Wellington author Linda Burgess chooses this and that and above all she chooses the book you want to buy several copies of this Christmas – The Scene of the Crime, by Steve Braunias (no relation to the Spinoff books editor). Thinking of what to recommend from what I’ve read this year, I realise how much of the … Read more
Wellington journalist and former books pages editor Ruth Nichol chooses the novel that many of our experts also chose. Just go and buy it, okay? I briefly thought Anne Tyler’s latest novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, would win the Man Booker Prize. What’s not to like – it’s clever, witty, wise and much more complex … Read more
Cambridge editor and author Stephen Stratford chooses books of verse by a couple of good old boys, and a good-looking book by an artist. Looking Out to Sea, by Kevin Ireland (Steele Roberts) It took me a long time to read this: every night I would read the first poem, for Ireland’s late brother, which … Read more
Wellington author Elspeth Sandys chooses two venerable geniuses of modern fiction – Anne Tyler, and Kate Grenville. Reading Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread is like visiting an old and trusted friend. The familiar themes – family and domestic life; the passage of Time; suburban America – are all there, but with a novelist of … Read more
Auckland writer Thom Shackleford chooses a memoir by the divine Patti Smith, a brilliant investigation into social media shaming by Jon Ronson, and a story collection featuring the divinely brilliant Don DeLillo. M Train, by Patti Smith. No one does melancholic cool quite like Patti Smith. With the independence of her children and the distant … Read more
Wellington writer and editor Ashleigh Young chooses books she struggled with and which blowtorched her heart. Some of the best things I have read this year are not books, or not yet books. They are manuscripts, or bits of writing by my creative writing students, or emails from friends. 2015 has been a good year … Read more
Auckland author Peter Simpson chooses six books by New Zealand authors, including one of the favourites to win the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards prize for best novel. Last year as one of five judges of the final New Zealand Post Book Awards I read virtually every local book published. I can’t recall precisely … Read more
Wellington arts festival dude and former book pages editor guy Guy Somerset chooses short story collections by Joy Williams, Lucia Berlin, and the king of the asterixes, Bill Manhire. This year, via new collections of their stories, I discovered two wonderful American writers who had somehow escaped my attention entirely during the past 35 years of my reading life, which … Read more
Auckland reviewer David Larsen selects the blockbuster Barrowman bio as his best of the year, and then journeys into the genre of sci-fi and fantasy and that. No question, my book of 2015 was Maurice Gee: Life and Work, by Rachel Barrowman. Long years of research and thought went into this: so often fatal. But … Read more
Christchurch writer Rachael King chooses three New Zealand novels, and two personal essays by two extremely cool American women. The Chimes, by Anna Smaill I loved the premise of The Chimes from when I first heard of it. It demands to be read slowly while savouring the puzzle of the language, the rules of the … Read more
One World One world, Thinking with one mind, Thinking with no mind, Other than what they are told. Preach to me, Sell me new and old; Indoctrinate me, That I will do what I am told. Trace my every dollar, Trace my every step; Trace my every sentence, No privacy is left. … Read more
Steve Braunias holds court on the judges of the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Let us now judge the judges. The first-ever longlist of the national book awards was announced this week, in anticipation of the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The news was greeted with various assorted huzzahs and the gnashing of … Read more
Elvis Costello’s autobiography doesnt seem to know when to STFU. ‘Death wears a big hat,’ Elvis Costello once sang, ‘because he’s a big bloke.’ No doubt Death would write a big memoir, too. But he’d probably stop short of the 670 pages of Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. True, Costello is the best songwriter … Read more
Quietly, almost by stealth, Elsbeth Hardie’s family memoir The Girl Who Stole Stockings made its way to the best-seller charts this year and may well be one of the best books of New Zealand non-fiction published in 2015. It’s a brilliantly researched history of the life – and minor crime, which had far-reaching consequences – of … Read more
Steve Braunias interviews the amazing AA Gill. AA Gill phoned from Australia to talk about his new memoir, Pour Me, which has many familiar qualities of his writing – it’s a wonder to behold, it’s luminous with bright and glowing prose, it’s got a lot of similes in it. It’s also hectoring, monotonal, rambling, seemingly unedited and often unforgivably … Read more
Ali Ikram’s picaresque account of his assignment to interview Keri Hulme. Volume two of Tell You What, the new compendium of New Zealand non-fiction writing selected by Susanna Andrew and Jolisa Gracewood, and published by Auckland University Press, features the usual suspects – Naomi Arnold, Ashleigh Young, Steve Braunias, and other assorted experienced litterateurs. There’s … Read more
Chum Likes, friends, the more chum we spread the more our pond fills up with eager, hungry fish.
