial offers a better understanding of our times. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear
War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg, $23
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History
Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter ($33, PB)
In an eloquent blend of history & memoir with a unique understanding of craft, Clare Hunter delivers a history of sewing & embroidery, told through the stories of the men and women, over centuries & across continents, who have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. From the political storytelling of the Bayeux tapestry’s anonymous embroiderers & Mary, Queen of Scots’ treasonous stitching, to the sewing of WW1 soldiers suffering from PTSD and the banner-makers at Greenham Common, Hunter’s tale stretches from medieval France to 1980s America, from a WW2 POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland.
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham ($35, PB)
Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the 30 years since, Chernobyl has become shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest & careless state endangers not only its own citizens, but all of humanity. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than 10 years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing & compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men & women who witnessed it firsthand.
Drawing the Curtain: Last Days in Old Europe by Richard Bassett ($50, HB)
With enormous charm, wit and insight, Richard Bassett recreates through his personal encounters the elegy, farce and tragedy of Central Europe in the last days of communism. Part memoir, part reflection, he begins in Trieste in 1979 where the embers of the Habsburg Empire still burnt brightly, then moves to the darker, claustrophobic world of Vienna in 1985, where the atmosphere of the Cold War seemed to infiltrate every brick of a city hovering between 2 worlds, and even the most seemingly harmless of culinary establishments masked the game of espionage between east & west. In the 3rd part, Bassett’s story shifts to Prague in 1989 during the dramatic, intoxicating days of the ‘velvet revolution’ & the long-awaited opening up of the east—all the time introducting an array of glittering character— penniless aristocrats, charming gangsters, even Amazonian blondes in the service of eastern European spy agencies; fractious diplomatists & disinherited royalty supply a colourful supporting cast.
Cities Of The Classical World by Colin McEvedy ($30, PB)
From Alexandria to York, this unique illustrated guide shows the great centres of classical civilization afresh. Colin McEvedy supplies 120 specially-drawn maps tracing each city’s thoroughfares & defences, monuments & places of worship. Every map is to the same scale, allowing you to appreciate visually the relative sizes of Babylon & Paris, London & Constantinople. McEvedy gives clear, incisive commentaries on each city’s development, strategic importance, rulers & ordinary inhabitants.
Alexander the Great: From His Death to the Present Day by John Boardman ($55, HB)
Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persian Empire in 331 BC captured the popular imagination, inspiring an endless series of stories & representations that emerged shortly after his death & continues today. An art historian & archaeologist, John Boardman draws on his deep knowledge of both Alexander & the ancient world to reflect on the most interesting & emblematic depictions of this towering historical figure—some related to historical events associated with Alexander’s military career & some to the fantasy that has been woven around him. From Alexander’s biographers in ancient Greece to the illustrated Alexander Romances of the Middle Ages to operas, films, and even modern cartoons, this generously illustrated volume takes readers on a fascinating cultural journey.
When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall ($35, PB)
On 8.11.1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This meeting has long been the symbol of Cortés’ bold & brilliant military genius, with Montezuma remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire & touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. Drawing on rare primary sources & overlooked accounts by conquistadors & Aztecs alike, Matthew Restall explores Cortés’ & Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements & failures, and the worlds in which they lived— leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story.
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Science & Nature
Capturing Nature: Early Scientific Photography at the Australian Museum 1857–1893 by Vanessa Finney ($33, PB)
In the mid-19th century, some of the earliest adopters of the revolutionary new art form of photography were scientists. Museums around the world were quick to see the huge potential for capturing fleeting moments of life, death & discovery. At the Australian Museum, curator Gerard Krefft & taxidermist Henry Barnes began to experiment with photography in the 1860s, preparing & staging their specimens—from whales & giant sunfish to lifelike lyre bird scenes & fossils—and capturing them in thousands of beautiful & arresting images. Capturing Nature reveals this fascinating visual archive for the first time, profiling the remarkable partnership of Krefft and Barnes, their innovative work & the Australian Museum’s urgent quest to become more scientific in its practices.
The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul Davies ($35, PB)
How does life create order from chaos? And just what is life, anyway? Leading physicist Paul Davies argues that to find the answers, we must first answer a deeper question—‘What is information?’ To understand the origins & nature of life, Davies proposes a radical vision of biology which sees the underpinnings of life as similar to circuits & electronics, arguing that life as we know it should really be considered a phenomenon of information storage. In an extraordinary deep dive into the real mechanics of what we take for granted, Davies reveals how biological processes, from photosynthesis to birds’ navigation abilities, rely on quantum mechanics, and explores whether quantum physics could prove to be the secret key of all life on Earth.
Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots by Kate Devlin ($30, PB)
From the ancient Greeks to 21st century movies, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes & our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real & fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Should we form intimate relationships with machines? Should robots be provided with a sexuality? How will it affect our everyday lives? Can we use them for therapy? Do they breach our laws on obscenity? Could they ever feel love? Computer scientist, Kate Devlin, explores how the emerging & future development of sexual companion robots might affect us, and the society in which we live. She explores the social changes arising from emerging technologies, and our relationships with the machines that may someday care for us and about us.
Transformations: Harriet and Helena Scott, colonial Sydney’s finest natural history painters by Vanessa Finney ($39.99, HB)
With their collecting boxes, notebooks & paintbrushes, sisters, Harriet and Helena Scott, entered the masculine worlds of science & art & became two of 19th century Australia’s most prominent natural history painters. Transformations tells the complete story of the Scott sisters—their early lives in colonial Sydney, their training as naturalists & artists on the isolated Ash Island in the Hunter River near Newcastle, and their professional triumphs. This is a rare pictorial record of two talented & determined women who transformed nature into art in their extraordinary paintings of Australian butterflies & moths.
Australian Birds of Prey in Flight: A Photographic Guide by Richard Seaton et al ($40, PB)
Birds of prey spend most of their time in flight and, when viewed from the ground, they are notoriously hard to identify. This photographic guide to the eagles, hawks, kites & falcons flying high above you provides individual species profiles describing distinguishing features—with text supported by detailed images showing the birds at six different angles & poses, using photographs from many of Australia’s leading bird photographers. Annotated multi-species comparison plates highlight key features that can help differentiate birds of prey in flight. A valuable reference & guide for identifying soaring birds in the field, or photographic images from your own camera.
The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins by David R. Begun ($42, PB)
Was Darwin wrong when he traced our origins to Africa? Leading paleoanthropologist David Begun makes the explosive claim that it was in Europe, not Africa, where apes evolved the most important hallmarks of our human lineage. Begun tells the story of how one of the earliest members of our evolutionary group evolved from lemurlike monkeys in the primeval forests of Africa, how they evolved over 10 million years, and then as the climate deteriorated in Europe, these apes either died out or migrated south, reinvading the African continent and giving rise to the lineages of African great apes, and, ultimately, humans.
