The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 John Scott Works by David Straight (Massey University Press, $70) Gorgeous tome celebrating the career of one of our most influential architects. … Read more
New work by poet Mohamed Hassan. If you are on mobile, read the poem in its intended format here. National Anthem I pledge allegiance to love and good coffee a sleepy heart two sets of feet burning a clatter … Read more
Poems by Louise Wallace, James Brown, Tofig Dankalay, Gregory Kan, Tusiata Avia, Qalina, Airini Beautrais, Selina Tusitala Marsh Ahakoa he iti he pounamu | Although it is small it is greenstone Louise Wallace I choose pounamu / it is a river stone / she was of the earth / she was orchids in the hothouse … Read more
A series of haiku by Twitter bard Uther Dean. Haiku Sue tore up her will, Drank the serum. Fuck the kids. She’d live forever. * My latest mantra: ‘None of this is important. You have enough love.’ * My man-size pillow Has a single hand to hold And a … Read more
The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. Auckland 1 John Scott Works by David Straight (Massey University Press, $70) Gorgeous tome celebrating the career of one of our most influential architects. … Read more
Rebecca Macfie talks to the acclaimed, alarm-sounding David Wallace-Wells, author of the extraordinary new book The Uninhabitable Earth “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” With these words, New York journalist David Wallace-Wells proceeds to pound the reader of The Uninhabitable Earth with brutal truths about climate change. About how much more rapidly it … Read more
The country’s biggest literary festival, Waituhi O Tāmaki, has just launched its programme, and it’s another ripsnorting lineup. Check out the whole thing here. Below, some of the events that are high on our list. Shayne Carter chatting with John Campbell The drool will be dripping from the rafters at the very idea of the snarling … Read more
Danyl Mclauchlan stares into the abyss that is Google and wonders if we are about to experience the birth of a new, even more terrifying capitalism. I feel it most when I’m at the supermarket. I’m standing there looking at jellymeat but at the same time, I’m aware of being embedded in a web of … Read more
New work by Fern Flat poet Sugar Magnolia Wilson. Spent The night sky is full of stars but we are more clever than most – we know they are just burned bones. Nothing beautiful – not space sailors blown from their ships – the light from treasure quickly grasped in … Read more
The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 With the End in Mind: How to Live and Die Well by Kathryn Mannix (William Collins, $27) 2 Rufus Marigold … Read more
Richard von Sturmer reviews the new novel by Wellington author Carl Shuker – a tense, razor-sharp story of a surgeon who makes a fatal mistake. The story that Carl Shuker tells in his novel A Mistake is delivered in a concise, razor-sharp style without an ounce of fat left on the bone. Such imagery is appropriate: … Read more
The clock has struck 5:00am – meaning the embargo on the 2019 Ockham New Zealand national book awards has been lifted, and the dear old Spinoff Review of Books is first in with the full list of who has made it. Okay so here is the shortlist, as immediately follows; drum roll please; do join us … Read more
The poet Hera Lindsay Bird interviews the brilliant American writer Mark Leidner, and does her best to explain why he’s her favourite writer of all time. Some time last year I wrote to Steve B and asked if he was interested in publishing an interview I was planning to do with Mark Leidner. He wrote … Read more
The Monday Extract: John Walsh and photographer Patrick Reynolds join forces to present a handsome new book about some structures in Auckland. Mackelvie Street Precinct, Ponsonby Road and Mackelvie Street The treatment of the shops’ white cement-sheet façades may be inspired by the pressed-tin ceilings of their Victorian and Edwardian neighbours, but on a blue-sky day … Read more
New poetry by Semira Davis. Into the garden come into the garden where your mother and uncle lean the bamboo corpses into triangle arches for the beans the garden where the earth reads your palm and the life line the love line the heart line are dirty and mud come into the garden and … Read more
The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson (MacMillan, $35) Manson, writing on Twitter recently: “Don’t … Read more
Anthony Byrt reviews an impeccably researched but somewhat tortured biography of Theo Schoon – only possibly a great New Zealand artist, almost certainly an anti-Semitic, misogynist, pretentious, belly-aching bitch. Art history is a brutal discipline, which feeds off the corpses of nearly-rans: the artists and dealers and curators and muses and rivals who make up an … Read more
Welcome back to Papercuts, our monthly books podcast hosted by Louisa Kasza, Jenna Todd and Kiran Dass. Papercuts is here for your February book news and recommendations. We chat about the Ockhams longlist, Jacquie Sturm, dear Peter Wells and Ashleigh Young. Plus the usual book reviews and a bonkers Who the Fuck Is? that could almost … Read more
Two scholars respond to our recent series on James K Baxter, and his wife, Jacquie Sturm. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, senior adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Canterbury, writes: Jacquie Sturm: Te Whakatōhea, Taranaki (1927-2009). Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka Māori Tuhinga Pakimaero. He Reta ki te Maunga – a … Read more
Steve Braunias farewells Peter Wells. But really I hardly knew him. “He was a noble man,” said Suzanne Blumhardt, his eldest surviving cousin, at the funeral for author Peter Northe Wells, 1950-2019, at St Matthew-in-the-City in downtown Auckland yesterday morning; one of his closest friends, novelist Stephanie Johnson, said: “He was a born writer and … Read more
An excerpt from David Cohen’s Book of Cohen, featuring Steve Braunias and musings on erotic salvation. “Just listen to that,” Steve Braunias says to me. It’s 1987 and we’re having lunch at the Cricketer’s Arms, a Wellington pub. Steve, a fellow music writer, rarely looks so good at this time in the day — or … Read more
The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 best-seller list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in Willis St, Wellington and High St, Auckland. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber, $33) “I read a few pages of the Sally Rooney book. It may say … Read more
Following last week’s revelations about James K Baxter, poetry editor Ashleigh Young presents a poem by Baxter’s wife, the late Jacquie Sturm. In Loco Parentis for Ethel and Bert Eleven years old in domestic service Blacking other children’s boots and only One day off a month to visit mother. That was her. He counted himself lucky With … Read more
John Summers is inspired by a dreamer who ended up living as a kind of Robinson Crusoe on a Cook Islands atoll ‘where there truly was no sound beyond the waves, the birds and whatever noise you made yourself’. Some of the happiest hours of my primary school education were those spent sitting on the mat, listening to … Read more
A new book by Tony McCaffrey deals with stage performances by people who have intellectual disabilities. John Lambie was an actor with Down Syndrome. He had had been part of the initial intake of children in 1965 into Hohepa Canterbury, a residential community in Christchurch for people with intellectual disabilities, run on the principles of Rudolf Steiner. In 2015, John … Read more
Jeremy Hansen pays tribute to author Peter Wells, who died yesterday – exactly a week after the launch of his final book, Hello Darkness, a memoir of living with his fatal illness. The past is a foreign country, especially if you were gay before the internet existed. In 1993 I was 23 years old and … Read more
Danyl Mclauchlan on the ‘ersatz enlightenment’ of Jordan Peterson, who opens his New Zealand speaking tour with tonight’s sold-out event in Auckland. “Oh people still buy his book,” a Wellington bookseller told me when I asked her if Jordan Peterson was still even a thing. “And they’re also buying his recommended books. He’s published a … Read more
The only published and available best-selling book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 best-seller list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington – which today was confirmed as one of three bookshops in the world shortlisted for the prestigious The London Book Fair International Excellence … Read more
A poem by the great Fleur Adcock from her book Collected Poems, launched this week. Toads Let’s be clear about this: I love toads. So when I found our old one dying, washed into the drain by flood-water in the night and then – if I can bring myself to say it … Read more