The sombre tale of two Southern Men facing up to the fact – or doing their best to ignore the fact – that one of them has a year left to live. Media veterans and lifelong friends, Colin Hogg and Gordon McBride, are chatting in the embers of a Hogg birthday afternoon, sun sinking slowly. McBride’s … Read more
So after I spent the first $35 (on a collection of essays by the late New Zealand writer Nigel Cox) of my $1000 prize as winner of the 2015 Unity Books Award – it entitles winners to a thousand bucks’ worth of books at the High St store in Auckland – I returned to the … Read more
A Year of Good Eating: The Kitchen Diaries III by Nigel Slater, reviewed by Ben Sheehan. I find myself at an odd point of life. Mid-to-late twenties, struggling to understand how I’m ever going to join the ludicrous Auckland property market. Pretty normal in that sense I guess, but I’m mostly at an odd point … Read more
Matt Vance is known to Dave Dobbyn, Lloyd Jones, Graeme Sydney, Jane Ussher and many other artists, musicians and writers across New Zealand as a good bastard. In his former capacity at Antarctica New Zealand, he ran the Artists in Antarctica programme, personally guiding many creative types around the ice in the summer months. His wide experience in … Read more
The Spinoff’s editor, Duncan Greive, co-authored the just-released Dan Carter: My Story with the All Blacks’ first five. Here he shares his memories of the tumultuous year the pair spent working on the book. The lowest I ever heard him was late in February. We spoke via Skype, as we often did through that portion of … Read more
On Writing by Charles Bukowski On Writing is not an instruction manual. Nobody who knows anything about Bukowski’s boozy, belligerent shambles of a life would expect one. As he was fond of confessing, Bukowski did not like people. Even as a baby in the cradle, he reports in his largely autobiographical 1982 novel Ham on … Read more
A publisher paid an unknown author a US$2m advance for his first novel. How come it’s complete fucking junk? It’s a bad sign when you sit down to write about a book and discover you’d much rather write about set theory. Especially if you know nothing about set theory. Garth Risk Hallberg’s grandly titled City … Read more
An expert’s guide to getting your sweet darling cutie pies to go to bed. How many hours do children need to sleep? Although it depends on the age of the child, one general answer is now clear: more than you think. Sleep loss affects everyone, but the impact is far greater on children who are … Read more
The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates ‘As a writer,’ writes Joyce Carol Oates, 241 pages into her memoir, ‘I have not been drawn to what is called memoirist prose because I have never felt that my life could be nearly as interesting as what my imagination could make of … Read more
abide more tritone idle mode because of sin the artisan cannot exact immaculate the transept rose in damask steel cannot restore with faithfulness the hawthorn’s point to Amor’s nose it vanishes like God inside … Read more
Simon Winchester takes on his most difficult subject yet – a biography of the Pacific. Graeme Lay delves deep, deep into its depths. There can be few people who when flying over the Pacific Ocean haven’t stared down from a window seat at the dark, wind-scuffed blueness below with a sense of wonder. Understandably so. … Read more
Guy Somerset reviews The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays by writer and critic James Wood. Good writing rubs off. When a good writer notices something, it helps us notice too. Good criticism also rubs off. When a good critic notices the noticing, we notice the noticing as well. It’s an almost virtuous circle. … Read more