Philosophy & Religion The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution ($25, PB) Known as the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the 21st century met only once. Everything that was said as they agreed & disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas & exchanged insights—about religion & atheism, science and sense—speaks with urgency to our present age. Questions they asked of each other included: ‘Is it ever possible to win a war of ideas? Is spirituality the preserve of the religious? Are there any truths you would rather not know? Would you want to see the end of faith?’ This dialogue transcribed and presented here with new introductions from the surviving three horsemen, and a sparkling introduction from Stephen Fry.
Ancient Philosophy: A Companion to the Core Readings by Andrew Stumpf ($39, PB)
This unique text is designed as a guide to the most important and influential works of ancient Greek philosophy. Andrew Stumpf begins with mythology & the pre-Socratics, then proceeds to examine a number of the most important works from Plato & Aristotle, including Euthyphro, Meno, Republic, the Categories, the Physics and the Nicomachean Ethics. Stumpf’s clear explanations & analyses provide an exceedingly helpful guide to student readers who might otherwise struggle with the primary texts. Maps, diagrams and images are provided to aid comprehension.
The Spirit of Zen by Sam Van Schaik ($33, PB)
Leading Buddhist scholar Sam van Schaik explores the history & essence of Zen, based on a new translation of one of the earliest surviving collections of teachings by Zen masters. These teachings, titled The Masters and Students of the Lanka, were discovered in a sealed 20th century. All more than a thousand years old, the manuscripts have sometimes been called the Buddhist Dead Sea Scrolls, and their translation has opened a new window onto the history of Buddhism. Both accessible and illuminating,Van Schaik’s book explores the continuities between the ways in which Zen was practiced in ancient times, and how it is practiced today in East Asian countries such as Japan, China, Korea & Vietnam, as well as in the emerging Western Zen tradition.
Before the Law: The Complete Text of Préjugés by Jacques Derrida ($34, PB)
‘How to judge—Jean-François Lyotard?’ It is from this initial question Jacques Derrida begins his essay on the origin of the law, of judgment, and the work of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard. If Jacques Derrida begins with the term préjugés, it is in part because of its impossibility to be rendered properly in other languages and also contain all its meanings: to pre-judge, to judge before judging, to hold prejudices, to know ‘how to judge’, and more still, to be already prejudged oneself. How does one come to judge the author of The Differend? How does one abstain from judgment to accept the term préjugés as suspending judgment and at once as taking into account the impossibility of speaking before the law, prior to naming or judging? If this task indeed seems insurmountable, it is the site where Lyotard’s work itself is played out. Hence this sincere & intriguing essay presented by Jacques Derrida, published here for the first time in English.
Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle by Paula Fredriksen
Often seen as the author of timeless Christian theology, Paul himself heatedly maintained that he lived & worked in history’s closing hours. His letters propel his readers into two ancient worlds, one Jewish, one pagan. The first was incandescent with apocalyptic hopes, expecting God through his messiah to fulfill his ancient promises of redemption to Israel. The second teemed with ancient actors, not only human but also divine: angry superhuman forces, jealous demons & hostile cosmic gods. Both worlds are Paul’s, and his convictions about the first shaped his actions in the second. Paula Fredriksen situates Paul within this charged social context of gods & humans, pagans & Jews, cities, synagogues & competing Christ-following assemblies to attempt an understanding of his mission & message. Her original & provocative book offers a dramatically new perspective on one of history’s seminal figures. ($36, PB)
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt ($48, PB)
A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency & political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological & humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction & a new foreword by Danielle Allen.
Now in paperback A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living by Luc Ferry, $23
Psychology The Strange Order Of Things by Antonio Damasio ($28, PB)
In The Strange Order of Things Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology & Philosophy, Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds & cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways & means of ancient unicellular life & other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate & transmit life—offering a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.
Now in B Format Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed & How to Find Hope by Johann Hari, $23 A Life Less Lonely by Nick Duerden ($30, PB)
Loneliness is an epidemic on the rise. It has long been documented that older people suffer from social isolation, but teenagers do too, likewise new parents, those with disability or illness, and anybody going through a significant life change. Using the research the Jo Cox Commission undertook following her murder in 2016, Nick Duerden offers a wealth of practical advice—how to spot the symptoms in yourself and in others; how to ease them; how to seek help and, ultimately, how to understand this most fundamental of human emotions—his aim being to provide us all with the tools we need to lead kinder, more connected lives.
The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some People Struggle and How All Can Thrive by Dr W. Thomas Boyce ($33, PB)
Why do some people succeed & others struggle? Why are some people’s lives filled with satisfaction & happiness & others with frustration & despair? Why do some people die young, while others live into healthy old age? Is it simply chance & luck, or are there early patterns of development revealing potentially determinative pathways into bounty or calamity? Dr W. Thomas Boyce presents findings that children have two very different responses to their environments. While some children are like dandelions & can thrive in almost any environment, there are others who, like orchids, are much more reactive & susceptible to their surroundings. Draws on extensive research, examples & real stories Boyce offers ways to address a child’s unique needs to help them find their fullest potential.
Reducing the Symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias by Jackie Pool ($33, PB)
This innovative new book sets out practical guidance for people with dementia, their families & carers on reducing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease & other dementias. Applying a ‘rementia’ based approach to dementia care, Jackie Pool shows how therapeutic cognitive rehabilitation techniques can be used to reduce symptoms of dementia & ultimately improve quality of life for people living with dementia. Covering topics such as nutrition, stress, communication, memory & sleep, it provides all the tools & information necessary to build a personalised & flexible self-care plan which will improve & sustain quality of life.
Happy Ever After: Escaping The Myth of The Perfect Life by Paul Dolan ($35, PB)
Get a good education, be successful, get married, have kids & look after your health. This is what we’re told will make us happy. But what if these stories are doing more harm than good? Paul Dolan draws on groundbreaking research & data to bust the common myths about happiness & show that the path to fulfilment is actually far more unexpected than we thought. With straight-talking wisdom, he invites us to reappraise our values, free our minds from the ‘narrative traps’ of conventional wisdom & write our own version of the good life, based on maximising positive, meaningful experiences that can generate new social benefits—not least greater tolerance for different ways of life.
Not Working by Josh Cohen ($33, HB)
Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity, and considers four faces of inertia—the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer & the slacker. Drawing on his personal experiences & on stories from his consulting room, while punctuating his discussions with portraits of figures associated with the different forms of inactivity—Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Emily Dickinson & David Foster Wallace— Cohen gets to the heart of the apathy so many of us feel when faced with the demands of contemporary life, and asks how we might live a different and more fulfilled existence.
