Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending March 22

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

Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending March 15

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

‘We don’t really have the luxury of time to rely on elections’ – David Wallace-Wells

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

10 surefire hits in the 2019 Auckland Writers Festival programme

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

Big Google is watching you

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

Book of the week: Carl Shuker’s masterful novel about a medical emergency

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

Announcing who made it onto the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlist!

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

Some structures in Auckland

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

Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending March 1

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

Book of the Week: That total asshole Theo Schoon

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

Papercuts: Cutting to the chase

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

Baxter, redux: Second thoughts on Jacquie Sturm and her lousy husband

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

Peter Northe Wells, 1950-2019

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

Hallelujah: in the church of Leonard Cohen

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

Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending February 22

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

The Friday Poem: ‘In loco parentis’ by JC Sturm

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

A white man’s fantasy – and sad reality – of living alone on a Cook Islands atoll

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

Giving voice: making theatre with actors who have intellectual disabilities

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

Hello Darkness, Goodbye Peter

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

The subtle art of not giving a fuck about Jordan B Peterson

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

Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending February 15

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