It’s got tussock, it’s got a lake, it’s got space and beauty and that: Lake Tekapo and its high country stations feature in an awesome new coffee table book. Feature image by Mary Hobbs. Mary Hobbs had a best-seller a little while back with her coffee table book The High Country Stations of the Mackenzie. It focussed … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best bookstores between the devil and the deep blue sea. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 La Belle Sauvage: Book of Dust Trilogy by Philip Pullman (David Fickling Books, $35) Next week the Spinoff Review of Books presents its list of the best books of 2017 and you can bet your ass … Read more
New poetry – actually, she sent it in on Thursday, and we have rushed it to the head of the queue in these dry days of summer – by Hawkes Bay writer Marty Smith. To the trees of summer If we could start the poem again, walking backwards in a waterlogged sky which refuses … Read more
Acclaimed New Zealand author Peter Wells has been keeping a diary ‘talking about what I saw, was going through, thought’ since his cancer diagnosis. November 15, 10.45am View from my hospital room. In the foreground, the green building is where I flatted with my brother Russell in 1974. Russell was a great stylist and the … Read more
New Zealand literature! What is it, who reads it, and why does it exist? Some or none or all of these questions are about to be answered in the second annual Spinoff Review of Books literary awards!!! Some say 2017 will go down in history as the year between 2016 and 2018, but it’s too early … Read more
Tessa Duder provides a brief history of children’s literature in New Zealand – and finds multiple reasons to be cheerful about the state of play in 2017. One grey, misty morning in the Auckland suburb of Mt Eden, a 43-year-old teachers college librarian is walking to work. His eyes are drawn up to that shrouded, … Read more
A selection of images taken at night by Wellington photographer Grant Sheehan in his new book The Night Watchers. Feature image: An Aurora Australis to the South throws a red and yellow tone across the rising Milky Way near Tekapo. Nikon DF, 14-24mm lens at 14mm, F2.8, 3200 iso, 40 sec; Mangungu Mission House overlooks … Read more
New verse from Wellington writer Geoff Cochrane. Overheard Scots College blazer, prefect’s badge. A slenderly sturdy six-footer, dark. He’s walking briskly with his head held high, his cellphone pressed to his ear, and this what I can’t but hear him saying: ‘Don’t do it. Please don’t do it. Please don’t do it, please.’ … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best bookstores in the North Island. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 Strangers Arrive: Emigres and the Arts in New Zealand by Leonard Bell (Auckland University Press, $75) Once were intellectuals. Publisher’s blurbology: “From the 1930s through the 1950s, a substantial number of forced migrants arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them … Read more
Duncan McLean is a writer and publisher living on the Orkney Islands in Scotland. He travelled to New Zealand, drawn by the books of Frank Sargeson – and discovered the forgotten man of New Zealand writing, Craig Marriner. I first encountered Frank Sargeson in Jane Campion’s film An Angel at my Table. It was quite a hit on the … Read more
Danyl McLauchlan celebrates the latest Jack Reacher masterpiece by Lee Child. About 15 years ago I was having a drink with an old friend, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits started playing on the bar’s stereo. My friend had very elevated taste in music and I wanted to impress him so I said, “Oh god … Read more
Yet another Spinoff Review of Books exclusive as we break the 5am embargo on the longlist of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards by 60 seconds: the following story went up on our site at 4:59am. With some ado here and there, below is the full list of the 10 longlisted finalists in the 2018 … Read more
Spinoff Review of Books editor Steve Braunias anticipates the longlist for the 2018 Ockham national book awards, announced at 5am tomorrow. One of the many great, bitter lines that VS Naipaul comes up with in Paul Theroux’s great, bitter book of their lost friendship, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, is his remark made every year at the announcement … Read more
On Wednesday the Spinoff Review of Books published a negative review of historian Anne Salmond’s latest work, Tears of Rangi, which claimed Salmond reduced her Māori subjects to ‘cardboard caricatures’. Here’s her response. This is a very interesting review. As Ranginui Walker used to urge, scholarship is like a marae, and one must be ready … Read more