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Summer Loves The two books that I read and loved over the holidays could not be more different. Carys Davies’ West is a slim novel, minute in observation and epic in its topic. In 1815, widower Cy Bellman sets out from his home in Pennsylvania to find mythically large beasts—after enormous animal bones are found in Kentucky. He is leaving his 10 year old daughter Bess behind in the care of his sceptical sister Julie, who is very clear that she finds his quest ridiculous. There are many characters in this book, but each one is memorable; Bess and her father, Julie, the lecherous town librarian, the very dubious farm hand, and most striking of all, Old Woman from a Distance, the Shawnee youth that Bellman employs as his bearer and companion. The author captures the breadth of the landscape in very few words, and the depth of the folly in even less. At times there is an incredible sense of menace, but not where you’d expect it. Cy Bellman’s journey is extremely uncomfortable but the author manages to transcend it, through language and narrative structure, she hasn’t written a punishing story, but a really curious one. Posy Simmonds’ latest graphic novel, Cassandra Darke, is also minutely observed, and a commentary of the times we live in. The eponymous Cassandra is a disgraced art dealer, who has just been uncovered as a fraudster. She is a curmudgeonly old baggage, and completely unperturbed by her fall from grace—although currently much inconvenienced, as she has lost her income. Through the agency of a former employee, who is also a relative of sorts, she finds herself embroiled in the mayhem of a serious crime, and proves herself to be more than a match for the criminals who foolishly try to inveigle her. The author has written quite a bit of text in this book, and her illustrations are superb, extremely accurate, but imaginative, while brilliantly evoking the time and place they are set in. While always keeping a sense of humour, Posy Simmonds often has surprisingly serious events take place in her books. Two previous books, Tamara Drewe and Gemma Bovery were respectively based on Return of the Native, and Madame Bovary; Cassandra Darke very loosely resembles A Christmas Carol, although it’s a lot more amusing. It’s rare to meet such an unapologetically cantankerous heroine as Cassandra Darke—in fact she would be a good ally of my other favourite cranky character, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Louise
The Library Book by Susan Orlean ($30, PB)
After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morning of 29 April 1986: who set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library, ultimately destroying more than 400,000 books, and perhaps even more perplexing, why? With her characteristic humour, insight & compassion, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens through which to tell the story of all libraries—their history, their meaning & their uncertain future as they adapt & redefine themselves in a digital world.
The Social Leap: How and Why Humans Connect by William von Hippel ($30, PB)
Human psychology is rife with contradictions—we work hard to achieve our goals, but when we succeed, our happiness is fleeting compared with our efforts. The most fundamental aspects of our psychology were permanently shaped by the ‘social leap’ our ancestors made from the rainforest to the savannah. In their struggle to survive on the open grasslands, our ancestors prioritised teamwork & sociality over physical prowess, creating an entirely new kind of intelligence that forever altered our place on this planet. Blending anthropology, biology, history & psychology with evolutionary science, William von Hippel traces our evolutionary history to show how events in our distant past continue to shape our lives today. From the everyday, such as why we exaggerate, to the exotic, such as why we believe our own lies, the implications are far-reaching & extraordinary—a fresh, provocative look at our species.
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Cultural Studies & Criticism The Revolution of Man by Phil Barker ($30, PB)
As a journalist, Phil Barker has spent years investigating the modern epidemics of suicide, domestic violence, pornography & misogyny, but also the essential bonds of male friendship, fatherhood & men’s relationships with women. During this time, he found himself seeing what it is to ‘be a man’ in a completely new light. Men are forced into a performance of masculinity that is suffocating, limiting and damaging. His book ‘skewers toxic masculinity & provides a manifesto for modern manhood’— showing how to rethink what it means to be a man and urging men to reconnect with their emotions so they, and the people they love, can start leading happier, healthier & more meaningful lives.
The Good University: What Universities Actually Do & Why it’s Time for Change by Raewynn Connell ($30, PB)
The higher education industry is booming, with over 100 million students worldwide and more funds flowing than ever before. University websites gleam with images of happy students and wise mentors, and their managers put out upbeat accounts of innovations. Yet universities have never been unhappier places to work. Highly paid, corporatestyle managers & cost-cutting governments have casualised the teaching workforce, out-sourced much of the professional & support work, and created widespread distrust. Student mobilizations have closed down universities from South Africa and India to Latin America. There’s an angry —sometimes anguished—debate inside universities. Critics speak of outdated pedagogy, exploitation of young staff, distorted & even faked research, outrageous fees, outrageous pay for top managers, corporate rip-offs, corruption, racism & mickey-mouse degrees.This book is not a research report, but rather, an argument for change and a search for a better logic and new paths of practice.
Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout by Ginger Gorman ($30, PB)
In 2013, journalist Ginger Gorman was trolled online. After the attack subsided, she found herself curious. Who were these trolls? And how does someone fight back? Over the next five years, she spoke to psychologists, trolling victims, law enforcement, academics and, most importantly, trolls themselves, embedding herself into their online communities & their psyches in ways she had never anticipated. She uncovered links between trolling, cyberhate & real-life crimes—mapping out a cohort of mostly angry, young, white men who rightly or wrongly feel marginalised & disenfranchised & use the internet to express this, and encountering the frequently extreme personal costs & the very real financial & economic costs of cyberhate.
Nobody’s Looking at You: Essays by Janet Malcolm
The title piece of Janet Malcolm’s wonderfully eclectic and previously uncompiled new collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, ‘Nobody’s looking at you’. Malcolm looks closely at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump’s TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuju Wang, to ‘the big-league game’ of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Turning to literature in ‘Dreams and Anna Karenina’, she focuses on Tolstoy as ‘one of literature’s greatest masters of manipulative techniques’. ($33, PB)
On Fairness by Sally McManus ($15, PB)
Most of us believe in fairness. Why then do we have creeping inequality in the land of the fair go? The answer lies in stagnant wage rises, gender pay inequity, insecure work & the lack of real opportunities for all while corporations are still consuming large profits & executives claim record bonuses. ACTU Secretary Sally McManus confronts these truths every day. In On Fairness, she explores the true cost of social injustice & argues for advancing Australia fair.
Life with a Capital L by D. H. Lawrence ($23, PB)
For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, ‘the one bright book of life’, yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. Edited by Geoff Dyer, this is a selection of his brilliantly varied essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence’s thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness & force.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee ($23, PB)
Novelist Alexander Chee explores the entangling of life, literature & politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading & writing fiction have changed him. In these interconnected essays he constructs a self, growing from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckoning with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover & a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and America’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing Tarotreading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations by Toni Morrison ($29.95, PB)
Spanning 4 decades, these essays, speeches & meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender & globalisation. The sweep of American history & the current state of politics. The duty of the press & the role of the artist. Morrison’s Nobel lecture on the power of language is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International & the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students & visitors to both the Louvre & America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved—reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers.
