Nine years ago, the author Ernest Cline published the monster hit Ready Player One. Somehow, despite being a huge gamer nerd, Sam Brooks managed to avoid it – until now. We also made him read the sequel, which came out last month. Sorry, Sam. Ready Player One is an ode to the kind of white … Read more
This short story, The Unremembered, appears in the new collection Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology, alongside stories from celebrated Australian and New Zealand writers such as Tulia Thompson, Renee Liang and Witi Ihimaera. There was this woman named Rona. She was the one pulled up to the moon for swearing. Rona was ordinary – wife, … Read more
Michelle Langstone runs away to the Marlborough region to find some peace in the quiet. There are things you can learn from the wild. If you go farther away, the messages get clearer, delivered uninterrupted down the wires of birdsong and through the swift-running currents of rivers. Where I stay, there is no light pollution … Read more
A new poem from Auckland poet Fardowsa Mohamed. Leftovers I burned the bariis on the bottom of the pot my mother shakes her head, and we joke that I am a failed girl At lunchtime the next day I don’t remove the lid fully but they still said I smell burnt and brown. The … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie 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 Hiakai: New Māori Cuisine by Monique Fiso (Godwit, $65) Meri kirihimete! 2 A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Penguin Random House, … Read more
Young adult novel These Violent Delights was released in the US three weeks ago and is already a massive hit. Sherry Zhang introduces a star. Chloe Gong wrote These Violent Delights in her childhood home in Auckland in May 2018. As in: that month she started writing it, and also finished. She was 19. Seven … Read more
Books editor Catherine Woulfe reads New Zealanders: The Field Guide, by comedian and sometime Paula Bennett impersonator, Tom Sainsbury. We begin as we shall end: with blather. Hi guys! My name is Tom Sainsbury and I am very excited to meet you … through this book. You’re probably thinking, ‘Who the hell is Tom Sainsbury? … Read more
Jordan Margetts, who is working on a masters comparing CK Stead and Philip Roth, reviews the second volume of Stead’s memoir. Not least among the neuroses and quiddities of novelists and poets is the lingering idea that they might actually get to cheat death. Not the death of the body, of course, but there’s a … Read more
What’s the best way to get adults reading? Get them reading when they’re children – and there’s no better place to start than the Unity Children’s Bestseller Chart. AUCKLAND 1 Skunk & Badger by Amy Timberlake & Jon Klassen (Allen & Unwin, $26, 4+) “One of the best books I’ve read all year … absolutely … Read more
A new poem by Oscar Upperton from a sequence about Dr James Barry, a 19th century surgeon whose gender has been the subject of much debate. Code name Young Barry begins the study of medicine, under a new name and in a new town. A name needs rinsing out, once in a while. I live … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie 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 A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Penguin Random House, $70) The first volume of Obama’s presidential memoirs, released four years after … Read more
Shipping delays mean bookstores are placing massive one-off orders rather than sitting back to see what sells. They’ve gone huge on Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land – there are probably enough copies in the country to dam Cook Strait. Luckily, Danyl Mclauchlan writes, it is in fact good. I somehow forgot that Obama could … Read more
Last year the fledgling charity scheme Kiwi Christmas Books gave 1600 children’s books to Auckland Women’s Refuge and the Auckland City Mission. This year they’re going national, as founder Sonya Wilson explains. My earliest memories involve books. Kew Hospital, circa 1983: I remember stiff scratchy sheets, red jelly on a grey tray, the smells of … Read more
The Swimmers author Chloe Lane interviews Zina Swanson, whose paintings are inspired by old and outlandish books about botany. December 1990, my family and I stayed with my aunty and uncle in the Christchurch suburb of Mount Pleasant. I remember the summer mostly hazily – picnics, swims, long hot days – though I also have … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie 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 The Promised Land by Barack Obama (Penguin Random House, $70) If you see Danyl Mclauchlan not reading this memoir over the … Read more
A new poem by poet, designer, artist, and musician Whina Pomana. In response to The Last Mastodon chapbook by Christina Olson So much about the treatment of dead things And incorrect assemblies They built a parking lot on top of Sally Hemings and— The casual disrespect white people have for death that doesn’t look like them And … Read more
Novelist Catherine Robertson explains why she and poet Jane Arthur will not be stocking [redacted] or [redacted] at their new store, Good Books, in Wellington. “You’re so brave” is the most irritating thing to say to someone who’s set up a new business. It implies you’ve taken a risk that no sane person would contemplate, … Read more
At the National Library on Wednesday, Lyttelton poet Ben Brown delivered the 2020 Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui. He spoke powerfully about Aotearoa’s incarceration of young people, and the extraordinary book he edited last summer as part of a writing workshop at Rolleston’s Oranga Tamariki youth justice residence, Te Puna Wai ō Tuhinapo. This … Read more
The winner of the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel Award reviews the sci-fi and fantasy anthology of the moment. Putting together an anthology is a balancing act. You’re making a statement: this is what the genre or scene looks like to me, and I’d like to think it looks that way to you too. Victoria University … Read more
Jillian Sullivan lives in a strawbale house in Central Otago’s Ida Valley. This essay, Between Lands, is from Map for the Heart, a new collection blending memoir and environmentalism. There’s a moment on the ferry crossing, mid-journey, when a bird hovering over the charcoal water turns and flies towards us, wings outspread. This bird, mollymawk, … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie 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 The Future We Choose: Surviving The Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres (Bonnier Publishing, $33) Figueres lead the 2015 Paris Accord. She … Read more
A new poem from Auckland poet Andrea Malcolm. Immunosuppressants My heart opens, my heart closes My fist opens, my fist closes My mouth opens, my mouth closes My heart opens, the saga begins My heart opens my heart closes My fist opens my fist closes My mouth opens my mouth closes Somewhere a song of … Read more
No Filter, a superb new book chronicling Instagram’s rise, reveals more about the pathology of Mark Zuckerberg than anything else, writes Duncan Greive. As with many of the tech companies that went on to blithely mess with society, at first there was nothing but starry-eyed idealism. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom was an aesthete, moved by … Read more
Locked down in Brisbane, chef Te Tangaroa Turnbull finally read the cookbook they’d been waiting for – and was moved to tears. Hiakai may be the most important cookbook yet written in Aotearoa. A foundation text for the use of traditional Māori ingredients, it deserves to be read alongside the likes of René Redzepi’s Noma … Read more
A prayer for a woman with dementia, this fictional piece by Cambridge writer Tracey Slaughter features in the new edition of Landfall. She will forget the house. It will leave her one window at a time, breaking off in pieces of pine and lace and quartered glass. She will forget the feel of the rooms … Read more
A new poem by Greek-New Zealand poet and translator Vana Manasiadis. Having a few beers with my mate My mate you think this is english but it’s not-english if it was english you might expect to hang at this dash – but instead I’m telling you that someone will start yelling. Alotta yelling happens in … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie 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 Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, $65) From thenews.co.nz: “The aim of the … Read more
Scottish historian Hamish Dingwall is working on a book about New Zealand suffragist Mary Ann Müller and wrote this essay as bait, basically. If you have any sort of archive (letters, photographs, a diary) regarding Mary or her life, no matter how small the snippet, Dingwall would love to hear from you. Email books editor … Read more
Today Owen Marshall, Grahame Sydney and Brian Turner release a big hardback book called Landmarks. A braiding of essays, paintings and poems, it’s a companion title to the trio’s Timeless Land, published in 1995. It’s a tribute to place, but it’s also about low-key, enduring friendship, as Marshall explains. In her emails to us, Harriet … Read more