NEW RELEASES (14.6.24)
Choose yourself a new book from these titles that have just arrived at VOLUME. Click through to our website to get your copies:
Performance by David Coventry $38
“David Coventry's new novel is informed and formed — and de-formed — by his experience suffering from ME, and is compelling, thoughtful, memorable, and disconcerting. A unique contribution to the literature of illness.” —Thomas
Performance is a self-portrait like no other. David Coventry takes us into his experience of ME, a debilitating systemic disease which took hold in March 2013 but has roots in his childhood. For Coventry, ME radically overturns the rules of time, thought and embodiment – an experience which has shaped the writing of this book. Through an illuminating blend of life transcription and deep imaginative projection, he shows how placing fiction into the stories of our damaged lives can remind us of who we are and who we might have been, even when so much of us has been taken away by illness. From a mountaineering disaster in Kaikōura to a literary encounter in Austria, a country mansion to a volcanic archipelago, this novel is a strikingly vivid, at times disorienting series of journeys, stopovers and emergencies that take in the world, one in which Coventry is often an outsider, even when at home in Wellington. With purposeful unreliability and flashes of humour amid pain and searching, Performance takes us into a space where ‘reading’ itself fails as a description of how we meet the text.
”Like all great art, Performance defies paraphrase. This novel is a staggeringly ambitious work that few writers or scholars could conceive and probably only one could enact. It locates David Coventry in a genealogy of modern and postmodern writers including Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard, whose illness intelligence is part of what makes their work innovative, important, and unforgettable.” —Martha Stoddard Holmes
”A masterpiece of narrative disintegration with a deep psychic grip on the reader – a book whose design not infrequently had me exhaling in both profound affect and aesthetic astonishment. A monumental achievement.” —Tracey Slaughter
Still Is by Vincent O’Sullivan $30
The thrushes are back. The blackbirds too are back, already worrying the thrushes, filching their choice worms. The gorse is running the hills along the Aramoana Road, spills the slopes yellow; the broom, so much more politely, you call it gold. Look again, the gorse walks prickling against the skyline. This is September.
Still Is gathers ninety new poems by Vincent O’Sullivan, who died recently. These are poems that call and respond, poems that elaborate and pare down, and poems in which an ending is a beginning.
Always Song in the Water: An ode to Moana Oceania by Gregory O’Brien $45
An expanded edition of O’Brien’s superb 2019 rumination on experiences of art, cuture, and environment, considering the ocean that reaches around Aotearoa and stretches to the Kermadecs and beyond as the medium that bears our thoughts in suspension and washes them on both familiar and unfamiliar shores. The entire book celebrates — in images, words and sound — our connectedness with the wider Pacific region, its peoples, flora, fauna and the expansive waters which both inspire and define us. The expanded edition returns to the themes, ongoing concerns and unresolved issues of the earlier project. In essence, the 2011 Kermadec voyage never ended. O'Brien considers that he and the other artists who voyaged to Rangitahua Raoul Island on HMNZS Otago in 2011 never really disembarked from the ship that took them north. He thinks of thems as still out there, on the ocean, absorbing its energy, listening to its oceanic songs and confronting the environmental issues which have only increased in urgency over the ensuing decade. The new edition includes a section of 40 extra pages of images and thoughtful text.
Old Black Cloud: A cultural history of mental depression in Aotearoa New Zealand by Jacqueline Leckie $50
Mental depression is a serious issue in contemporary New Zealand, and it has anincreasingly high profile. But during our history, depression has often been hidden under a long black cloud of denial that we have not always lived up to the Kiwiideal of being pragmatic and have not always coped. Using historic patient records as a starting place, and informed by her own experience of depression, academic Jacqueline Leckie's timely social historyof depression in Aotearoa analyses its medical, cultural and social contexts through an historical lens. From detailing its links to melancholia and explaining its expression within Indigenous and migrant communities, this engrossing book interrogates how depression was medicalised and has been treated, and how New Zealanders have lived with it.
Without Model: Parva aesthetica by Theodor W. Adorno (translated by Wieland Hoban) $47
In Without Model, Theodor Adorno strikingly demonstrates the intellectual range for which he is known. Taking the premise of the title as his guiding principle, that artistic and philosophical thought must eschew preconceptions and instead adapt itself to its time, circumstances, and object, Adorno presents a series of essays reflecting on culture at different levels, from the details of individual products to the social conditions of their production. He shows his more nostalgic side in the childhood reminiscences of 'Amorbach', but also his acute sociocultural analysis on the central topic of the culture industry. He criticises attempts to maintain tradition in music and visual art, arguing against a restorative approach by stressing the modernity and individuality of historical works in the context of their time. In all of these essays, available for the first time in English, Adorno displays the remarkable thinking of one both steeped in tradition and dedicated to seeing beyond it.