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal ($30, PB)
150 Americans are killed each day by the opioid epidemic, described by a former head of the Food and Drug Administration as ‘one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine’. Chris McGreal travels from West Virginia pill mills to the corridors of Washington DC as he unravels the story of Big Pharma’s hijacking of American healthcare & politics to push mass prescribing of ‘heroin in a pill’. He meets the police & FBI agents who struggled to get prosecutors to go after doctors they called ‘drug dealers in white coats’; the families devastated by painkillers they thought would heal, not kill; and the physicians & scientists who took on the drug companies behind the epidemic. The result is an immensely powerful account of the terrible human cost of the crisis, and a stark warning of the consequences of a healthcare system run as a business, not a service.
Accidental Feminists by Jane Caro ($33, PB)
Women over 55 are of the generation that changed everything. We didn’t expect to. Or intend to. We weren’t brought up much differently from the women who came before us, and we rarely identified as feminists, although almost all of us do now. Accidental Feminists is our story. It explores how the world we lived in—with the pill & a regular pay chequetransformed us & how, almost in spite of ourselves, we revolutionised the world. It is a celebration of grit, adaptability, energy & persistence. It is also a plea for future generations to keep agitating for a better, fairer world.
Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros by Michael Chabon ($28, PB)
This book is a compilation of Michael Chabon’s pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into Chabon’s literary origins & influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading. A series of love letters & thank-you notes, the collection is unified by the theme of the shared pleasure of discovery, whether it’s the boyhood revelation of the most important story in Chabon’s life (Ray Bradbury’s The Rocket Man); a celebration of ‘the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars’ (Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his character John Carter); Chabon’s own rude awakening from the muse as he writes his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; or a playful parody of lyrical interpretation in the liner notes for Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special—the true purpose of which, Chabon insists, is to ‘spread the gospel of sensible automotive safety & maintenance practices’.
Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by Denis Feeney ($40, PB)
Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Not so, Denis Feeney boldly argues. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. Feeney traces the emergence of Latin literature from 240 to 140 BCE, beginning with Roman stage productions of plays that represented the first translations of Greek literary texts into another language. From a modern perspective, translating foreign-language literature into the vernacular seems perfectly normal. But in an ancient Mediterranean world literary translation was unusual if not unprecedented. Feeney shows how it allowed Romans to systematically take over Greek forms of tragedy, comedy, and epic, making them their own and giving birth to what has become known as Latin literature.
Talk of Treasure by Jane Carswell ($30, PB)
Jane Carswell began her working life at Pegasus Press shortly after its audacious publication of Janet Frame’s novel Owls Do Cry, and years later she went on to write an award-winning memoir called Under the Huang Jiao Tree. The road between one book & the other was paved with both delight & self-doubt. Her new book is about the transformation between the books we read & treasure & the ones we write—inviting us into her world and its jostling demands of music teaching, writing, friends & family, a succession of Chinese guests, and travels to a world of meditation and monasteries.
2nd Hand Rows
Australian Painters of The Heidelberg School: The Jack Manton Collection by Patrick McCaughey and Jack Manton (Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1979) Hardback. First Edition. 160pp, colour illustrations. Owners signature on front paste down and inscription on the free front endpaper. Very Good condition in Very Good Dustjacket. $45 Welcome once again to our devoted band of readers. As I write, in high Summer, the mountain landscape of our Blackheath domicile resembles instead the opening stanza of Dorothea Mackellar’s poem, My Country – all ‘grey blue distance’ and ‘soft dim skies’. Time then, to call back the bright, dazzling, Australian Summer, and how better than to leaf through this handsome volume of art of Australian artists from the Heidelberg School—named after a town north east of Melbourne. It originally comprised a group of artists who—beginning in the 1880s—chose to paint in the open air, directly from nature and to capture what they saw as a truly Australian vision. The term later evolved to include painters who worked together in artist’s camps around both Sydney and Melbourne. These Australian Impressionists included Tom Roberts, Rupert Bunny, Charles Condor, Frederick McCubbin, Walter Withers and Arthur Streeton. In March 1889, in a letter replying to criticism of their work by the Melbourne art critic, James Smith, Roberts, Condor and Streeton set forth their artistic principles: ‘…that we will not be led by any forms of composition or light and shade; that any effect of nature which moves us strongly by its beauty, whether strong or vague in its drawing, defined or indefinite in its light, rare or ordinary in colour, is worthy of our best efforts and of the love of those who love our art.’ All are represented here in this collection of 70 paintings, along with an introduction and commentary on each work by Patrick McCaughey on the work and significance of the Heidelberg Painters. So, as the misty, rainy days continue on, if you wish to recapture a true Australia Summer, gaze upon McCubbin’s Sunset Glow (1891), Streeton’s Oncoming Storm (1895) or Withers’ Tranquil Pastures (1910).
Rule Britannia
Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic to the evacuation of Dunkirk & beyond, a national propensity to glorify disaster and valiant defeat seems to strike at the very heart of what it means to be British (something Australia inherited if the Gallipoli legend is anything to go by). In this book Stephanie Barczewski surveys the enduring but evolving myth of heroic failure in British culture over the last 2 centuries, arguing that it played an essential part in the nation’s coming to terms with its changing role on the international stage. Initially employed to helpfully gloss over the moral ambiguities of imperial expansion, and then providing a comforting myth of resilience in the face of adversity during WW2, Barczewski shows that the commemoration of heroic failure as the 20th C progressed came to serve as a metaphor, and sometimes as an explanation, for British decline. $20, HB Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal $25, HB Henry Morton Stanley, so the story goes, was a cruel imperialist—a bad man of Africa—who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo. He also conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, remembered in the words ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Compare & contrast with the Heroic Failure above (Stanley features) as Tim Jeal offers Stanley as neither all good nor all bad. Rejected by both parents at birth & consigned to a Welsh workhouse, Stanley emigrated to America, fought in the Civil War—on both sides—before becoming a journalist & then an explorer. With unprecedented access to a previously closed family archive, Jeal provides a re-examintation of post-colonial guilt, new insights into African history, and a fresh understanding of the nature of exploration. Crucible of War: The Seven Years; War & the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754–1766 by Fred Anderson $25, HB With the Seven Years’ War , Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean—and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role—permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Fred Anderson reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. The war taught George Washington on & other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers.