New verse by Canadian New Zealand writer Michael Gould. They called it love I saw the man I thought I loved three times in two days, but after that we didn’t have much to say we kissed, though our eyes didn’t meet and smiled, but a sense of denial was already spelling defeat. Was … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best book stores north of the South Pole. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Nikau Café Cookbook by Kelda Hains & Paul Schrader (Nikau Café, $60) Food. 2 Journal of Urgent Writing volume 2 edited by Simon Wilson (Massey University Press, $40) A collection of essays commissioned and put together by The … Read more
Dave Comer was a film location scout who is credited with finding many of the spectacular locations for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. His widow Peta Carey introduces her new book of his photographs. It’s an odd affair, a book launch. Particularly your first book launch. My very kind publisher had warned me, “It’s … Read more
Buddy Mikaere finds bias and misrepresentation in Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds, an otherwise acclaimed history of early New Zealand by Anne Salmond. Anne Salmond’s new book Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds is broadly divided into two parts. Part one revisits the already well traversed history of the early contact years between Māori and … Read more
Brannavan Gnanalingam writes about the overwhelming whiteness of English literature as taught in New Zealand – and throws down a challenge to the gatekeepers, including the Spinoff. UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph caused a stir in October with a front page story about a black Cambridge student who had “force[d] Cambridge to drop white authors”. The Telegraph‘s … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best bookstores in the Southern Hemisphere. AUCKLAND UNITY 1 Drawn Out: A Seriously Funny Memoir by Tom Scott (Allen & Unwin, $45) Much is anecdotage, a life well-told, by the great cartoonist who reminds readers that he has also excelled as a playwright, film-maker, and TV script writer. 2 … Read more
New verse by New Plymouth writer Elizabeth Smither. The man who wanted to stroke my hair The St Kilda tram. Bright summer air. Breeze through the window gap, stirring all manner of motes, tendrils of hair lifting their traces on my neck. Fine hairs of a different sort, underneath. Antennae not needed for … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews a memoir by author Claire Tomalin, who is candid about her affair with Martin Amis but maintains a classic English reserve. Sixties London. Claire Tomalin is the wife of Nick Tomalin, a brilliant, handsome young journalist and war correspondent. Claire is too modest to say so in her autobiography, but the photos show … Read more
In the latest of our occasional series of essays which investigate whether literature exists in the provinces, John Summers looks for clues in Greytown in the Wairarapa. I do most of my writing on the Wairarapa line, the WRL. Every morning, every evening, it rattles beneath the hills between Wellington and Greytown with me aboard, … Read more
Flash fiction writer Sandra Arnold on the time a hot air balloon ride went horribly wrong and could easily have gone a lot, lot worse. In 1992 one of my former students announced that he’d passed his pilot’s license exam, and wanted to thank all the teachers for helping him learn English and adjust to … Read more
Steve Braunias reports from the 2017 LitCrawl in Wellington – and wonders whether it could be duplicated in Auckland. Ashleigh Young (genius) couldn’t get in. Fergus Barrowman (publisher) couldn’t get in. Leah McFall, the Sunday columnist with a dedicated following – she couldn’t get in, either. And then word spread about someone else who was … Read more
Morgan Godfery was born to a teenage mother and a gang father in Kawerau, New Zealand’s poorest town. He recounts the experience in this essay from the Journal of Urgent Writing, 2017. Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. — T. S. Eliot, … Read more
The best-selling books at the best two bookstores adhering to building codes. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Drawn Out: A Seriously Funny Memoir by Tom Scott (Allen & Unwin, $45) Much is anecdotage, a life well-told, by the great cartoonist who reminds readers that he has also excelled as a playwright, film-maker, and TV script writer. 2 … Read more
New verse by New Zealand-born writer living in England, Fleur Adcock. Hot Baths These days when anxious friends confide in me about their intimate medical problems it’s never that they’re afraid they’re pregnant and the situation is complicated by not being sure whether the father was that guy from Christchurch at my party … Read more
Deborah Coddington celebrates a biography of former Green MP Sue Bradford. When did New Zealanders who loved a good debate morph into silo mentality? Current zeitgeist has us in this curious – not to say alarmingly unhealthy – state that we all must urgently agree over everything: personal opinions, political policies, future predictions, even book … Read more