The Lifers
Michael Steven
From Sean Macgregor’s lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven’s second collection presents his clear, clean vision of ‘the lifers’ who inhabit these islands and beyond.
Steven’s writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.
This is your real name
Elizabeth Morton
In lieu of flowers, bring weeds. Elizabeth Morton’s poems look unflinchingly at a raw and unstable world – the crash, the aftermath, the comeback, ‘the black heat at the centre of things’. The poems in Morton’s second collection are charged with a visceral energy. This is poetry as incantation: an intense, larger-than-life, tactile experience.
The General and the Nightingale
Dan Davin’s War Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
Dan Davin was the author of the only substantial body of war fiction written by a New Zealand soldier during any of the wars of the 20th century in which the nation was engaged. The General and the Nightingale brings together Davin’s 20 war stories, some drawn from his war diaries and loosely based on his experiences as ‘a wartime scholar-soldier’ and those of his fellow soldiers in the British and New Zealand armies.
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The Gorse Blooms Pale
Dan Davin’s Southland Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
Dan Davin, one of New Zealand’s acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1913. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family in Southland.
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Politics in the Playground
The world of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand
Helen May
Freshly updated in 2019, the third edition of Politics in the Playground: The world of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand is a lively history of early childhood education and care in Aotearoa New Zealand in the postwar era. The book follows on from Discovery of Early Childhood (1997, 2013), which traced the origins of institutional care and education for young children in Europe, US and New Zealand prior to state interest and serious investment.
This latest edition brings the story right up to date with developments under the Labour coalition government of Jacinda Ardern.
Landfall 238: Spring 2019
Edited by Emma Neale
Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary.
Strong Words 2019
The best of the Landfall Essay Competition
Selected by Emma Neale
A collection of 21 striking essays by new and seasoned New Zealand authors from the Landfall Essay Competition 2018, Strong Words shows what Virginia Woolf once described as the art that can at once ‘sting us wide awake’ and yet also ‘fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life’. It celebrates an extraordinary year in New Zealand writing.
The Paper Nautilus
A trilogy
Michael Jackson
The Paper Nautilus is about loss – the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. The paper nautilus provides a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the angelically beautiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered.
Michael Jackson has recourse to his ethnographic fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as well as autobiography and fiction, in exploring his theme. This book crosses and blends genres most engagingly. Beginning as a series of essays, it gradually morphs into a mesmerising work of the imagination in which the boundary between author and other becomes blurred, and the line between fact and fiction erased.
Queer Objects
Edited by Chris Brickell and Judith Collard
Queer lives give rise to a vast array of objects: the things we fill our houses with the gifts we share with our friends, the commodities we consume at work and at play, the clothes and accessories we wear, various reminders of state power, as well as the analogue and digital technologies we use to communicate with one another.
But what makes an object queer?
The 63 chapters in Queer Objects consider this question in relation to lesbian, gay and transgender communities across time, cultures and space. In this unique international collaboration, well-known and newer writers traverse world history to write about fabulous, captivating and transgressive items ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman artefacts to political placards, snapshots, sex toys and the smartphone.
Women Mean Business
Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand
Catherine Bishop
From Kaitaia in Northland to Oban on Stewart Island, New Zealand’s nineteenth-century towns were full of entrepreneurial women. Contrary to what we might expect, colonial women were not only wives and mothers or domestic servants. A surprising number ran their own businesses, supporting themselves and their families, sometimes in productive partnership with husbands, but in other cases compensating for a spouse’s incompetence, intemperance, absence – or all three.
In this fascinating and entertaining book, award-winning historian Dr Catherine Bishop showcases many of the individual businesswomen whose efforts, collectively, contributed so much to the making of urban life in New Zealand.