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Summer Reading
Welcome back devoted readers. Here are a few books that have found space on my ever-crowded reading table over the last several weeks. In the 1920s, medical researchers discovered that many former boxers often suffered long term neurological disorders affecting their memory and cognitive ability. Brain damage, as a consequence of one too many blows to the head during their career. This was given the term ‘punch-drunk syndrome’—more formally, Dementia Pugilistica. After nearly two years of reading about and observing the impact of the actions of the 45th President of the United States, I diagnose myself—and much of the World—as suffering from Dementia Trumpia. I managed about half of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House ($45, HB), before closing it in dismay. Woodward writes as smoothly as ever, but his calm chronicling of the sheer incompetence, amorality and (yes) criminality of this Presidency overwhelmed me. As an antidote, I turned to Michelle Obama’s Becoming (39.99, HB). This candid, and engaging memoir is twothirds warm detail of her life growing up in Chicago and one-third a clear eyed, broad brush survey of life as First Lady in the White House. Highly Recommended, though down a notch for the statement on Page 419: ‘I have no intention of running for office—ever.’ Down a further half notch for no index. Important historical anniversaries are sailing onto the horizon over the next couple of years. 2018 saw the 250th anniversary of the departure from England of Captain James Cook in HMS Endeavour—the beginning of his epic voyages. This year and 2020 see the anniversaries of first contact with New Zealand and Australia. I am sure they will also see a flotilla of new books examining the greatest sailor-explorer of any age—both his discoveries and their enduring cultural impact. In the meantime, Cook’s Journals ($25, PB) the vivid, first hand record of his discoveries is an essential starting point. Also recommended is Nicholas Thomas’ Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook ($25, PB). This finely written account covers all of the three voyages, ending in Cook’s death in Hawaii in 1779. No mere chronological travelogue—there are plenty of those—this is a freewheeling narrative which often sees the author step into the historical account himself and relate his own experience. Thomas highlights incidents that illuminate the two-way encounters of Pacific islander and the Europeans. As the apparently lone (almost?) Gleebooks staff member who does not read a lot of crime fiction/thrillers, it may stop the Gleaner presses to announce I thoroughly enjoyed Christine Mangan’s Tangerine ($23, PB). Set in 1950s Morocco, a timid English wife, Alice Shipley arrives in Tangier in tow with her unpleasant husband who has married her for her fortune. He disappears daily into the city, while Alice remains afraid to venture out much at all. Then Lucy Mason, her one-time best friend and college roommate shows up unexpectedly. Estranged for years over a mysterious college incident, Lucy’s sudden reappearance and her determination to introduce sheltered Alice to the delights of city are told in chapters that alternate between the two women’s points of view. The past and the present unfold. As does Lucy’s darkening obsession with Alice and her increasingly manipulative, suffocating friendship. This book reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s unique Ripley thrillers. I found myself thinking that the sweltering, claustrophobic atmosphere of the tale combined with the lush, vivid descriptions of Tangier itself would make an equally enjoyable film—and it turns out that Scarlett Johansson has already been cast in the role of Alice in a forthcoming production. ‘There is a mysterious force in the Cosmos where Time and Space converge. A place beyond Man’s vision but not his reach. The most mysterious and awesome point in the Universe. Swallowing everything in its path—radio waves, light even Stars and Planets.’ The above quote is actually taken from a trailer to the Disney film, The Black Hole (1979) which I recall watching on the big screen. It had a cast of reliable B-List stars: Maximilian Schell, Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux and Roddy McDowell, along with some very ambitious special effects. After nearly 90 minutes, the convoluted plot finally arrived at what this filmgoer had paid to see…
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travelling inside a Black Hole. The quote is also an accurate description of a Black Hole and as Chris Impey in Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes ($38.95, HB) informatively—and entertaining shows us—the head spinningly complex phenomenon of Black Holes are weirder than we can imagine. A Black Hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Einstein (of course) predicted their theoretical existence and dismissed it as a mathematical curiosity. Black Holes however seem very real and are now used as ‘a proving ground for the most cherished theories in physics’. Apparently at the centre of every galaxy there is an immense ‘supermassive’ Black Hole absorbing everything and containing billions of solar masses. By the way, at the end of the film, the spacecraft enters the Black Hole and finds it a hellish maelstrom populated by threatening, demonic, black robed figures. However, a floating, white, angelic figure guides the ship through a dazzling tunnel of light to safety. So, if our ultimate fate is to be consumed by a giant Black Hole, perhaps it won’t be so bad. Stephen Reid
Poetry
Magical Negro by Morgan Parker ($23, PB)
These poems are both elegy & jive, joke & declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. Morgan Parker connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma and objectification, while exploring tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans—focussing primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, Parker’s collection tackles interior & exterior politics—of both the body & society, of both the individual & the collective experience.
Sincerity by Carol Ann Duffy ($33, HB)
Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy returns with Sincerity, her last full collection as Poet Laureate, a magisterial achievement that is a frank, disarming and deeply moving exploration of loss and remembrance in their many forms.
The Nectar of Pain by Najwa Zebian ($28, PB)
In The Nectar of Pain, Canadian-Lebanese Najwa Zebian sheds light on the feelings and experiences that emerge from a painful heartbreak. She writes that the process of cleansing oneself of that pain—day by day, hour by hour, and second by second—is the real work of healing. With uncommon warmth and wisdom, Zebian empowers all who have lost to let go of anger and transform their suffering into the softness, sweetness, and beauty of nectar. She holds her readers by the hand as they heal.
The Many Uses of Mint : New and Selected Poems 1998-2018 by Ravi Shankar ($14.95, PB)
In The Many Uses of Mint Ravi Shankar resuscitates old poetic traditions while breathing new forms into life; he translates the ancients and collaborates with living artists and writers; and he peers through spirit at the secrets of the luminous universe. His work, over time, proves that by partaking of formalism, philosophical inquiry, musicality and play, language’s wet clay can be shaped into artifacts of exceeding beauty and lasting resonance. 2 Signed Copies.
Evolution by Eileen Myles ($30, HB)
This is the first all-new collection of poems by Eileen Myles since the selected volume I Must Be Living Twice—finds her crafting radically introspective work in the characteristically exuberant style that the New York Times called ‘one of the essential voices in American poetry.’ Following the critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), the poet continues their lifelong inquiry into the mystery and miracle of human life, in its mutability and temporality. ‘I suppose / I’m afraid / of forever,’ Myles writes in Angel, and this existential restlessness pervades the collection. With incisive humour and heartfelt honesty, these poems reconcile the body’s brevity in light of time’s limitlessness, exemplified in the title piece, Evolution.