The Social Space of the Essay, 2003—2023 by Ian Wedde $50
“From the outset, the social space of the essay is involved with the text' s readers to the degree that conversation is implied - more or less intimate, even argumentative. The essay will often have originated in conversation, or the conversations of groups gathered around an event. Its long form may both contain and measure the extended time of face-to-face conversation or imply that extent; in this it will differ from social media, email and instant messages. These forms are often both dynamic and distanced, with the immediate energy of in-the-moment exchanges. The essays collected here, though, hope for the pleasure of extended conversation, both in their content and in the critical participation of their readers.” Wedde’s third collection of essays ranges widely through Aotearoa, the Pacific ocean, and the libraries and museums of the world. Artists considered in depth and often from multiple perspectives include Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Judy Millar, Peter Black, Anne Noble, Yuk King Tan, Elizabeth Thomson and Gordon Walters, while writers including Allen Curnow and Russell Haley are remembered.
Interesting Times: Some New Zealanders in Republican China by Chris Elder $40
The era of Republican China began with the fall of the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty in 1912, and came to an end in 1949, when Mao Tse-tung declared the People's Republic of China. The 37 years in between were marked by power struggles between competing warlords, anti-foreign riots, floods and widespread famine, an eight-year conflict with Japan, and the depredations of an ongoing civil war. For the Chinese people, and for foreigners living in China, these were indeed interesting times. Some New Zealanders were drawn to China by missionary zeal or humanitarian concern, others by commercial opportunities, still others by political curiosity or simply by their appetite for risk. In this book, famous figures like Rewi Alley, James Bertram and Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde) rub shoulders with long-term China hands like the YWCA secretary Agnes Moncrieff and the missionary Alice Cook. Interesting.
Eat Pacific: The Paific Island food revolution cookbook by Robert Oliver $60
Eat Pacific includes 139 zesty recipes from Fiji, Sāmoa, the Kingdom of Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tahiti, New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea, taken from the popular TV series Pacific Island Food Revolution, now in its third season. There’s more than healthy, tasty, affordable food, however. This book has a powerful health and food-sovereignty message: local food cultures hold the key to better diets, economic sustainability and combatting diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul $60
Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I'm alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, "Time is a strange substance" and who knows really, with our time-bound com- prehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.
Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876-1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists' work), and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory — the artist at present — and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.
Human? The lie that’s been killing us since 1788 by Ziggy Ramo $39
So-called Australia is built upon a lie — that 97% of the population are human, and the others simply 'Indigenous', devoid of the same basic rights. Human? is the story of Ziggy Ramo's experience growing up under the weight of this lie. “We've had 235 years of continued destruction in the name of 'civilised progress', under an oppressive colonial system that punches down on almost everyone. We all deserve more. But to move forward we have to be honest about the past.” Written on the precipice of becoming a parent, Human? is Ziggy Ramo's offering for the future an attempt to bridge a nation-wide knowledge gap, and start a new conversation. Ramo asks — Would you still fight for human rights if it meant giving up your privilege?
Tarot by Jake Arthur $25
Jake Arthur's beguiling second poetry collection opens with a tarot reader coaxing us into a reading over a cup of tea. And in a rush of vivid scenes and impressions, we begin to imagine episodes from different lives — a woman tries to train a robin; parents anxiously attend a teacher-parent interview; a man is cast overboard and wonders if he will ever be found. Each card prompts a new character to mull over their uncertainties, hopes, obstacles and joys.Loosely inspired by the illustrations of the famous 1909 Rider-Waite tarot deck, with its riotous depictions of magicians, occultists, lovers, fools and angels, these poems have us grappling our way towards a clear path.
”An enchanted and enchanting clamour. Intimate, wise, utterly glorious. —Catherine Chidgey
The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright $26
Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent. New format.
The Pinchers and the Diamond Heist by Anders Sparring & Per Gustavsson $20
Theo is good at most things. He can almost count to a thousand, knows several French words and can operate the washing machine. But he can't lie or steal. “You must try harder,” says his mother sternly. The Pincher family love to steal things. It’s what they are born for! When his parents leave to visit the diamond exhibition, Theo's heart sinks. After breaking Grandma out of prison (his little sister needs someone to read her bedtime story), Theo sees no alternative but to stop his parents stealing the diamond. His shout of “Stop! Police!” brings them only delight—Theo's lie has shown he is a true Pincher. A mix of adventure, silliness and everyday family life.