Some Say: Poems by Maureen N. Mclane
Here are poems on sex and death; here are poems testing the ‘bankrupt idea / of nature’. From smartphones to dead gods to the beloved’s body, Some Say charts ‘the weather of an old day / suckerpunched’ into the now. Following on her bravura Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes, Maureen McLane bends lyric to the torque of our moment—and of any moment under the given sun. In this her fifth book of poems, McLane continues her ‘songs of a season’ even as she responds to new vibrations—political, geological, transpersonal, trans-specific. Moving through forests & cities, up mountains, across oceans, toward a common interior, she sounds out the ecological mesh of the animate & inanimate. From its troubled, exhilarated dawns to its scanned night sky, Some Say is both a furthering and a summation by a poet scouring and singing the world ‘full / as it always was / of wings / of meaning and nothing’. ($23, PB)
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Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal Jay Parini, HB
The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art Sebastian Smee, HB
Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss Wrote the Cat in the Hat Judy Sierra (ill) Kevin Hawkes, HB
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All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental DisordersBy (author) Horwitz & Wakefield, HB
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Karen Joy Fowler, PB
Swing Time Zadie Smith, HB
Railsea China Mieville, HB
Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders, HB
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives Tim Harford, HB
Afterglow (a Dog Memoir) Eileen Myles, HB
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Barbara Kingsolver , HB
Aikido: My Spiritual Journey Gozo Shioda, PB
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The Seventy Great Journeys in History Robin Hanbury-Tenison, HB
Bicycling Along The World’s Most Exceptional Routes Rob Penn, HB
The Conquest of Everest: Original Photographs from the Legendary First Ascent Lowe & Lewis-Jones, HB
The Scots: A Photohistory MacKinnon & Oram, PB
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26 Songs In 30 Days Greg Vandy, HB
Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop Marc Myers, PB
Bookshelf Alex Johnson, HB
21st Century Design: New Design Icons from Mass Market to Avant- Garde, HB
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The Arts Ben Sledsens ($90, HB)
The young Belgian artist Ben Sledsens’ (b. 1991) large canvases translate the classical genres of painting—the portrait, the still life, the interior, the landscape—into the visual language of his own rich universe. The influence of great masters such as Matisse, Rousseau and Bruegel is never far away in his small utopias. No rigid lines or preconceived diagrams, but a naturally flowing reflection of his thoughts at a given moment. The canvases, which are literally large enough to step inside, invite you to disappear into your thoughts, with the ending of one work sowing the seed for the next.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Imaginary Travels
Throughout Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s career, one unifying theme emerges—the search for what he saw as unadulterated and primal. This volume explores the far-reaching influence of non-western art on Kirchner’s oeuvre & the importance of his life in Davos, Switzerland, where he found a temporary peace despite the impending threat of censorship by the Nazis. This book contains reproductions of Kirchner’s paintings as well as his sculptures, woodcuts, sketches, drawings, textiles, carvings & furniture. Archival material in the form of letters & diary entries offer an unprecedented look into the artist’s creative process. ($105, HB)
Marcel Duchamp: 100 Questions. 100 Answers
As the inventor of the Readymade and a founder of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s work is still provoking important discussions about what defines art. Accompanying the first exhibition of the important Stuttgart Duchamp Collection, this book also presents the work of the Swiss artist and educator Serge Stauffer and his renowned research on Duchamp’s art and writings. The series of 100 questions Stauffer wrote to the French artist in 1960, and Duchamp’s answers, provide important insights into Duchamp’s intellectual and creative practice and bear witness to the depth of Stauffer’s exceptional research. ($105, HB)
Mr Brainwash: Franchise of the Mind ($99, HB)
French-born filmmaker Thierry Guetta took on the moniker of Mr Brainwash after expatriating to Los Angeles. Armed with wheat paste, spray cans, brushes & paint buckets, Mr Brainwash set aside the video camera & attacked the streets in 2006 with stencils & posters of beloved icons & quickly became a renowned figure in the burgeoning street art scene alongside Banksy, Space Invader & other urban art brinkmen. Playful & colourful with a hint of mischief, each work is a journey through his pop culture wonderland. He has created cover artwork, album campaigns, music videos & installations for a variety of the most iconic figures & brands including Madonna, Michael Jackson, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Mercedes & many others. This volume contains critical essays by art historians Eleanor Heartney & Donald Kuspit.
The Novembergruppe, 1918–1935: From Hoech to Taut, From Klee to Dix ($105, HB)
In the wake of WWI & the German Revolution of November 1918, a group of German artists, architects, composers & writers banded together to work toward a democratic society that would reflect the values of the Weimar constitution. Members included Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Hoech & Piet Mondrian—open to all styles, from Cubism, Futurism & Expressionism to Dada, Abstraction & New Objectivity. Until their dissolution in 1935, when they were banned by the Nazi regime, they exhibited nearly 3,000 works throughout the country. This book focuses on 3 distinct periods over the course of the group’s history. Each section features essays & a series of elegantly reproduced illustrations.
The Ceramics Studio Guide: What Potters Should Know by Jeff Zamek ($47, PB)
Learning from others’ mistakes is always more efficient & less costly than committing them yourself. This book is packed with practical information that will enable potters to successfully complete the many steps in pottery production. Making functional pottery or ceramic sculpture entails many different skill sets & processes in forming clay, drying clay, glazing & firing. Any one of these steps can cause failures. As ceramics consultant Jeff Zamek points out, under ideal conditions a beginning or advanced student would be guided by a teacher at every step; mistakes & bad habits would be caught as they occurred & corrected. While such learning situations are rare today, this book fills the gap. As Zamek says,’This book offers you forty years of wisdom, generated by my students’ and my client ceramics companies’ issues with clays, glazes & kiln firing.’ With its solutions to common problems, this guide helps potters to succeed.
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Knitter’s Dictionary: Knitting Know-How from A to Z by Kate Atherley ($35, HB)
The Knitter’s Dictionary is your comprehensive resource to understanding the language of knitting in a quick-reference guide that no knitting bag should be without. Over 150 illustrations show you everything from the difference between a toque & a beret to how-to information on increase & decrease stitches. Handy cross references lead you quickly to the information you need—whether you’ve come across a new abbreviation in a knitting pattern or you’ve forgotten the steps to a long-tail cast on. Plus, the extended information on more challenging topics like taking measurements, understanding gauge, and fibre care instructions make this more than a dictionary.
Making Moving Toys & Automata by Robert Race
This beautiful book draws on Robert Race’s extensive collection of traditional moving toys, looking at the ways the makers have achieved remarkable & varied results, often with very limited resources. Each chapter begins by looking at the mechanisms & materials used in some of these traditional moving toys, goes on to consider possible variations & describes how to make a related moving toy. Race shows that designing & making these simple but wonderfully satisfying mechanical devices is fun, and that good results can be achieved in many different ways, using a variety of materials, tools & equipment such as wood & wire, card & paper, bamboo, string, tin plate & feathers. ($27, PB)
Textiles of Japan: The Thomas Murray Collection
From rugged Japanese firemen’s ceremonial robes & austere rural work-wear to colourful, delicately-patterned cotton kimonos, this lavishly illustrated volume explores Japan’s rich tradition of textiles. The Thomas Murray collection featured in this book includes daily dress, work-wear, and festival garb and follows the Arts and Crafts philosophy of the Mingei Movement. It presents subtly patterned cotton fabrics, often indigo dyed from the main islands of Honshu & Kyushu, along with garments of the more remote islands: the graphic bark cloth, nettle fibre & fish skin robes of the aboriginal Ainu in Hokkaido & Sakhalin to the north, and the brilliantly coloured cotton kimonos of Okinawa to the far south. Photographed in exquisite detail, these fabrics offer insight into Japan’s complex textile history. ($145, HB)
Le Corbusier: Drawing as Process ($80, HB)
Architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965), began his career as a painter. He studied under Charles L’Eplattenier and, together with the artist Amedee Ozenfant, founded the Purist movement in the manifesto After Cubism. Even after Le Corbusier turned to architecture, he continued to paint and draw. The more than 300 drawings in this volume have never before been published for an English readership—they chart the evolution of Le Corbusier’s process from his youthful travels abroad to his arrival & maturation in Paris. Daniele Pauly shows how his drawings functioned within an intimate zone of private reflection, and provides a crucial new background against which to comprehend Le Corbusier’s architecture & urbanism.
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz ($75, HB)
Anselm Kiefer is a profoundly literary painter. In these 10 conversations with the writer & theologian Klaus Dermutz he returns to the essential elements of his art, his aesthetics & his creative processes. Kiefer describes how the central materials of his art— lead, sand, water, fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor & ink-influence the act of creation. But no less decisive are his intellectual & artistic touchstones: the 16th century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and the innovative theatre director & artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer & Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as Kiefer’s own status as a controversial figure.—his relentless examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering, communal memory, & the seductions of destruction which have earned him equal amounts of criticism & praise.
Rosetsu: Ferocious Brush ($105, HB)
Born into the family of a low-ranking samurai, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–1799) is renowned today as one of the most imaginative artists of early modern Japan. His visually stunning and highly idiosyncratic paintings earned him a place in Japan’s ‘Lineage of Eccentrics’. This book surveys Rosetsu’s art with sixty of his most important paintings, beginning with his earliest works in the realist mode of his teacher Maruyama O-kyo, and ending with his haunting, visionary, and occasionally bizarre final masterpieces. Screen paintings, scrolls, and albums depicting Zen eccentrics, raucous children, ethereal beauties, otherworldly landscapes, and vivacious animals and birds take viewers on a journey through Rosetsu’s own travels and into his unbridled imagination.
what we're reading
Jack: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday ‘Love is volatile. Recalcitrant. Irrepressible. We do our best to tame it, to name it and plan for it and maybe even to contain it between the hours of six and twelve, or if you’re Parisian five and seven, but like much of what is adorable and irresistible in this world it eventually tears free of you and, yes, sometimes you get scratched up in the process.’ For lovers of Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney and Jennifer Egan....between the hours of eight and one.
Jonathon: Golden State by Ben H. Winters—In a future California, telling a lie is a crime and honesty holds society together. Or does it? And what about metaphor? Winters’ detective Laszlo Ratesic moves through a procedural frame to eke out the edge where the story that a society tells itself begins to fray, burn, or simply adjust with the needs of the powerful. A political meditation ripe for our post-factual times. Janice: The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott—A young Irish immigrant finds it impossible to carry on and turns on the gas. The fire that ensues sees Sister St. Saviour, an old nun, appear in the damaged apartment and take over the lives of the widow and her unborn child. Thus, Sally becomes the convent child, growing up in the basement, playing while Sister St. Saviour does the ironing. Sally becomes involved with the work of the nuns, visiting the poor and feeding hungry. She goes to school and is influenced by her teachers to join them. Whether this will happen or whether an action of Sally’s makes this unlikely, we shall see. I like Alice McDermott’s Irish catholic family novels. She is a wonderful writer, her description of the New York slums is vivid and disturbing. I found the nuns, Sally and her mother, very believable, each trying to do the best they can under very difficult circumstances.
Performing Arts
Daddy Who? The Rise and Demise of Australia’s Greatest Rock Band by Craig Horne ($39.95, PB)
Author and musician Craig Horne was with Daddy Cool every inch of the way. With an insider’s view, he tracks the journey from when they burst onto the scene in October 1970, with their infectious doowop mayhem, and follows their rapid rise to the top—when they were on the front cover of every newspaper & rock magazine in the country, and when radio played hits like Eagle Rock, Come Back Again and Hi Honey Ho! virtually nonstop. Horne reveals the madness of Daddy Cool’s three US tours, from their showcase performance at LA’s Whisky A Go Go, to New York’s famed Madison Square Garden, and supporting the likes of Alvin Bishop, Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, Little Feat and Captain Beefheart.
Present Tense: A Radiohead Compendium (ed) Barney Hoskyns ($33, PB)
Fearless in their desire to change and shape-shift, the Oxfordshire quintet, Radiohead, has—through the nine studio albums from 1993’s Pablo Honey to 2016’s A Moon-shaped Pool—consistently stretched the boundaries of what ‘rock’ means and does. This book collects the best writing on this most literate of pop groups, from the earliest local reports about On A Friday—Radiohead’s first moniker—through the inspired commentary of Mark Greif & Simon Reynolds to the trenchant profiles of Will Self, John Harris & others. It’s an anthology that goes a long way towards explaining what editor Barney Hoskyns describes as the band’s ‘seriousness, emotional grandeur & willingness to stare humanity’s dystopian hi-tech future in the face’.
The Actor’s Survival Guide: How to Make Your Way in Hollywood by Jon S. Robbins ($44, PB)
This handbook is an essential guide to the business of living & working as an actor in the Los Angeles area. Exploring the experience of relocating to LA the book offers a business-centred road map through the industry. This 2nd edition features a number of new sections & topics including: Recent census data for the Los Angeles County Neighborhood Statistics; Updates on casting diversity with the most recent SAG/ AFTRA data; Changes in contracts for film, television & stage, including information on AEA’s new Hollywood Equity Waiver policy; Details on new contracts for film, television & new media; ongoing contract negotiations for video game content; Audition workshops; Emerging role of social media in an actor’s marketing strategy; an expanded glossary to include new media & performance capture vocabulary
Orson Welles Portfolio (ed) Simon Braund ($70, HB)
This is a lavish hardback containing Orson Welles’ Portfolio— much of which has never been seen before. Orson Welles, famous as an accomplished actor, writer, producer and visionary director, had originally aspired to become a musician or artist. Having studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for one summer, he continued to draw and paint throughout his life. The majority of his artwork, including costume and set designs and caricatures, has been unavailable to the public. Until now.
Judy: Mythos by Stephen Fry—What a pleasure to be told these tales by the amusing and erudite Stephen Fry! It’s all here, from Chaos to Prometheus, with many informative and hilarious footnotes. Zeus’ radiance as a young man almost painful to look upon is footnoted thus: ‘As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort’. The pleasure of the narrator infuses the whole enterprise of Mythos. John: Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring skirts the border between literature and thriller. As the title suggests it is set during the historic events, 50 years ago, when the communist government of Czechoslovakia relaxed the restrictions on individual freedoms only to be crushed by the Soviets. The events are seen through the eyes of a young English couple, students from Oxford University, and a British diplomat and his Czech girlfriend. It tells their stories and their stories become intertwined with historical events. Wonderfully told and very deftly resolved. Highly recommended. Andrew: The Wall by John Lanchester—The Wall is quite a departure from Capital, Lanchester’s previous novel—which was a kind of contemporary Dickensian beast, based around a rapidly gentrifying south London street. It was fat and meticulously observed and very very current. The Wall couldn’t be more different. It is a lean and spare 200 odd page novel that I flew through. Set in a dystopian Britain in the very near future (a bit like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go). Britain has built an almost impenetrable wall around its entire coast, manned by a national guard, made up of young men and women on compulsory two-year stints. I will admit I was a bit impatient with this book for the first couple of dozen pages; I don’t love speculative fiction, and I found the climate change and refugee themes initially so obvious and blatantly telegraphed that I was about to give it up—but I’m really glad I didn’t. The plot kicks in with a series of enthralling voltas, and the tedium of life on the wall is replaced with incipient terrors every which way. It becomes a corker of an adventure horror novel that ultimately crams a lot into its relatively few pages; and manages, too, a real melancholy profundity. It is a real page-turner and where Capital tended to get bogged down with verbosity I think this sparer form suits Lanchester really well.
Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime LA (19251945) by H. Colin Slim ($81, HB)
H. Colin Slim explores the ‘pre-Craft’ period of Igor Stravinsky’s life, from when he first landed on American shores in 1925 to the end of WWII in 1945. Through a rich archival trove of ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and other documents, Slim examines the 20 year period that began with Stravinsky as a radical European art-music composer & ended with him as a popular figure in American culture. This collection traces Stravinsky’s rise to fame—catapulted in large part by his collaborations with Hollywood & Disney & marked by his extra-marital affairs, his grappling with feelings of anti-Semitism, and his encounters with contemporary musicians as the music industry was emerging & taking shape in midcentury America. Slim’s lively narrative records the composer’s larger-than-life persona through a close look at his transatlantic tours & domestic excursions, where his personal & professional life collided in often-dramatic ways.
How to Be Invisible: Selected Lyrics by Kate Bush
‘For millions around the world Kate is way more than another singer-songwriter: she is a creator of musical companions that travel with you through life. One paradox about her is that while her lyrics are avowedly idiosyncratic, those same lyrics evoke emotions and sensations that feel universal’. Selected and arranged by the author, with an expansive introduction by the novelist David Mitchell, this book presents the lyrics of Kate Bush for the first time. ($30, HB)
Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery by Robin Wallace ($45, HB)
That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven’s response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven’s music. Perhaps no one is better positioned to help us do so than Robin Wallace, who not only has dedicated his life to the music of Beethoven but also has close personal experience with deafness. One day, at the age of 44, Wallace’s late wife, Barbara, found she couldn’t hear out of her right ear—the result of radiation administered to treat a brain tumour early in life. 3 years later, she lost hearing in her left ear as well. Despite receiving a cochlear implant, Barbara never overcome her deafness or ever function again like a hearing person. Wallace tells the story of Beethoven’s creative life from the inside out, interweaving it with his and Barbara’s experience to reveal how Beethoven adapted to his hearing loss and changed the way he interacted with music—creating music becoming a visual and physical process, emanating from visual cues and from instruments that moved & vibrated. Wallace’s resulting insights make Beethoven and his music more accessible, and help us see how a disability can enhance human wholeness and flourishing.
New in Columbia University’s Constellations series ($28 each) Dune by Christian McCrea Mad Max by Martyn Conterio
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TOP 30—2018
1. Any Ordinary Day 2. 12 Rules for Life
Leigh Sales Jordan B Peterson
3. The Shepherd’s Hut
Tim Winton
4. Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
5. Dark Emu
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6. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
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7. Simple
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8. Welcome to Country
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12. The Barefoot Investor
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13. Warlight
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14. The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
15. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life 16. No Friend But the Mountains 17. Less: A Novel 18. Milkman 19. Normal People
Eric Idle
Behrouz Boochani Andrew Sean Greer Anna Burns
Sally Rooney
20. Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
21. The Land Before Avocado
Richard Glover
22. Educated
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24. Nine Perfect Strangers
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26. Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia 27. The Lost Man 28. Rather His Own Man 29. The Life to Come
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(ed) Heiss Jane Harper
Geoffrey Robertson Michelle de Kretser Billy Griffiths
and another thing..... Welcome to another reading year. I continue in my hope that 2019 will be the year that the final volume in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series will appear—although after watching Saoirse Ronan as Mary Queen of Scots slow walk through a forest of men to her appointment with the executioner, I’m not sure why I’m so eager to see that grim chapter in Cromwell’s life. Of course, if the previous volumes are anything to go by it will be both excruciatingly unreadable and poetically rereadable at the same time. Apparently Mantel denies she’s taken her time with The Mirror and the Light because of a reluctance to kill off her marvellous creation, and at the Man Booker Festival 50, she affirmed that the novel would be published in 2019—so far I can’t find a definite release date on any of our data bases, so fingers crossed. Meanwhile new collections from the marvellous Janet Malcolm and Toni Morrison (pages 18 & 19) will help in filling the void. Recently, while doing a postXmas tidy of the shop I came across a novel by playwright, poet, film-maker, novelist, Gary Indiana called Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (another reason I advocate the physical bookstore browse—you always come across something no end of ‘customers who read this...’ recommends would have led you to). Party boy Cunanan became a media sensation after a killing spree that culminated in the shooting of Gianni Versace, and Three Month Fever is an interesting mix of true crime, fiction and cultural criticism as Indiana traverses the ‘empty landscape of American culture’ using language that often demands a halt to reread. This book is the 2nd part in a trilogy that Semiotext(e) is republishing. I now have the first, Resentment (which has the Menendez brothers’ trial as background) on order, and am looking forward to the reissue of the 3rd, Depraved Indifference which is inspired by grifter mother-and-son team Sante and Kenneth Kimes. Always an infinite number of trails on the next shelf along. Viki
For more February new releases go to:
Main shop—49 Glebe Pt Rd; Ph: (02) 9660 2333, Fax: (02) 9660 3597. Open 7 days, 9am to 9m Thur–Sat; 9am to 7pm Sun–Wed Sydney Theatre Shop—22 Hickson Rd Walsh Bay; Open two hours before and until after every performance Blackheath—Shop 1 Collier’s Arcade, Govetts Leap Rd; Ph: (02) 4787 6340. Open 7 days, 9am to 6pm Blackheath Oldbooks—Collier’s Arcade, Govetts Leap Rd: Open 7 days 10am to 5pm Dulwich Hill—536 Marrickville Rd Dulwich Hill; Ph: (02) 9560 0660. Open 7 days, Tue–Sat 9am to 7pm; Sun–Mon 9 to 5 www.gleebooks.com.au. Email: books@gleebooks.com.au; oldbooks@gleebooks.com.au
